“—the watch will send as many men as it takes to cart you away. Then they put you in gaol to wait for a trial.”
“I would have died before they put me in a cage,” Mörget said.
“Or afterwards, when they hanged you. They would have probably arrested Croy for helping you, and detained me on pure suspicion because I happened to be nearby.”
“Thanks to Malden it did not come to that,” Croy said, and slapped the thief on the back.
“I suppose I owe you at that,” Mörget admitted.
“Think nothing of it. But perhaps you’ll tell me one thing. Why did that fight start in the first place, and how did it get so out of hand? Normally a tavern fight ends with bruised knuckles and maybe a chair being broken over someone’s head, not axes and maces and faces getting chopped off.”
Mörget shrugged. “A man insulted me. He besmirched my honor.”
Croy nodded in understanding but Malden had to look away.
“You Ancient Blades and your honor will get me killed one of these days. Alright, what did he say? What was such a dreadful blasphemy?”
“He saw me drinking milk and said I was the largest babe he’d ever clapped eyes on. I thought it a nice jest, and saw no harm in it.”
“Men in taverns often joke and make sport,” Malden said. “It means nothing.”
“But among clansmen, one must always respond to a jape with another. So of course I had to tell him that in my country, even infants were bigger than the men than I’d seen in this city. He didn’t like that much.” Mörget shrugged. “He tried to grab my arm—as I have said, that is forbidden to strangers in my land. So I picked him up and threw him against a pillar. I thought that was the end of it, until I saw his friends drawing their knives.”
Malden made a mental note never to try to shake the barbarian’s hand again. “Alright,” he said, “that explains how we all came to meet. But now, tell me, pray thee, what you’re doing in the Free City of Ness in the first place. We don’t get … ah, that is to say, a man of your people is a rare sight this far west.” Malden had grown up hearing horror stories of the barbarians, of how they ate their own babies and that their women were all seven feet tall. As an adult he’d often heard them spoken of in hushed tones, as it was commonly believed that the barbarians would sweep over the mountains any day and invade Skrae and enslave them all. It was all hearsay, of course. He had never met a barbarian before, nor ever expected to.
“Ah!” the barbarian said, and looked like he might start laughing again. “I am glad you asked. I am looking for Sir Croy.”
Malden was confused. “Well, you found him—but did you expect to find him in that tavern? It’s not the sort of place he normally frequents.”
Croy himself was still trying to catch his breath. His eyes were locked on Mörget’s face.
“I knew nothing of him, until now, except his name. Perhaps I spoke wrong,” Mörget said, with a frown. “I am looking for another Ancient Blade. I am looking for the help of an Ancient Blade. It did not matter which one. I have sought them for a very long time, looking anywhere men with swords gathered. Until today my search was fruitless. From town to town I wandered, asking everywhere. Few men would even speak to me, but in the town of Greencastle I was told there was not one, but two such men in Ness. Sir Croy, and Sir Bikker—champions of your king, each of them bearers of a puissant sword. Ghostcutter and Acidtongue, they are called. I was told that Sir Bikker would be found in a place where ale is sold, if he could be found anywhere.”
Malden and Croy traded a glance. Until a few months ago, that might have been true. Bikker had been in Ness—though that man had fallen a long way since he’d been one of the king’s champions. He’d hired himself out as a sell-sword to the sorcerer Hazoth and the traitor Anselm Vry. And then he’d put himself at odds with Malden and Croy. That had nearly ended in both their deaths. Instead—
“I’m afraid Bikker is dead,” Croy said, still a little out of breath.
“Dead?” Mörget asked.
“He broke his oath,” Croy nodded, as if that explained everything.
Apparently it did, as far as Mörget was concerned. “Ah. So you had to strike him down. I understand. It is part of our duty, our sworn duty, we who bear the Blades.”
Malden didn’t want to talk about Bikker. The dead man had caused him a great deal of trouble, once. “Well, you found the other one, anyway. The other Ancient Blade in Ness. Now, what do you want with Croy?”
“There is a task I must perform. The other part of our oath must be fulfilled.” The barbarian’s eyes had gone out of focus, as if he was looking at nothing but the inside of his own skull. As if his thoughts were very far away.
Malden scratched at an eyebrow. “If you specifically need the help of an Ancient Blade, that suggests just one task I can think of.”
“Indeed. I am hunting a demon.”
Croy jumped to his feet, all sign of weariness gone from him. “Where?” he demanded.
CHAPTER NINE
There was no word Malden knew that could get Croy’s attention better than “demon”.
The world had its share of monsters. Up in the Northern Kingdoms there were still bands of goblins on the loose, and the occasional troll for a knight to test his steel on. Malden himself had met an ogre, and knew stories of everything from the dread Longlegs of the Rifnlatt to the dragons of the Old Empire. All such creatures could be felled by good swords or by magic, it was said. Demons were different.
They were not of the world. They did not belong there. Instead they were creatures of the Bloodgod, and they abided in his Pit of Souls, that place where all men were eventually judged and punished for their sins. Demons were normally trapped down there with eight-armed Sadu, but they could be summoned to the mundane realm by sorcerers who sought to tap their incredible power. Such a pact was illegal and utterly forbidden, and with good reason. Demons did not hail from the world of living men, and in that world were unnatural things, unbound by natural law. They were enormously powerful and almost impossible to kill. The sorcerer Hazoth had called up two of them before he died, and either one of them might have destroyed all of Ness if they had not been stopped.
Luckily for Malden and his fellow citizens, Croy had been there to slay them. Ghostcutter had prevailed against them, just as it had been made to do. The Ancient Blades had been forged for just that purpose.
And over the last eight hundred years they’d been quite successful at it. The men who wielded them often died in the process, but the swords had all but eliminated demonkind from the world. Now the existence of a single demon anywhere on the continent was a rare—but utterly fearful—occurrence. If the barbarian had encountered one, Croy had no choice but to go and slay it.
“You must tell me everything,” Croy said.
The barbarian nodded. “And so I shall. Two years ago I was hunting in the mountains at the western end of our land,” the barbarian said, squatting down on the tiles. “I was after a wild cat that had already tasted human blood, and found it to be good. I went into the hills with only a knife and three days’ food in a sack. Just having a bit of fun, you know.”
“Yes, of course,” Malden said. “Fun.”
Mörget squinted at the sky. “I followed the cat’s trail until I ran out of food, and then for five days more. Its spoor took me ever higher, up to a place where the trees grew no taller than saplings, and then to where they thinned out until there was nothing but lichens to eat, and spring water to quench my thirst. From time to time I found the remains of some creature the cat had killed—or so I thought. The carrion was broken open, crushed and sucked dry.
“On the sixth day I found the cat itself, and all its bones ground to dust. There was not much left of it save the head and one paw. The rest had been … dissolved, yes, I think that is the word I mean. Eaten away as if by acid. It was then I knew I hunted bigger prey than I thought.
“I made a hunting blind in the cave of a raven, and sat me down to wait. It was another seven days before I caught my first good sight of the thing I tracked. It came to me at twilight, moving along the bare rock face of a cliff. It was about fifteen feet long, though it was hard to measure. It did not climb, you understand, for it had no legs. It crawled—no, it flowed like water along the rock, living water.” Mörget clenched his fists in frustration. “I describe it poorly. I have not the honeyed words of a westerner, forgive me.”
“It’s alright,” Croy said. “Go on.”
“Its skin glistened like autumn moonlight on a brackish pond. The skin had no regular form, but flowed and oozed as it moved. There were shapes under that skin, shapes like hearts and livers and even human faces, that pressed up against the skin from inside, mouths open in soundless screaming. I decided then this was no natural beast.”
“A fairly safe conclusion, it sounds like,” Malden agreed.
“I made myself still, and did not so much as breathe as it came ever closer. I did not wish to scare it away. It came up to the mouth of my cave, and still I held myself in readiness, my knife in my hand. It came inside, into the darkness, and I could barely see it. It flowed up over my bare feet and my flesh screamed at its alien touch, but still, I made myself like a statue. It climbed up my body, faster now, as if it had become excited, as if it hungered for me. It was only then I struck.
“Yet how to slay a beast with no muscles, no bones? I stabbed at the shapes like hearts and livers and faces, but my knife could not puncture its slimy skin. It flowed over my chest and part of its substance oozed up to my face. It tried to fill my mouth and nose so that I could not breathe. I stabbed and pulled at it, to no avail. I wrestled with the beast, rolling on the floor of my cave, tearing at it with my fingers. I was so close to death I could feel her hands upon my shoulders.”
“Her hands?” Malden asked.
“Death is my mother,” Mörget said. It sounded like a litany, something the barbarian had said so many times it would spring to his lips without bidding. “When I die, she will be there to bring me home. But not that day! With all my strength I fought against this demon, aye, for demon it had to be—I fought for long hours as it wrapped around me like a cloak, smothering me. Would it absorb me, I thought, until mine was one of those screaming faces I’d seen under its skin?
“Strength did not matter to the beast. It yielded every time I grasped it, stretched like dough in my hands. Always it covered more of me, always it sucked hungrily at my more solid form. Then, of a sudden, I was inside the beast. It had swallowed me whole. My lungs cried for breath, my skin burned as if I’d been doused in acid. I could just see by the light that streamed in through its translucent hide. Before me were the livers and hearts and faces—faces attached to no skulls, faces with no eyes, like living masks. There was another shape inside there, one I had not seen before, just as a man will not see a piece of glass that is under dark water. This was the biggest of the shapes, a thing like a clear egg full of worms. With the last of my strength I grasped it with my hands and started pulling it apart. It was more solid than the rest of the beast, and when I broke it open, it bled. Could I breathe then, I would have laughed, for I knew death favored me still. The beast trembled and shook and spat me out all at once, dripping from my skin to the floor of the cave. It raced away from me, for it knew I was going to slay it. I tracked it all that night, though it moved far faster than a man on that rough terrain. I tracked it up the mountain side, until it came to another cave, which I thought must be its lair.
“This new cave was far deeper than I expected, however. It proved to be the mouth of a tunnel that led deep into the heart of the mountain. Nor was it any natural cavern. Had I not been so hot for the thing’s destruction, I would have noticed how regular the floor was, how the walls had been carved out of the rock by metal tools. The tunnel went down and down until it came to what looked like a blank wall. There was no light down there, so at the time I could not see that a solid block of stone filled the tunnel, a block cut almost to the exact dimensions of the shaft. I was just in time to watch the thing flow around that block, to ooze through the hair-thin gap between the block and the wall. It nearly got away from me. I managed at the last only to stab at it one more time, and to pin one of its hearts to the floor. It tore itself in half to get away from me, so desperate was it to escape.
“I had not killed it, I am sure of that—the part that got away still lives. What remained behind shriveled rapidly, parts of it drying out and turning to dust, other parts melting and soaking into the floor of the tunnel. I put the heart in a sack and brought it down the mountain, to my father, who is called Mörg the Wise. He is a man of great learning, they say, and it was he who told me of demons, for I had never heard the word before. He told me how they are hauled up out of the pit, and how they take forms unseemly to man. He said that if such a thing was haunting the steppes, all of our clan were in great danger. I said I would take a band of men back up to the mountain and slay it but he shook his head. He had something else in mind.
“In the eastern land of my birth, no boy becomes a man, not truly, until he hunts and kills an animal of his father’s choosing. I had thought this cat, the poor creature I originally tracked, would be the prey that made me a man. Yet my father laughed at the prospect. After all, I had not killed the cat myself, but only seen what did it. He demanded that I track and kill the demon properly—with a tool that was made for such work. And that was when he gave to me Dawnbringer, and made me swear all the vows of an Ancient Blade. I will not be allowed to marry, or sire children, or lead men to battle, until this demon is destroyed.
