The Hammer and the Blade

  "Good to see you up," Egil said to Derg, as the young guard helped break camp.

  "And you," Derg said with a grin.

  When Rakon completed his ritual and returned to the campsite, he held a leather bag. Powder dusted his hands.

  "We must move on. Minnear will be full in two days. We have to reach the tomb of Abn Thuset before that."

  "Pardon, my lord," Jyme said, "but you didn't see how many of those things are out there. We saw them last night. There are thousands of them."

  "They won't trouble us," Rakon said.

  "And how's that?" asked Egil.

  "The Vwynn fear this place. They smell the magic."

  "Which is why they haven't attacked us," Nix said, nodding. "So?"

  "So this," Rakon said, holding up the leather bag he held. "This is dust made from the glass of this place. To the Vwynn, it will have the same magical stink as this location."

  "You're going to cover us in dust?" Baras asked.

  "I trust my armor more than magical dust," said Jyme.

  "You'll have to trust both," Rakon said. "We leave within the hour."

  "And if it rains?" Egil asked, eyeing the slate that roofed the sky.

  "Let's hope it doesn't," Rakon answered. "Maybe you could pray about it, priest."

  Egil ignored Rakon's insulting tone. "I think I will."

  "Divide up the supplies amongst the men, Baras," Rakon said. "We leave the carriage here. We'll be leaving the road to make straight for Afirion."

  "Yes, my lord," Baras said.

  After they'd loaded up, Rakon dusted all of them in the magical powder, even the horses. The dust felt slick on the skin, like talc, and it proved resistant to removal. Nix supposed that was a good thing.

  They set off, pale ghosts trekking through a dead land. Rakon rode a horse with Rusilla. The eunuch rode with Merelda. The rest of them walked.

  They emerged from the ring of ruins with blades and crossbows ready, but the Vwynn did not attack. Nix saw movement in the shadows of the ruins, reptilian eyes glaring out at them from the dark crannies and coves.

  "Night will tell the tale," Jyme said nervously.

  Throughout the day the Vwynn trailed them, circled at a distance, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, always hugging the shadows. Nix felt the creatures' eyes on him, an itch between his shoulder blades.

  The Vwynn called to each other from time to time: growls, howls, clicking, grunts. Nix feared they were arranging an ambush, but the Vwynn did nothing but follow and watch as the group moved through the ruined land, left the road behind, and struck out due east across the forlorn terrain of the Wastes.

  At nightfall, Rakon dusted everyone once more. They passed the night without an attack, troubled only by the guttural sounds that carried to them from time to time out of the darkness. Minnear rose, huge in the sky, nearly full, and in that baleful moonlight the Vwynn three times prowled sidelong up to the edge of the camp, their thin forms all scales, muscle, sinew and claws. But they ventured no closer and seemed more puzzled than aggressive.

  One by one the men fell asleep. When Nix fell off, dreams came.

  He was not standing in the long hallway lined with doors. Instead, he was in a small bedroom behind one of the doors. The room smelled of unwashed bodies and fear. He was sweating, his heart racing. He lay flat on his back in the bed, his hands manacled to the bedpost.

  A sense of dread settled on him, sank into his bones. He was nude, terrified, vulnerable. Something awful was about to happen, something unspeakable.

  He heard a scuffling from the hall outside the door, the thump of a heavy tread on the floorboards. A shadow darkened the slit of light leaking between the door and the floor.

  He screamed, his voice high-pitched, feminine, an echo of the screams he'd heard in the earlier dreams. He struggled against the chains, pulled against them until they cut into his wrists and stained the sheets with his blood.

  The handle on the door turned.

  He couldn't breathe! He couldn't breathe!

  The door opened and a huge form filled the doorway, blotting out the light.

  He closed his eyes, screamed and screamed.

  He awoke to Egil shaking him. Dawn lightened the sky. Baras, Jyme, Derg, and the other guardsmen were already nearly done breaking camp.

  "Nix," the priest said, still shaking him.

  "I'm awake," Nix said.

  His head felt as if it were filled with cloth. His eyes ached. He'd been crying in his sleep, maybe.

  "Gods, you were out," Egil said. "And you look like shite."

  "Feel it." He rubbed his head. His eyes went to the horses, where Rakon and the eunuch were seating Rusilla and Merelda. Egil's bucket head followed his gaze.

  "We'll be clear of this soon," the priest said, and helped Nix sit up.

  "Maybe." Nix touched his nose and his finger came away with a smear of blood.

  Soon they were underway. Throughout the gray day, the ghost of his nightmare haunted him. He felt anxious, frightened, and angry by turns.

  "You all right?" Egil asked him, as they trudged along the enspelled road.

  "As well as can be," Nix answered. He stared at Rusilla as they walked.

  Rakon shared a horse with her, holding her upright as they rode. Her head bounced around and Nix took care not to meet her eyes. Merelda shared a mount with the eunuch, four vacant eyes between the two of them.

  Even afoot they made good progress. The terrain smoothed as they traveled eastward, the world healing as they went. Around sunset they cut through a patch of scrub-dusted, scree-covered hills. From atop the low summits, Nix could see Afirion's sands stretched out before them, a sea of beige dunes that stretched as far as he could see. To the north, the failing light of the setting sun glittered feebly off the dark of the Bleak Sea. He could not see the Gogon Ocean to the south but he knew it was there. The guards audibly exhaled, pleased to be leaving the Wastes behind them.

  "The Milai Peninsula," Nix said, picturing in his mind the narrow slice of uninhabited land that connected the Demon Wastes in the west to the Afirion Desert in the east. He and Egil had seen it many times, always from the south, while riding the waves of the Gogon Ocean.

  "I'll confess to doubting we'd make it," Egil said to him.

  "Hate for this to be one of the last things we see," Nix said, wiping sweat from his brow. "Still have the tomb ahead of us. Of course, I don't plan on dying in it. You?"

  "I do not."

  They descended the hills and broke for a meal while Rakon and Baras consulted a yellowed map in the failing light. Rakon spoke animatedly, pointing northwest, toward a series of cliffs that overlooked the curving shoreline of the Bleak Sea. Sea birds wheeled in the air near the shore. Baras followed his lord's gesture, nodded.

  As Baras returned to the rest of the group, Rakon studied the sky, his brow creased in tense worry.

  "The tomb of Abn Thuset is in those cliffs," Baras said, pointing.

  "Really?" Egil said sarcastically.

  "Let us see the map," Nix said.

  "Lord Norristru said–"

  Nix and Egil walked through Baras toward Rakon. "I'd see that map, sorcerer."

  "I'm sorry, my lord," Baras said, trailing them. "They're–"

  "It's all right, Baras." Rakon gently unrolled the map and held it for Nix to see. "See for yourself."

  Nix and Egil studied the yellowed parchment until their eyes glazed over. The map was ancient, faded almost beyond legibility. In typical Afirion fashion, the image of the terrain had been superimposed over a treatise written in tiny script. Nix recognized the script as Afirion pictoglyphs and some numerals, but he could read only snatches. He noted a repeated pictoglyph for "wizard-king," though the glyph looked somewhat different to him than others he'd seen previously. He focused on the terrain, compared it to what he saw around him and what he knew from experience.

  He made out the ocean coastline to the south, but the shore of the body of water that should have been the Bleak Sea
was too far north and much too small. There were symbols on the map he took for cities, two of which would have been in the Demon Wastes, one of them about where the sea of glass was located.

  "This isn't accurate," Nix said. "Look here. The Bleak Sea is too small."

  "It was much smaller then," Rakon said. "Before it… changed."

  "Changed?" Egil said. "An entire sea? How old is this map?"

  "Quite old," Rakon said, rolling it up carefully.

  "How can you be sure the tomb's here, then?" Egil asked. "There's no scale on that map. We could be leagues away. The tomb could be underwater, if it's even the right tomb. I don't intend to abide this fakkin' spellworm forever, sorcerer."

  "He does not need to explain himself to you," Baras said, and put his hand on Egil to steer him off. Egil shoved him away.

  "Yes, he does," the priest said.

  The eunuch rumbled from atop his mount.

  Rakon stared into Egil's face. "I've cross-referenced this map with others in my possession, both current and ancient. Those, combined with the text on this map, describe the location of the tomb quite precisely."

  "I'd like to see those other maps," Nix said.

  "They were too delicate for such rough travel," Rakon said. "But be at ease. The tomb is in those cliffs. We press on a few hours more tonight, resting when we reach the shore of the Bleak Sea. Then you'll recover the horn for me and I'll release you."

  "And you'll save your sisters," Nix said.

  "Yes," Rakon agreed, licking his thin lips. "I'll save my sisters."

  By the time they reached the shore of the Bleak Sea, Minnear had risen over the horizon, full but for the slimmest crescent. Tomorrow it would sit full in the night sky, reigning over the night, since Kulven was new and dark.

  They camped in the lee of a scree-covered rise two or three bowshots from the beach. Rakon stared at the moon's cratered face as the guardsmen set up camp.

  The air smelled of the sea and the wind carried the rush of the waves to their ears. That night the men sat around the fire mostly in silence. Nix and Egil, too, held their tongues, each alone with his thoughts about the tomb, what they expected to find there.

  Nix drank sour beer until his vision blurred.

  "You'll need to be clearheaded tomorrow," Egil cautioned him.

  "That's why I'm doing it," Nix said.

  Only after collecting a fine drunk did he try to fall asleep. Thankfully, the alcohol stupor held at bay any dreams of breathing doors and manacles and impending doom. He woke in the late morning with a hangover, but nevertheless felt better than he had in days. Egil was not in the camp.

  "Egil?" he asked Jyme, who was sipping coffee from his tin cup.

  Jyme pointed northwest, toward the steep cliffs that walled part of the Bleak Sea in its basin. Nix squinted, his head aching from too much beer. He thought he saw three small figures moving around at the top of the cliff.

  "Baras and Rakon are with him," Jyme said.

  Nix nodded and geared up. While he did so, he looked over to the tent in which Rusilla and Merelda lay. The eunuch stood before the flap.

  "No more plaguing my dreams after tonight, witches," he said softly. "We get this horn and bid you farewell forever."

  "You say something?" Jyme asked, his mouth full of bread.

  Nix ignored him and jogged up the rise for the cliffs. Sea birds cawed behind him, wheeling in the air near the beach below. Working up a sweat helped him relieve the hangover. He found Rakon consulting the map, Baras standing beside him, and Egil at the cliff's edge, looking out over the sea. Nix stepped up beside his friend. From the high vantage granted by the cliff, Nix could see blue-black water for leagues.

  "It should be here," Rakon called to them, his voice irritable and nervous. "It must be here."

  "Nothing looks like an entrance to a tomb, though," Baras said.

  "The sorcerer seems convinced the tomb is hereabouts," he said to Egil. "Perhaps they imagine there'll be a sign announcing its presence."

  Egil smiled. "There is," he said, and nodded down at the surf.

  Rocks jutted from the shallow water, all of them ruffed by foam. Sea birds perched on them. Bird shite and the ages stained them.

  "The rocks?"

  Egil nodded. "The rocks. Watch."

  Nix soon saw it. The surf rolled, surging forward to smash the cliffs, then pulling back.

  "There," Egil said, pointing as the surf receded.

  Nix saw it. A carved stone face staring up at him. The water quickly covered it, only to reveal it again as the surf ebbed. Time and water had eroded the details, but Nix could make out sunken eyes, the nub of a nose, the outline of a mouth formed into an inscrutable smile, and, most importantly of all, the stylized serpent headdress of an Afirion wizard-king.

  "Well, well," Nix said. He turned a circle, studied the terrain. He thought about Rakon's map, the fact that the Bleak Sea had once been much smaller. "Has to be the cliff face. This was probably a valley once. What say you?"

  "I was thinking the same."

  Nix nodded toward Rakon and Baras. "You show them yet?"

  Egil shook his head and put his palm on his stomach, as if the spellworm had squirmed. "I haven't. Wanted to get your thoughts first."

  "And you wanted Rakon to suffer."

  "There was that," Egil said. He put his palm on his stomach. "Though withholding it seems to agitate the damned spellworm."

  "Let's get on with it," Nix said. "The sooner we get this horn, the sooner we're free of the compulsion. I want some space between us and this sorcerer and his sisters."

  "We could always kill him instead," Egil said, and groaned as the spellworm did its work.

  "You really need to tame your thoughts," Nix said with a grin. He turned to Rakon and Baras. "Over here!"

  "Did you find something?" Rakon called, his voice eager, hopeful. "What did you find? Speak, man."

  Nix let him dangle until they reached him. When the surf receded, he showed them the Afirion face staring up at the sky. Rakon's intake of breath was sharp enough to cut meat.

  "It's here," he said.

  "In the cliff face, probably," Nix said. "We're going to need rope. We'll hitch it to the horses."

  Baras sidled up to the edge of the cliff, leaned over to try to see the cliff face.

  "Mind yourself," Egil warned. "You go over the edge, we'll be looking for your body in the surf. That's rough water."

  Baras nodded, backed off.

  Rakon licked his lips, stared down at the face in the water, appearing, disappearing. His hands fidgeted.

  "Go get as much rope as we have, Baras. And bring the horses."

  "And whatever torches we have," Nix said. "Now, tell us what this horn looks like."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was late afternoon by the time Nix and Egil had gathered up such supplies as they expected to need, checked and re-checked their own gear and weapons, and taken a hearty meal. Egil prayed. Nix got his mind right.

  Rakon paced and fumed throughout.

  "We never rush," Nix explained.

  "Body, soul, mind, and gear need to be prepared," Egil said.

  "Prepare faster," Rakon said. "Minnear rises full tonight."

  When they were ready, all but the eunuch and the sisters ascended to the top of the rise. Nix tied a series of step knots in the ropes and harnessed them to the pack horses. Egil took them in hand and pulled. The harnesses held and the horses seemed untroubled.

  "Well tied," the priest said, as he tossed the lines over the side of the cliff.

  "Of course they are," Nix said. "I tied them, didn't I?"

  "You must return with the horn quickly," Rakon said.

  "We don't even know for certain that this is the right tomb," Nix said.

  "And neither do we know that it holds the horn," Egil added.

  "It is and it does," Rakon said. "It must. My guards will accompany you. All but Jyme and Baras."

  Nix shook his head. "They'll be in the way."
He looked to the guards. "No offense."

  They shrugged. None of them looked eager to descend the cliff face on a rope.

  "They go with you," Rakon insisted.

  "The spellworm already ensures our return," Nix said. "We don't need guards hounding us."