The Barrow (86 page)

Azharad raised his hands up to the Heavens.
An Age is ending! And in the fires that are coming, someone will surely walk this path! It could be you, if you wanted it; you need but ask and this path is your path. Free me, and become my captain! Free me, and become my champion! Help me back into the world you hate so much, and I will help you break it!

Stjepan eyed Azharad with a slight smile.

“
I have only one thing to ask of you, dread Lord,” he said quietly. “The sword
Gladringer
. . . where is it?”

Around the bier no one moved.

Arduin stood still staring at the sword, as did Godewyn and Caider Ross. The beautifully made sword glistened to them in the flickering lamplight.

Finally Godewyn and Caider glanced at each other, then at Arduin, and then back to the sword. Godewyn caught Caider Ross' eye, and gave an imperceptible nod at the sword.

Caider Ross grinned and nodded, and made a quick step forward as if to lunge for the sword lying on the body on the bier.

And Arduin swept his war sword from its place of rest in the crook of his couter and it flashed high in the air in a blur, and then he cut straight down through Caider Ross' shoulder and into his chest, cleaving the startled man open before he had a chance even to flinch.

Godewyn leapt back against a wall, almost tripping over an urn filled with coins, his eyes wide. “King of Heaven!” he spat.

He stared aghast as Arduin put an iron-shod foot against Caider's chest and pushed the body back onto the dirt floor of the chamber to free his sword from the man's ruined ribs and lungs. Arduin turned toward him, a murderous glint in his eyes. Godewyn licked his lips, starting to measure his chances against the Champion of the Tournament of Flowers standing before him in full harness and with bloodied sword raised in challenge.

Azharad paused and looked away from Stjepan.

“Where is Gladringer?” Stjepan repeated.

Azharad looked back at him and stretched out a hand to the Athairi.
Free me, bring me back into the World, and I will tell you!

“Do you even know where it is?” Stjepan asked.

Free me, take the hero's path, and I will tell you where to find it
, said the ghost.

Stjepan studied him a long moment. “I think not,” he finally said. “If I help break the World, it'll be without you.”

Azharad laughed bitterly.
Then you are a fool
, the ghost said. And he turned and faced Stjepan and raised his mask, revealing a face corrupted by disease and eaten by worms and maggots, his eyes missing, his teeth sharpened into fangs. He moved toward Stjepan, his hideous face opening in a frustrated and terrifying scream.

Stjepan sat up with a start to discover he had been lying against the lid of the iron casket as it rested on the sloping sides of the pit. He breathed deeply, and then winced at the pain of Godewyn's blow. He tried instinctively to bring his hand to the back of his head and when that didn't happen he realized that his hands were tied behind his back.

And then he froze as he became aware that above him someone was walking along the lip of the funneled pit, just as Azharad had been circling him in his dream.

“Azharad,” said Stjepan with a tired sigh. “Even awake my answer is the same.”

“No. Not Azharad,” came Annwyn's voice.

Stjepan rolled a bit onto his side on the sloping wall of the pit and looked up and over his shoulder; it was indeed Annwyn, walking around the chamber above him. She wore golden serpent bracelets, ornate anklets and arm torques and a jeweled necklace, and little else except the moving, pulsing map. She trailed her damask robes behind her.

He frowned, staring at her, his mind still groggy and shaken.

“Where's Erim? The others?” he asked.

“I fear they've all gone and left us. But then, what's happening here no longer concerns them. It is just you and I, here, alone in the dark. The map, and the map reader,” she said.

Stjepan turned away from her. “I think I dreamed this moment,” he said quietly. He began to surreptitiously struggle against his bonds.

“A pleasant dream? The two of us giving rise to something new, here, in this place, beneath the earth,” said Annwyn with a tone of hope.

“I don't think so,” he said. His head hung low in resignation, but his voice was sharp and clear. “It is time for this charade to end, Annwyn. The map has placed a compulsion upon you. You've become a pawn of the Nameless Cults, and I will aid you no further.”

Arduin and Godewyn circled each other around the bier and the body and its sword, slowly and calmly. Godewyn looked down at Caider Ross' body as he stepped over it, and a dark cloud of anger passed over his face. His nostrils flared and his lips skinned back from his teeth in a vicious snarl as he hefted his broadsword in his left hand and his axe in his right. But some part of him raised a warning flag.
Careful, careful
, he thought.
This one's a born killer, trained from birth to take men apart with a sword, and he clearly hasn't lost a step since they named him a Champion of the Tourneys . . .

“You know why they call me Red-Hand?” Godewyn asked Arduin suddenly with a grin. “I was given that name when I was but fourteen, when a local bard sang a song about the revenge I took on a man that had stolen from me. I was already well on a path steeped in other people's blood and misery, and I've never looked back. When I die, the men and women I've killed will be lined up at the Place of Judgment waiting for me, whole flocks of them, a full fucking chorus of the unhappy, untimely dead waiting to greet me with their moans and wails.”

“I look forward to sending you to them, then,” said Arduin with gritted teeth. “It's high time, I think, that you take your place in whatever Hell is waiting for you.”

“Ah, it won't be that easy, my Lord. You're hardly the first to try, and I don't think you're gonna be the last. After I kill you, I'm gonna take that sword and I'm gonna find that cursed little shit Gilgwyr,” said Godewyn. “I'll cut him limb from limb, slice his lying tongue out and feed it to him.” His grin got wider and meaner. “Then I'm gonna find your sister and I'm gonna stick her with the sword in my pants, and make her scream like you never could.”

Arduin shook with rage. “You . . . you . . . you . . . you . . .” he stammered, until words utterly failed him and all that was left was a blinding hunger for death.

They stopped circling and lunged for each other, blades crossing.

Annwyn laughed as Stjepan staggered unsteadily to his feet, his hands tied behind him, and turned to look up at her walking her circle around the lip of the pit.

“Is that what you think when you look at me? The others . . . when they looked at me . . . when they looked at
me
, they first saw this form,” she said as she dropped the damask robe to the earth behind her, and let her hands run over her body, over her hips and sides and up her breasts. “. . . This flesh, this skin . . . And
then
they saw the map.” She looked at him with curious eyes, and she began to walk down into the pit, taking a long circular spiral down its sloped, funneled walls, slowly getting closer and closer to him as she spoke. “But not you. When you look at me, you see the map first. In fact, it's all you see. You don't see my form, my flesh, my skin. You don't see me, you don't see what I am becoming.”

Stjepan stood at the base of the pit, his boots in muck and dead maggots, and he looked into her clear blue eyes. “I see full well what you've become,” he said.

“No, you don't,” she said. “I want you to look at me. Not at the map, look at
me
.”

“I see you better than you think, Annwyn, and you are not yourself,” he said.

“I am more myself than I have ever been,” she said with a smile. Stjepan said nothing, watching her warily as she got closer.

Annwyn reached the floor of the pit and walked around him and the casket, carefully stepping so that she did not enter the muck and dead maggots pooled at the pit's lowest point in front of the open casket. As she passed behind him, her hand reached out to touch him on his bare shoulder. Her finger trailed across his back, tracing a line on his skin from one shoulder to his spine to his other shoulder. “All these days and nights you've looked at me. It's only fair that you show me
your
form,
your
flesh,
your
skin,” she whispered in his ear. “Let me see you. And then we can finish what we've started.”

She turned him around. She looked down across his smooth chest, her eyes coming to rest on the rings in his nipples, then down across his flat, muscled abdomen. She could smell sweat and sun-burnt copper skin and the heat rising from his body.

“You and me and the map, alone under the earth,” she said, looking up into his eyes with a knowing smile.

She started to undo the buttons on his breeches. She slid her hands under the waist of his breeches, separating it from his skin, sliding her hands behind him to glide her fingers over his firm buttocks. She crouched in front of him, and as she did so, she pulled her hands down and with them his breeches, and she smiled in delight at what she found rising to greet her.