The Shadow King Read online

  Grieving the death of his friend and mentor Xin, Keilan and Nel and a troop of Dymorian rangers pursue the paladin Senacus south after the attack on Saltstone. The Pure is the only link to those who perpetrated the assault, which nearly killed the queen. They catch up with Senacus just outside the gates of Lyr, one of the Gilded Cities, but the commander of the Lyrish guards takes them all into custody, fearing what would happen if Dymorian swords slew a paladin of Ama just outside the city gates.

  The ruling archons of Lyr summon Keilan before the Council of Black and White to discover why this has happened and what they should do, but they are interrupted by an emissary from the famed Oracle of Lyr. She leads Keilan, Nel and Senacus to the coral temple of the Oracle, where they are given a vision of one possible future that the Oracle wishes to avoid. In this vision, demonic children battle a sorceress in the ruins of Menekar, and the rest of the world has been laid waste. To Keilan’s surprise, he realizes that the silver-haired sorceress looks very much like his mother and also one of the sorceresses that he saw in Jan’s memories, when Alyanna’s ancient cabal performed the ceremony that granted them immortality. The Crone of Lyr, one of the most powerful women in the city, convinces Keilan that the reason the Oracle shared this vision with him was because she wants him to find this sorceress who can challenge the demon children. She suspects he must have some connection to her.

  Keilan, Nel, and Senacus set out for Keilan’s village, hoping to find some clue about his dead mother that will help lead them to the sorceress. Along the way, they stop in the Reliquary of Ver Anath and see their old friend, the scholar Garmond. From him they learn about the Raveling, the great cataclysm that destroyed the old lands of Shan, and the demon children responsible for bringing down that tragedy.

  They travel the Iron Road, finally arriving in Keilan’s village. There they discover that once, when in the grip of a fever, his mother spoke of a famed pirate lord, who has retired on an island in the Broken Sea. They travel to the island, Ven Ibras, and learn that Keilan’s mother lived there briefly before fleeing when strange robed creatures came searching for her. The same creatures seek out Keilan, and bring him to the island of the immortal sorceress Niara, where it is revealed that she is his grandmother. She takes him on as an apprentice, alluding to the great things they must someday do together, and he learns about her life work of helping mankind avoid the fate of all the other intelligent species that came before. She also reveals that long ago the warlocks of Shan sought her out to help craft a weapon that could destroy the Betrayers, which she is still in possession of.

  While Keilan is learning sorcery, his childhood friend Sella discovers a room full of strange dolls, one of which warns her about Niara. The sorceress’s servants imprison Keilan’s companions for the theft of the doll. Senacus escapes and confronts Niara, and the sorceress is enraged when he reveals himself to be a paladin of Ama. In the resulting fight, Keilan is cut by the knife imbued with the blood of the Betrayers, and when trying to save Senacus he accidentally kills Niara. He is distraught as they return to Ven Ibras with the weapon, but resolves to bring the knife to the only person he knows who can wield such an artifact: the Crimson Queen.

  Perched upon the dead man’s face, the raven dipped its head towards where Algeirr knelt in the snow, as if asking for his permission before feasting.

  No, not permission – it paid homage to the one who had delivered up this bounty.

  Algeirr traced the jagged rent in the dead warrior’s ring-mail hauberk, forcing himself to look – truly look – at what his actions had wrought. His nephew’s patchy yellow beard was crusted with ice; his eyes, blue as the northern sky, were wide and staring. Upon his pale cheeks, the bird’s claws left faint indentations. The wind gusted, ruffling the dead man’s wolf-fur cloak, stirring his lank hair.

  Beneath the links of his armor a blacker iron glinted. Algeirr’s fingers sought and found a tiny hammer scrawled with silvery runes, strung on a thread of wraithgut. A heavy sadness filled his chest. Algeirr rubbed the amulet between his thumb and forefinger, murmuring the Stormforger’s lament for the slain, the ruined city around him receding as he reached for his god. His nephew had still believed. His nephew had held fast to the old ways, despite the Gray King’s heresies.

  The raven pecked at the dead man’s eye, tearing loose a clot of glistening tissue. Algeirr lashed out at the bird and it rose into the air, shrieking.

  “So the raven feasts upon its own,” came a young man’s voice, faintly mocking.

  Algeirr tucked the amulet back under the dead warrior’s roughspun tunic and raised his head. The fighting in the city must have ended, for around him had gathered the great Skein lords of the southern Frostlands: thanes of the Wolf, Bear, and Stag, men who pastured and sowed and raided across the tumbling Serpent. And beside them, slightly apart as was their wont, were the thanes from the harsher north, Iron and Ghost and White Worm clansmen, paler and more gaunt, their lips set in thin lines. Some had been wounded in the day’s fighting and leaned exhaustedly upon greatswords streaked with dried blood. Others stood tall, cheeks flushed from the battle’s savage thrill. Their breath ghosted the frozen air.

  Algeirr stood, wincing as his knees protested, and faced the speaker. Agmandur the Young Bear met his gaze briefly, then looked away, his smile fading.

  “Do you mean me, stripling, or the bird?” Algeirr said bitterly.

  The Thane of the Bear forced a chuckle. “The bird, Priest. The bird.”

  Algeirr gestured at the dead warrior sprawled in the blood stained snow. “This was Svartun, my nephew. He used to clutch at my leg and beg for tales of Brigga Bluespear and Gorm One-Eye. I whittled for him his first wooden sword so that in the dark he would not fear the Nightfather.”

  The Wolf lord, Hert, tall and gray and lean, stepped forward and laid his hand on Algeirr’s shoulder. “We know the burden you bear, old one. It is almost finished.”

  “Yes,” Algeirr said, turning from the thanes and squinting up at the mass of stone looming above them. “The end is near.”

  Just one final, terrible task remained. No man was more cursed in the eyes of the gods than the kinslayer – yet what if that deed was done to save the gods themselves?

  They stood in the shadow of the Bhalavan, the Hall of Heroes, where dozens of Skein kings had felt the cold kiss of the black-bone crown upon their brows. Cracked pillars flanked massive bronze doors covered by the squirming runes of fallen Min-Ceruth, the mysterious writing half obscured by snowdrifts that piled twice the height of a man.

  Countless times Algeirr had slipped inside and found his clansmen seated at long tables, being served great haunches of aurochs and bear by shuffling thralls, hefting stone pitchers brimming with mead as they laughed and boasted and sang. But there would be no song inside the Hall of Heroes this day; the men he had feasted with and loved as brothers were dead, motionless in the snow like Svartun, feathered with the black-fletched arrows of the Ghost clan, or with their iron helms riven by double-bladed Stag axes.

  A wave of dizziness washed over Algeirr, almost driving him to his knees again. What had he done?

  “W-w-wait!”

  Algeirr paused, his hand on the greening bronze of the door, and turned back to the city. An elder and a young boy were threading their way between the corpses scattered across the great square, a small flock of carrion birds taking wing as they passed. With a cry the boy stumbled, collapsing in the snow, and the graybeard hauled him to his feet.

  Beyond them the city of Nes Vaneth spread in all its broken, tumbled glory – an endless vista of shattered stone and ice, its crumbling buildings sunk in snow, sundered arches curving together like the ribs of giants, and the jagged remnants of pale green crystal towers stabbing the sky. Smoke billowed from beyond the distant gates, smearing the cloudless blue. Not long ago Algeirr had stood and watched as the warriors of the gathered Skein clans had pulled weeping women and children f
rom the Raven longhouses and then set the buildings aflame, trying his best to harden his heart against their screams for mercy. But it was impossible. Despair continued to grow inside him, an emptiness gnawing at his certainty that this was what the gods demanded.

  He waited with the thanes at the Bhalavan’s great doors.

  “Who are you, old man?” said Kjartan of the Stag when the graybeard finally reached them, the polished bone of his helm’s tines flashing in the sun.

  “M-m-my n-name is—is—”

  “Onndar,” finished Agmandur, and he looked little pleased to see his clansman.

  “A skald,” said Hroi, his voice whisper-quiet. Though Hroi was barely more than a boy, Algeirr sensed that the White Worm thane was the most dangerous of the gathered Skein lords. From his shoulders hung the checkered cloak of the Skin Thief, the blackest of the Skein gods, and it was rumored that one of those cured swatches belonged to his own father, the old thane of the White Worm. “He comes to see a king cast down, and another raised to take his place. Every song must have an ending – right, singer?”

  Onndar nodded, visibly relieved to be spared the struggles of an explanation.

  Hroi’s bloodless lips curved into a slight smile. “The Stammering Skald – even at the edge of the barrowlands we have heard of you.”

  “And this one?” the Wolf thane, Hert, asked, his mouth tight with anger, pointing at the wide-eyed boy.

  “M-m-my ward, my s-sister’s child.”

  “This is not a place for babes,” Hert said disdainfully. “Nor for singers.”

  But Algeirr knew why the skald had joined them. There would be many a lay composed about this day, and Onndar wanted his song to be the one on the lips of every singer in the Frostlands. The Raven thanes had worn the black-bone crown for nearly seven hundred years, and having it pass to another clan would have seemed a rank impossibility only a few years ago. After all, many of these same lords had sworn fealty and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Gray King four years past at Icebridge during the Red Thane’s rebellion, when the upstart Fox clan had been extinguished and the Raven’s primacy reinforced. Yet, somehow, the seeds of their destruction had been planted that very day, as it had been during Gunmunder’s long convalescence from his wounds that his strange heresies had been born.

  Onndar had come to see a king unmade . . . and to see who would be bold enough to take up the fallen crown.

  Algeirr cleared his throat noisily and spat. “Enough prattle,” he said, then entered the darkened hall, pausing after only a few steps so that his eyes could adjust. The massive iron braziers that had once blazed night and day were dead, the cook pits filled with mounded gray ash. It seemed the hall had not hosted many celebrations in recent days. A bone-deep chill filled the room, and something else as well, the sense of being watched . . .

  There. Movement beneath one of the long feast tables, among the shadows. Algeirr strode closer, gripping the hammer hanging around his neck, a demon-banishing prayer upon his lips, but stopped when he saw what huddled there. Only a girl, clutching a ragged purple shawl around herself – some thrall from below the Serpent, her dusky skin marking her as Myrasani, or perhaps from iron-walled Vis. She shrank back from him, murmuring something in her lilting tongue, and he snorted and turned away.

  “What’s that?” asked Gerdin, the hard-eyed thane of the Iron clan, peering past him. All the thanes had by now assembled inside the bronze doors, though none had ventured very far into the cold and forbidding hall.

  “The spoils of war,” Agmandur said, making a show of adjusting his belt. “And I’ve half a mind to despoil this spoil here and now.” Laughter rumbled among the Skein.

  Algeirr beckoned for them to follow him deeper into the hall. “The Stormforger watches us, do not doubt. Let us show him we are true warriors of the Frostlands.”

  “True warriors would have the girl and then kill the king,” Agmandur muttered behind him, but Algeirr ignored the Bear thane and led them past the feast tables and into the far shadows of the Bhalavan, where strange shapes reared out of the darkness. Great stone warriors resolved from the murk as they approached, the long-dead heroes or kings or gods of Min-Ceruth – Algeirr did not know which. They watched the intruders with empty gray eyes, swords and lances upraised. On the shoulder of one perched a falcon, wings spread, its head a nub of chipped stone, and around the forearm of another a serpent coiled, scaled with strange designs.

  Beyond the statues an arched passage curved away into blackness. Algeirr drew forth a torch, and after a few long moments of striking flint to stone, a spark finally caught, and firelight pushed back the dark. His hands were shaking badly. Ageran, Stormforger, give me strength!

  He led them through twisting corridors that sloped downward, deeper and deeper into the Bhalavan. They passed entrances to cells where the Jugurtha, the warriors whose axes had been sworn to defend the Raven King unto death, had once slept – Algeirr had been surprised to see their black-horned helms earlier, in the pitched battle near the Winding Stair, where the spine of the Raven defense had been broken. The Jugurtha would not have left the king’s side unless commanded by Gunmunder himself. Why send them away? Did he think the Raven powerful enough to defeat the combined strength of six other clans? Or did he know himself damned and mercifully allow his sworn axes to die defending hearths and wives instead of a madman’s folly?

  Burning gobbets of fat dripped from Algeirr’s torch, hissing briefly upon the cracked stones before vanishing. Like the souls of men. Flaring bright for a brief moment and then swallowed by darkness.

  Such thoughts! They did not befit a priest of the Stormforger. He shook his head to clear it of blasphemy – any Skein who had stayed true to the gods and died in glorious battle would be carried in the beaks of the dark-winged flock to the High Halls, and be feasted by those who had already journeyed into the Nightfather’s shadowy realm. So it was written in the epics.

  The corridor jagged left and opened into a large room, its ceiling lost in shadows and the floor beneath the strewn rushes a mosaic of blue-and-white glazed tiles. The straw scattered about was dry and brittle, and clearly had not been changed for weeks, and the pallet looked as if no one had slept in it for at least as long. Where was the magnificent silver bear-pelt blanket that had swaddled Gunmunder during his long sickness? Algeirr had knelt beside this same bed for weeks, lost in prayers to the Green Mother, watching his sleeping king’s ashen face twitch and grimace. The demon had been whispering to him then, in his dreams, he now knew. Seducing him. Had the king succumbed easily, weakened by his sickness, or had Gunmunder turned his soul into a battlefield, fighting against the false promises and poisoned words? Was there a part of him that resisted still?

  “Where now, priest?” growled Kjartan, glancing around the empty room. “If Gunmunder has fled the city while we’ve been standing around his bedchamber, I’ll have your ugly head.”

  Algeirr stalked to the far side of the sleeping pallet and gestured for the trailing thanes to follow him. A few gasped when they saw that he stood at the edge of a black pit crudely hacked through the ancient tiled floor.

  “It is as you told,” Ferrin Oathsealer said, crouching beside the opening and lowering his gleaming ebonwood bow into the darkness. Before the man-tall bow had completely vanished, it struck stone, and the Ghost thane glanced up at Algeirr, who struggled to meet the albino’s unsettling eyes. “Only five spans deep,” Ferrin said, frowning.

  “At first we must crouch,” Algeirr said, his mouth suddenly dry. “But the passage grows larger quickly.”

  Hert kicked at a loose chunk of tile, sending it tumbling into the black. “For so many centuries this was unknown to those sleeping above . . . what squatted down there, listening in the darkness?”

  Algeirr fought back a shudder. The ancient Min-Ceruthans had been a sorcerous people, and none knew what abominations their magics had birthed. They had raised Nes
Vaneth and her sister cities from the womb of the world, shaping stone like a potter might clay, twisting the very fabric of these lands to their whims. The southern traders had told him that the Iskannatum, the black devouring ice, had been the dying counterstroke of another race of sorcerers, the magi of the drowned Mosaic Cities, but Algeirr still preferred the tale he had heard as a child around the hearth fire – that the Stormforger had destroyed the Min-Ceruthans for their presumptions. Sorcery was a vile and wicked thing, and the gods could not abide those who aspired to make themselves the equal of the divine.

  They stood at the edge of the pit, shifting their feet and glancing at one another, until Hroi stepped forward, his mirthless laughter echoing.

  “What frightened women we are!” he cried, drawing his famous sword, Night’s Kiss, the clouded amber blade hissing like a serpent as it slid from its sheath. “If you wish to wait here, I’ll bring back the black-bone crown, but it will be on my brow and you’d all best bend the knee!” With a derisive snort he leaped into the darkness, his mottled cloak flaring behind him.

  Agmandur cursed and followed, his great shoulders barely clearing the edges of the hole. He reached up to help Algeirr climb down, and then the others followed, though less gracefully, not as limber as the two young thanes.

  Before and behind them the passage vanished into blackness. Adjusting his sweaty grip on the haft of his torch, Algeirr pushed his way past the younger thanes and led the way forward, his other hand clutching the Stormforger’s amulet. The hammer’s iron seemed warm to the touch. He did not turn to see if the others followed him, and for a brief, terrifying moment he imagined that he crept alone through the tunnel. Then he heard Agmandur curse again when his head bumped the low ceiling, and other sounds soon reverberated in the tight passage: boots scuffing on stone, the clink of mail and weapons, the labored breathing of those who had suffered wounds.