“Tell me something, if you will,” Achmed said, taking off the veil that shielded his face and wringing the water from it. “Something that has long puzzled me. It is said in legend that it was you that slew Tsoltan, the F’dor-priest who was once my hated master. How did you do it? You are not Dhracian, and yet you killed him, both man and spirit. I need to know, especially if it will help us in the battle that is to come.”
MacQuieth leaned back, oblivious to the rain.
“I hunted him,” he said, his voice heavy with the memory. “I was young then, in what I thought was my prime. I was the shadow of the king, the queen’s champion, the black lion. In those days, those times, there were those who said I had wings. And on days when the wind was at my back, I almost believed them. If you remember but one thing about me, remember this: I have never failed to complete a quest that I undertook alone.
“And I work best alone. I am no minister, no advisor, no ambassador. I had no wish to be a general, just in the vanguard.” He broke his gaze away from the endless sheets of rain long enough to meet Achmed’s eye. “In the days after you left, I was the vanguard.
“But I was also a fool. When the Seren War began I had no idea such a thing as F’dor existed; they had been long bound, imprisoned in the Vault of the Underworld for ages before. The lore of them had been lost, or I ignored it. I carried the courage of the fool, or it carried me. I had met children of the four other Firstborn races, Seren and Mythlin, the children of the stars and the sea. I had struggled with wyrmkin like you, Aesche, the spawn of earth, and knew the Kith well; many of them were Kinsmen, brothers of the wind, born as they were of the element of air. The missing element should have been obvious, but I forgot about the children of fire.
“Tsoltan had been the nemesis of my king, and therefore my nemesis, from the beginning of the war; it was just a matter of time before my comrades and I uncovered his identity. When we did, I went after him alone.
“I caught him outside the Spire, his lair in the old world, on an errand he could not leave undone.” MacQuieth’s voice warmed in the telling; his eyes looked out into the sheets of blinding rain, as if seeing past them into history. “His men, his retainers were nothing. I fell on them with such fury that the water sword smoked, atomizing lives, wrenching souls and organs from their houses like an avalanche, or a tidal wave.” He chuckled softly. “I love the sound of the blade, the feel of steel on bone. It was glorious.
“The demon itself, now, that was another matter. At first, of course, it fought. It had no idea who I was, or that I carried its doom in my teeth. It had every strength—strength of time, strength of element. And I had one advantage—it could not afford to kill me.” “Why?” Achmed asked.
“Because,” MacQuieth said matter-of-factly, “I was carrying it within me. I was its host.”
Achmed choked on a stream of rainwater pouring from the broken roof, coughing violently. “What did you say?”
“I took it into myself, into my body; like you said Michael has done; I invited it in, swallowed it.” His face grew darker. “And then I wrestled with it.
“I had to unravel my own darkness from the demon’s so I could kill the spirit from vision rather than anger. My race, my sword, my solitude; I was the shadow of the king. That gave me a pool of strength. I drowned it. Held its fire under the waters of my life. Eventually it came to begging, wheedling, before it finally surrendered, whispered itself away. I had killed the body long before, so when it gave up and dissipated on the wind, it was well and truly gone. Not even enough of a spark of black fire to light a candle to guide me home from the depths of the Spire, a place of consuming blackness.
“You did not think it was merely time that has made me into the frail human refuse that I am? Gods, no. My frailty, my dissipation, comes from life, not time; from the things I visited upon myself, such as the battle I have just related to you, and the spirit-breaking demands that others have visited upon me.” He glared at Ashe for a moment. “None so much as Gwylliam.
“But I have no regrets about having spent myself as I have,” he said, his voice softer now. “Immortality is foolishness. Everything dies, goes. Mountains age and fall, islands slip into the sea. And if not these F’dor, with their endless appetite for destruction that brings the curtain down, then it will be someone else, some fanatic who will snare the sun and pull it into the earth. Sooner or later, life ends. Those who seek to cheat that concept are worse than the F’dor in their ceaseless hunger for oblivion.”
Achmed looked over to see Ashe trembling.
“What is it?” he asked sharply.
“I cannot do that,” the Lord Cymrian whispered. “I have lived with the touch of the F’dor, have felt the demon’s fingers reach into my chest and tear out a piece of my soul; I know the torments of sharing being with it. I cannot fight the beast like that.”
“Nor can I,” Achmed said.
MacQuieth looked at them both intently. “Not even to save your wife? Your friend?”
Neither man answered.
A flash of lightning crackled through the sky in the distance, lighting the sea.
The ancient warrior shook his head. “I am sorry. I have told you but one method to kill the demon; it will not work for you, though others might. You may be good men, good kings. Even a worthy husband and a worthy friend. But you are not Kinsmen. Neither of you are made for it; your senses of self are too strong. You were put on the Earth to rule; Kinsmen are not rulers. We are a brotherhood that sees through darkness and time, but one thing we are blind to is that we have a purpose other than to serve.”
“I will do it if I must,” Ashe said, looking up into the darkness of the half-roof. “If the demon slips away from Achmed during the Thrall, I will do whatever I must to keep it from escaping.”
MacQuieth smiled and tapped the scabbard that held Kirsdarke.
“I doubt you will need to,” he said, his voice clearer and stronger than they had heard it. “You bear the right weapon.
“We all live on the blade of balance, a slurry of water, air, fire, and earth. The great swords allow one to alter the balance. There were five elemental swords made. A million were forged, but only five made, consecrated—not all together, but each in its time by loving hands. Daystar Clarion by the Seren, born in the twilight of the gods. Fired and finished by starlight. It’s an old power, but it’s distant, far away from us. There was a fire sword, now gone, combined with the sword of the stars. The blade Michael bears is born of wind, but wind is fleeting. It is water that will vanquish dark fire when wielded by the right hand. The sea is the one thing that still touches us all. Earth is broken, wind is lost, fire is quenched. The waters touch us all. Kirsdarke is our sword.”
Achmed, leather of water, inhaled deeply.
“Look at me if you do not believe in the enduring power of water,” MacQuieth said jokingly. “Salt is a wonder as a preservative. There are fish in the depths of the sea hundreds of years old, did you know that? Trust in the sword, and in yourselves. And, if it appears you are about to fail, remember that living forever is not always a blessing.”
A rumble of thunder punctuated his words.
52
And then it was morning.
The rain remained, gray and foreboding, coming and going on the wind, leaving behind an ever-present mist that shrouded Achmed’s senses in a maddening fog.
They followed MacQuieth, trusting in his tie to his nemesis from the old world, though each step into the mist coming off the turbulent sea made their confidence, if not their resolve, wane slightly.
The ancient hero had stopped at one point along the rough land overlooking the sea and quietly lashed his horse to a tree in the last copse he saw. The others followed his example, noting that the forest of Gwynwood to the east still hung in heavy smoke from the fires that had so recently burned there.