All the dead were well known to Alahir. He had grown up with two of them. And another had been one of his history teachers. This last, a stern man named Graygin, had been nearing sixty, and had tried to hide the fact that the rheumatic had begun to eat away at the joints of his arms. Alahir had known of the condition. ‘I should have sent him home,’ he thought.
‘The fields are green, the sky blue, where these men ride,’ he said, as the warriors gathered round the grave. ‘They will be welcomed in the Fabled Hall, for they were men, and the sons of men. We will all see them again. Keep them in your minds and your hearts.’ He sighed. ‘When this patrol is over we will gather them up and speak the stories of their lives.’ Pulling his mail-shirt hood into place he donned his plumed helm. ‘Now it is time to ride,’ he told them.
Throughout the afternoon they rode a twisting trail, higher and higher into the mountains. Alahir had sent scouts ahead, and they reported no sign of enemy activity. On one section they found the bodies of three lancers, crushed by falling rocks. Trees were down, cutting off the trail in places, and the riders had to dismount and haul them aside, or make difficult detours over rock-strewn slopes.
Gilden, his face stitched and bloody, angled his mount alongside Alahir as they topped a steep slope.
‘Land’s pretty twisted now. Can’t tell where we are,’ he said.
‘We’ll see better when we crest that rise,’ replied Alahir, pointing southwest.
A strong breeze was blowing. It was chill with snow from the upper peaks. Alahir shivered.
Turn to the east, said a voice in his mind.
Alahir tensed in the saddle. Gilden spotted the movement. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. The horse spooked.’ Alahir felt anger swell in his heart. He had thought he had silenced the voices years ago, when he had refused to answer them. They had brought him nothing but humiliation and mocking laughter. As a child he would answer them out loud, and other children would stare at him, at first confused, but then would come the jeers.
‘Alahir’s talking to ghosts again!’
Stupid Alahir. Alahir the Loon. ‘The poor boy is unhinged,’ he heard an old woman tell his mother. So he had stopped speaking to them, and stopped listening to them. Gradually they died away. In truth he had never really expected them to stay away for good. His grandfather had gone mad, people said. He had dressed in rags, covered his face in mud, and moved about on all fours wailing like a hound. His great-grandfather, on his mother’s side, had also been insane. Gandias had walled up his wife and two of his sons, and had taken to murdering travellers on the high road above Siccus. It was even said he drank their blood. His trial had produced shocking evidence of his debauchery. When he had been taken to the scaffold Gandias had shrieked and begged, insisting that the voices had told him to do these dreadful things, and that he was not to blame.
So when Alahir started hearing voices his mother was terrified. One night Alahir had crept downstairs and listened to a conversation between mother and father. ‘Madness runs in families,’ he heard her say.
‘What if he is another Gandias?’
‘He’s just a boy with an over-active imagination,’ his father told her. ‘He will grow out of it.’
Alahir never forgot that conversation. It was why he had never married. If he was to go mad like Gandias he would do so as a single man. No wife of his would be walled up to die in a dark, airless room.
As the years passed he had grown a little more confident about the voices. Never convinced he was free, but allowing his hopes to grow.
Now they were back.
Turn east, Alahir. There is something you must see.
‘You need to step down from the saddle, man,’ said Gilden. ‘Your face is whiter than snow.’ The sergeant reached out to take his arm.
‘I’m fine!’ snapped Alahir, snatching his arm out of reach. The movement was so sudden Alahir’s skittish horse reared, and sprang to the left, moving out onto a steep scree slope. Immediately it began to slide. Alahir fought to keep its head up as it scrambled for footing. There were few riders better than the Drenai captain, but even he almost lost control. Finally firmer ground appeared under the horse’s hooves and it scrambled safely to a rock shelf some two hundred feet below the other riders. Alahir looked up at the worried faces above him and waved to show he was all right. Then he rode on, seeking a path back to the high trail.
Irritation flared as he was forced to continue along a rock trail running east, away from his men. Ahead of him was a sheer wall of rock that had been split open by the earthquake. Several tons of earth had been displaced, and a score of trees levelled. As he rode by he glanced at the desolation. His eye was caught by an odd sight. Just beyond the huge mound of fallen earth he saw a wide lintel stone above a half-buried doorway. It made no sense. Who would build a doorway into a mountain?
Alahir knew he should get back to his men. The enemy lancers might have regrouped, or been reinforced. And yet. . The doorway beckoned to him. How long must it have been hidden here, to have been covered so completely?
Dismounting, he trailed the reins of his mount and climbed over the earth mound. On closer inspection the lintel stone was beautifully carved, and an inscription had been engraved upon it. It was full of earth, and Alahir scraped some of it away with his dagger.
He soon realized it was in a language unknown to him. Considering the history of the land he decided the inscription must have been Sathuli. Possibly a tomb of some kind. His interest waned.
Then the voice came again. Go inside, Alahir.
‘Leave me alone, damn you!’
If you wish it I will never speak again. But go inside. The hope of the Drenai lies within.
No other inducement would have caused him to lever himself into the dark of the tomb, but his heart and mind had been filled with worry for his people for too long now. With a sigh he removed his crested helm, laid it on the earth, then climbed inside. Beyond the entrance was a tunnel, going off into the dark.
Alahir moved along it. Some fifty paces ahead he saw a shaft of light shining down through a crack in the ceiling. Alahir made his way towards it.
The shaft was illuminating a great block of what at first seemed to be ice, shimmering and glistening.
Squinting against the glare Alahir approached the block. It was too perfectly shaped to be ice. More like a gigantic cube of glass. Then he saw what it contained and his breath caught in his throat.
On a wooden stand within the block was a suit of armour, beautifully crafted in bronze. It had overlapping scales of plate, and the breastplate was emblazoned with a golden eagle, wings spread, flaring up and over the chest. There were scaled gauntlets, and a winged helm, crested with an eagle’s head. Beneath the breastplate was a bronze ringed mail shirt, and leggings with hinged knee caps. Then there was the sword, the hilt double-handed, the guard a pair of flaring wings, the blade gold. It shone in the shaft of light as if it was crafted from fire.
Alahir’s mouth was dry.
He stepped forward on trembling legs. His booted foot crunched down on old bones, and he glanced down to see the desiccated remains of a man. Shreds of dry cloth clung to the bones.
‘Who was he?’ he asked.
Lascarin the Thief. He saved the Armour of Bronze and brought it here, before the horror that was the last battle.
Alahir knew the story of that battle. Every Drenai child did. The civil war had raged for nine years, culminating in a fierce exchange at Dros Delnoch. The fortress had been built to withstand an assault from the north, and was virtually open to attack from the south. The defenders had been vastly outnumbered, and, three days before the last battle, the thief Lascarin had stolen the Armour of Bronze. Two days later an earthquake ripped through the fortress, bringing two of the walls down, and killing more than a thousand men. The surviving defenders had taken their families and fled north to the colony of Siccus.