The Warrior King (Book 4) (27 page)

But as the blade fell, Roderick summoned every last scrap of his will, those parts that had stayed rebellious all of these weeks. He forced every bit of will into his neck muscles, concentrating everything on this one thing. When the sword bent, Roderick bent with it. He moved an inch, maybe two. That was enough.

In that moment, the veil of shadow lifted from his sight, and he saw his brother’s face in full. Anguish left a crease on Whelan’s brow, and in his eyes lay horror at what Roderick had become, and an additional twist of pain as he recognized what his brother was doing, throwing himself in front of Soultrup. In the instant before the blow fell, Roderick remembered when he and Whelan had ridden into battle side by side against the Dark Wizard. His final death would fall hard upon Whelan’s shoulders.

I forgive you, brother.

Soultrup crushed into Roderick’s helm. It shattered, and the blade smashed into his skull, caving it open. Terrific pain flared in his head, and then he went down. Somewhere inside, the other entity screamed in rage and betrayal.

A smile came to Roderick’s lips as he died. This time, his body did not rise.

#

Roderick woke after what seemed hours. A hand tugged insistently at his sleeve.

“You
must
get up,” a voice said. “Stand!” 

Roderick climbed, groggy, to his feet. He blinked, his mind clearing. He stood in a garden that surpassed all beauty. Flowering plants ten feet tall stood over lawns of impossible green. There were fountains and streams that bubbled and coursed through brick-lined channels. A honey bee the size of his thumb flew past. Stone hooks held terra cotta pots filled with overflowing flowers, around which swarmed hummingbirds of gold and iridescent green and blue.

The speaker was a young wizard with golden, curly hair. He wore a white robe and had deep gray eyes that seemed to look right through the dead captain.

“Who are you?” Roderick asked.

“My name is Memnet the Great. I was the friend and teacher of Markal. You know him?”

“Of course.”

Roderick looked down at the grass where he’d been lying. It lay bent and yellow in the outline of his body, as if he had been lying there for days.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Only seconds. I expended great effort to bring you back to consciousness so soon. Normally it takes days.”

“But the grass . . . ”

“I curved time. Hurry, there is no time to explain. You must help us or we will lose.”

The details of the battle came back to Roderick, together with the nightmare of the past several weeks. He had full control of his limbs, and the swirl of unwelcome emotions was gone. The evil entity that had been oppressing him was gone. If this beautiful place was death, his consciousness fully intact, then he would take it.

“I am within my brother’s sword?” he asked as the wizard turned away.

Memnet ran with his bare feet padding the stone and Roderick ran after him. The captain was dressed in a simple, clean tunic, unarmed and barefoot. The stone was rough beneath his feet, but not unpleasant, and cool in spite of the warm sun overhead.

“You are within the sword. The enemy is attacking. I need you to fight with us. With your weapon, you can turn him back, while we defeat the torturers.”

“What weapon?”

Even as he said this, his hand closed around the cool hilt of a sword, which had sudden weight. But he couldn’t see it, only sense its contours.

“Form it with your mind,” the wizard said. “You are powerful and good, Captain Roderick. Your soul was bound and enslaved, and you fought free. You have the will to shape it yourself.”

Roderick thought about his time with the Knights Temperate, when a sword felt like an extension of his arm. Heavy, yet weightless at the same time, it seemed as though it were six feet long and made of light, cleaving through the wicked and the unjust as he struck a blow for his brotherhood, for the teachings of the Martyr, for good and justice. The air shimmered where the sword should be.

Even as he thought these things, the terrain changed. The green turned to gray, the leaves yellowed on the trees and clogged the fountains, which ran dry. Soon, the trees sat dead and gaunt against a sky turned cold and gray as slate. Ahead of them stretched a dry, lifeless plain, with the vast ruins of some great and dead city lying in front of them. The wreckage of vast stone temples raised like skeletons to the sky.

They came down a broad boulevard of stone, twice as wide as the Tothian Way itself, the mightiest road Roderick had ever seen or imagined. In the middle, a terrific battle was being fought. Wizards, torturers, and mages hurled balls of fire at each other and brought lightning sizzling from black clouds that hung in the leaden sky. Warriors on foot fought a savage battle, armed with swords as black as obsidian or spouting white fire. Armor was gold and silver and white on one side, and black and red on the other.

Memnet stopped and chanted. He held out his hand, and several glass spheres circled above his palm. Each one seemed a world in itself, with storms raging within. They flared white, and a massive bolt of lightning split the sky with a deafening thunderclap. It blasted into the center of a group of enemy wizards and sent them flying.

“The dark knight,” Memnet said, turning. Sweat stood out on his forehead, and a vein throbbed in his temple. “Pasha Malik. You must face him.”

The greatest of the warriors was a man who looked eight feet tall, his armor red, his sword as tall as a man and so black that it seemed to suck the light from the air. He used it to clear opposing men from the road, hacking them to pieces and sending them flying away as wisps of light.

All of this, Roderick knew instinctively, was a representation of the will, power, and wickedness or righteousness of the combatants. Nobody here would die, but the battle would have very real consequences for control of the sword.

And Roderick understood now what had been happening when Whelan struggled for control of Soultrup. Out there in the real world, Pradmort and the other two ravagers would be pressing Roderick’s brother, while within the sword, the giant knight in red and his forces were driving back Memnet and his. Soon, the battle would be lost. Outside the sword, Whelan would die.

Roderick ran down the road toward the battle. He felt himself growing as he did. His skin shimmered, and then he was covered with brilliant silver plate mail from his helm to his sabatons. The sword had taken shape in his hands and seemed to be a thing of pure light.

The two armies parted as Roderick strode toward the red knight. Malik was taller, his sword and reach impossibly long. But Roderick was broader of shoulder and the muscles in his arms felt as large and strong as tree trunks. He brought his sword in a wide, devastating arc. The shadowy weapon of his enemy lifted to meet his.

The two weapons met in an explosion of dark and light sparks. They mingled together, seeming to pass through and overwhelm each other. The shadows raced down the blade and into Roderick’s arm and shoulder, together with a biting cold that sent ice deep into his bones. He grimaced in pain and jerked his sword free.

Malik let out a sneering laugh, thinking he had won the first engagement. He brought his own sword around for a counterattack.

But Roderick’s heart leaped when he saw that his enemy’s sword was diminished by the initial clash. The shadows weren’t as dark, and streaks of gray infiltrated the tip. The shadows bleeding off the edge dissipated the instant they left the weapon. Meanwhile Roderick’s own weapon seemed to have grown, and it flared so bright that it was impossible to stare at directly.

The two weapons met again. This time, only the shadow weapon gave off sparks, the blackness falling all around the two warriors on the road, where it formed inky pools that quickly evaporated. Roderick’s sword flared white one more time, then passed all the way through his enemy’s blade. What was left of the shadow sword dissolved in the air. Malik raged and cursed.

Roderick brought his sword around one last time, and this time, the enemy could only lift a feeble arm to block the attack. The sword of light sliced through Malik, and then the enemy was nothing but a black wisp, fleeing the battlefield with an incoherent scream.

After that, the battle was swiftly won. Memnet and his apprentices drove off the enemy wizards and torturers, and Roderick organized his surviving fighters into a wedge, which swept enemies from the road. The instant the last of Malik’s forces had fled the battlefield, the city began to rebuild itself. Stones stacked on top of stones, huge statues of unknown kings raised themselves from the sand. The clouds drifted away, and the sun shone down again, and when it did, green sprouted from the soil.

“We have done it,” Memnet said. His golden hair had turned gray in the battle, but already Roderick could see fresh, youthful hairs sprouting on his head.

Roderick bent double and clutched his knees, gasping and overcome with exhaustion. His sword dissolved, his armor vanished. He was barefoot again and dressed in a white tunic. When he caught his breath, he raised himself and looked at the wizard.

“So that’s it? We’ve won?”

“For now,” Memnet said. “But that is only the battle within. There is another fight—a more important fight—that continues in the real world of Mithyl.”

“My brother. Is he safe?”

“Not yet, and there is nothing more we can do. Only Whelan can claim the final victory.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Markal reached his feet as Whelan wrenched his sword from his brother’s skull. The king let out a cry of anger and grief, and as the other three ravagers came at him on the battlements, the sword twisted and bucked in his hand, as if trying to throw itself from the castle wall.

Markal’s left hand burned with pain, having become a blackened, withered claw. Memnet’s Orb lay inside his robe next to his breast, cold and dead, its power drained. That left only Markal’s right hand, with which he could cast a single spell. And then the wizard himself would be exhausted and would need hours, if not days, before he’d be strong enough to coax out even the barest of magic. He would have to choose his last spell wisely.

The wall-walk of the battlements was narrow enough that Whelan would only have to face one ravager at a time, but there were three of the tireless undead knights, and Markal could sense magic flowing into them from the east, from the direction of Veyre and the Dark Citadel. It was as if Toth himself sat upon his stone, gathering his power and sending it into his forces.

The ravagers had stepped over Markal instead of killing him, intent on their quarry, which left the wizard behind them. He could cast his final spell and knock at least two of them over the wall. But a quick glance behind him showed shadows in the gathering darkness of twilight trying to gain the wall. Some twenty or so ravagers had survived the collapsing gate tower and were now climbing the exposed staircase inside the ruined tower. The first of them was almost to the top. If they gained the castle walls, they would pin the king, the wizard, the archers, and the Knights Temperate inside.

Of the three ravagers coming at Whelan, Markal now recognized the lead man. He was a Knight Temperate named Pradmort of Crestwell. A young man, fair skinned and with blond hair, he had joined the brotherhood to follow his two older brothers, and in the Battle of Arvada had proven himself a greater warrior than either of them, which had earned him command of a small company of knights. A few days after the battle, he and his company had vanished while hunting bands of surviving Veyrians. Now Markal knew what had become of him.

Pradmort and Whelan traded blows. As Markal watched, the king seemed to be wresting control of Soultrup, and his defense grew more vigorous with every parry and thrust. Roderick must be within the sword now, lending his strength and will to Memnet’s fight against Malik the Cruel. The confidence in Whelan’s posture improved moment by moment.

Behind the king, his knights had gained the castle walls and were pushing through the archers and signalers, but like the archers, who couldn’t get an angle at the ravagers, they would be unable to join the battle so long as the king was in front of them. It was up to Whelan to stop Pradmort and the other two enemies himself, one after another.

Events forced Markal’s hand. He turned away from the fight to the rest of the surviving ravagers. The first had gained the top of the tower and was stretching out to grab at the broken wall itself so he could scramble the rest of the way to the battlements.

Markal lifted his right hand. He forced his mind to a pinprick of focus, letting the rightness of his cause wash over him, his hatred of the dark wizard who tried to subdue and enslave the entire world, even thwarting the rule of the Brothers. Commanding both the living and the dead.

“
Moenia atque en mortariu cadunt saeclum.
”

It was the same spell he had cast earlier. This time, it was weaker, and at least half the force of the spell evaporated in the air like rain falling on a scorched desert plain. He didn’t have the stored magic of the orb, only his hand, and drawing the same spell so close to its first casting was bound to produce a weaker effect.

But if the spell was weaker, so was the gate tower. It had already fallen into ruins, and only one wall and the central staircase of the tower remained standing, these fatally weakened at the base. The tower swayed for a long moment and collapsed in a thundering crash of stone and dust. When the air cleared, the tower was a heap of stone. Markal searched the darkness for moving shapes, but saw none.