A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (18 page)

Hjorn made his way carefully down the cliff with a lantern, dropping
the last short distance and dusting himself off. He walked over to the squire,
stopping awkwardly a few strides away. The boy was even younger than he had
looked at first glance. Still a few years from the start of a beard, or what
passed for one among the Tallfolk. He continued to stare out where the rising
mist was lost now to darkness, bright eyes pale with fear.

“Sorry,” Hjorn said after a few moments, but the squire was
silent. “You bound to the black-haired guy?”

The boy nodded.

“He your kin?”

The boy shook his head.

“Friend?”

No.

“You’re not working for him anymore. You got someplace to go?”

Another shake of the head.

“Any family?”

Hjorn saw tears welling. He tugged at his beard, perplexed for a
moment.

“Do you like stories?”

Slowly, the boy looked up. He held Hjorn’s gaze for a long while.

Hjorn felt a point of bright pride welling up inside him. He
stood tall.

“I have a guest room,” he said.

In the ruins of the attackers’ camps, Hjorn found a brace of
grouse fresh killed, cleaned, and left behind. He washed them with clear water
from the oversized pack of the squire’s, then slung that pack on his belt. He
lifted the boy to his shoulders, felt him cling tightly as he climbed.

He got the fire going with the last of the wood and a couple of
bundles of broken arrows for kindling. He had been stuck on the porch for too
long, would walk down to the pine grove tomorrow. Also, he had stairs to fix.

Hjorn cooked grouse for dinner and he told the story of the trickster-warrior
Roinara. She had walked alone into the Fane of Last Light, bargaining with the
dead heroes who dwelt there for the mortal life of Prince Glinus the Forgotten.

The boy clapped and clapped when Hjorn was done.

As he went to sleep that night, the young squire comfortable in
the guest room, Hjorn realized for the first time that he was wrong before when
he talked to the axe. When it offered him its dark pact the first time and all
the times thereafter. Now, Hjorn thought. Only now, he had everything he
needed.

THE TIMES HE JOURNEYED to the Free City, he stayed in a
series of rented rooms in a dozen different wards as a matter of longstanding
habit, because there were people who sought his counsel from time to time, and
he was determined that it should not be so easy to find it. There had been
messages this trip, left in the Smooth Swan and the Wild Godling and the
Wyvern’s Eye where he was known, but these were from a month or more ago, it
having been three months before that and High Spring the last time he passed
through the Thirty-League Gate.

Spells of warding and watching that he had placed on the single
door and the dark stairs to the Urorfidith-ward loft confirmed no one passing
by that he would have recognized by face or name, just as the landlord
confirmed no visitors asking after him. No one skulking about with vaguely
transparent inquiries regarding the dark-haired mage under any of the names he
traveled by. So it was that he was pulled surprised from the haze of a dark
sleep by the distant sound of the spell-locked outside door split from
shattered hinges in the dead of night, and pounding footsteps along the dark
hall that cleared his head in a heartbeat of all his unremembered dreams.

He slipped naked from the bed, felt the chill where the fire had
died as he pressed back to the wall and was ready, the incantation on his lips
by instinct, sent across the chamber with a snarling twist of both hands and
hitting the intruders hard where they smashed through the dark oak of the
foyer. He counted a half-dozen at a quick glance, armed and all in uniforms of
dun and rust-red, save for the leader in a cloak of sable that hid his face and
form as he toppled and fell.

It was an old spell and common enough, one of the first he ever
mastered, but made more potent since then with special flourishes all his own.
It dropped them now without a sound. Then a seventh appeared, last in from the
shadows. Blade drawn as he avoided the worst of the spell’s effect, faltering
but not fallen. The mage made a twisted flick of callused fingers, a pulse of unseen
force unleashed that cracked the figure’s head back against the wall like a
warrior’s backhand blow.

The guard collapsed alongside all the rest. With a word, the mage
threw light to the air, let it spread to scour the shadows and mark the bodies
cast down in the eldritch slumber whose dreams they would try in vain to
forget.

In the pale gleam of that light, he saw the spill of golden hair
from the woman who had been first in, the black hood thrown back to let it fall
free.

She hadn’t been leading them. The shouting in the dark-paneled
corridor. They were chasing her, he realized numbly, because his thought was
seized in the iron grip of a recognition and a memory he tried vainly to shunt
away to the shadow where it had lain for so long.

He listened now, forced himself to focus away and out from the
circle of light where he stood. He had first chosen the loft in the upper
reaches of the university quarter for the raucous isolation he tried to ignore
now, the halls and taverns and campuses below and around him an unsleeping city
within a city. Within the silence that was the alternative, he had never been
able to sleep. Voices and music rang out from beyond the ruined door now,
echoed from the unseen terrace behind him, the same as every night. But no sound
of pursuit from either side.

The rooms were part of a high terrace that clung to the upper
tiers of the old Ilvani quarter, reached by stair and bridge from across and
above a broad courtyard of sculpted white stone and restless trees. It was two
storeys up along the closest approach, and the fact that he heard only the
mundane sounds of the street below told him that the guards and the woman who
was their quarry had all made that climb unobserved, quiet under cover of
night.

The same badge marked all their shoulders. He saw it, gaze
focused there to force his eyes from her face. A red hammer entwined with fulvous
ivy, a noble’s standard, but even unrecognized as it was, he would have known
this was a noble’s guard detail by the cut and crispness of their cloth. A long
way from home, but no dirt from the road on them. No stain of damp from the
rain that had been falling for most of the past week where the winds of autumn
pushed in from the distant eastern seas.

He gently lifted her with one bare foot under the shoulder,
turning her. He saw her face emerge full from shadow, saw the narrow line of
the mouth he had kissed for the first time when he was twelve years old.

He stared for a long moment, then turned away. He occupied himself
at the bookshelves, finding what he looked for despite his state of
distraction. He pulled on tunic and leggings, a high-collared jacket. Slowly.
He needed to not look at her for long enough that when he turned back finally,
he saw her face again as it was, not as it had been. The elegant line of cheek
and jaw possessed a regal edge that it had not worn ten years before.

No, he thought darkly. Eleven years now.

A weariness to the set of the face. Lines of worry there that hid
the memory of the easy smile of youth, even slackened by magical slumber. The
half-open eyes were unchanged, the perfect sky blue of a thrush’s egg that he
had almost managed to forget.

He put his foot to her shoulder again, hard because only that
would wake her from the dark sleep of his enchantment. She cried out in pain as
she flinched, arms flailing for the moment it took for the magic to fade. She
looked frantically around her as she half-rose, saw where the guards lay
unmoving. She looked up, saw him standing above her.

He held out his hand.

Her gaze slipped down again, the guards’ breathing shallow but
steady, and he had no idea whether it was relief or fear he saw in her as she
extricated herself from the tangle of bodies, one desperate hand still
clutching tight to her cloak.

“How long will they…” Her whisper trailed off as she gestured to
the six, seemingly afraid she might wake them. She spoke the Gracian tongue
that once held all the promise of his youth, and which he used as little as
possible now as a result.

“Get clear,” he said as he unfurled the scroll he had sought and
found among the books, its writing flaring as he spoke words that could not be
heard and twisted one hand in the tight knot of the spellsign. Even as she
scrambled away to the wall, the six bodies were suddenly wrapped in a scouring
pulse of shadow that turned their flesh grey for a moment. Then they were gone.

She stared in shock. He took a moment’s comfort from that before
he spoke.

“I expect I don’t need to ask if your father knows you were
coming here tonight.”

He paced away from her, judged the time by the chill of deep
night in the air and the subtle change in the din from the street below. Only
halfway to dawn, the songs fading to quieter voices through the dark transition
of night to day, as he heard her frantically pace the now-empty floor behind
him.

“You didn’t…” she began. He smiled, his back to her. “You can’t…”

“A full accounting of the things I can do would leave you amazed
beyond any expectation. Who were they, and are there more behind them?”

“What did you do to them?” she shouted. Her voice was ice behind
him, but it was her movement that set him on edge, two steps toward him and the
hiss of her cloak along the wall as she swept past. He turned in time to see
the sword in her hand, tip already marked across a space of two paces, dead on
his heart. He could see the scabbard beneath her cloak now, set low against her
leg. Slow to draw, easy to hide.

The incantation was already in his mind, set to strike her down
with little more thought than it would have taken to swat a wasp. A reflex reaction
built up over a lifetime of having swords drawn against him. More often than
not, by people from whom he hadn’t expected it.

He came to the Free City for the first time at the turning of
autumn his fourteenth year, winding through the endless leagues of farm road
and clustered villages that blossomed green and bright around the great walls
under what had seemed an endless rain. Through all that long journey from her
father’s house, through all the years since, he told himself he hated her.

Until this night, this moment, he hadn’t realized how wrong he
was.

He felt the words of power die on his lips, fading in the same instant
in his mind. His hands were shaking, forced to his side and balled to fists. As
he often did, he reminded himself that it was a fine line between controlling
the power that lived in him and being controlled by it. He still needed to work
on that.

“I see you still recall your mood when last we saw each other,”
he said.

“What did you do…?”

“Sent them safely to finish out their slumber on the lawn of
Ladryck Green. The last of the tavern traffic from the waterfront wards will
have their cloaks and weapons pawned before they awake, but the mother of all
headaches aside, they’ll be fine.”

He saw that she believed him, but it didn’t quell the anger in
her. He smiled as he stepped forward, raised his hand to push aside the blade
and take the full embrace of that cold gaze. And as if he struck her, she
stumbled back suddenly, screaming with a fear that he had never heard in her
before.

“Stay away!” Her voice carried an edge sharp as the sword looked,
but the fear fought her movements as she whipped it away from him, left herself
open as she held it tip to the ground, eyes down suddenly. “You can’t… You
don’t understand.”

The blade she bore was gleaming silver, a rapier forged in a
style he had never seen before, and imbued with a power he felt as a faint
surge on the air, the incantation of detection second nature to him, made
without thinking. Dweomer lived in that steel, had flared with her movement. A
powerful magic. Old. He couldn’t name the place in him where the knowledge and
certainty came from, but he knew enough to trust it. A byproduct of a
lifetime’s study of arcane craft.

“Why are you here?” he asked at last, and he felt the fear in her
again as her eyes found his.

“I need your aid.”

The perfect silver of the blade seemed to ripple where it caught
the light. Her hand was shaking, and his gaze slipped past the sword to note
her now with rather more interest. With the cloak thrown back, she lost none of
the grace of the girl she had been when he last saw her. She was tall and she
was pale, in the manner of one who had grown up in good health and plenitude
but been kept for too many of those young years from the world outside. But he
saw the tight knots of muscle thread her arms still, marking her also as one
who made up for all that cloistered time in the company of the weapon masters
of her father’s house.

“What help would you need that your father could not buy?” he said
at last. “And of all the people you might seek it from, why me?”

“Because no coin will buy the trust I need, and my father cannot
know. I need your guidance. Like all the times before.”

He held her gaze for a long while. Searching for something there,
but when realized he didn’t know what, he turned away without a word. Near what
was left of the door, he checked that the foyer remained empty as he slipped on
boots and a well-worn belt of scaled hide, a dagger hanging from it. He found
the black cloak that hung by the bed, slipped it on as he waited for her to
realize that it was up to her to speak.

“You are not the easiest person to find,” she said.

“That depends on how badly one wants to find me. If you need
magic, there are easier places to seek it.”

He turned back, saw her staring at the rapier where she raised
it.

“I need answers,” she said. “This blade. You must examine it, but
you cannot touch it. I fear some curse in it, and I need to know the truth of
what it is.”

He felt the pulse of power again, felt it sing with a voice that
was hers and not hers. A chill that he tried to ignore threaded his spine. “If
you wish me to assess an artifact, you should probably be prepared for me to
actually look at it,” he said.

“Are you trained to the blade?”

“I can clean a trout or a would-be cutpurse with equal dexterity
if pressed to it,” he said. He adjusted the set of the dagger’s scabbard at his
hip. “But as to a real sword, my familiarity extends to knowing which end to
hold. What of it?”

She motioned him forward. She held the blade near but not close,
letting it catch the light again. The mage squinted. Stared. Running along the
length of that steel, he saw the faint gleam of liquid. Not moisture on the
metal, but of the metal. A dull sheen that anyone with a passing acquaintance
of the alchemist’s art would recognize.

“Quicksilver,” he said.

She nodded, but a flicker of uncertainty crossed her face
suddenly. “That is its name. Or at least what its master calls it. You know
this blade?”