This was it, then. This was the foretold moment-the moment Orne was to die.
Croy decided he would make that death mean something, at any cost. Struggling with the iron bar, he put all his muscles into moving it until he felt something tear in his back. The bar came loose from its brackets and crashed to the ground with a noise so loud it jarred his bones. He pushed hard on the gate until it started to swing open.
Only then did he look back.
Orne was lost in the melee, but he could see Bloodquaffer rise and fall and slash and spin. Never had Croy seen a man fight so desperately, never had he watched a sword move so fast. Heads, arms, and fingers bounced and spun in the air as Bloodquaffer took its due. But with every barbarian the sword cut down, a dozen axe blows came at Orne, while spears jabbed at him through every opening and arrows seemed to float on air above him. The barbarians didn’t seem to care if they struck or killed their own numbers in the confusion, only that they took down the doomed knight. Blood pooled between the cobblestones and ran in the gutters, but they fought on.
Croy longed to go and help his friend-but he dared not. He bent to pick up the king and throw his sleeping form over one shoulder.
It was then he heard a booming, horrible laugh that he knew all too well. Striding through the crowd of barbarians, Morget came to challenge Orne.
“No,” Croy said, staggering under the weight of the king.
No, it could not be. Morget could not still be alive. He’d been under Cloudblade when it fell. It was Morget’s own hand that set off the explosion that leveled the mountain. Not even Morget could have survived that.
Yet here he was.
Morget-the biggest man Croy had ever seen. The fiercest warrior he’d ever known. The son of Morg, and himself a chieftain of many barbarian clans. Morget’s face was painted half red like those of the berserkers, but he was more dangerous than any of those insensate warriors.
Croy had called Morget brother once. They had fought together against a demon, and Croy had marveled at the strength in the barbarian’s massive arms and the sheer delight Morget took in hacking and slashing and killing. The man had terrified him even when they were on the same side.
But Morget had betrayed him-had betrayed everyone who went into the mountain with him. Even before the barbarians declared war on Skrae, he and Morget had become sworn enemies. If he’d thought Morget still lived, he would have been honor bound to do nothing until he had tracked him down and slain him in single combat. Slain him and taken from his treacherous hands the sword called Dawnbringer.
Morget waded into the fight, an axe in one hand, the selfsame Ancient Blade in the other. The throng of barbarians drew back and Croy saw Orne in the sudden clearing. The knight had lost half the armor from his left arm and his helm torn from his head. But Orne’s face was perfectly calm, resigned to his fate.
He brought Bloodquaffer up, ready to parry Morget’s axe stroke.
Morget was as big as a horse and his arm was like a tree trunk. The axe came around in an arc, a blow as fast and inescapable as an avalanche.
Orne took the perfect stance and gripped Bloodquaffer’s hilt in both hands. He braced himself in perfect form. How many times had he stood like that, ready to take a blow that could have killed a normal man? Orne was a knight and an Ancient Blade. A warrior of incomparable skill.
He could no more have stopped the axe blow than he could have held back the ocean at high tide. The axe would have cut him in half if that had been Morget’s intention. Instead it cut right through Bloodquaffer’s blade.
The end of the serrated sword spun in the air for a moment, then dropped to clatter in the street. Orne was left holding a hilt and a foot of severed iron.
Impossible, Croy thought. Swords could be broken, of course. A strong enough man could shatter even dwarven steel, and Morget was the strongest man Croy had ever seen. Yet-Bloodquaffer was no ordinary sword. The Ancient Blades were eight hundred years old. They had been forged by the greatest smiths of their day using techniques long lost to modern metalcrafters. They had been imbued with potent magics and blessed by priests of both the Bloodgod and the Lady, back when the people of Skrae worshipped them both equally. The swords were sacred, and they were supposed to be eternal. In all those centuries, none of them had ever been broken. Yet Croy saw it with his own eyes. Bloodquaffer shattered as easily as a piece of poorly forged iron, and with it eight hundred years of tradition.
It was like the world had come to an end.
It was like everything he had ever known was proved wrong.
Even Morget looked surprised at what had happened. But he did not slow his attack. The axe smashed against the cobblestones, carried onward by its inexorable momentum, and then Morget’s sword arm swung around, his own Ancient Blade held straight outward in a perfect form.
Orne did not flinch as Dawnbringer’s chopping stroke took off his head.
His time, at last. As had been foreseen.
Croy longed to howl out in injustice, to call to Morget to try his hand and his axe against Ghostcutter next. He burned with the need to avenge Orne’s death and strike down the barbarian as his vows required. Every particle of his being and every shred of his soul needed that, needed to see the battle through.
Yet he had taken a vow, another vow he could never break. He must save the king, no matter what he personally desired. His battle with Morget would have to wait.
Croy did not waste another moment. He hurried through the open gate and pushed it quietly closed behind him. If the barbarians had seen him, they would come howling for his blood next. They would give chase.
They would kill him, and the king.
He could do nothing but keep running.
He tried to be quiet, willed himself not to be seen as he hurried down the road to the west, outside of Helstrow’s walls. He did not stop until he reached a copse of trees well outside the fortress-town’s precincts, a place where he thought he might hide long enough to catch his breath. He laid the king down in a sward of soft grass and looked back the way he’d come, his eyes unblinking.
Looming above the walls of Helstrow, he could see the keep and the palace. Both of them were burning.
Part 2
Interlude
There was a place in the Free City of Ness where drovers brought their sheep to pasture while they waited to be taken to market. A pleasant common of green in the midst of a boisterous and noisy city. It was not particularly safe at night (no place in Ness truly was), yet for its idyllic calm, it had become somewhat fashionable, and some of the richest men of Ness built villas on its edges, pleasure palaces where they could get away from the endless flow and ebb of commerce.
In the middle of this sward there stood a wide swath of rubble and burnt timbers that no one had ever fully cleared away. It marked where the grandest of those houses once stood. Everything of even remote value had been gleaned from the spot, but no one wanted to build anew there and even the sheep gave it a wide berth.
It had been the house of Hazoth, the sorcerer. It was the place where that great man had been dragged down into the pit by his own enslaved demons. It was also the place where Cythera was born, and where Coruth the witch had been imprisoned for many, many years.
Coruth was probably the first person to set foot inside its ruins since the night it came down. It never occurred to her to do so before-she had been glad enough to get away from the place-but sometimes a witch had to go where others feared to tread.
That day she looked mostly like an old and bent woman, because that was how she felt most of the time, and no one was watching, so she didn’t have to take the trouble to appear as an imposing figure. Her robes were black and shapeless and unremarkable. Her iron-colored hair was bound back with a bit of cheap ribbon. She walked with a measured step that suggested some of her great age, though she retained enough vanity not to use a walking stick.