Honor among thieves

Chapter Thirty

Helstrow burned for days. The barbarians were too busy celebrating to notice. A great carousing went on in whatever houses remained spared by the flames, an orgy of drinking and debauchery. Out in the streets, men of Skrae hung by their necks from every eave and standard, or lay stinking and bloody on the cobbles. Inside the houses, berserkers danced and reavers gambled for the spoils of war, while drunken thralls made sport in the elegant mansions, stealing what they could carry, smashing anything too big to be moved.

Of all that horde, one man stayed sober on the night of the victory-Morget, now called Mountainslayer, who never touched spirits. Nor did he exult or crow in victory. Instead he roamed the alleys and lanes of Helstrow, looking for something he could not find.

This place, this fortress city, belonged to him and his people now. As it should be. As it always should have been. Morget knew the story of this land, having heard it repeated by scolds since he was just a boy.

Once, Morget’s people and the people of Skrae had been cut from the same cloth. When they first arrived on this continent, fleeing from the decadence and bureaucracy of the Old Empire, they had all been warriors, every man among them as proud and fierce as Morget’s berserkers and reavers. They lived as nomadic hunters and raiders. Over time, though, the weaker among them banded together to form villages and holdfasts and eventually permanent cities. They built high walls to keep out those who were too strong and wild to live in any structure more permanent than a tent. Eventually the city people united against the nomads. A great war was fought, and the wanderers, the warriors, were too small in number to resist. They had been pushed back to the east, where they could not endanger the city folk. Eventually they were pushed right over the Whitewall Range. A wall higher than anything their cities could boast.

For two hundred years the clans of the East had been penned in, kept locked behind those mountains by the men of Skrae. Morget’s people had once been great warriors-soldiers, generals, slayers of elves and ogres. For far too long they’d been reduced to raiding the sheep of the hillfolk north of their steppes or at best picking away at the edges of Skilfing in the Northern Kingdoms. It kept them sharp, forcing them to keep their arms strong and their fighting skills honed. But it made them bitter as well because they knew their true destiny was to rule, to smash open every wall and plunder the treasures inside.

Now that destiny was coming to fruition. And yet…

Morget had believed it would make him happy to stand here, to walk these streets he’d conquered. He’d thought he would feel some kind of fulfillment now that his life’s grand task was under way. He would take the West back for the strong, for the righteous, for those who worshipped only Mother Death.

So why, then, did he wander aimlessly, feeling empty, feeling like he was still only part of what he should become?

For anyone else it would have been reckless to wander those ways alone. Morgain and her spearmaidens roamed the rooftops with bows. Their faces were all painted to resemble the visage of their goddess Death, and they acted as Her servants in the world that night, finishing off those few soldiers of Skrae who had not surrendered and who thought to hide in dark and small places. Time and again as Morget turned down a new street his thoughts were interrupted by the sudden twang of a bowstring and a desperate cry. His clanswomen were drunk on black mead, that most befuddling of brews, and Morget wondered if they even saw half the targets they fired at or if they chased as many phantoms as real enemies. More than once they drew on him, but he had only to stare upward, his red-painted face fixed in a scowl, and strings were eased, arrows unnocked.

He came at one point to the Halls of Justice, the last public building in the fortress-town untouched by fire. Inside he heard Hurlind the scold recounting the day’s battle, embellishing the tale with many a jest and pointed observation on the quality and quantity of Skrae’s collective manhood. Morget almost passed by, but as he glanced in toward the light and merriment, he saw something he could not ignore.

His father sat on a stone bench, surrounded by half-dressed barbarian women as drunk as he was. The masterless dog was curled up on Morg’s lap, kicking one leg in sleep. Berserkers had passed out on the marble floor in heaps. As the first to the gate, the first to storm the city and brave its defenders, these men had been given the honor of feasting with the Great Chieftain, yet none of them had managed to stay awake long enough to enjoy it. The fury they brought to battle was not without a price to be paid later, a torporous exhaustion that could last for days. Morget had been one of them once, and he understood, so as he stormed into the chamber of justice he did not trod on his brethren but stepped over their snoring bodies.

Hurlind was bowing low as Morget came upon him from behind. The scold had a velvet pillow in his hands, upon which lay the crown of Skrae. Morget knew it had been recovered after the battle of the eastern gate, picked up from where it fell in the grass. The crown was crushed in on one side now, and a few of its emeralds were missing, but someone had polished it to a high luster.

And now Morg, Great Chieftain of the eastern clans, was reaching for it.

Morget struck Hurlind across the back of the neck with one massive fist and drove him to the floor. The crown went flying, to spin in circles in a corner of the room.

Morg frowned at his son. From behind a column, Torki, Morg’s champion, loomed into the firelight, a great-axe in his hand.

Morget sneered at the burned face of the giant champion. He’d beaten him once, and could do it again. If challenge were offered, he was ready to accept.

But it seemed Morg had received the message his son meant to send. That crown was not for the Great Chieftain. No man of the eastern steppes could ever call himself king-that was the law. The Great Chieftain only spoke for the men under them. He did not rule them.

Besides, the battle might be over but the war was just beginning. Helstrow had been taken and sacked, but Helstrow was not all of Skrae. Nor was it certain the true owner of that crown was dead. Most of the clans believed the king had perished in the fighting, but until Ulfram V’s body was found, Morget would not believe it.

Morg stared down into his son’s eyes as if mistrusting the fire there, the fire that would not let Morget rest, even in triumph. The fire that had always separated father from son and kept them understanding one another. Morg had never respected that fire. You put it there, Morget wanted to say, but this was not a time for words. Eventually the Great Chieftain waved away his son, and Torki took a step back. Morget spat on the floor near Hurlind’s face and went back out into the night.

He spent a while by the eastern gate, digging bodies out of the rubble. Even after the portcullis came down, the gate had not been wide enough to admit the barbarian horde en masse, so much of the stonework was pulled down-while defenders still thronged its battlements. There were plenty of corpses to find.

None of them belonged to the king.

Howling with frustration, Morget picked up stones and threw them into the night, not caring what he struck. He trampled on the king’s banner, dropped here by a sniveling herald.

There will be other days, he told himself. Other battles. The clans will not be satisfied for long by this blood. They will want more, and I will give it to them, in the name of our mother Death. I will make this country bleed until it runs white.

He sat down on the pile of fallen masonry and took from his belt the only souvenirs he’d kept from the day’s spoils. A hilt, its corresponding blade broken off at a jagged edge, and six inches of another blade from a sword older than history. Bloodquaffer and Crowsbill, or what was left of them.

He’d been surprised as anyone when the swords shattered. The axe he carried was of the finest dwarven steel, he knew-he’d stolen it himself from an abandoned dwarven city. The mirror-bright face of its blade was streaked with wavy shadows, and in a certain light the axe looked iridescent. It was a fine weapon, though not magical in any way.

Yet it had sheared through two Ancient Blades without stopping. Morget had long believed the seven swords to be indestructible. Everyone believed that-it was an article of faith. Yet here he had the proof that even magic swords were mortal.

Knowing that, he could only wonder one thing.

Will I truly find an enemy here in Skrae, the enemy I’ve sought so long? The enemy who will be more precious than any lover-the enemy who can challenge me, and make me sweat, because I do not know I can beat him?

He had conquered every foe he’d met east of the mountains. He had pushed so hard to come west because he thought he would find there what he sought. But if even the legendary Ancient Blades of Skrae were so easily brought low His reverie came to an instant stop when he heard a moan rise up from the pile of corpses. A survivor-one he had not found in his frantic search, one his sister had not discovered as she haunted the dead city.

Morget leapt down from his perch on the rubble and kicked bricks and bits of scorched mortar away from the source of the sound. Then he reached down with one massive hand and lifted his prize free of the debris.

“You,” he said, the first word he’d spoken all night.

“Are you going to kiss me now, or stick me on a spit and roast me alive?” Balint the dwarf asked. She must have fallen here when the gate collapsed, staying with her ballista crews until the fatal moment. “Either way, I need a change of breeches first.”