are both blessed and cursed. We will have to put that sword to good use before it rots away into nothingness.”
“You gave that fool Alun one of these swords to bear,” Madoc said. “Will you let him bear it into battle?”
“You call him a fool? You are the one who made him a warrior, and he acquitted himself well in battle this morning, by all accounts. Do you now regret your choice?”
“Oh course not,” Madoc blustered. “But…he has no training with the sword, and it is an enchanted weapon!”
“Your point is well taken,” King Urstone said. Alun had fallen behind the war party. He didn’t have a warrior’s legs, couldn’t hope to keep pace. The king had assigned some men to help him along, even if they had to lug him like a sack of turnips.
The king’s mind turned to worries about his own son, and so he suggested, “Perhaps we should find another to bear it. Your son Connor, he is trained with the sword, is he not? It is said that he’s quite good. Would he like the honor?”
“I, I, uh-” Madoc blustered. He knew his son was clumsy with the sword. He had a strong arm, more fitted to the ax. More importantly, he wasn’t about to send his son charging into battle against the Knights Eternal, enchanted sword or no.
King Urstone fought back the urge to laugh.
Madoc often complains to his friends that I’m a fool, King Urstone realized, but the man has never fared well in a match of wits with me. “Have no worries,” Urstone said at last. “ I will bear that sword into battle, and cleave off the head of a Knight Eternal.”
It was altogether fitting that the king do it. Urstone had been trained with the sword from childhood, and there were few men alive who could hope to match him with it. More importantly, it was said in Luciare that “the king bears upon his shoulders the hopes of the nation.” In ancient times, it was believed that the combined hopes of a people could give a warrior strength in battle.
These weapons were enchanted with old magic. Perhaps, Urstone thought, there is old magic in me, too.
Thus, the fight that he was racing to was not just a battle between two individuals. Urstone would be pitting the hopes of Luciare against the powers of Lady Despair.
Madoc grunted, “That would be best, I think. Yes, that would be well.”
Urstone peered hard at him. He doesn’t hope for my success in battle, he realized. He hopes to see me die.
Yes, how convenient would that be, King Urstone slain in a glorious battle, a hero’s death, leaving Madoc to rule the kingdom.
But I have a son still, a son who can spoil his plans.
Tonight at dusk the trade is supposed to be made, only a dozen hours from now.
“Wish me luck?” the king asked.
“Most assuredly,” Madoc said. “My hopes rest upon you.”
Nightfall was many hours away when a wyrmling guard came crashing down the stairs three at a time.
“Humans are coming, warrior clan!” he roared. “The road is black with them!”
Vulgnash leapt to his feet. For two hours he had been sitting with nothing to do, listening only to the occasional talk of the small folk in their room, whispering in their strange tongue, as quiet as mice. He had strained his ears. He knew that he would not be able to understand the meanings of their words. He had no context to put them in, but often, he had found, when learning a new language, it was best to begin by familiarizing himself with the sounds. He had been silently cataloguing the vowels and consonants, occasionally trying them out on his tongue.
Now, with a battle coming, there were other matters to attend to.
He raced up to the tower. The sunlight was as bright as a blade there, slanting down from the east. There was no cloud cover.
To the south he could see the human war band, sunlight glancing off their bone armor, as yellow as teeth. The men ran in single file, bloody axes in their hands. In the distance, racing down the winding road, they looked like a huge serpent, snaking toward the horizon for almost a mile.
They would reach the fortress in less than half an hour.
His captain raced up behind Vulgnash. “Master, shall we evacuate, head into the woods?”
There were trees all around. Leaves hung thick upon the oaks and alders. But they would not offer the protection that Vulgnash needed. His wyrmling troops could cope with the light much better than Vulgnash could.
“No, we’ll fight them here.”
The captain tried not to show fear, but he drew back. Vulgnash was condemning him to death.
“I’ll deepen the shadows around the fortress,” Vulgnash said, “and I will place the touch of death upon each of you, give you my blessing. And I have these-” he reached to a pouch at his throat, pulled it hard enough to snap the rawhide band that held it. The bag was heavy with harvester spikes.
“Take three to a man,” Vulgnash told him, placing the bag in the captain’s palm, “no more.”
The wyrmling commander smiled. He and his men would die, but it would be a glorious death, fighting gleefully in a haze of bloodlust, lost to all mortal care.
“Shall I have the men kill the captives,” the commander asked, “as a precaution?”
Normally, that is what Vulgnash would have done. He would have made sure that no matter what effort the humans spent, they would lose in the end.
But his master’s command was upon him, and Vulgnash always executed her commands to perfection.
“No, leave them,” he said in resignation. “If the warriors win through, I may have to come back and take them again.”
They’re going to kill me, Alun thought, as he raced along the road. Connor and Drewish are going to kill me now. Don’t let the dogs get behind me.
He worried about Connor and Drewish. The fact that wyrmling warriors might be on the road ahead, led by the immortal Eternal Knights, somehow did not seem as sinister.
Of course, he was falling-down weary.
His legs had turned to mush, and he could run no more. He was wheezing like a dying man, unable to get enough air no matter what, and chills ran through him while beads of sweat stood out cold upon his brow.
They charged up a hill through the woods, and Alun stumbled and sprawled on his face. For a moment he lay on the ground, laid out like a dead toad, and he was happy, for so long as he was on the blessed ground, he could rest.
“Up with you,” a soldier chided, grabbing him by the arm and yanking. Another soldier took him by the other arm, and soon they were carrying him, each of them cruelly holding an arm. “Move those legs, damn it. There are wyrmlings ahead, and we need you to fight them all for us.”
Alun knew that he would be no good in this fight. There had been three harvester spikes in the little packet that he’d found, but he had dropped that somewhere back at the fort. He’d searched the floor for it, but never found the spikes. He felt dirty and shameful for having used them at all. They were, after all, made from glands taken from folks captured at Caer Luciare. Folks like Sir Croft, or that little boy, Dake, that had disappeared last month. The harvester spikes were an affront to all decency. Yet now as he went into battle, he yearned for the thrill he’d felt before. Without them, he would be lost.
Suddenly there was shouting up ahead, “We’ve cornered them! We’ve got them!”
And the soldiers went charging up the hill, trees whisking by on either side, bearing Alun like a marionette.
Alun hoped that the battle would be over by the time that he reached the spot, but they came upon an old hill fort formed from great gray slabs of basalt. Trees grew up around it, and brush and blackberry vines, leaving it a ruin, hidden in gloom.
Indeed, the gloom grew thick around it, so dark that one could almost not see the door. The harder that Alun peered, the deeper the shadows seemed to thicken, until the door was just a yawning pit in the blackness.
