The Doom of Kings: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 1 Read online

He shook the shifter’s hand. Geth saw him out. Once the door was closed, he turned around and surveyed the chamber. The hair on the back of his neck and on his forearms had lifted while he’d been talking to Midian. They hadn’t been alone in the room, but at least the unseen presence seemed familiar. “Chetiin?” he said.

  The sharaatkhesh elder slipped out from behind a cabinet that Geth could have sworn had been flush against the wall. “I spent too much time riding with you,” he said in his scarred voice.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “With Midian.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Geth said. Chetiin’s ears just twitched slightly. Geth shook his head and sighed. “Was there something you wanted?”

  “To wish you luck in the ritual. If it succeeds, preparations are ready and we’ll ride out in three days.”

  “Why wait so long?”

  “It was Senen’s suggestion. She thinks you may need time to recover after the ritual.”

  Geth grimaced. “That doesn’t sound promising,” he said. “You’ll be able to use the time, though—you’ll need to arrange supplies for an extra person. Ashi’s probably going to come.”

  Chetiin’s face creased in a smile. “So I heard—but that’s no problem. I assumed that she’d eventually get her way and planned accordingly. We’ll still be ready to go. Tariic is lending us some of his magebred horses for the journey.”

  “Will you need to ride with me again?”

  “I have arranged for my own mount this time.” the goblin said. His smile disappeared, though. “The news of a traitor in Matshuc Zaal is disturbing. I heard it from Haruuc this morning.”

  “A traitor could let enemies pass through Matshuc Zaal,” said Geth.

  Chetiin shook his head. “The Gan’duur oppose Haruuc, but they have no more desire to see the forces of Breland enter Darguun than anyone else. It’s disturbing to know that the Gan’duur found a sympathizer in such a sensitive position. Their strength is increasing. For Haruuc’s sake, I hope our mission is a swift one.” He went to the door, then turned back to look at Geth. “I’m pleased that you’ve chosen to work with Haruuc, Geth.”

  “I thought the Silent Clans were officially neutral.”

  “We are. I’m pleased because I like you.” Chetiin’s expression was sober. “You should know that the bearer of Aram isn’t as important to Haruuc’s cause as the sword itself. If you hadn’t agreed to help us—here, in Sigilstar, or in Lathleer—I would have had to kill you and take Aram. I’m glad I didn’t have to do that.”

  A chill brought Geth’s hair up again, but before he could say anything, there was another knock on the door. Chetiin stepped to one side of the door and motioned for Geth to open it. The shifter did. It was Senen and Ekhaas, both dressed in black robes. Senen held out a fold of white fabric to him.

  “It is time,” she said.

  Geth glanced down and was somehow not surprised to find that Chetiin was gone. He took the white fabric from Senen. It turned out to be a simple linen robe with a loose belt. “Undress and put it on,” Senen told him. “You must wear nothing else.”

  She and Ekhaas turned their backs. Geth shrugged and followed her instructions. As he undressed, he asked as casually as he could, “Ekhaas, what would have happened if I hadn’t agreed to go to Sigilstar with Chetiin?”

  “I would have gone to Lathleer or wherever you were and tried to talk you into coming myself.”

  The answer was direct and honest, but Geth couldn’t help but wondering if it came too easily. He pushed away the cold feeling that welled up inside him and pulled the robe over his head, tying the belt around his waist.

  “Ready,” he said.

  Senen turned and looked him over, then pointed at his throat. “Nothing else.”

  Geth reached up and his fingers touched the collar of black stones. “No,” he said. “I keep this.”

  “Anything you wear could affect the ritual,” Senen insisted. “Take it off.” She stepped forward as if she’d pull it off him herself.

  “Senen,” Ekhaas said quickly, “it won’t interfere. It’s an orc Gatekeeper artifact, and Gatekeeper magic only makes Aram more powerful. I’ve seen it.”

  Senen looked at Ekhaas, her ears folded down, then she moved back. “Are you certain?” she asked. “Nothing can go wrong.”

  Ekhaas glanced at Geth, then nodded.

  Senen pursed her lips and for a moment reminded Geth very strongly of Vounn. “Ban,” she said. “Bring Aram in its scabbard and come with us.”

  They led him up, climbing higher and higher in the tower. Geth’s stomach gurgled unhappily, and the exertion of climbing made his head feel a little bit light. Senen nodded approvingly. “It is as it should be,” she said.

  Geth held back a curse.

  The final climb was up a tightly wound spiral staircase down which flowed the smell of night air. The stone steps were cold under Geth’s feet. When they stepped up from the staircase, they were on the very roof of Khaar Mbar’ost, a small space that was perhaps fifteen paces from side to side and surrounded entirely by open air. Geth didn’t need to go near the edge to know how high above the ground they were. The sounds of the city that were clearly audible from lower windows were only a dull murmur, obscured by the constant whisper of a breeze. The sun was just settling below the horizon, and the sky that surrounded them was a fiery canopy, purple like Wrath in the east and overhead, blue, then pink, then red and orange to the west. The moons had not yet risen, no stars were visible, and the Ring of Siberys was a pale smear in the south.

  Another person waited on the roof, another hobgoblin woman in a black robe like those Ekhaas and Senen wore. The third woman was old, though—so old and seemingly frail that when she moved to meet them it was like watching an injured bat crawl across a rock. Her eyes were sharp, however, and she looked him over carefully, asking the same questions about the stone collar—in Goblin this time—that Senen had. Ekhaas gave her the same answer, but at least the old woman grunted and nodded with more conviction than Senen had, then turned to Geth.

  “I am Aaspar,” she said. “This is the first part of the ritual that will wake Aram.” She gestured around them with a gnarled hand. “Tonight you will hold vigil beneath the moons and think on the history of the sword that you hold in your hand.”

  “I don’t know its history,” said Geth.

  The old woman looked at him blankly and Ekhaas murmured in her ear, translating his words for her. Aaspar clicked her tongue. “You know the history. Ekhaas tells me she has told you stories of the name of Kuun. They are the same.”

  Geth blinked. He remembered—vaguely—stories Ekhaas had told him to pass the nights during a desperate race across the Shadow Marches. “I … I might not always have been listening,” he said.

  Ekhaas scowled at him as she translated, and Aaspar laughed.

  “Think on them. You’ll remember more than you believe. Now go to the circle and kneel. Leave Aram’s scabbard outside it before you enter.”

  There was a circle drawn on the rooftop in charcoal. Geth walked to it, drew Wrath, set aside the scabbard, and stepped into the circle, kneeling on the stone of the roof. Aaspar swooped down after him, more like a bat than ever, and with a quick motion filled in a small portion of the circle that had been missing.

  “When we are gone, you may move about the roof,” she said, “but you must remain awake and you must hold onto Aram through the night. Don’t release it. Do you understand?” He nodded and she clicked her tongue again. “We will return at dawn.”

  She stepped back to form a line with Ekhaas and Senen. “Face the sun,” she told Geth, and he shifted around so that the red light was in his eyes. The movement put the three women at his back. His shoulders prickled, knowing they were back there but not knowing what they were doing.

  Then they started to sing.

  Geth recognized Ekhaas’s voice in the song, like burning cedar. He could pick out another voice, too, higher and more clear. Soaring over both voic
es, though, was a sound that barely seemed as if it could come from the throat of a living creature. It had a depth like the sea and a luminous beauty like a hundred beeswax candles glowing in the dark. It pulled at his heart and seemed to reach into the base of his skull to push against his mind. He felt it in his head, in his chest, in his belly, in his groin. It brought a dozen emotions washing over him at once, so many that he couldn’t react to them all but could only kneel and stare out into the gathering night.

  It was Aaspar’s voice, and all he could think was that if this was what her song sounded like, how had the songs of the great duur’kala of ancient Dhakaan sounded?

  Slowly, he became aware that the chorus of the three duur’kala was changing and growing both deeper and fainter. At the same time, the charcoal outline of the circle within which he knelt seemed to be shifting and spreading across the rooftop. Soon the stones for a sword length around him were black, then two sword lengths. The circle was growing like the shadows of the setting sun.

  The sun.

  He looked up and realized that the sun had almost entirely vanished below the horizon, sinking just as the duur’kalas song had. He could almost imagine that the three women weren’t just singing along with the sun’s setting but that they were actually singing it down. Time seemed to slow as he watched the disappearing sun and listened to the fading song.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Geth blinked.

  The night was silent—and complete. The sun had set, and even the last red smudge was gone from the horizon. The duur’kalas song had ended. Still kneeling, he twisted to look behind him. The rooftop was empty. It was also completely black. The charcoal of the circle had crept over every stone, leaving only its interior, where he knelt, clear.

  In the east, the first two moons of the night were rising, the pale gray twins of Therendor, big and bulky, and Barrakas, a third its size but twice as bright. Geth stood and stepped out of the clean circle with a caution that struck him as ridiculous. Aaspar had said he could move about the roof after they’d left. He made certain he kept a tight hold on Wrath, though.

  His knees were already stiff and protesting the time spent kneeling on the bare stone. He could feel the cool of the night creeping through the thin linen robe, and his hunger was a constant nagging. The night wouldn’t be pleasant, but that was the point of vigils, wasn’t it? At least he was allowed to move. He jumped and stretched, easing some of the pain and warming his body a little, then went to peer over the edge of the tower.

  He immediately wished he hadn’t. The view down onto the moonlit sprawl of the city, the Ghaal River and its first cataract flashing in the distance, seized the light-headed feeling he’d had climbing the stairs of Khaar Mbar’ost and set it spinning. Geth stepped back from the edge and crouched until the spinning stopped. He considered trying it again, to see if he could get used to the view, but decided against it. There was enough to see by looking out and up at the unfettered view of the sky. He sat down as comfortably as he could with the stones of the roof chilling his backside, held Wrath to him, and looked up into the night.

  Think on the history of the sword that you hold.

  Geth tried to remember what he could of the stories Ekhaas had once told him of the Dhakaani family named Kuun whose history had been tied to the sword. It was easier to think of the story that Senen had told only a few nights before, of Taruuzh and the forging of Wrath from the byeshk of Khaar Vanon. He wondered about the Rod of Kings and the Shield of Nobles. What had the shield been like? Did the rod still exist? He tried to envision Taruuzh laboring over his creations. He’d seen Taruuzh after a fashion. He’d been to the ruins of Taruuzh Kraat and seen the massive sculpture of the dashoor that stood there. In the ancient caves beneath Taruuzh Kraat, he’d seen the wizard-smith’s effigy atop his tomb and faced his ghost through a storm of unnatural cold …

  He blinked again and jerked his head upright before he could fall asleep. “Grandfather Rat’s naked tail,” he muttered. The night seemed colder than it should. It would be far too easy to nod off. He got back up onto his knees, kneeling once more. It took effort to stay upright. That would, he hoped, make it easier to stay awake as well. He bent his thoughts back to Wrath, forcing himself past Taruuzh.

  Taruuzh had given the sword to Duulan Kuun, the first to carry it, but the name that had always stuck in Geth’s mind was Rakari Kuun, who had been the last to carry it. He’d always felt an affinity for the hobgoblin hero who had destroyed a terrible evil but in the process lost his birthright. Geth had walked where Rakari had walked and had fought the evil—or a phantom of the evil— that Rakari had fought. Sometimes he still woke to nightmares of Jhegesh Dol, the Place of Cuts. In his dreams he could hear the sound of knives and bone saws and the screams of tortured orcs, goblins, and hobgoblins. He could see their mutilated ghosts and the horrible spectacle of their amputated limbs given a terrible, vengeful life of their own. He imagined what it must have been like for Rakari Kuun to enter Jhegesh Dol when it wasn’t an ethereal remnant of the past but a real place, full of pain and horror. He imagined the hero’s fear at facing the lavender-eyed monster that had been the lord of Jhegesh Dol, one of the alien daelkyr, his fingers replaced with living blades as long as swords, as sharp as axes, so sharp they cut light itself …

  And in Geth’s mind, for what seemed like an instant, he was Rakari Kuun, plunging Wrath into the lord of Jhegesh Dol, forced to flee as all the blades of Jhegesh Dol fell like a steel rain.

  Heart racing, Geth’s eyes opened wide, and he was back on the roof of Khaar Mbar’ost. Time had passed—the twin moons had risen higher and another moon was reaching over the horizon—but he was certain that he had not fallen asleep. The memories that had played in his head had simply belonged to someone else.

  He lifted Wrath into the air and stared at the sword. Did it shine a little brighter? Was there a depth to the twilight metal that hadn’t been there before?

  He groped for another story, the tale of Mazaan Kuun and the Hundred Elves. What had Ekhaas said of Mazaan Kuun? That he’d been a great strategist in the days when the Empire of Dhakaan had clashed with elves from the island-continent of Aerenal who had attempted to create a colony on the mainland. Mazaan had stood alone on the plains against a hundred elves, each wearing the spirit of an ancestor like a mask …

  And he was Mazaan Kuun, luring the elves into a river-washed canyon where the stones split into a maze and where smoking fires turned friends into enemies. Wrath rose and fell only fifty times, but in the end, all of the hundred elves were dead. Half had been killed by their own kind in the frenzy of battle.

  The moons had moved even more when he saw them again. Time had passed as he remembered the story. No, as he had lived the story. There had been details in the memories that Ekhaas had never conveyed in her story. The sound of horses, the sight of one hundred massed elf riders he might have imagined, but he couldn’t have imagined the unfamiliar smell of the smoke with which Mazaan had filled the canyon.

  “You,” he said to Wrath. “Tiger and Wolf, you’re doing this.”

  He tried to remember one of Ekhaas’s stories of Duulan Kuun and found that he all but plunged into it. Duulan fought a roaring giant, taller than a hill, by climbing up the monster’s back and thrusting Wrath—newly forged—into its ear. He leaped clear of the dying creature and swept up the woman, a princess of the beautiful city of Paluur Draal, who would become his wife.

  Moons barely flickered before his eyes as the next story came over him. Duulan turning the tide of a battle against cackling gnoll tribes. And the next story, Duulan grieving over the grave of his wife, then riding into the Eternal Forest in pursuit of the dark fey creature that had killed her.

  The stories came without interruption. Duulan’s twin sons, Nasaar and Vanon, who wielded Wrath in turn, and all the great deeds they did with it. Mekiis, the youngest of Duulan’s great-grandchildren, who took up the sword when she was a child and killed the assassin who would have k
illed her, who later became a duur’kala and the wife of an emperor. Biish, who was her nephew and became an outlaw as one dynasty of emperors fell and another began.

  Geth was aware of the flow of time, of moons that seemed to rush and stutter across the sky. He was aware of the pain in his joints and the cold in his muscles. He had vague hints that he sometimes stood and staggered about the roof, trying to warm himself, but there was always the flow of stories. Some of them, like the ribald adventures of Jhezon “One-Eye” Kuun, he was certain Ekhaas had never told him, but they played out in his mind all the same.

  He thought he laughed. He was certain he shouted in rage and in excitement. When Wrath once again plunged into the heart of the lavender-eyed lord of Jhegesh Dol and was abandoned by Rakari Kuun, when everything went dark as if there were no more stories and no more heroes, he cried.

  But then the darkness lifted and a new story began. The story of a strange new creature not of the name of Kuun, not hobgoblin at all and almost as much beast as man, but still a hero who carried Wrath out of Jhegesh Dol and into a new age …

  He heard music.

  Geth opened his eyes to see Ekhaas, Senen, and Aaspar singing. This time, though, they stood with their backs to him, facing the rising sun as they sang the day into existence. Their song of dawn was as exquisitely beautiful as the song of dusk, ascending into something powerful but still ethereal.

  Wrath was still in his hands, still raised before him. His arms ached and trembled with the effort of holding the sword, but they held firm. Beneath his fingers, Wrath seemed to pulse and surge in a way that it never had before. He felt a bond to the sword and to all those of the name of Kuun who had carried it in the distant past. With Wrath in his grasp, he felt like he could do anything.

  His spirit might have been flying with the duur’kalas song, but his legs weren’t taking him anywhere. They were numb. When he looked down, he saw that he was kneeling exactly where he had started within the charcoal circle, once more shrunk back to only a line on the stones of the roof.