A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (17 page)

The axe still wasn’t talking to him, but he could hear it darkly
muttering that night from its place on the mantle. It was a language he didn’t
understand, but he sensed the rage that underlay the unknown words all the
same.

Three more Gorbeyna warbands came the following day, but Hjorn
was ready for them this time. Before dawn, he toted three barrels from the
cellar and set them out and open on the front porch. The first group threw
themselves at the wine with unbridled enthusiasm, drinking themselves into a
stupor and collapsing in a snoring, sodden heap. The second group drank was
what left. The third turned on the first two when they found the barrels dry.

They left six dead on the porch before they fled back to the
forest, Hjorn sadly rolling the bodies over the edge of the cliff as a fourth
group, newly arrived, burst from the tree line at a run. He waited until they
were halfway up the steep stairs. Then he rolled the empty barrels down one
after the other, the shrieking Gorbeyna bowled over to tumble back down in an
undignified and badly bruised heap.

Hjorn watched them slink off, but he stayed out past the rise of
the Clearmoon on the porch, watching carefully for any further movement along
the narrow paths below. The night passed quietly, except that over the hiss of
wind and the roar of the river below and even in the short stretches when he
could sleep, Hjorn could hear the voice of the axe faint and dark in the back
of his mind.

The Hogorba arrived shortly after dawn, great hairy brutes that were
twice the size of their Gorbeyna kin and proportionally unpleasant. Torches and
guttural war chants heralded their movement up the switchback paths. Hjorn
watched them from the porch and lost count of their number. He saw the mark of
a white dagger on their shields and breastplates, the sign of a tribe he didn’t
know. He also saw the steel-spiked battering ram they carried as they eyed his
front door.

He went inside to retrieve the axe, its hilt strangely cold in
his hands. The tight-wrapped black leather had taken on an oily texture that
made his skin crawl, but he held it firmly as he strode to the edge of the
porch, raised the blade above the horde advancing now with shields up. Then he
carefully chopped away the supports that held the stairs in place, the closest
Hogorba only halfway up as the long flight of steps collapsed beneath them and
sent them screaming to the ground below.

There will be more,
the axe whispered unhappily. Hjorn
only shrugged. He dug out his knife and hatchet and filled a small pack with
rope. Then he held the axe tight and thought about the edge of the ravine where
the trail squeezed through a gloomy grove of close-growing willow, and suddenly
he was there.

There was no one else around, but he thought he heard distant
shouts from farther down the mountainside. He was wary as he worked, but no one
showed up for the better part of the afternoon as he carefully laid a series of
tripwire snares along the path. They were of a design he had shaped himself
over long years of hunting, and of convincing the mountain cats to take their
own hunting away from his house and his ravine. Each was anchored with a
thick-twisted trunk, bent low to the ground and holding enough spring strength
to stun a horse in its tracks. He hid each loop of rope with a mulch of mold
and broad blue-weed leaves when he was done.

With the axe’s magic, Hjorn jaunted back to the porch and waited
the time it took for the first screams to be heard over the river’s echoing
roar. He saw the trees shake where whoever was coming for him was tossed left
and right. Hjorn hoped it would make them think twice about another assault.
They came again at dawn to tell him he was wrong.

For four days, he watched as the Gorbeyna and the Hogorba and
their huge reeking Birgard barbarian-cousins of the western mountains threw
themselves at the cliff face but were turned back. On the fifth day, he heard
shrieks and the clash of swords before dawn, and the horde gave ground to
mud-streaked Tallfolk of the hills, who howled and fired a hail of heavy
stone-tipped arrows at the porch for the better part of the afternoon.

The next morning, individual warriors sent ropes and steel hooks
up to the porch, which Hjorn dutifully cut free with the axe as he protected
himself from arrows by sliding beneath his kitchen table like it was a turtle’s
shell. The day after that, the mountain tribes squabbled with a mercenary band
of hulking Tallfolk and the more graceful Ilvani for the right to assault
Hjorn’s house. Two stealthy rogues clambered up the cliff face but were driven
back with hails of arrowheads that Hjorn collected from the scores sent against
him the days before. He had no way to shoot them, but carefully dropped from
the top of the tall cliff in clusters, they picked up a healthy amount of momentum
by the time they hit.

He was dozing the following dawn, when a two-score strong force
of Tallfolk warriors in full armor and on horseback announced their presence
with trumpets and sent the mercenaries scattering. How they made it up the
switchback trail, Hjorn was afraid to even guess. They charged from the tree
line with lances at the ready, but then circled around aimlessly when they saw
the bluff rising before them.

Hjorn was getting angry now. It had been a long while since he
slept more than a few fitful winks at a time, forced to stay on his guard
through night and day. The faintly heard voice of the axe was a constant dark
droning in his mind.

“Go home and leave me alone!” he yelled to the riders circling
threateningly below him, but a hail of arrows and insults drove him off the
porch and inside. He grabbed the axe from the mantle, ignoring its vicious
curses as he jaunted into a poplar bluff a day’s walk down the trail. He
jaunted back a short while later with an enormous hornets’ nest in hand that he
pitched off the edge of the porch. The vicious insects had no time to notice
that they had even been moved until they smashed into the riders and their
mounts at high speed.

For another week, they came. For another week, Hjorn carried out
hit and run attacks on the growing number of warriors and mercenaries amassing
below his front door. Using the power of the axe, he shifted between his home
and the wilderness around the bluff in search of increasingly ingenious
ammunition.

When the Ilvani war-mages came, they blasted his porch and front
door with fire and lightning, but the stones that Hjorn had laid using the
ancient craft of his people held fast. In response, he collected boulders from
the shattered rockslide wall that was as close as anyone could come to the dark
chasm where the river disappeared. He dropped them from the edge of the porch,
sending them down the bluff with a sound louder than the spells that had
scorched his walls.

He jaunted into the camps of some sort of doglike creatures that walked
on two legs, leaving with them a brace of skunks he plucked from their twilight
dens in a distant meadow. Over long days and sleepless nights, he countered the
fury of the horde below him with his best ideas, but Hjorn’s ideas were
beginning to run out. The axe’s voice was growing more and more erratic in his
mind. It had moved beyond threats aimed at him and was shrieking about how it
wanted to kill
everyone,
everywhere, just because.

Or were those his own thoughts he was hearing? Hjorn wondered suddenly.
It was getting hard to tell.

One morning, there was a great battle in the camps below, various
factions laying into each other with fire and steel as if the horrific
vengeance that the axe screamed for had overwhelmed them. When it was done, the
day was passing and the woods were in flames. Bodies littered the foot of the
bluff, the Tallfolk and the Gorbeyna and Hogorba and Ilvani and Doglings
slinking away into the twilight shadows of the trees.

Two figures stood alone, both of the Tallfolk. One was an armored
warrior, pale of face and dark of eye, his gore-flecked black mail glowering
crimson in the light of the setting sun. The other was a mere boy, some sort of
squire or page by Hjorn’s view. He carried an oversized pack on his back. A
battle standard showing a white horse rampant on a field of blue fluttered atop
a long pole leaning on his shoulder.

With calm determination, the warrior walked to the foot of the
bluff. Slowly, methodically, he began to ascend, the greatsword that was near
as tall as he was slung to a back scabbard. Despite the weight of weapon and
armor, he clambered up the cliff like a shadowed spider. His squire stayed
below, watching with wide eyes and gamely waving the knight’s banner aloft to
catch the twisting breeze.

Over the previous weeks, Hjorn had learned a hundred different
ways by which he might have dispatched this new threat. But as he heard the
axe’s voice murmuring dark benedictions in its unknown tongues, he understood
something suddenly. A thing he silently cursed himself for not having realized
before.

Though he still couldn’t understand the axe’s words, he knew
their meaning now. The blade was calling for a new master. One worthy of its
dark ambition. All the fighting, all the bloodshed, and he could have ended it
at any time if he had only known it sooner.

Hjorn was no hero. He wasn’t his grandfather, standing in the firestorm
of Fignarmald like a resolute wall of sinew and steel.

He was tired. He stood and watched the warrior climb.

As the armored figure clambered over the ledge where the stairs
were once attached, he drew the greatsword in a fluid motion. He swung it
one-handed in a wide circle before he let it come to rest before him, tip down
as he clutched grip and pommel to his armored chest. He pulled his helm off,
tossing it aside as he shook his head, a thick mane of black hair rippling like
dark cloud against the sunset. He appraised Hjorn with glaring eyes.

“You are an unclean scion of a darkling race,” the knight said in
a commanding voice, and Hjorn’s eyes narrowed because he wasn’t entirely sure
what ‘scion’ meant. “You have sullied a great blade of power with your touch,
and you will pay.”

In the words, Hjorn heard a thread of nobility and grace, all but
lost now within the dark voice that twisted through his mind and the warrior’s
alike.

Kill him,
the axe whispered.

“Your life is forfeit,” the warrior said.

Vengeance left sleeping cold for over five thousand years is
thine, and in the name of Immaru and Rasilnar which is the Shrike which is the
Butcher Blade, thou wilt rule the world!

“I will rule the world…”

“Great,” Hjorn said. “Here.”

He took a single step forward. He spun the axe so that the haft
was held out toward the warrior. He sensed a moment’s uncertainty in the knight
and the axe alike.

“Take it,” Hjorn growled. “I don’t care anymore. Rule whatever
you want.”

Kill him!
the axe screamed, and its voice was a dark pain
rooting deep in Hjorn’s skull.
Thou wilt kill him for ignorance and
impudence and leave his bloated corpse for the crows!

“Treachery!” the warrior screamed, but his hand shot out to grasp
the black leather of the haft. Hjorn felt the strength in that grip as he was
yanked forward, stumbling to one knee as the knight hefted the axe high with
his free hand.

Thou art the chosen one! Thou art the master of blades and the
heir to Jhanasaath, and the power of ages dwells in this steel!

“I am the chosen one!” the warrior screamed, and his voice was
the axe’s voice suddenly, twisted through with an evil whose darkness echoed
down an endless well of years and longing.

“So just take it then. Go!”

But the knight only flung the greatsword aside as if it weighed
nothing, letting it clang to the stones of the porch as he raised the axe above
Hjorn’s head in preparation for a killing stroke. Hjorn stared, wide-eyed.
Where the blade caught the last light of the sun, its edge gleamed red like the
madness in the dark knight’s eyes.

“I am the master of blades and keeper of the Shrike, and its
power is mine!”

“Suit yourself,” Hjorn said.

Still on one knee, he shot up a heavy-fingered hand to slow the
axe’s descent. Not enough to stop it, but in his instant of contact with the
haft where it joined the blade, Hjorn thought of a place he knew well. It was a
place he saw each morning when he stepped onto his porch to breathe in the cool
air of the early dawn, and that he saw each night as he watched the sun set
through the haze of mist.

He concentrated on that place even as the descending axe twisted
from his grip. With the blade a finger’s breadth from his face, he felt the
beginning of the quick lurch as the weapon jaunted. A sensation as familiar to
Hjorn now as sight and touch after weeks of sending himself hither and yon
across the mountains. At his direction, the axe carried the warrior out a
hundred paces into empty air, high above the whirlpool where the river coursed
away beneath the mountain and into shadow.

The dark knight screamed all the long way down, but his was the
only voice Hjorn heard.

He stood in the familiar roar of the river for a long while.
Along the edge of the woods below, he saw the last straggling camps of those
who were defeated by the dark warrior pack up and leave. In the touch of the
wind, where he had heard the axe’s dark voice for long days now, there was only
silence.

Carefully, Hjorn kicked the helmet, then the greatsword to the
edge of the porch and over, watching as they tumbled noisily down the cliff and
disappeared into the dark below. He hadn’t heard the sword talk, but he wasn’t
taking any chances.

He turned back to the house, more tired and sad than he had ever
been. Then he stopped.

Hjorn stepped to the edge of the porch again. Below him, alone in
the twilight, the young squire stood at what would have been the perfect location
to watch the dark knight drop to his death. The standard had fallen at his
side.