What Remains of Heroes (6 page)

A display rife with falsehoods, but inspiring
nonetheless
.

Bale’s chest swelled as he regarded the images. The older reliefs told of times altogether different, when true goodness mustered against true evil. Many members of the Sanctum believed good and evil sat at opposite ends of a balancing scale, and if one dipped the other rose. The more evil in the world the less good, and the converse. Bale thought differently. He guessed the true goodness in men’s hearts, the kind that kindled self-sacrifice and real courage, only manifested in the face of true evil. At all other times, like now, it sat dormant, smothered beneath layers of ambivalence.

Along either side of the flagstone path to the Bastion’s main entrance stood two rows of crimson-sashed guardsmen, faces veiled in the traditional display of humility in the presence of their divinely blessed king. Bale passed swiftly and uneasily between their silent forms, approaching a great door bearing the dragon emblem of Rune. He began ascending the granite stairway leading to the door, but just then one of the guards beside him jolted as though rudely awakened from a slumber.

“Halt, sir!” the guard huffed through the thin fabric of his translucent veil. He was a portly sort, the same oaf who’d confronted Bale during previous visits to the castle. “You will state your name and your business with the Crown.”

Bale rolled his eyes and presented his warrant. “Acolyte Zandrachus Bale of the Ancient Sanctum of Illienne the Light Eternal. I am here at the summons of the king’s staff, whose business I am not compelled to discuss with you.”

The guard suppressed a yawn and waved Bale along. “I’ll fetch Chamberlain Alamis. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled at the news of your return.”

Chamberlain Alamis was a tall reed of a man, impeccably groomed and dressed in an elegant robe of blue silk. He wore no cover upon his face or head, which Bale found an odd departure from the customary display of deference to Rune’s High King. The man’s pale eyes studied Bale with unsettling intensity, and he bowed mechanically as Bale approached. He shook Bale’s hand limply, then gestured toward a long hallway and they began walking.

The interior of the Bastion was even more impressive than its imposing exterior. It was an ancient place of impossibly long hallways of polished stone, lined with flickering candles, priceless relics from conquered lands and storied weapons of old heroes. The walls stretched upward and arched toward soaring ceilings so high they were lost in shadow. It seemed a place worthy of great kings and old legends, and even Bale’s stalwart cynicism wavered upon viewing the marvel.

The chamberlain leaned toward Bale. “I apologize for yet another intrusion upon your
dearly
valuable time, Acolyte. I’m quite certain you have matters of far graver import demanding your attention. However,” he leaned closer, as though to avoid unwanted ears, “High King Deragol has been quite, um,
eccentric
, and it seems to be catching.”

Bale found it strange that the chamberlain himself would preside over his visit, but thought it best to play along. He nodded deeply and rubbed at his chin, doing his best to portray the calm, thoughtful appearance he guessed people expected from members of the Sanctum.

Alamis halted abruptly and remained still until a hooded official had passed them. He then seized Bale with a hard grip upon the shoulder and pulled him uncomfortably close. “Your faith binds you to protect the Crown, yes?”

Bale found the chamberlain’s penetrating, pale eyes unnerving. “I serve the Faith, and thereby the throne and the kingdom.”

“Queen Reyis suffered another miscarriage last winter. Her eighth. You are aware of this, yes?”

“I am,” Bale said, trying to pull free of the tall man, “but the royal couple’s difficulties with conception are well known. My order trusts Illienne the Light Eternal will bless them with a child, and ensure the bloodline of High Kings remains intact. It is a matter of faith.”

“Perhaps. But what is not so well known is the effect this has had on the High King. Alas, he’s gone quite mad.”

Bale had heard hints of this in recent years. The High King was approaching fifty and there was growing concern he would not be able to sire an heir. “His tragedies would weigh upon any man.”

“But this is not
any
man, Acolyte. This is Rune’s High King, the most powerful man in all the world. Your order proclaims that this man is possessed of divinity, the great blessing of Illienne. Think what would happen if our enemies knew High King Deragol had been reduced to a blubbering fool. Already some of the thanes raise questions they wouldn’t have dared in previous years.” He drew closer, painfully so. “These are the most dangerous of times, Acolyte. Our enemies are bold and numerous, and present both without and within our land. Perhaps even within these very walls.”

“You have my word, Chamberlain. The Sanctum will do everything we can to help. I should summon my superiors. They should meet with the High King to see if this illness can be cured.”

Chamberlain Alamis’s eyes narrowed. “No. You will not. Between his bouts of blathering, the High King has decreed he wants nothing to do with the Sanctum. I am sure this is simply a tragic consequence of his state, but for the time being his wishes must be honored lest he succumb to greater madness.”

Bale did not reply, instead shifting his eyes about to avoid the chamberlain’s unnerving glare.

Alamis paused for a moment, then nodded. “Very well. You will relay these directives to your order. What he, and I, require of you and your superiors is
trust
, Acolyte. Trust when I speak, I speak for High King Deragol. Trust I serve him, and have his implicit authority. Trust me, and bring me word of any
hint
of treason. Trust, and do not question.” He regarded Bale for an instant longer and then released his grip.

Bale rubbed his shoulder. “We live to serve. We would never betray the Crown.”

Chamberlain Alamis resumed his march down the hall, his pace brisk. “Excellent. To the kitchens, then.”

Bale followed, finding the thought of dealing with rats preferable to dealing with people.

The scullery maid seemed a simple woman, stoutly built, chubby faced, and dressed in the plain, hooded robes of palace servants. She seemed also an earnest sort, and her accent marked her as hailing from the coastal farms of the Waters of World’s End, far to the north. Bale had read such folk were renowned for their forthrightness, although not their intelligence.

She seemed frightened, and in her melodic speech recounted arrhythmic taps on doors, unattended objects moving about the kitchen during late hours, and squeals and shrieks from the larder. She then fell silent and glared disapprovingly at Alamis.

Perhaps not the brilliant sort, but certainly a sound judge of character
. “There is more you’d like to discuss?” Bale ventured.

The scullery maid whispered a curse and gestured toward the chamberlain.

Bale turned to the chamberlain, who was returning the maid’s glare with a bemused smile. “It would be best if you left us, Master Chamberlain. Discussions on the subject of possessions and demonic manifestations are most delicate in nature, and require the complete confidence of the witness. It seems this woman has more observations she can only discuss in private.”

Alamis looked suspiciously at Bale, his pale eyes narrowing in seeming appraisal. “Very well,” he said at last.

Bale noticed the scullery maid’s eyes nervously follow the chamberlain as he glided across the steamy expanse of the kitchen. The chamberlain stopped and leaned against a sturdy table and began paring his nails with a small knife. He seemed sufficiently beyond earshot, so Bale urged the maid to continue.

She gripped his hand almost painfully. “There is more, spooker.” She grimaced. “I’m sorry. I meant Acolyte. I mean no disrespect.”

With a nod he urged her to continue.

“I don’t confuse no rats for devils, sir,” she said quickly. “I am no fool, and I know there is evil afoot in this place. I risk my life in doing this, but I could think of no other way to get word to you.”

Bale shot a glance across the kitchen and his eyes were met by the chamberlain’s sneer. Bale had only just met Chamberlain Alamis, but knew already he neither liked nor trusted him. His influence with the throne was well known, and if the High King were truly mad then the chamberlain was very likely running the castle, if not the whole of Rune.
To run afoul of this man would be most dangerous. Yet
… Something stirred within Bale, a bravery he’d rarely possessed. He breathed deeply and exhaled.

The maid pulled at his cloak, her eyes pleading. “Can you help me?” she asked.

Bale nodded, thinking of something his teacher, Lector Erlorn, had once told him:
“Character is doing what you don’t want to do, for reasons you cannot avoid.”
He held the woman’s eyes for a moment. “I will keep your confidence, even at my peril,” he said.

“I can’t bear the weight of secrets,” she whispered, pressing a piece of folded parchment into Bale’s hands. “Especially dark ones.”

Bale winked as he tucked the paper inside his robes. “Now,” he said with a quick thump of his staff. He secretly produced the sprig of drimroot and squeezed it tightly, producing a great puff of pleasant-scented, white smoke. It was a simple trick, but a minor miracle to those unfamiliar with alchemy. “Let us dispel these wicked spirits!”

3

Murder to Make

K
arnag Mak Ragg
squinted in the morning sunlight, flint-colored eyes surveying the vast valley of oaks and poplars draped with mist. The Ghostwood, at the southernmost edge of the kingdom of Rune, struck him as similar to the wind-bitten highlands of his youth. Both were hard countries, unforgiving and full of predators.

Like
me
.

He pressed himself upward to stand and shook fresh blood into brawny limbs. Morning meditations were a ritual common among his people, used to seek hidden truths or consult with ancestors long dead. Karnag was not given to such nonsense, but found the meditations stilled his restless mind. With his waking hours rife with violence, he needed what calm he could find.

“Awake at last, eh?” asked Drenj from the mouth of a small tent at the opposite end of the hilltop clearing. He was a Khaldisian from far to the south, his brown tunic sagging from his form to reveal olive skin covered in tattoos. “I was beginning to think you’d learned to sleep on your knees. Like a camel.”

Karnag ignored the young man’s remark and set about readying his weapons. He often grew weary of such prattle, borne by nerves or bravado and bearing no meaning. Such words were breaths wasted rather than saved for combat.

“Are you certain I can’t lend you a knife?” the southerner said, dragging a whetstone down the length of his curved Khaldisian steel.

Karnag brushed aside the thick braids of his black hair and studied the weapons he’d laid on his bedroll, all agleam in the morning sun. Six daggers balanced for throwing. Two swords, one short for tight quarters and the other a long, two-handed blade for cleaving men apart. A hunting knife he’d used for gutting deer that fit neatly in his boot, and a blackjack for laying out a man without spilling blood. “I’m certain,” he said.

“Do you figure on using
all
of those things in a fight?” asked Drenj.

“Careful, lad,” said Tream, a dark-eyed thug with rotting teeth. “You’re new to this company, and Karnag’s not the sort to be trifled with. Least of all by a skinny whelp like you. He’s a damned nasty killer, boy. Nastiest of them all.”

The Khaldisian seemed undeterred. “Are they trinkets for decoration?”

Karnag scowled, his patience wearing. “They all have their purpose.”

“You have only two hands, you know,” said Drenj, laughing overlong at his joke as though encouraging the others to join him.

“And you have but one mouth,” Karnag said, “but you blather on as though you have ten. Perhaps my hands are as potent.” He snatched a dagger and flung it hard and true. It cracked into the center support at the mouth of Drenj’s tent, mere inches from the youth’s head. The tent collapsed about him in turn.

The company of hired killers laughed heartily. Drenj cursed and yanked the linen away from his form, his kohl-lined eyes narrowing. “Are all of you northerners like this? Savage ingrates with thin skins and thick heads?”

Fencress Fallcrow, a raven-haired woman clad as ever in black, sauntered across the clearing. She was a hard lass, rough-featured and muscular, yet had a roguish charm with her sapphire eyes and biting wit. She stopped near Drenj and flipped a copper coin at him. “And are all of your kind painted like whores? I fear you make even me feel like a man, Drenj.”

“Not much of a stretch, eh?” said Paddyn, a scrawny lad with grubby skin and a missing front tooth.

The company laughed again, all save Karnag.

Karnag slid his daggers into the sheaths sewn into the blood-red leather of his jerkin. He straightened and his countenance darkened. “Shut your mouths and saddle the horses,” he said, sweeping his eyes across his four companions. “We have murder to make.”

The old forest creaked and yawned, with veils of white moss swaying from the boughs like haunting wraiths. The thick canopy strangled away all but the brightest beams of sunlight, and narrow hunting trails twisted through the brush-choked floor in a maddening webwork. Distant beasts howled in the gloom.

Karnag vainly sought obvious hoof-prints amidst muck and brush, while Drenj found markers in the form of every bent blade of new grass and crushed spring clover. The young man located the tracks with ease, forcing Karnag to admit that, in spite of Drenj’s mindless tongue, he was a skilled woodsman.

“How far away?” Tream asked, urging his chestnut mount close behind Karnag.

Ahead of them, Drenj looked upward and appeared to locate the sun through the heavy weave of trees. “We should manage to travel perhaps half again as fast as the Lector and his retinue. I’d wager we’ll be upon them by nightfall.”

Tream leaned forward in his saddle, as though he could spy the Lector and his companions in the distance. “Trample and torch their camp, eh?”

“No,” said Karnag. “That would invite chaos. We’ll gut the Lector in his sleep.”

Tream looked at him wide-eyed. “The man is a member of the Sanctum, its Lector no less! They say in the Old Faith the Lector speaks the word of Illienne the Light Eternal, the very goddess who guides the kingdom of Rune from her grave!” Worry pinched his pimply brow. “It’d be better for us all if we didn’t gut this man like an animal.”

Karnag shook his head. Tream had a decent sword arm but his head was made of mush. “I’m sure people say all sorts of things about the Lector. And we’ve been hired to kill him. Do you think your soul would be spared if the man burned to death or if his brains were squeezed loose by your horse’s hooves?”

Fencress chuckled behind them and Tream turned to give the black-garbed woman a hard look.

“Perhaps it would!” Tream said. “I mean, if the Lector happened to catch fire, it wouldn’t be
me
doing the killing.”

Fencress giggled again. “Well, if you were to stab him,” she said, humor dancing in her blue eyes, “it wouldn’t be you doing the killing, either. You could blame it on your sword.”

Karnag glared at them and in an instant they fell silent.

After a time Tream cleared his throat to speak, his eyes downcast. “This is no
ordinary
man we hunt, Karnag. I mean…” He paused and picked at his brown, pitted teeth. “I mean this is the sort of thing that could curse us, if you believe the Old Faith. Curse us forever.”

Karnag stared at the man in silence. Tream stared back but his watery eyes quickly broke away. “We are hired killers,” Karnag said, and no doubts quailed in his heart. “We were cursed the moment we first accepted coin to kill someone who’d done us no wrong. Accept your path. Revel in it.”

Three days had passed since Karnag and his four hired killers had left the town of Raven’s Roost, two days after the Lector. They’d ridden hard, for time was against them. “
You must slay him before he reaches the mountains
,” their patron had demanded. That gave them another two days’ ride before the Lector would reach the Southwalls, Rune’s southern border. It was time enough to do it right. They traveled lean and needed none of the comforts required by a man of the Lector’s pampered station. Signs of his passage were growing fresher, more obvious. The task’s conclusion was becoming a certainty.

Near mid-morning they came upon the ruins of an ancient shrine in a clearing along the trail. Drenj’s skills as a tracker proved infallible, and he discerned that the Lector and his entourage had paused at the shrine less than a day prior. The horses were lathered from their ride, so Karnag called for a respite.

The shrine was a mess of moss-covered stones, indistinguishable from the remains of any other ruin but for the unique construct. Karnag had seen its like before, and the markings of the Old Faith were known to him. Eight stone pillars in a round with a well at their center. It seemed a fine place to test the company’s mettle.

Tream dismounted and spoke in a hushed tone. “This is an old shrine, from before the faith was rewritten. Eight pillars. One for the High King of Rune, and the others for the immortal Seven Sentinels. The well is for the Godswell, the place where the gods descended into oblivion.” He approached one of the pillars and laid his hands upon it. “Reminds me of the rhyme my mum used to sing:

Illienne named eight on the eve of her
death,

Rune’s high king and seven more
blessed,

Aspects of god each gifted in
gloom,

And together cast Yrghul down to his
doom,

The king’s line reigned with the god’s light
grace,

Whilst seven stood watch to guard men’s fate
.

There were more rhymes, of course. But that one was my favorite. Always made me feel safe, somehow.”

Karnag looped the reins of his steed about a branch then ambled through the jumble of stones to the well. He coughed once, twice, and again. Loudly. When he sensed the company’s eyes upon him, he lowered his trousers and began to piss. Several heartbeats passed before the stream sounded its arrival at the well’s depths.

Tream charged forward with arms outstretched, as though to snatch the piss in his hands. “Fool! You fool! That’s a Godswell! This is holy ground!”

Karnag finished and turned to Tream, who stood with mouth agape.

“This,” Tream said, breathless, “is holy ground.”

Karnag slapped him hard across the cheek. With his other hand he snatched a knife from a scabbard stitched into his jerkin and pressed it against Tream’s stubbly throat. “Then I piss on the dead gods,” he growled.

Tream fell back and slammed against one of the pillars. “You cannot do this! This is a shrine to the Old Faith, from before it was corrupted and the Sentinels were banished! I can’t allow this blasphemy!”

“Blasphemy? Against what? Against whom? I’ve disgraced holy ground. What is more, I’ve slaughtered hundreds—
hundreds!
—of men. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve set fire to homes with families barred inside. I’ve had people mutter prayers with my sword at their throats. Did the dead gods stay my hand? Even once? Did the dead gods strike me down? No. Your faith is nothing more than a sad way to endure the cruelty of life, to claim there is some divine ‘plan’ guiding things. There isn’t. There is only you against everything else, and your reward for surviving is determined only by what you can take.”

Tream blinked and looked skyward. “Dead gods forgive him!” he breathed. “Karnag, you cannot speak this way! Not here!”

Karnag shook his head and grabbed Tream by the shoulder. “I cannot trust you with this task, Tream. You’re too weak. You’ve said these things here, yet you’d have me believe you’ll stand by idly when I place my blade at the Lector’s throat? Ha. We are murderers. If there are such things as gods, how could they abide villains such as we? Do you think it matters who we kill? Or how we kill them? Or,” he laughed, “where we piss? We are wretched people, and if there are heavens above they will most certainly be shut to us. I set my own fate. If your faith tells you otherwise, then go home.” He turned Tream about and shoved him toward the horses. “Be gone.”

Tream stumbled several steps before turning to face Karnag. “My coin,” he said, his eyes wet and pleading. “What of my share of the coin?”