Unclipping his heavy red cloak, he passed it to Lares.
Far below, Elphons saw the wagons of the merchant convoy enter the deep woods bordering the long Lake of Cepharis. The duke’s mood soured. They had first caught sight of the convoy earlier that morning as a dust cloud on the horizon. Slowly they had gained on it and were now a mere half mile behind them. Elphons had been looking forward to arriving at the lake, divesting himself of his armor, and swimming in the cool water, and did not relish the thought of sharing it with two score of wagoners and their families. As always, the young Lares was in tune with his master’s thoughts.
“I could ride down and get them to move on, sire,” he said.
It was a tempting thought, but Elphons pushed it aside. The wagoners would be no less hot than he, and the lake was common ground. It would be enough for the duke and his retainers to ride close and wait patiently. The wagoners would get the message and move on more swiftly. Even so, it meant that before the day was over the duke and his retainers would be eating dust thrown up by the convoy.
Elphons patted the sleek white neck of his charger. “You are tired, Osir,” he said to the horse, “and I fear I am not as light as once I was.” The charger snorted and tossed its head.
The duke touched heels to the charger’s flanks and began once more to make the long descent. A solitary cloud drifted momentarily between the sun and the land, and Elphons enjoyed a few seconds of relief from the heat.
Then it was gone. With the prospect of the lake looming, Elphons drained the last of the water from his canteen and swung in the saddle to watch his wagons making their slow and careful descent. There was scree on the road, and if it were not handled with skill, a wagon could slide off the road and smash into shards on the rocky slope.
His wife, the silver-haired Aldania, waved at him, and he grinned back. As she smiled, she looked young again, he thought, and infinitely desirable. Twenty-two years they had been wed, and he still marveled at his luck in winning her. The only daughter of Orien, the last but one king of the Drenai, she had fled her own lands during the war against Vagria. Elphons had been merely a knight at that time and had met her in the Gothir capital of Gulgothir. Under any normal circumstances a romance between a princess and a knight would have been short-lived, but with her brother, King Niallad, slain by an assassin and the Drenai empire in ruins, there were few suitors for her hand. And after the war, when the Drenai declared for a republic, she was even less sought after. The new ruler, the fat giant Karnak, made it clear that Aldania would not be welcome back home. So Elphons had won her heart and her hand, bringing her to Kydor and enjoying twenty-two years of great joy.
Thoughts of his good fortune made him forget burning heat and painful joints, and he rode for some time lost in the memories of their years together. She was everything he could have wished for: a friend, a lover, and a wise adviser in times of crisis. There was only one area in which he could offer any criticism: the raising of their son. It was the only subject on which they argued. She doted on Niallad and would hear no words said against him.
Elphons loved the boy, but he worried for him. He was too fearful. The duke twisted in the saddle and glanced back. Niallad waved at him. Elphons smiled and returned the wave. If I could turn back the years, thought the duke, I would throttle that damned storyteller. Niallad had been around six years of age when he had learned the full story of the death of his uncle, the Drenai king. He had suffered nightmares for months, believing that the evil Waylander was hunting him. For most of the summer the boy had taken to creeping into his parents’ bedroom and climbing into bed between them.
Elphons had finally summoned the Drenai ambassador, a pleasant man with a large family of his own. He had sat with Niall and explained how the monstrous Waylander had been hunted down and had his head cut off. The head had been brought to Drenan, where, stripped of skin, it had been displayed in the museum, alongside the assassin’s infamous crossbow.
For a while the boy’s nightmares ceased. But then news had come of the theft of the crossbow and the murder of Karnak, the Drenai ruler.
Even now, nine years later, Niall would not travel without bodyguards. He hated crowds and would avoid large gatherings when he could. On state occasions, when Elphons forced him to attend, he would stay close to his father, eyes wide with fear, sweat on his face. No one mentioned it, of course, but all saw it.
Elphons returned his attention to the trail. He was almost at the foot of the slope. Shading his eyes, he stared ahead at the wooded lake a quarter of a mile ahead. There was no one swimming. How curious, he thought. They must have pushed on. Hardy men, those wagoners.
And yet they had women and children with them. One would have thought they would have appreciated a cooling swim. Perhaps they realized the duke was close behind and were nervous about stopping. He hoped that was not the reason.
Lares moved alongside him and waved the troop of twenty soldiers forward. They cantered past the duke and rode ahead to scout the woods.
Sadly, such precautions were necessary. There had been three attempts on the duke’s life in the last two years. Such was the Angostin way. A man held power only for as long as his strength and guile held out. And his luck, thought Elphons. The four major houses of Kydor were involved in an uneasy truce, but disputes broke out often and battles were fought. Only last year Lord Panagyn of House Rishell had waged a short and bloody war against Lord Ruall of House Loras and Lord Aric of House Kilraith. There had been three battles, all indecisive, but Panagyn had lost an eye in the third, while Ruall’s two brothers both had been killed in the second. Lord Shastar of the smaller House Bakard had now broken his treaty with Panagyn and allied himself with Aric and Ruall, which suggested that a new war was looming. This was why, Elphons believed, Panagyn had sent assassins against him. Angostin law stated that the duke’s forces could not be used in disputes between houses. However, if the duke was dead, his three thousand soldiers probably would join Panagyn. The man, though a brute, was a fighting soldier and highly regarded by the troops. With them he could win a civil war and make himself duke.
Sooner or later I will have to kill Panagyn, he thought. For if he ever slays me, he will see my son murdered on the same day. Elphons found that the fear of such an outcome weighed heavily on him. Niallad was not ready to rule. Perhaps he never would be. The thought made him shiver. He looked up at the sky. “Just give me five more years,” he prayed aloud to the Source. In that time Niallad might change.
The duke drew rein as his cavalrymen fanned out and entered the wood. Within moments they were galloping their mounts away from the trees and back to the convoy. The captain, a young man named Korsa, dragged his mount to a halt before the duke.
“There has been a massacre, my lord,” he said, forgetting to salute.
Elphons stared hard into the young man’s ashen face. “Massacre? What are you talking about?”
“They are all dead, sire. Butchered!”
Elphons heeled the charger into a run, his forty lancers swinging their mounts and following him.
The wagons were all drawn up within the trees some fifty feet from the water’s edge, but there were no horses. Blood was everywhere, splashed against tree trunks, pooling on the earth. Elphons drew his longsword and gazed around the scene. Lares and Korsa dismounted, while the other cavalrymen, weapons in their hands, sat nervously awaiting a command.
A cold, winter wind blew across the lake. Elphons shivered. Then he climbed down from his mount and walked to the water’s edge. Amazingly, there was ice on the water. It was melting fast. He scooped some into his hand. The mud beneath his feet crunched as he moved. Sheathing his sword, he walked back to where Lares and Korsa were examining the traces of an overturned wagon. Blood was smeared on the smashed wood, and a blood trail like the crimson slime of a giant worm could be seen leading away from the wagons and deeper into the trees. Several bushes had been uprooted.
Elphons turned to one of the soldiers. “Ride out and keep
the wagons back from here,” he said. The man gratefully swung his horse and rode away.
Melting ice was everywhere. The duke scanned the ground. It was badly churned, but he found a clear imprint just beyond the wagon. It was like the mark of a bear, only longer and thinner: four-toed and taloned.
In the space of a few moments something had descended on forty wagoners and their families, killed them and their horses, and dragged them away into the woods. It could not have happened without a sound. There must have been screams of terror and pain. Yet only a few hundred yards away Elphons had heard nothing. And how could ice form in this cloying heat?
Elphons followed the blood trails for a little way. Dead birds littered the ground, frost on their feathers.
Lares crossed the blood-covered ground. The young man was trembling. “What are your orders, sire?”
“If we skirt the lake to the north, how long till we reach Carlis?”
“By dusk, sire.”
“Then that is what we shall do.”
“I cannot understand how we heard nothing. We had the woods in sight all the time.”
“Sorcery was used here,” said the duke, making the sign of the protective horn. “Once my family is safe in Carlis, I’ll return with Aric’s forces and a Source priest. Whatever evil is here will be destroyed. I swear it.”
It was still early when Waylander strolled into the north tower library, climbing the cast-iron spiral staircase to the antiquities section on the third floor. The three acolytes of the priestess Ustarte were sitting at the central table, examining tomes and parchment scrolls. They did not look up as he entered.
Strange men, he thought. Despite the thick stone of the tower, the heat was already rising within the chamber, yet they were garbed in heavy gray-hooded robes, had silk scarves around their necks, and wore thin gray gloves. Waylander did not acknowledge them as he moved past, but he felt their eyes on his back. He allowed himself a wry smile. He had never been loved by priests.
Waylander paused and scanned the shelves. More than three thousand documents were stored there, ancient skin-bound volumes, fading parchments, even tablets of clay and stone. Some were beyond deciphering but still drew scholars from as far afield as Ventria and the distant Angostin homeland.
His search would have been so much easier had the old librarian, Cashpir, not succumbed to a fever and taken to his bed. His knowledge of the library was phenomenal, and it was through him that Waylander had gathered many of the precious tomes. He tried to recall the day he had read of the shining swords. There had been a storm raging, the sky black and heavy. He had sat where the priests were now, reading under lantern light. For three days he had been racking his mind for any bright shard of memory.
He glanced toward the open window and the new wooden shutters. Then it came to him.
The old shutters had been leaking, and water had splashed onto the shelves close by, damaging the documents stored there. Waylander and Cashpir had moved some of the scrolls to the table. It was one of those he had been idly scanning. The area of the shelf closest to the window was still empty. Waylander walked across the chamber to the small office used by Cashpir. The place was a mess, scrolls scattered everywhere, and he could hardly see the leather-topped desk beneath the mass of books and parchment. Cashpir had an amazing mind but no talent whatsoever for organization.
Waylander walked around the desk and sat down, picking through the parchments that lay there, recalling what had pricked his original interest on the day of the storm. One of the scrolls had told of giant creatures melded from men and beasts. Waylander himself had been hunted by just such creatures twenty years before; they had been sent to kill him by a Nadir shaman.
Waylander studied the scrolls, examining each one before laying it on the floor at his feet. Finally he lifted a yellowing parchment and recognized it immediately. The ink had faded badly in places, and one section of the parchment had been stained by fungus. Cashpir had treated the rest with a preservative solution of his own design. Waylander took the scroll back into the main library and walked to the window. In the sunlight he read the opening lines.
Of the glory that was Kuan Hador there are only ruins now, stark and jagged, testimony to the fruitless arrogance of man. There are no signs of the god-kings, no shadows of the Mist Warriors cast by the harsh sunlight. The history of the city is gone from the world, as indeed are the stories of its heroes and villains. All that remains are a few contradictory oral legends, garbled tales of creatures of fire and ice and warriors with swords of shining light who stood against demons shaped from both men and beasts.
Having visited the ruins, one can understand the birth of such legends. There are fallen statues that appear to have the heads of wolves and the bodies of men. There are the remains of great arches, built, as far as one can ascertain, for no purpose. One arch, named by the historian Ventaculus as the Hador Folly, is carved from a sheer cliff of granite. It is the most curious piece, for when one examines it, one finds that the pictographic carvings on the inner arch pillars vanish into the rock, almost as if the cliff had grown over it like moss.
I have copied separately many of the pictographs, and several of my colleagues have spent decades trying to decipher the complex language contained in them. So far complete success has eluded us. What is apparent is that Kuan Hador was unique in the ancient world. Its methods of architecture, the skill of its artisans, is apparent nowhere else. Many of the stones still standing are blackened by fire, and it is likely that the city was destroyed in a great conflagration, perhaps as the result of a war with neighboring civilizations. Few artifacts have been recovered from Kuan Hador, though the king of Symilia has in his possession a mirror of silver that never tarnishes. This, he claims, was recovered from the site.
Waylander paused in his reading. There followed a series of descriptions of site examinations and a suggested layout of the city. Bored by the scholarly writing, Waylander skimmed through the text until he came to the concluding paragraphs.
As is ever the case when a civilization falls, tales abound that it was evil. Nomads who inhabit the areas that once were the realm of Kuan Hador talk of human sacrifice and the summoning of demons. There is no doubt that the city boasted great magickers. I suspect, from the statues and those pictographs we have been partly able to decipher, that the rulers of Kuan Hador did indeed have some understanding of the vile art of meld magic. It is entirely probable that more recent examples of this abhorrent practice—among the Nadir and other barbaric peoples—are legacies of Kuan Hador.
I have listed separately some of the oral legends pertaining to the fall of Kuan Hador. The one most told concerns the return of the shining swords. Among the nomads of the Varnii—distant relatives of the Chiatze—the shamans speak a succession of doggerel verses at season feasts. The first and last verse read:
But seek ye not the Men of Clay,
Who buried lie in crafted night,
Their shining swords are put away,
Their eyes are closed against the light.
Death must await these Men of Clay,
who stand in rows of ghostly white,
and will until that dreadful day,
when they awake to one last fight.
A more complete translation can be found in Appendix 5. The historian Ventaculus produced an appealing essay on the song, claiming it to be a metaphor for the death and resurrection of those of heroic virtue, a faith system not unusual among warrior peoples.
Putting the scroll back in its rightful place on the shelf, Waylander strolled from the library. Minutes later he emerged onto the central terrace outside the banquet hall. Kysumu was waiting there, standing by the balustrade and staring out over the bay and the sea beyond. The little swordsman turned as Waylander approached. He bowed deeply. Waylander returned the compliment.
“I have found little,” he told the Rajnee. “There are stories of an ancient city that once ruled this land. Apparently it was destroyed by warriors with shining swords
.”
“A city of demons,” said Kysumu.
“So it is said.”
“They are returning.”
“That is quite a leap of imagination,” said Waylander. “The city fell around three thousand years ago. The scroll I examined was written a thousand years ago. One attack on a merchant and his bodyguards is too little to convince me.”
“I also discovered a scroll,” said Kysumu. “It talked of nomads avoiding the ruins because their legends say the demons were not all slain but escaped through a gateway to another world, one day to return.”
“Even so, the evidence is small.”
“Perhaps,” said Kysumu. “But when I see birds flying south, I know winter is coming. They do not need to be large birds, Gray Man.”
Waylander smiled. “Let us say you are correct and the demons of Kuan Hador are returning. What is your plan?”
“I have no plan. I will fight them. I am Rajnee.”
“Matze Chai tells me you believe your sword brought you here.”
“It is not a belief, Gray Man. It is a fact. And now that I am here, I know it is right. How far are the ruins from the palace?”
“Less than a day’s ride.”
“Will you lend me a horse?”
“I’ll do better than that,” said Waylander. “I’ll take you myself.”
If one fact of life was incontrovertible for Yu Yu Liang, it was that one golden ounce of good luck was invariably followed by several pounds of bad—usually, in his experience, falling on him from a great height. Or, as his mother would say, “When the emperor’s parade passes by, the horse turd collectors are not far behind.”
The blond-haired Norda had left his bed only moments before, and Yu Yu was happier than he had been in months despite the initial criticism offered by the woman. “You are not in a race,” she had whispered to him as he clung to her. He had paused, his heart pounding wildly.