Champion of the Last Battle

Prologue

When once his assistants had, under his supervision, administered the drugs and departed the chamber, the old, wizened Zahrtohgahn physician stood beside the massive bed for long and long, just observing the old, dying man who lay thereon. Master Ahkmehd was, himself, but a bare score of years the junior of his patient and had been his personal physician for nearly twoscore years, his friend and trusted confidant for almost as long.

Unconsciously, the stooped practitioner wrinkled his nose at the stench of corrupting flesh from his patient’s inflamed arm, that arm which he had not been allowed to amputate properly after a wounded bear had so torn and mauled it that it would never have been of real use again even had infection not set into it.

“Ah, Bili, my dear, old lord,” he sighed at last in his own guttural language. “Yes, you surely were a stark warrior and were well named Bili the Axe by friend and foe alike. But you were so much more, as well; you brought true and abiding peace to a much-troubled land in the near fifty years you ruled it.

“Assuredly, Ahlah granted you a long life and you used it well. So well did you use that life you shortly will depart that I cannot but regret that you die an infidel, for if any man ever deserved the Paradise of the Prophet, it is you, Lord Bili of Morguhn. Ahlah keep you, my good, old friend. Never will there. be another like unto you.”

To the dying old man upon the bed, the words made no sense—for all that he spoke Zahrtohgahn fluently—they were but a muted drone to senses dulled by drugs, hypnotism and fast-approaching death. During the week or so since the pain of the suppurating flesh had become of such intensity that Zahrtohgahn wiles and drugs had been necessary, his consciousness had spent precious little time in this present world of his—that of a suffering, slowly dying, aged man.

Rather had he retreated into his own mind, into his memories, to live again the tumultuous, exciting days of his life of nearly fourscore years before—days of war and love, of hard, rough living, of crashing battles, of priceless moments of passion shared with the long-dead woman he had never ceased to love and to mourn through all the decades that had followed. Now, once more, he left the aged, almost-dead husk to again inhabit that young, powerful, towering body of the young Thoheeks Bili, Morguhn of Morguhn, the Bili of some seventy-eight years agone.