The Barrow (91 page)

“Most of them will not bring ruin to the world in their greed!” said Stjepan.

“They have already ruined it, with their petty pursuits and mindless sorrows!” cried Leigh, standing and towering over Stjepan. “Gone are the days of magic, when men and heroes of true power walked the world!”

“And is that how you see yourself?” asked Stjepan.

“Do you really think you have the right to judge me? You were a great student at the University, at least when you could put your mind to it, but you're just a hedge-witch, like your dead mother; no match for the likes of a true magician like me! You know not the game here, nor the stakes!” ranted Leigh as he backed into the center of the pit and began turning in circles, his arms wide. “We change the fate of the World today!”

Annwyn's eyes rolled back into her head, eyelids fluttering. The bed of
Ghúl
backs roiled beneath the sweating skin of her back and ass as the body of Azharad pressed down and into her, making her feel like she was caught in a great vise of flesh that pistoned its hardest part deep within her. Annwyn was no longer chanting, instead she was moaning and gasping and babbling like a mad woman, caught up in the frenzied motions of her lustful coupling with the body of Azharad, the roar of voices in the air, the ministrations of the dark spirit shape, the furies of the map within her body and upon her skin, and the thrusting of the unnatural cock within her—all of which was driving toward a climax.

“I am the servant of a Nameless Cult!” roared Leigh, triumphant and deranged. “Nymarga, the Devil, the Magician King, knows well my worth! I will usher Azharad back into the World, and after that we will raise the Worm Kings again, and they will rule the broken Earth from Thrones of Brass and Fire! I will be his Vizier, and Annwyn his first Bride, his first Queen . . .”

The dark spirit shape hovering in the air about the body of Azharad finally began to move onto the body, seep inside it, to try and
inhabit
it, to reach down through it and touch her insides through its plunging member. And at that Annwyn's eyes flew open. The appearance of rapture on her face changed in an instant. Her face hardened, became stern and purposeful. And she cried out in a different voice now.
“Sumes paradeska malathratta ir dures, dume lira malathratta! Malathratta ir dures! Malathratta ill dures!”

Leigh stopped and stared down at Stjepan for a moment in confusion, then turned and looked up at Annwyn and the body of Azharad in outright alarm.

“Somehow I think Annwyn has other plans,” said Stjepan with a grim grin playing on his face as the dagger started moving against his bindings again.

Above them, the spirit and body of Azharad realized something was wrong and tried to withdraw, but Annwyn wrapped her leg and arms tightly around the body and would not let it go. Wisps and tendrils of dark matter seemed to waver and lash out around the body of Azharad as his spirit, not yet fully connected to his body, was being slowly pulled away and down into Annwyn. But the dark shape seemed to be fighting back against Annwyn's spell, struggling to remain tethered to its flesh, clinging to its body like a man might cling to a rock to avoid the pull of the whirlpool, but the spirit was weak after centuries imprisoned, and it was losing the fight. Her blue eyes flashed as she cried out:
“Malathratta ir dures! Malathratta ill dures! I open myself to you, Azharad, as the World opens itself to you! I am the gate! I am the path, O King! And I close the gate, and I bind you! Azharad! King of the Bale Mole! I bind you! Azharad! King of the Uthed Wold, Master of the Vale of Barrows! I bind you! Azharad! Master of the Nameless Cults! I shut the door, and I bind you!”

Leigh's eyes flew open as he realized what was happening. “No . . . no . . . no, no, no, my Lord!” he stammered as he tossed the ancient book aside and started to move up the slope of the pit.

Stjepan finally undid his bonds. He raised the dagger and in a flash hurled it straight up into the back of Azharad's head, then launched himself at Leigh, the rope used to tie his hands now held as a garrote. They went down in a heap against the side of the pit, the rope around Leigh's neck.

The dagger into his skull severed the last ties between Azharad's body and his spirit, and the dark spirit shape was now fully unmoored. Annwyn's body arched back and her arms and legs spread wide, opening herself to the winds in the chamber, and the foul spirit was being drawn out of the air and out of its own body and instead into hers. Her chant was lost in the roar of the wind and a great cry of terror and despair that seemed to rend the very air of the chamber.

With a face of grim determination, Stjepan slowly strangled Leigh with his makeshift garrote, his knee planted firmly in the middle of Leigh's back. The Magister clawed against the dirt, his eyes bulging.
This cannot be how it ends
, he thought desperately.
I was so close. All my plans. So many people to ruin. It's not fair. It's not fair.
And a voice, scratching at his left ear, barely audible beneath the roar of his heart and his lungs, answered back:
Of course it isn't fair. But it's not the end.

With a final great cry, Annwyn consumed the spirit of Azharad. The brazen, horned mask shattered, and the body of Azharad fell away from hers, limp and useless, dead once more, as dead maggots poured out from the bag of its skin and bones onto the ground. The
Ghúl
slowly lowered Annwyn's shuddering body to the earth and gently clustered around her.

Leigh, red-faced, his mouth working soundlessly, started to convulse as his heart seized up, and then his bowels released in his death spasms.

When he was sure the Magister was dead, Stjepan let go of the rope around Leigh's neck and spun about, snatching up a discarded pickaxe from the earth, and turned and took a step as if about to run up the side of the pit, looked up, and froze.

The room was quiet and still.

The lip of the pit near the entrance was crowded with the revived corpses of the barrow's guardian warriors, armed and armored in their archaic finery and bearing large oval shields, pointing the rusted points of their spears and swords down at him. They formed an arc across part of the lip, and surrounded a group of the
Ghúl
that seemed to be clustered behind them. Stjepan could barely see Annwyn, he got the barest glimpse of her pale ivory body beneath the huddle of the cadaverous creatures. A part of him was afraid they were consuming her; a part of him was afraid they weren't.

“Annwyn! Annwyn? Can you hear me?” he shouted, almost laughing. “A witch! A sorceress! You're a witch . . . the Divine King's priests were
right
. . . I don't understand, but how?”

Annwyn spoke weakly from behind the arc of barrow warriors and
Ghúl
, her voice floating down to him as if from far away. “I asked you to look at me. But you didn't. No one did . . . no one knew my measure, no one thought me capable of anything but sorrow. Poor despondent Annwyn, cloistered away for so long that I scarce remembered I was alive, and yet all that time, I read, I read the books that I paid the old women to bring me, books with silly, pretty covers, and I learned and I practiced the arts of magic hidden within them.”

“Annwyn, what have you done?” Stjepan asked. “What have you done with the spirit of Azharad?”

Her voice gained in strength and surety. “When Harvald cast his Sending, he thought I would be an easy vessel to compel . . . but he did not know what I was capable of. I fought his spell, and beheld the map and its purpose, to allow the Nameless Cults to one day return Azharad to this world! And so I dreamed this charade, a subterfuge of skin and body, to foil their plans; to escape the prison my father and my brothers had made for me at last; to remake my place in the World!”

“What have you done? Show yourself, Annwyn!” Stjepan cried out.

The
Ghúl
and the barrow warriors parted, and Annwyn appeared behind them, naked but for the glint of gold and gems at her wrists and ankles and neck, poised and imperious, looking down at Stjepan in the pit. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, without a trace of the map upon her, an image of perfection. She held out her arms to her sides, and the
Ghúl
began to slip her dark damask robes back upon her body. She tucked her arms into its sleeves, and allowed the robe to slip down off her bare shoulders. She did not bother to close it about her, leaving her breasts and belly and a finely turned leg exposed to the flickering lights of candle and lamp.

“Do you think me some fresh evil, with all the powers and knowledge of a wizard's bound spirit at my command?” she asked, with a voice rich with laughter and spite. “That is the self-serving thinking of the Sun Court that burned your mother at the stake: to divide always the World in two, a single bright light and a single malignant dark. You are too long from the woods of your birth, Athairi, that you forget the lessons of the Queen of Heaven and of Night! The World is not lit by a single bright light, but by a hundred hundred stars, both bright and dim, and the dark is not a single hue, but a hundred hundred shades of gray and black and blue. And between them, the Known World is a riot of color.”

Stjepan looked up at her, and he breathed heavily, still trying to catch his breath. “I wish I could . . .” he started to say. “I truly wish I could . . . But I can't let you leave, not with Azharad's magics at your command . . .”

Annwyn studied him for a moment. “But then I was never to leave here alive, was I, Black-Heart?” she asked quietly.

Stjepan looked down at the earth, and gave a wry chuckle, and looked up at her with a small smile.

“I am no threat,” she said softly. “I despise the world we came from, the petty doings of the High King's Court, but that does not mean I wish to see the World ended, for theirs is but a small and miserly part of it. I wanted to remake my place in the World, and I have done so:
my
world is different,
m
y world has changed. I have become myself. No, you need not worry, for my role in the wars and chaos to come will be but a small one . . .” She studied him again for a moment, as if seeing something about him for the first time. “But if you have the courage, bear this message back to your masters: I will find my own way in the world, and they will disturb me at their peril.”

Stjepan closed his eyes, and then he nodded. As Annwyn turned to leave the chamber, one of the
Ghúl
offered her the pieces of the horned mask of Azharad. The top part of it had survived in more or less one piece, the horns spiraling up out of the forehead plate, and she lifted it up out of the
Ghúl's
hands and contemplated it.

“Annwyn!” he cried, his eyes flying open.

She looked back down at him.

“How can I know you're really you?” he asked.

She smiled then, a secret kind of smile, and it seemed to him for a moment that she looked down at him with genuine affection. A look of affection that turned to sadness, to longing, to pity.

“You can't,” she said.

She turned to the barrow warriors and gave voice to a command. “Ne tuattha tem.” And then Annwyn turned and walked out of the high-domed chamber with barrow warriors for escorts and a trailing pack of the
Ghúl
.

“Annwyn! Annwyn!” Stjepan shouted desperately. He hefted the pickaxe in his hands.

A line of barrow warriors remained, looking down at him from behind their helms and shield and pointed spears and swords, silent and unmoving.

Annwyn and her grisly entourage moved through the barrow that had been built for her. She walked at a stately pace, holding her chin high with royal hauteur, bearing a horned half-mask tucked in the crook of her left arm, trailing a damask robe behind her as her train. The barrow warriors walked before and behind her, her royal guard, and the
Ghúl
trailed behind them. The corpses of her courtiers, awakened now to new purpose, emerged from dark chambers and passages as she walked past them, bearing with them the treasures and offerings of the barrow and joining in behind her, forming the beginnings of her new court
.