The Sword of the South - eARC (21 page)

She turned away and buried her face in her hands.

* * *

Wave Mistress
shouldered up the river on a favoring wind and an incoming tide. Kenhodan stood out of the way on the quarterdeck, listening to Brandark volley orders to his helmsman, and decided that if this was only a preliminary to the true spring floods he had no desire to see the river in full spate. Away from the bay, the White Water belied its name, for it was dark with mud and flotsam of every sort rode its current. The hull shuddered with glancing blows as Brandark fought the river, and Kenhodan didn’t envy his task.

Trees, logs, rafted jams of branches and timbers—all rolled slowly down the hungry river, mingled with occasional floating barns and other waterlogged structures. And Brandark had assured him the White Water wasn’t a large river by Norfressan standards. It was far smaller than the Geen Leaf, to the north, or the mighty River of the Spear, to the east, but the hradani admitted that the White Water had to accept more snowmelt than the Geen Leaf, and its narrower bed produced a swifter, fiercer current.

Bahzell joined him as they crawled upstream, pointing out spots of interest along the side and banks. It seemed to Kenhodan that there wasn’t a square foot of Norfressa which Bahzell hadn’t trodden, ridden over, or had described to him, and far too many of those anecdotes were punctuated by battle.

“I wish I shared your delight in warfare,” he said finally, shaking his head over the cold fear of his remembered rage. “It would help.”

“Delight?” Bahzell rumbled thoughtfully. “Now there’s a word I’d not use myself, lad.”

“What other word
can
you use?” Kenhodan asked curiously.

“Whatever it may be you’re thinking,” Bahzell said soberly, turning to face him squarely, “there’s not a sane man as ever lived who’s seen battle, lost folk dear to him, taken too many lives himself, and still thinks it’s anything but ugly, vile, and vicious, lad. It may be you’ll find this hard to believe, but it’s happier I’d be if it happened I’d never see another. Yet whatever it might be as might make me happy, it’s not something as is going to happen, for the truth is, there’s things worse—
far
worse—than they are.”

He turned away to look out over the river.

“It’s a champion of Tomanāk I’ve been these seventy years and more, Kenhodan, and not something as ever crossed my mind might happen when I was a lad. And well it shouldn’t have, for there’d not been a hradani champion—of any god, much less himself—in twelve mortal centuries since the Fall. It wasn’t so very happy I was to discover himself was after wanting
me
to be one, either, and yet to speak truth, himself had the right of it from the start. Folk call us his Swords, and so we are, for it’s us he sends against those things as are worse. It’s not so many of his champions die in bed, Kenhodan, but this we do have. If die we must, it’s with a sword in our hand, our back to those we love, and our face to anything—
anything
—as threatens them. And when all’s said and done, that’s not so very bad a way for any man’s life to end.”

“No,” Kenhodan said softly. “No, I can see that.”

“And, to speak another truth,” Bahzell said, turning back to him, “it’s not so bad a thing to be a hradani when swords are out. It’s too many centuries the Rage’s been the curse of my folk, but it’s a weapon ready to hand, as well, one as fits us to battle the way a dwarf fits hammer and anvil. Especially since himself was after telling us the truth about it.”

Kenhodan nodded, but he also hesitated. The Rage was the curse of the hradani, the sudden, often unpredictable, eruption of bloodlust and massacre which did so much to explain the wariness with which the other Races of Man regarded them. And since the battle against the corsairs, he’d wondered if what he’d felt then was what so many generations of hradani had felt.

“What ‘truth’?” he asked finally.

“About the Rage?” Bahzell cocked his ears, and Kenhodan nodded again. “Well, as to that, how much is it you remember about the Rage?”

“Not much,” Kenhodan admitted. Practice had made it easier for him to face and admit the yawning gaps in his memory, but it hadn’t become any more pleasant. “I know it’s afflicted your people for a long time, and I know it came out of Kontovar, I don’t really know how it came to be, or why.”

“Ah.”

Bahzell looked over the side at the flooded river for several minutes, clearly considering what Kenhodan had said. Then he turned back to the red-haired man.

“You’ve the right that the Rage’s been the bane of my folk from the Fall itself,” he said quietly. “As to why that might be, why, the answer’s not so very hard to find. In the final Wizards War, after the Dark Lords were after setting up the Council of Carnadosa and turned openly to black sorcery, there weren’t so very many things they’d stop short of doing.

“It’s said the last two emperors of the Empire of Ottovar stood strong for the Light, but by then the rot had set too deep for them to stop it. Toren—him as they call ‘Toren Swordarm’—was the last emperor, but he’d no hope of holding the Empire together, and he knew it. So he and Wencit were after putting their heads together with Duke Kormak of the Crystal Cave dwarves and hatched a plan to save what little they could, but they couldn’t save
my
folk.

“It’s often I’ve wished I’d known Toren,” the hradani said softly. “Forty years he was in the field, year after year, with no pause, no summer when there were no armies after marching, no towns and cities after burning. Forty years, Kenhodan, and it was only four battles—
four,
in all those years—as he lost. Yet for all that, it was too little and it was too late, and he fought all those years
knowing
as it was too late. He’d win a battle, lose men, fight another battle, and lose more men, then turn to the next campaign and lose still more men. In the end, he ran out of men—and time—yet he’d held long enough to cover the Long Retreat.”

Bahzell paused again and reached for his pipe. He filled it slowly, and as his words cast a pall over Kenhodan, the red-haired man fancied he smelled the smoke of a burning land when Bahzell lit the tobacco.

“All Wencit and Toren ever hoped for was a rearguard action,” Bahzell said quietly. “Just to hang on long enough to be getting out as many as they might. There’d been coastal colonies in Norfressa for two hundred years before ever Toren named Kormak their governor and put him in charge of sorting out the refugees. And whatever else, he’d the right man in the right place, for Kormak was one as did his job well. It’s no accident the Empire of the Axe is the strongest Norfressan realm even today, Kenhodan. Kormak’s house was one as
earned
its crown, by the Sword!

“And to my mind—” Bahzell jabbed his pipe stem it Kenhodan “—the fact that Toren was after naming Kormak “King of Man Home’—it was Kormak’s grandson as added ‘Emperor’ to his title—proves as how Toren never planned to leave Kontovar his own self. And I’m thinking I understand that, too. Without his army, the evacuation ports would fall, and the army wouldn’t last a year without him to lead it. But that was an army as would die where it stood if
he
stood with it, lad. So he and his troops, they were after
holding
those ports for forty years, and when his army died, he died with it, fighting at its head. He nodded slowly. “That was no easy thing to do, lad, not when every man of them knew how it had to end. Tomanāk’s way can be hard, but Toren was a man as understood why that is, and he served himself well.

“Yet true as that may be, true as death, it was also Toren’s fight as brought the Rage upon my folk. You wonder about it?” Bahzell’s voice hardened. “Well, it’s not so very hard an answer, for the Dark Lords never counted on Toren and his army. And when that army was after refusing to break, refusing to lie down and die, why, they needed something to smash it, and so they found it.

“It was our size, d’you see? Our strength. We make good troops, we hradani, for it’s a mortal lot of killing we take. Many of us were after fighting for Toren, for we were loyal as any. The last three commanders of the Gryphon Guard were hradani, every one of them—but is there anyone today as remembers Forhaiden died holding the imperial standard?” Bahzell spat over the rail and shook his head, ears flat. “All it is they remember is that we were after fighting for the Dark Lords, and that we did. Aye, Kenhodan, that we did.”

He brooded darkly at the river, his nostrils flared.

“The Dark Lords needed an army as could break the Gryphon Guard, and if it happened we wanted no part of treason, why there was always some damned wizard as could encourage us with a little sorcery. Just a little thing. Only a spell as turned us into blood-crazed beasts—that was all.

“We remember, Kenhodan. In our old tales, we remember we were peaceful as any, once. No better, mind you, but no worse. Until that wizardry got into our blood and bone. Until it was after
twisting
something inside us, and it’s the Rage we’ve carried with us ever since.”

He stood silent for several long seconds, and then he shook himself.

“That’s what the Rage is,” he said softly. “Why we were after betraying our emperor, why it was as armies of hradani looted Trōfrolantha and butchered any as stood in their way. And it’s why my folk have been who we’ve been for thirteen hundred years while no one cared. No one but Wencit.

“And then himself chose me as his champion, for it was time.”

“Time?” Kenhodan’s voice was quiet, shadowed by the way Bahzell’s explanation echoed his own strange, bottomless fury.

“Aye.” Bahzell nodded. “The Rage isn’t something as leaves a folk untouched, and it’s there in our souls, the knowing other folk aren’t far wrong to fear us as little more than beasts when the Rage’s upon us. But the truth is time’s a way of changing almost anything, Kenhodan, even the Rage, for the Rage we have today’s not the one those blackhearted bastards were after giving us. It’s a terrible thing, the Rage, and not least because when it comes on a man, it’s after making him more than he’d ever be in his life entire without it. Even when the blood hunger burns hottest, there’s a…splendor to the Rage. Everything he’s after having inside him, every ounce of strength, every breath of passion—
all
of it—why, it comes together, burning inside him like a Dwarvenhame furnace. There’s some among us as crave that the way a drunkard craves drink, for there’s a power to it no one as never tasted it can truly understand. I’m thinking it must be a bit like Wencit’s descriptions of wizards and wizardry—a thing as some men give themselves to even knowing as how it’s like to destroy them in the end.

“And such the Rage is, for when it comes on a man all unexpected, when it’s after taking him by the throat, all of that focus bends itself to blood and killing, and there’s naught will stop him but his own death. That’s the reason so many of my folk spent so many centuries fighting the Rage, for we’d seen what it did to those as opened the door, let it in and let it take them. But when himself first spoke to me, he told me as how the Rage has changed. The old Rage is with us still, and will be. Still waiting to take us down into the madness and drown us in blood. But when a man as knows what he’s about, as makes the choice himself, is
summons
the Rage,
gives
himself to it and not after letting it simply
take
him, why then
he
commands
it
. It’s after being his, and not him being its, and all that focus and all that power and passion are after lifting him up, not dragging him down amongst the beasts and worse than beasts. It’s become a tool, another weapon against the Dark,” Bahzell smiled grimly, “and there’s Hirahim’s own joke on the Dark Lords in that!”

Kenhodan looked up into that strong, grim face and tasted the centuries of bloodshed, grief, and horror the Rage had inflicted upon the hradani since the Fall. The parallel between the Rage—the ‘
old
’ Rage—and the fury which had filled him as the corsairs attacked was terrifying, and he wondered if Bahzell even suspected that there might be at least one human who understood exactly what a hradani felt in that moment of passionate power and carnage. Yet strands of hope wove themselves through the terror, for in the end, hadn’t he done precisely what Bahzell had just described? He’d embraced the fury, used it rather than allowing it to use him.

“Thank you for explaining that to me,” he said finally. “I didn’t know—or else it’s another thing I’ve forgotten—how the Rage came upon your people, Bahzell. But you’re right,” he smiled thinly, thinking about how slowly the corsairs had seemed to move, the way he’d gone through them like a direcat, “it
is
Hirahim’s own joke against the Dark.”

* * *

Thousands of leagues from the White Water, a cat-eyed wizard shook with silent mirth. He would never have believed a hradani could be so eloquent!

His cheeks sparkled with tears of laughter as he blanked his crystal. Let the hradani maunder about the woes of his people—he had greater woes in Belhadan, if only he knew. The cat-eyed wizard toyed with the idea of sending Bahzell images of what passed in Belhadan, yet he put it aside. Bahzell might be a hradani, and so, by definition, little more than the beasts of the field, but the cat-eyed wizard was unprepared to estimate him too lightly. The Council of Carnadosa had spent the better part of seven decades in periodic attempts to eliminate him with a deplorable lack of success. Whatever else might be true, Bahzell clearly was a champion of Tomanāk, and Tomanāk had taken excellent care of His tool. Fortunately, there were other gods who were prepared to take excellent care of
Their
tools, and the tide was setting heavily in Their favor.

Of course, Tomanāk wasn’t the only one who’d taken care for Bahzell and his family, and the cat-eyed wizard frowned slightly as he reflected upon that unpalatable fact. Even after all these years, he was no closer to discovering what Wencit had expected of the hradani, his wife, and their halfbreed daughter. It was clear they were important, for Wencit had been quick to smash every probe directed at Bahzell’s family over the years. Indeed, he’d threatened to reopen the spells which had strafed Kontovar—to unleash that devastation a second time, even at the cost of his own life—if the Council ever again so much as attempted to use the art against Leeana Hanathafressa. No one on the Council had been able to understand why the ancient wild wizard would make that threat on Leeana’s behalf—and only on her behalf—after over twelve hundred years. Until her daughter was born, that was. Precisely what part Wencit had expected Gwynna Bahzelldaughter to play remained unclear—not even the cat-eyed wizard’s divine patrons seemed to have the answer to that—but clearly his threat had been intended to protect the vessel of the girl’s birth.