Child of the Sword, Book 1 of The Gods Within (27 page)

“No colder than the tits on that old witch
Olivia, I’ll wager you,” one of his fellows answered.

More of their ilk joined them. “I’ll be glad
when this spring is done,” one said, “and summer’s here to warm my
bones.”

“I’d like to warm my bones on that witch
AnnaRail,” another said.

One of them laughed. “If Lord Valso is
pleased with us, you may get yer chance.”

Morgin waited, breathless, shivering. He
counted twenty-three Kull backs now. There’d be one more, then a
few words of instruction, and the gate would close. He deepened his
shadow, tensed for action, waited.

The last Kull stepped out. The Kull
gatekeeper followed, but stopped, one hand on the half open gate.
As he made some crude joke about the Elhiyne women Morgin released
the wind spell. It gusted, blew the gate momentarily free of the
gatekeeper’s hand. Morgin slipped behind him, past him, through the
gate and into the castle yard, pressed his back tightly against the
inner wall near the gate.

The gatekeeper cursed and swore, grabbed the
gate, swung it shut, threw the bolt. He walked away swearing about
Elhiyne winds, and did not look back. Morgin slipped quickly into
the inner recess of the gate and the dark shadow that lurked there.
In all he had moved only the thickness of the heavy gate, but now
he huddled against its inner side, waiting, biding his time.

He could not wait long, though. He had no
delusions about the limitations of his shadowmagic in broad
daylight. By the time the castle fully awoke he’d have to be well
concealed elsewhere. So he waited only long enough to be certain
the yard was empty, then moved quickly, just another shadow among
the many beneath the parapets.

There came a sudden commotion at the
entrance to the main building. Morgin ducked quickly into the
relative safety of the stables as Valso and the Tulalane stepped
into view. The Decouix prince strode purposefully to the man-gate.
“I tell you something is wrong here. I can sense it.”

Several Kulls accompanied Valso and the
Tulalane. Their commander pleaded, “But, Your Highness, our guard
has been meticulous.”

The Tulalane scanned the courtyard slowly.
Morgin ducked back into a deep shadow, holding his breath,
motionless. Valso stood within the recess of the man-gate and
sniffed about like a hound on the scent. He turned to the Kull
commander angrily. “He’s been here. Inside. I can smell his
magic.”

“But that’s impossible, Your Highness,” the
Kull said fearfully. “This gate is rarely opened. And then only
under the eyes of two twelves of my men.”

“Don’t argue with me, Verk,” Valso snarled.
“He’s been here. And not long ago.”

“He’s right,” the Tulalane said, still
scanning the courtyard. His head moved slowly from side to side
like a snake preparing to strike.

Across the courtyard, huddled deep within
his shadow, Morgin watched and waited, swearing that he would not
be spooked prematurely. The Tulalane scanned the yard once more,
then his head froze, looking at Morgin as if there were no shadows
in this world of mortals. His lips curled slowly into a satisfied
grin. He raised his arm, pointed at Morgin. “He’s there, Verk. Take
him. Now.”

The Kull peered intently, shook his head. “I
see nothing, my lord.”

Morgin waited no longer. The stables were a
trap with only one exit. If they caught him there he’d be done for.
He put all the power he could muster into the strongest shadow
spell he’d ever made, then sprinted out of the stables and across
the yard. The cry rose immediately, for gray-black shadows do not
run of themselves in the light of day.

Morgin dove into a narrow gap between two
buildings, a back route he’d taken hundreds of times as a boy and
knew well. He burst into a small garden, hurdled one row of flowers
and trampled another. He turned right, then left, then cut into the
kitchen and ran head-on into two Kulls. All three of them sprawled
into a cascade of pots and pans.

Morgin was the first up, with one of the
Kulls close behind. Morgin kicked him in the side of the head, then
spun about and brought his sword down blindly on the other Kull. It
bit deeply into the halfman’s shoulder. He spun back to the first
Kull, kicked him in the face, then sprinted out of the kitchen and
into the main building.

This was home ground. He knew it well, but
the Kull pursuit was close on his heels so he cut a random path
through the ground floor halls. There was shouting and screaming
behind him and all around him, and he had no time to think far
ahead, just to the next room or corridor, often only one step ahead
of his enemies. There came a time when he thought they would catch
him, and that he would die then and there, but then those behind
him thinned out as they split up to search the castle, and for the
first time he had hope of losing them.

Elated that he might be free to move about
the castle at will, adrenaline surging through his veins, he turned
into a wide corridor and met two Kulls face to face. One had a
sword and reacted quickly with Morgin. Their weapons clanged
together once, but Morgin’s magic was strongly aroused. He swept
the halfman’s sword aside and took off most of his head with the
next stroke.

The other Kull bore a crossbow and was
slower to react. Morgin turned upon him, brought his sword down in
a long arc just as the halfman raised his weapon. He felt his blade
bite into the Kull’s skull just as he heard the twang of the
crossbow. Then, as if he were a doll slapped backward by some great
god
, the crossbow bolt slammed into his chest, lifted him
off his feet and dropped him on his back in the center of the
corridor. The bolt had passed straight through his chest and out
his back.

He coughed, struggled for air, tried to cry
out but no sound came. His mouth filled with blood. He spit it out.
More blood pulsed from the hole in his chest. He tried to breathe,
but a white, hot lance of pain shot through his chest. His mind
blinked, and for an instant he lay in an odd world of painless
tranquility, then it blinked again and he returned to a world of
agony. The corridor tilted and swayed crazily. His mouth filled
again with blood, and he understood then that his wound was mortal.
He had come to life’s end, and curiously, his only fear was that
his family would not know of his passing.

With his mind swimming in a sea of pain and
gathering darkness, he rolled onto his side to die. His vision
blurred, narrowed, then his eyes locked onto a shimmering haze that
caressed the wall before him. It sparkled, fluttered an ethereal
flame fed by some unknown power. Then it disappeared, and there,
recessed into the wall as if it had been part of the castle for
centuries, he saw the alcove he remembered as a child, his
enchanted place of hiding. It had not appeared to him in years, and
he had long forgotten its existence, but now old memories flooded
into his mind as he crawled there, dragging himself across the
floor through his last agonized moments of life.

The pain seemed almost distant as inch by
inch he crawled into the alcove. He struggled slowly to the far
side, rolled onto his back, lay there with his head resting against
the far wall. Now he could die, and the Kulls would not find him,
and Valso would not know his fate, and perhaps, if nothing more,
the prince of the Decouixs would ever wonder at his return.

Out in the corridor a lone Kull came upon
the bodies of his two dead comrades. He looked cautiously up and
down the corridor, prepared for an attack that might come from any
direction. Then, seeing that none would come, he relaxed and
frowned, disappointed. He looked back the way he’d come. “This
way,” he shouted. “He come this way.”

The corridor filled quickly with Kulls, the
black pits of their eyes alight with an eagerness for blood. “Where
is he?” one snarled.

“Don’t know,” the first snarled back,
squatting down to examine one of the dead. “He’s a fighter, this
one is. Not easy to kill.”

“I like ‘em not easy to kill,” another
growled. “Makes for more sport.”

Their leader eyed the scene carefully, then
reached down and picked up Morgin’s sword. “He must be bad wounded
to leave his blade behind.”

Another pointed to the crossbow bolt half
buried in the wall. “Look! Here’s Mook’s bolt. It’s blooded.”

The Kull leader looked the scene over one
more time, as if trying to reconstruct what had happened. He
examined Morgin’s trail of blood, a jagged smear that disappeared
strangely beneath a solid stone wall. He inspected the wall,
seeking a crack or fissure that might indicate some secret passage.
To Morgin, who lay dying on the opposite side of the wall, it
looked as though the Kull was comically inspecting thin air.

The Kull leader finally shook his head and
turned away from the wall. “Enough of this,” he snarled. “He can’t
be far, and if we don’t find him soon the prince’ll have our
balls.”

Morgin watched the Kulls move down the
corridor, his mind flickering in and out of consciousness, his soul
fluttering between the agony of life and the bliss of death. And
then the blood suddenly stopped pulsing from the hole in his chest.
His ears filled with a distant roar and he tried to scream, but no
cry came to his lips. Kings and wizards flashed before his eyes as
demons of great power spoke to him in words he could not
understand. He walked the halls of strange castles, stood before
the tombs of long dead
gods
, but finally, laying on his back
in the alcove, his grip on consciousness began to fail and he
drifted toward the darkness that awaited him.

But as the darkness approached he had a
vision that the alcove itself opened into a much larger chamber, a
chamber that had not been there before. It was a room cluttered
with swords and shields and armor of the finest kind, not fighting
armor, but the ceremonial armor of a mighty lord, perhaps even the
trappings of a great king. His eye caught the glint of a jewel
embedded in the hilt of a sword, and another in the face of a
shield, though the metal was oddly lacking of luster and seemed
dulled by the dust of ages. And he noticed that on the walls the
tapestries hung in moth eaten tatters, while cobwebs filled the
corners and dust lay upon everything.

Even with his mind dulled by pain he knew
then that the chamber of his vision was actually the tomb of a
great and mighty king, for at the center of the chamber, surrounded
by riches beyond imagining, had been placed a throne, and upon it
sat unmistakably a king, though like the tapestries on the walls he
too was decayed far beyond life. In life he had been a majestic
king, while in death he was no more than a skeleton of bones and
tufts of hair, seated upon his throne, one skeletal arm resting
casually on an armrest, the other on the hilt of a great sword.
Morgin recognized him as the skeleton king of his dreams.

Morgin’s eyes were drawn to the sword, for
it was a thing of craftsmanship beyond that produced in any land of
Morgin’s knowledge. Buried in the hilt were gems and stones of
incredible value; etched along the blade were runes of vast power.
It rested tip down in the dust of the floor, its upper weight
balanced by no more than the casual grip of the skeleton’s
hand.

The skeleton’s hand! It seemed oddly
indistinct, as if the bleached white bones of the fingers were
changing, fleshing out. Morgin’s eyes moved to the crowned skull, a
grinning white mask of death framing eye sockets of black shadow.
The skeleton moved; its head turned; the eyeless pits looked upon
Morgin and there came a moment of clear, crisp thought in which he
seemed to understand all, but then a sea of pain washed it away,
and the darkness consumed him.

~~~

The flesh continued to form on the skeleton;
the face filled out: a young face, strong, handsome. The eyes were
no longer pits of shadow but pools of sorrow and mercy, and the
king was once again a king of life and health, seated upon his
throne dressed in a suit of golden mail and glimmering silk and
rich leather. The tapestries on the walls shown with the brilliance
of their colors again, and the assorted trappings of arms and armor
were clean and bright once more. But there was one feature that
marred the illusion of beauty, for at the king’s feet lay the
skeleton of a simple warrior, and unlike the other trappings the
warrior remained in decay. It was obvious the warrior had not been
sealed in the chamber at the time of the king’s dying, but had
entered the tomb at some later time, and, mortally wounded, had
crawled some distance across the chamber’s floor before dying at
the feet of his already long dead king. And still clutched in the
whitened bones of the warrior’s hand was a plain and unadorned
sword, the only weapon in the tomb that did not sparkle with inlaid
jewels and precious stones.

The king turned to look first upon the
decayed body of the warrior at his feet, and then upon Morgin, and
his eyes held a sadness beyond time itself. About him there hung a
scent of unreality, as if he clung to the air and the earth and the
sky by a thread of magic thousands of years old. He gripped the
great sword in a powerful hand, stood, and crossed the room easily,
as if he had done so only the day before.

He knelt over Morgin, and as he did so his
face was a mask of sorrow. He reached out slowly, placed a hand
gently on the wound in Morgin’s chest, a wound from which the pulse
of life had ceased. The sadness in his eyes deepened; he placed the
great sword on the floor and with both hands lifted Morgin’s
lifeless form, holding him tightly against his own breast. The
young king looked old and sad, closed his eyes and bowed his head.
He whispered softly, “Forgive me, mortal, for what I must do.”

Much later he returned Morgin gently to the
dust covered floor. The wound in Morgin’s chest had disappeared,
though the blood stains on his tunic remained as mute evidence of
his ordeal. The king stood slowly, as if tired and old beyond
imagining; the sorrow had not left his face, or the sadness his
eyes. He turned, and carrying the great sword he walked back to his
throne. But before reaching it he paused, hesitated, looked back as
if something was left undone. He stared at Morgin’s still form for
a moment, and then at the skeleton of the warrior who had died at
the foot of his throne. He bent down carefully over the warrior and
removed the simple, unadorned sword from his grasp, then returned
to where Morgin lay. He stooped down, placed the sword’s hilt in
Morgin’s hand and curled Morgin’s fingers about it. “You will need
this, Lord Mortal,” he said. “May it stand you in good stead.”