Bruce Blake - Heart of the King

If Braymon hadn’t saved him, if he hadn’t fallen and put himself in position to be the one cursed to raise the king, he wouldn’t be wherever he was now and all his friends wouldn’t be dead.

Then he remembered the Kanosee soldier in the tomato field with his sword raised skyward to strike the killing blow.

“I am dead.”

“No, Khirro. You are not dead.”

Khirro turned his head toward the familiar voice and opened his eyes to look at the magician’s face. Athryn wasn’t looking at him, instead concentrating as he dipped the tip of his knife in a black liquid held by a cup-shaped stone. He pressed the point to a bare spot of flesh on his inner thigh and sucked breath through his teeth as a mix of black ink and red blood ran down his leg. It had been the job of his now-dead brother Maes to inscribe the spells in his flesh; this was the first time Khirro had seen Athryn do it himself.

“Where are we?”

“I do not know exactly.”

Khirro’s brow creased.

“How did we get here?”

“I brought us.”

“You brought us here, but you don’t know where here is?”

Athryn shook his head.

“Sounds a bit dangerous, don’t you think?”

“And trying to best six warriors in battle is not?”

Khirro sat up, the wounds he’d sustained during the brief battle surprisingly free from pain.

He healed me, too.

“Good point.”

He saw he’d been lying on a stone path running between a number of buildings, all of them at least partially destroyed by force, fire, or both. A stout wall in similar disrepair surrounded the village.

“Is there anyone else here?”

Athryn’s knife dimpled his flesh again; he sucked another breath through his teeth and closed his eyes, collecting his thoughts before answering.

“No one here alive but us.”

The rotted faces of undead soldiers jumped to Khirro’s thoughts and he leaped to his feet, grasping for the hilt of the Mourning Sword to find it missing. Athryn paused in his tattooing and looked up.

“The Mourning Sword,” Khirro gasped.

“One of the soldiers knocked it from your grasp.”

Khirro searched the ground by his feet, took a few steps toward the nearest run-down hut, but stopped when he thought of the ghastly undead soldier who came close to taking his life. He stopped short of the entrance. A pair of feet-one bare, the other clad in a worn boot-were visible just beyond the threshold. The flesh of the bootless foot was wizened like the corpses in the field.

“Where is it? Did you bring it?”

Athryn dabbed blood and ink from his thigh with the sleeve of his shirt, stood and walked to his companion’s side.

“Khirro, I did not carry you here. The fallen soldier’s death gave me the power I needed to transport us.” He paused. “I could not bring the sword.”

Khirro stared, anger roiling in his gut, but he held it in. The magician wasn’t to blame for him dropping the sword. On the contrary, Athryn was the reason he still lived. Again. No one deserved his anger but himself.

“We have to go back for it.”

“Go back where? We do not know where we are. And the sword will not be there. What soldier would not take it for his own?”

Khirro gritted his teeth, his anger at himself increasing as he realized he’d not only lost the legendary Mourning Sword, but that doing so left him swordless in the land of the enemy. He looked away from Athryn, chewed his bottom lip until he tasted blood.

“You said we’re the only ones alive?”

“Yes. Nothing but corpses like in the field. Many of them.”

“But none of them are moving?”

Athryn cracked a smile and put his hand on Khirro’s soldier.

“No, none of them move.”

Khirro walked toward the ruined hovels. He felt Athryn’s eyes on his back until the magician’s footsteps took him back to where he’d been sitting. A minute later, he heard him suck a pained breath as he returned to inscribing a fresh spell upon his leg.

Khirro peered into the first hut. The desiccated corpse within looked to have been a man, but it was difficult to be sure. The eyeballs were missing, long chewed out by some vermin, and its patches of stringy hair gave no clue. Only the tattered shirt and dirty breeches suggested the dead person’s gender.

In the next building, he found no corpses, though the table was set for a meal: three plates, three cups, three forks. They were picked clean by scavengers but for the last few crumbs of bread remaining on the wooden board set in the middle of the table.

Khirro wandered building to building, peering into the ones still standing, occasionally toeing the charred remains of huts burned to the ground. He’d counted twenty-five corpses by the time he reached the shack that made him pause.

It was half fallen-down and sparsely furnished, like the others, left as though life stopped in the middle of everything. A rocking chair sat beside a long burnt-out fire in a stone hearth; a woman’s corpse sat in the rocker. She wasn’t as badly dried-out as the others, her raven hair brushed and tidy, her gray dress without holes, her eyes closed. She looked peaceful as she sat with her legs crossed at the ankles and a bundle held to her chest.

A familiarity to the scene caused a stirring in Khirro’s chest, but he couldn’t discern whether he recognized the place from a dream or from his life before being forced into the king’s army, before being cursed with his burden of restoring the king. That life seemed too long ago to remember, its contents hidden from him by the fog of time.

He stepped across the threshold and found that the warm air inside smelled of dust and neglect, not death. The corners lay in shadow and his hand went instinctively to the scabbard where it would normally find the Mourning Sword, his fingers clutching empty air.

“Gods,” he cursed and pulled his dagger instead.

Each footfall raised a puff of dust as he crossed the room, eyes searching the shadows. Nothing moved. Five paces took him to the rocking chair where he stood, dagger in hand, staring down at the bundle the dead woman clutched, staring at the baby which she held to her breast even in death.

A blanket, gray with age and tattered at the edges, swaddled the babe. Khirro pulled a corner of the blanket aside gently and saw the child’s cheek was plump, its skin smooth. Somehow, the child was the only thing he’d come across in his search that looked as though it may have been recently alive. He watched its face for a moment, doubting what he saw.

The baby’s eyes opened and looked directly into his.

Khirro gasped and stumbled back a step, feet catching; he tumbled to the dirt floor in a cloud of dust, landed hard on his backside and stayed there looking up at the woman and her bundle. The child made him think of another baby he’d seen in the recent past in another ruined village, but the mud baby had been a dream. This time, he was awake.

He clamored to his feet and brushed dirt off his breeches as he stood, eyes never leaving the grubby blanket until he heard a sound behind him. He spun around, dagger held out before him, but saw nothing.

When Khirro faced the woman again, he immediately sensed a change. The child sat lower on the woman’s lap, as though she’d slumped and her bundle slipped from her breast. As Khirro looked, the corpse shifted. He jumped back. The swaddled infant rolled off the dead woman’s lap and hit the floor with a dull thump, the blanket’s corner caught between her knees. The bundle rolled toward him, gray cloth unwinding until it came to rest near his feet.

The baby’s once-plump cheeks were sallow, its glossy eyes pasted closed. The wrinkled skin on its face made its head look like an apple that had passed months beyond rotten. A tiny, brittle-looking arm stuck out at an odd angle, reaching toward Khirro’s foot. He stared at the dead thing, confused.