Robert Adams - The Death of a Legend

The gray dawn had crept upon the stillness of the morning, its meager light reflected from the heavy, icy dew bedecking trees and leas and croplands of the Principate of Karaleenos. Slowly, grudgingly, the river mist—thick as bean soup and the unappealing color of dingy cotton bolls—began to clear from about the walls of the city which sprawled along the south bank of a swift-flowing river. Over the last of the rolling, northerly hills, a dozen cloaked and hooded riders urged tired horses along the Traderoad toward the bridge that led to that city. Ease of movement for traders was the reason for the road’s existence and maintenance, but the small, mounted party was not made up of traders.

A sharp-eyed sentry atop the stone watchtower guarding the northern end of the bridge easily spotted the telltale signs— erect lances, bowcases and quivers now covered with waxed leather against the wet and mist, the unmistakable posture of veteran cavalrymen—and a quick word from him to those in the room below brought a bugler up the ladder to hurriedly blare two staccato signal calls.

In the lower levels of the tower, the inner shutters were opened, letting in blasts of cold, damp air but giving the bowmen behind the slits a deadly and overlapping coverage of the approaches to and the passage past the stronghold. From the south bank of the river, another bugle answered the first and, shortly, a distant but resounding clang told that the massive iron-sheathed oaken portcullis now most effectively barred easy entrance to the ancient city of Karaleenopolis. Once the winter capital of kings, it was now the seat of the Prince of Karaleenos, who ruled the former kingdom as the local satrap of the High Lord of the Confederation of Eastern Peoples.

As the small cavalcade neared the outer fortification, the lead rider threw back the hood of his travel cloak, unbuckled and then removed the helmet beneath it, baring his close-cropped, blondish hair and fair-skinned but weather-bronzed face.

The grizzled sentry turned to the bugler and the noncom who had come up to join them. “Best blow the ‘Let Pass,’ lad. That bareheaded one, he be the Undying Lord Tim Vawn, commander of the Army of the West I sojered with him fer near thirty years, and he don’t like waiting, as I r’call.”

Within the massive fortress-palace, core of the citadel around which the city had been built, in a circular tower-chamber before a blazing fire of resinous pine logs, a man and two women sat at ease on low, padded couches. Atop a round table between them were small ewers of several wines, decanters of brandy and cordials, pipes and tobacco and a large bowl of unshelled nuts. They had been there throughout the night, and the wan light of the new day showed layer upon layer of bluish tobacco smoke filling those parts of the chamber where the hearthfire’s draft could not pull it up the chimney.

Although the two women were very different—the one a very fair, blue-eyed blonde, the other of a light-olive skin tone, with eyes as sloe-black as her long, thick hair—they appeared to be about of an age, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years. But appearance was, in their highly unusual case, deceiving in the extreme; the blonde, the Undying Lady Giliahna Vawn, was seventy-six, while the black-haired woman, Neeka Morai, was nearing eighty. The man who sat with them differed only in degree of age-lessness. Where not darkened by sun and weather, his skin was darker than Giliahna’s though lighter than Neeka’s. So long as there had been a Confederation, the Undying High Lord Milo Morai had been its ruler—over three hundred years now.

Save for his rich attire, he could have—and often had— passed unnoticed on any street of any city in his domains. His glossy black hair was stippled here and there with errant strands of white and had gone a uniform silver at the temples, but his body seemed hale and fit, his movements strong and sure. He had appeared just so for nearly a thousand years.

Placing a sun-browned hand before her pale-pink lips, the blonde yawned cavernously, and the dark woman spoke. “Why don’t you get some sleep, Gil. You know one of us will mindcall if… well, if you’re needed. Our bodies need steep just as much as any human one does, so go on up to bed.”

“No, not alone.” The fair woman shook her head decisively, picked up her small, bejeweled pipe and began to clean its bowl, leaning far to the side to tap the loosened residues into the ashes on the hearth. “Tim will arrive today. He may be on the bridge this very minute, and I mean to be up to greet him.”

Milo said, his dark eyes narrowing, “Wishfulness, Gil… or another instance of knowing?”

She shrugged. “Frankly, Milo, I don’t know. It’s pure hell to have abilities you can’t control. All I know is that last night I just suddenly realized that Tim would be here today, early.”

She paused to blow through the stem of the pipe, then reiterated, “So I’ll take my sleep when he has come… with him.”

Milo chuckled and selected a brace of nuts from the bowl. “And scant sleep the two of you will have. You forget, I was at Theesispolis three years ago when he came back from the west. I just thank Sun and Wind that you two are what you are. The hearts of mortals would never have held out against such punishment. I’ve little doubt that a protracted session like that first two weeks or so would’ve put to shame a pair of minks.”

The blond woman flushed but retained her small smile, which suddenly blossomed fully as, with a creaking of leather, a jingle of spurs and the clank and ring of fine steel armor, footsteps were heard upon the stairway which led up to this eyrie.

His name was Bili Morguhn. His place of birth had been The Duchy of Morguhn, and the time of that birthing was almost a century agone. His sire had been Hwahruhn, Thoheeks and Chief of Clan Morguhn, his mother Mahrnee of Zuhnburk, a daughter of the Duke of Zuhnburk. Bili, too, had held the lands and titles of his patrimony before he had been elevated to ahrkeethoheeks for a while and, finally, to his present rank and station—Prince of Karaleenos.

With his assumption of the exalted position and title, he had had to divest himself of the chieftaincy of his clan. His clansmen had then elected his younger brother, Djaik, to succeed him, and Chief Djaik’s grandson was now Morguhn of Morguhn.

During his fifty years as Prince of Karaleenos, BUI had ruled wisely and well, and, as he had not finally been persuaded to quit his familiar and comfortable seat until his forty-ninth year, he had also outlived almost all his contemporaries.

But death comes, soon or late, to all mortal men and women, and in his great, canopied bed within his princely bedchamber, Bili lay dying—coming at last to the end of that long, long road on which he had taken his first, hesitant footsteps more than ninety-nine years now past in far-off Morguhn.

Yet as short a time as three months before, he had been healthier and more vital than many a man of far less advanced years. Disdaining litter or carriage and forking a big white saddle mule upon streets or roads and his coal-black hunter—Mahvros was the name that he and each of his predecessors had borne, all being direct descendants of the great black warhorse who had borne Bili down from his war training in the Middle Kingdoms to the north—in wood and field and lea.

Bili the Axe—as he had been known in his youth—had been a man of action all his long life, and, with cares of state and weighty responsibilities so hampering him that he no longer had the time or leave to go a-warring, he had grudgingly forsaken warhorses and prairiecats for hounds and hawks, discharging his immense energies in the chase.