A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (44 page)

Death is the ending of things. Death is a part of the natural
order, the settling of accounts, the passage from what is before to what is now
and what is tomorrow. Peace is the beginning of things, the time before the
breaking that comes when all the natural forces of life and nature are unleashed.

The place between is his life. All the peace from long ago,
burned into memory like a book of scars that he must read and read again. All
the pain that is tomorrow’s, driven into his flesh like iron nails as punishment
for what he is.

“My lord?”

The voice rings out loud in the stillness of his mind. He feels
the echo that differentiates it from the voice of the Blade, repeating the
signs and shadows of the conclave in dark whispers.

The White Pilgrim wheels, finds himself face to face with four
guards. The armor and cloak of the Black Duke. Faces he does not recognize. Two
have swords already in hand, the other two drawing as they see him. No warning
of their approach, his mind and senses focused inward, into the domed hall and
what unfolds there.

He feels the hunger twist through him like something alive.
Through the Blade’s sight, he sees himself through these strangers’ eyes. An
old man, bent. The black boar at his shoulder makes them approach carefully,
taking him for one of them until he turns to show the road-grimed robes beneath
the cloak. A belt of frayed rope is loose above a scabbard, from which the White
Pilgrim draws a longsword whose weight is seemingly too much for him. It hangs
in his hand, trembling with the effort of clutching it.

Their looks are something between humor and pity. The warrior
with the two blades of a sergeant at his shoulder detaches himself from the
others.

“Yield,” the White Pilgrim says. He hears laughter from all four
as the sergeant strides forward. “One man must die tonight,” the White Pilgrim
says. His voice has an edge they too easily ignore. “Along with any others who
stand in the way of that deed.”

The guard sergeant raises his blade, a slow arcing strike. In a
flash of silver, his sword is gone from his hand. A second flash and the hand
is gone.

He stares in shock as the White Pilgrim grabs him, spins him,
anchors all his weight and strength by deadly instinct to send the sergeant
hurtling through the remains of the garden’s wall of glass with a scream.

All the shouting, all the blustering and bravado of the domed
hall is shattered in an instant. The canvas that blocked the night and the open
air of the garden comes down as the sergeant flies through it, hitting hard and
sprawling in a nest of blackened shards.

More figures follow a heartbeat behind. Three in the uniform of
the Black Duke swarm the fourth at their center, a blur of grey and white, silver
and red. The White Pilgrim fends off attacks from three directions, the Blade
singing in his hand.

Chaos erupts in the hall, a dozen blades drawn at once.
Skirmishes flare between the leaders of Gracia, who are reduced to brawling
fear in the instant. Accusations shouted of ambush and betrayal, the incantation
of spellcraft, animyst and arcane power filling the air.

The White Pilgrim threads through it like a deadly shadow. He discards
the cloak of the black boar where it limits his movements, spins at the center
of a web of blood and steel. The three guards who pursue him are fought to a
standstill, screaming for aid as they fall back beneath a staggering series of
fast strikes.

He attacks relentlessly. He feels the hunger of Whitethorn even
as he fights it, forcing his strikes to sword and armor rather than the soft
flesh of arm and neck. He parries without counterstrike as he feels his way
through the movement around him, feels the sight that is the Blade’s mark out
the field of combat. Feels it flood him with the fury that will drink deep of
the blood of betrayers this night if he will only let it.

“Hold now! Hold now!”

The voice booms out over the chaos of screams and steel. The
Black Duke’s warriors respond first to their master’s call, falling back where
they press the White Pilgrim, who turns. There at the edge of the broken table
that divides the hall, Arsanc holds his sword in one hand, his other clenched
within a globe of light that flares to every corner of the chamber.

As the dukes of Gracia shield their eyes against the brightness,
the great doors of the domed hall are cracked wide with the echoing boom of
stone on stone. From the corridors and side chambers beyond, the captains and
war-mages and guards of nineteen dukes spill through from where they have held
their own court, awaiting word of the business of their masters.

Some dozens make it to the sides of their lieges before Arsanc himself
snarls an incantation. A shimmering black fog rises, congealing even as warriors
and mages fall back to either side. In its wake, the doorway is sealed in a
shroud of dark stone that echoes with the anger of voice that created it.

“Hold now!” the Black Duke shouts again. “Spell and sword, all
stand down!”

A sudden silence twists through the throne room. The dukes of
Gracia, the knights and war-mages who defend them, all fix wary eyes on each
other, on the Black Duke, on the White Pilgrim. They cluster around the chairs
of the king’s companions, a force of magic and military strength as formidable
as any ever assembled in the Elder Kingdoms.

It would take very little provocation for all the leadership of
Gracia to perish here, the White Pilgrim realizes. He senses the power held in
dangerous check, the rage and fear that threads the chamber. The Black Duke’s
ultimatum.

One man must die tonight.

The White Pilgrim steps toward Arsanc. One of the Black Duke’s
defenders slips in from behind with axe in hand, ignores his duke’s orders in
favor of a perfect unseen strike. The White Pilgrim swings back without
looking, takes the attacker cleanly at the wrist, cutting to the bone. Then
around from the other side, cutting deep at the shoulder as the axe spins away.
His gaze never leaves Arsanc across from him.

“Hold!” the Black Duke shouts again. No one moves, save for the
White Pilgrim as he continues toward the broken cleft of the white table,
collapsed inward to a crevasse of rubble and dust.

He fights the call of the sword to strike again, strike hard.
Drink deep of blood and the power it provides. The dead Gareyth, the Black
Duke’s men in the orchard all laugh to see him.

Arsanc is not laughing.

“I told you I was the source of all your pain,” the White Pilgrim
says. “I told her they would not listen.”

Arsanc does not ask how this ancient man, this wreck of a man
could possibly have made his way here, left for dead two days and thirty
leagues away. He does not ask how the White Pilgrim still lives. His shadowed
eyes betray the darkness of his understanding.

“Those who would actively seek the crown of kings betray an ambition
that makes them wholly unsuitable for rule,” the White Pilgrim says. He hears
the tone of command in his own voice, sees the reaction in the assembled dukes
as they look from him to Arsanc. They fall back to leave space around the white
table where he paces, bare footfalls steady in the silence.

“You cannot…” Arsanc whispers. “You cannot be.”

His own blade pulses blue-white in his hands. One of the great
blunt-ended broadswords of the Norgyr. Runes of magic flare along the length of
its steel, Arsanc channeling its arcane power.

The power in the sword of kings that is Ankathira that is the
Whitethorn shivers through the White Pilgrim, who hears the voice of the Blade
as a dark laughter in his mind.

A hatred flares in the black eyes of the Black Duke. The shadow
that a lifetime’s pain inflicts on others, because the target that pain should
seek is dead and gone. Forever out of reach.

The White Pilgrim looks from face to face as he passes the dukes
of Gracia in turn. He seeks for familiarity in those eyes, sees only shadows
staring back at him. Too much time passes. Old faces that might be faces he
knew, reshaped by long years. Young faces to replace the old who fight at his
side and kneel in this chamber and pledge their rule to the high king’s law
when the fighting is done.

Sons and daughters. Usurpers and new blood. Time passes for them
as it does for all folk, all things. Flesh and life fading, images graven in
stone and mosaic, sketched in charcoal or pigment. All worn away in time.

All things end. All things but him, and the sins he bears that
hold him here.

“She was wrong,” he says to himself, to the faces staring stunned
around him, to no one. “The things we remember, good or bad, are no matter.”

He feels the Golden Girl’s hand at his shoulder. She is tall, he
realizes suddenly. Possessing the wide innocence of her father’s eyes, the
steadiness of her father’s hand as she grasps his, holds it tight.

“A king might return from the dead,” he says. “Speak his name and
be cast aside as a fool. An old man, senses lost. No face to be recognized because
the memories have left him behind.”

“Only the good has been remembered,’ she whispers, weeping. Long
ago. “The people need their king, who vanquished the usurper and restored to
Gracia its honor and peace. The darkness will be forgotten. Your legend has
undone all sins.”

He tries to reach for her hand, but she is not there. Only a
dream now.

He tries to reach for Nàlwyr, for Aelathar, but he is alone.

“Only by deeds,” the White Pilgrim says, shouting now. “Only by
what we do are we remembered. The best and worst of what we are. Our humility,
our hubris, our fears, our courage. We vow our lives to those who follow us, to
those we lead, and so our lives are reckoned in the end only by how we die!”

He turns back. He looks to Arsanc once more where the Black Duke
stands cold, a dangerous darkness in his eyes. The White Pilgrim fights to keep
his breathing slowed in the silence.

“Do you remember me now, my duke?”

Arsanc is a dozen strides away as he raises his sword for a
killing stroke. But then the single step he takes toward the White Pilgrim
consumes him in a flash of light that disgorges him again a single step distant.
Whitethorn is up to parry, faster than thought, three furious strikes sent wide
as the White Pilgrim twists away.

Arsanc stares in stark disbelief, falls back into a defensive
posture as the White Pilgrim counterattacks. Whitethorn is a blur of silver
where it lances out, meets steel twice before cutting beneath Arsanc’s sword
arm with the force of all the Blade’s hunger behind it. The White Pilgrim feels
the sword of kings strike but glance off, the Black Duke’s armor flaring white
for a moment beneath a shimmering shield of arcane force.

He staggers back, watching Arsanc as he halts. A moment’s
respite.

“It does not matter,” the White Pilgrim says. “Who I am. All that
matters is what was done. What will be done in answer.”

Arsanc unclasps his cloak, casts it aside. “Here is my answer,”
he whispers, and from a scabbard at the back of his belt, he draws a
blue-bladed dirk as he strikes in a blaze of steel. The long looping arcs of
the sword set up the dagger as it lashes out like a serpent from the left arm,
the Black Duke fighting effortlessly, drawing on the dweomer of the broadsword
to augment his strength. The sight of the Blade senses this, the White Pilgrim
hearing it in the voice that guides his hand as it parries, blocks, parries
again.

The Black Duke makes a final onslaught, the broadsword howling as
it strikes the side of the white table where it slopes up beside them. A chunk
is hacked from its marbled edge, smoldering where it falls.

“Your day is done,” the Black Duke shouts. “My blood’s revenge is
on you.”

A quick strike from Whitethorn arcs off the broadsword cleanly,
the Blade shrieking in the White Pilgrim’s ears now, ravenous. “The sins of the
father lost cannot be paid for by the daughter,” he calls. “No more than the
guilt of the father can be cleansed by the innocence of the murdered son.”

“My brother’s life is not bartered in platitudes! For my
brother’s blood, the butcher’s daughter is mine, and I will bestow on her the
death that should have been her father’s when she begs me in the end!”

“I am the one you hate!” the White Pilgrim shouts. “I am the one
whose madness cost a brother’s life!”

“Then show me your children, old man, that they might feel the
same pain you will feel when you fall here!”

“I gave the order that sent Nàlwyr to Stondreva and your brother
to his doom!”

The White Pilgrim feels the weight of the truth slip from him. A
confession left unspoken, uttered twice now for the first time in long years.
And even as he speaks, he sees and understands the subtle shift in the Black
Duke’s gaze where the words sink in through a lifetime of pain.

“What do you remember, old man?”

Arsanc strikes hard, a newly fired rage in him flaring as he
pushes the offensive. As the White Pilgrim falls back, he understands that
something is changed.

Arsanc is as ready to kill as ever. But more than that, now and
only now, the Black Duke is ready to die. Finally. No way out anymore from the
pain he carries. Nothing else beyond this moment when everything ends.

“I remember it all,” the White Pilgrim says, and he does.

The power of the Blade clears his mind, feeds him the hunger that
is the lifeblood of his reign. The power of Whitethorn threads through him,
replaces his strength of self as if his blood were black shadow suddenly, fed
and pumped by the heart of steel in his hand.

“Havar was the brightest light,” the Black Duke screams in a
voice churned of raw malice. “My brother was a scholar. A poet. Something better
than the bloody line that got him.”

The White Pilgrim feels the Blade begin to lead him in, too
close. He leaves himself open as Arsanc attacks in a relentless flurry. The
dirk takes him clean through the side to slash skin and muscle, staining the
robes that are white once with a stream of blood. The pain staggers him even as
he feels the power of the sword of kings staunch the wound, begin to knit torn
flesh whole again.