Once A Hero (2 page)

The inhabited houses in Jammaq were not that different from their silent, dark companions. Music, likely intended to keep out the ghostly howl of the wind, pinpointed them even before we saw light. We snuck past them like spectres ourselves, but the risk of discovery remained low. There was a chance that someone might look out if we accidently made a noise, but we had taken precautions against discovery in that event as well.

Our dark trousers and robes, colorful scarf and sash, and the beaded-leather quitawi dangling from our right wrists, marked us as members of the natari. Perhaps more feared among the Reithrese than the ghosts lost in the city's street-maze, the militant guardians of Reithrese religious tradition had a reputation for brutal, cold cruelty in the prosecution of their duties. They were inviolate, and no one was immune from their judgment, so everyone avoided them. So arrogant and confident in their roles were they that the two we waylaid to obtain our disguises had been shocked that we dared strike them.

We came to a crossroad, and I lashed the quirt against my left palm as I looked around for directions. To the southwest I could see the tower complex for which we were bound. Towers of all heights and thicknesses stabbed into the air like a multifingered hand clawing stars from the night sky. The flickering orange glow from the center of the tower-circle pulsed out enough light to mold the towers themselves into grasping silhouettes.

"Do you think the natari have no street signs here to confuse the ghosts, or to earn money guiding families to their lodgings here and back out again?"

"More the latter than the former, I would imagine, but not having seen a ghost so far, I think their efforts in that direction are at least partially successful." Resting his war ax across his knees, Aarundel crouched down and reached out with a long-fingered hand to push at a couple of cobblestones. "None are loose, Neal."

I frowned. The city of the dead had no street signs and few enough landmarks beyond the tower silhouettes. So far, operating on the idea that the gargoyles were all meant to scare ghosts from the tower back into it, we had been keeping the stone faces at our back. Here, though, the gargoyles faced us from one alley and looked away down two roads. The broader street curved off and away, while the narrower one seemed to continue dead west. Loose stones might have marked which way others had gone before, but Aarundel's report dashed that hope.

I dropped to my haunches beside him. "Being as how the Reithrese and Elves are both Elder races, how would you mark them as balancing ceremony with practicality?"

Aarundel's head came up, and scorn echoed through his harsh whisper. "They are a vulgar and ostentatious race, given to frivolous display."

"And probably not very pleased with the prospect of spending much time here at their grisly doings, eh?" I glanced at the weathering of the gargoyles in both the wide and skinny roads. "We'll take this one, then, my friend. There's enough of a difference that says the wide is new and not for us."

The Elf nodded and headed off down the narrow roadway, with me quick at his heels. Neither one of us had much scholarship in the ways of the Reithrese—though Aarundel could manage their angular tongue—but we knew just enough about their religious fetishes for me to hatch my plot and for Aarundel to imagine it might succeed. What was born as an "I wonder" teamed up with a couple of "we really shoulds," and before reason could rear her fair head and dissuade us, we rode for the mountains and invaded Jammaq in search of a sword.

The Reithrese, being bound to the goddess of the underworld—called Reithra by those of us who had no need or desire to know her true name—have some peculiar rites when it comes to the treatment of the dead. Being like men in all ways except the length of their life, the power they command, and their hateful nature toward outsiders, the Reithrese bring their dead to Jammaq. They entomb them in the tower, with lesser folk being stored higher up—further distant from their goddess—and the great and mighty lying in the bosom of the earth herself.

A year or so later, weather willing and bandits bribed, the relatives of the deceased return to open the tomb. They clean the bones and put them in a box to be carried back to Alatun or one of the other Reithrese cities to be kept in family shrines. Finally, as part of the funeral, the dead's possessions, which were stored with him in that first year, are auctioned off to the person who can make the best case for why he should inherit the item in question.

"And no one can make a better case for owning my sword than I," I mumbled as we wound our way down a snake-twist road.

Despite my words being muffled in the scarf, Aarundel's sharp ears heard my remark. "Your sword? Khiephnaft was never your sword, my friend."

"It's a fated blade, Aarundel, you've said so yourself. It has to be mine."

"I must have missed seeing the name Neal Roclawzi in reading the various prophecies concerning the sword."

"It's there, unless someone like Finndali has been revising texts, and you know that for the truth." I turned left onto a broad boulevard that arced on down toward the towers. "Besides, you know Tashayul wanted me to have it. Cleaveheart is mine; he declared it so during his speech dedicating Jarudin to Reithra,"

Aarundel's dark eyes flashed from above his scarf. "That would be a rather broad interpretation of, 'Neal is the last person in the world I want to have this sword!' would it not?"

"It loses something in the translation." I smiled devilishly. "In the original I'd wager he was more eloquent in describing how I should get the blade."

"This I believe sincerely."

Tashayul had no reason to want me to have anything but his undying enmity. The Reithrese people had once possessed a vast empire that had extended from ocean to deserts and back again. Over the centuries it had begun to shrink, as nations of men split off and proclaimed their own independence. The Reithrese contented themselves with a commonwealth for a while, then let a Human empire nibble away at their borders. Five hundred years ago they even accepted Elven intervention in the affairs of what had been their empire. The days of Reithrese glory had faded for all time.

At least it seemed that way to all but the Reithrese. Being long-lived—both because of their nature and the chaotic, elemental magicks they had mastered—they took an almost Elven view of mayfly Humanity. In addition to their perspective, they had another thing that made waiting and tolerating all possible for them. Like a dagger hidden in a boot, they had a prophecy, and this prophecy said their empire would be born anew.

Tashayul and his brother, Takrakor, determined through the former's cunning and the latter's magicks, that they were the individuals fated to reunify the old empire under their leadership. They started a crusade in which their troops committed atrocities that almost served to eclipse the excesses of the Eldsaga in their ferocity. The brothers let it be known that they intended to slay or enslave all Men within the borders of what had once been their empire. Humanity, politically fractured and without leadership, had no way to oppose them.

What Men needed was a hero. Having been proclaimed a hero by sayers of sooth since my birth, I came to see the Reithrese war as the crucible in which I would be tested. We Roclawzi had long prided ourselves in our warrior tradition, and the Reithrese had never beaten us before in a fight. Because I had been born on Midsummer's Eve—in a blizzard and beneath a triangle of full moons—great things were expected of me. The storm, the Triangle, and even one event hiding the other were all omens that could be taken for good or ill as appropriate and caused me to feel I had been born to be the sort of hero who could stop the Reithrese. In answering my call to duty, I forged a sword, mounted a horse, and headed down out of the mountains to lay claim to a legend or to lie still in an anonymous grave.

It was a time of chaos in which the whole of the world was filled with as many horrors as Jammaq itself. To the Reithrese, men were not really much more than demi-oxen who could guide their bigger brethren at the plow. While this did place us a bit higher in the scheme of things than in the average Elven view, it didn't spare many lives. As I rode west, I heard refugee tales of villages being burned, babies being drowned like kittens in rivers, and all resistance being crushed wherever a defense was raised.

It took no alchemist to see one thing about the Reithrese probes: they ranged far out and away from the main battle lines in Ispar. The only good thing about being pointed out as a hero born among a warrior people is that my training involved heavy doses of military strategy and tactics. To be truthful, among my people a frightening war cry counts for more than either strategy or tactics, but I enjoyed the study of both, so I was given as much as I wanted,

It struck me that while the fight for Ispar raged on, the Reithrese were spending an inordinate amount of time in the mountains of Esquihir. Not having wanted to head into the world utterly ignorant, I had read of Reithrese history and tactics. From my reading I recalled a previous and painfully short-lived campaign by another Reithrese general that had ended in those mountains. His effort had been unremarkable—and it failed because internal Reithrese politics eroded his support—but he was supposed to have borne a magical sword said to confer immortality upon the warrior who wielded it and to guarantee that warrior the winning of an empire.

Tashayul clearly wanted that sword.

That meant I wanted it as well.

Khiephnaft had been lost to common knowledge, but Tashayul's torturers turned up some clues to its location. Full of the innocent enthusiasm of youth, I killed horses in my mad dash across Barkol's grassy oceans, and killed Reithrese in Ispar's southern reaches. Fearful humans gave me shelter and supplies on my trek. When I let them know that I had come from the mountains with a sword I meant to use to kill Tashayul, tongues loosened and directions flowed freely.

Hoping against hope that the foolish youth from the Roclaws might do what no other human had managed—the Triangle birth working to inspire hope—folks pointed me toward a small Jistani convent in the Esquihir mountains. They claimed Cleaveheart had been kept by the nuns as a weapon meant for a champion sworn to Jistan to use in destroying his enemies. I'd never been very religious—the gods are perverse and like torturing Men with dire predicaments—but I was willing to offer an oath to Jistan if he'd lend me the blade.

Of course, I was not alone in wanting to get my hands on that blade. What people told me freely, and the Reithrese had to torture out of folks, had almost been forgotten by the Elves. For reasons of their own, they wanted this blade that they called Divisator. Aarundel said that meant "Sunderer," but that was long after we first met. So, while Tashayul and I raced for it, coming from the east and the west, the Elves came in from the north.

I arrived on the site first, and the nuns welcomed me as if I were indeed the champion for whom they waited. I asked to take possession of Cleaveheart immediately, but the abbess avowed that Jistan had specified a number of rituals before the blade could be given over to my keeping.

I pressed her on this point. "I'm thinking, good Sister Constance, that Most High Jistan would understand about the urgency of the situation."

"Were that true, Neal Roclawzi, he would have given us a sign." Her face closed up in all the sign I needed to know I was doomed to wait.

Tashayul and his Skull-riders arrived as I was sleeping off a long ride and a full meal. The nuns, given the choice between death or surrender of the sword and my person, found themselves divinely inspired to declare me a heretic. This they did while I slumbered. I awoke from a dream about wrestling a snake to find myself bound hand and foot.

Standing beside the abbess, I watched from a balcony as a trio of nuns bore Cleaveheart to Tashayul. "No rituals, Sister?"

"We have had our sign, Neal Snaketongue." The nun eyed me sternly. "If you are truly Jistan's champion, He, in His divine wisdom, will find a way to unite you with the blade."

Watching Tashayul take practice cuts down in the courtyard, I had a feeling he, too, had a way to unite me with the blade, causing me to wonder if what I had taken as good omens were not so good after all. With the dawn's rose light glowing from the long serpentine blade's single razor edge, and the sword whistling as it sliced the air, wondering became knowing and I knew I'd seen my last dawn.

Two of Tashayul's guards accepted custody of me from the nuns and brought me down into the convent's courtyard. I towered over both my warders, but that was to be expected, as Reithrese tend to be slightly shorter than the average man. Even so their stocky Reithrese builds mocked my gangling limbs. In the few combats I had fought against their kind, my quickness and reach had made up for what I surrendered to them in strength. Hobbled by a short length of rope and with my arms bound behind me, those advantages went the way of my faith in Jistan.

Coming into the courtyard, perspective on, Tashayul changed and with it changed my assessment of him. Unlike his fellows, Tashayul and I could see eye to eye, which made him quite remarkable among the Reithrese. Stripped to the waist, Tashayul moved quickly and smoothly, with thick muscles sliding effortlessly beneath sweat-sheened skin that had been darkened by long exposure to the sun. His black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail that fell midway down his spine. Successful cuts at imaginary foes brought a smile to his face, peeling his lips back to reveal a mouth full of emerald teeth.

A booted foot applied to the back of my legs drove me to my knees in front of Tashayul. The Reithrese slashed the blade within a hair's-breadth of my nose, then sheathed Cleaveheart in one fluid, practiced motion. He took my straight, double-edged sword from one of his human slaves and bared it. He flipped it over and back, then tested the weight of it in his sword hand. He sighted down the edges of the blade, then leaned on the sword as if it were a cane and he a Kaudian dandy on a seaside promenade.