Dark Swords

[Seydon of Arda]

I

She slept through the heat, suspended in an animated trap of mauve light that shifted with her imagination. Unconscious meditation, her favourite, simple, momentary, and ephemeral. The future condensed on the skin of her eyelids, dripped through a milky cataract, and sent lightning snapping to the mind's fourth eye far behind the lump of gelatin grey matter. She never remembered these visions, just a vague recall that they had been and nothing else. It was warm and floating, weightless but somehow solid, like a wrap of pressure across her imagined avatar, the weight of time and gravity. This time, instead of what could be, her dreaming process recalled what had been. Moments that were a day old. The roiling purple and skeins of back lit blood vessels over her eyeballs brightened into a wall of old parchment. A dark, young boy, tall and skinny with a parched, narrow face marched with along resolutely. He stepped over the edge of her sight and blew apart into a dust devil.

The funnel of earth swept a sting of grit into her gauzed cornea. Pain coaxed her free from self-imposed dream imprisonment, feeling herself rocket towards the wall of sandy vellum, where the outline of the boy walked across, breaking and crackling through into... Light...

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Sunlight gently braised the sand. A tiny figure with exaggerated emaciation came crawling out from beneath a shady lean-to, her skin cracked and peeling like old paint, the colour of rusting iron. She ignored the midday swelter and came out from the make-shift camp, circling a small fire pit and dragging an ancient, notched silver hookah along with her. The shawl and tattered poncho across her back was wet with sweat, dampened from the stress of dreaming. The moisture dripped onto the baking earth, hissing and drying out into minute salt lumps. She walked with feet clad in soles of calloused sandalwood and paced to her favourite 'seat': a worn bowl in the sand, so well the grit had been flattened and smoothed together.

The hookah she placed on a small table of arranged sandstone brick, feeding charcoal and a plug of tied hjuetto sticks into an upper bowl. She dozed through a quarter hour, occasionally syphoning stale smoke out through a small neck-valve, until she put her lips to the hose-pipe and sucked a long draft of liquified smoke onto her tongue. The sugar in the taste made her shattered molars ache and wine a note of pain, 'till all at once her musculature went slack. Now, she dreamt awake: the far dune ridges crystallized into slopes of opaque glass, rolling with solar wind.

It was curious when later, still gripped by the hjuetto drug, she listened to turbine roar. The sound announced a scuttling scorpion coming over the mirrored ridge, tapping over the landscape of undulating glass. Ten-thousand reflections mirrored a sand-worn underbelly pulsating with odd biomechanical machinery, the inset arachnid compound eyes red as newborn blood. Ebony mandibles parted, issued a throbbing sound of engine whine, six rigid stalk-legs bouncing with suspension. She took another draft from the hookah and waited for the beast to slow, feeling her grey matter contort and twist reality with it. Glass shimmered into water. The tall scorpion halted and throttled down into quiet. A section of segmented chitin broke open and disgorged an upright shadow from its wet guts.

The shadow approached her, appearing as a cutout of midnight sky. The old woman batted her shawl off, sucked on the hookah, snorting a puff of sweet smoke through her scab clogged nostrils, and showed off her toothless smile.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Seydon of Arda knelt beside the ancient woman in the sand and pulled a sheet of folded flimsiplast out of a breast harness pocket. He laid it before her crossed knees, missing the Gregale's A/C, anticipating a long shakedown cleaning and replacing components worn by Tash-Taral's ubiquitous, shifty terrain. Hookah smoke roiled across his face, the colour of the armoured war-car sitting on its high tires. The woman seemed to shudder out of a dazed episode and regarded the young, sharp-faced boy on the unfolded flimsy.

“Oh. The child. The exile. He came here. Went off to lose his soul,” She whispered.

“His name's Odain. A water thief. His tribe cast him out, but he has family willing to pay to have him returned home. There's laws of allowance,” Seydon explained. It was a convoluted mess involving star-crossed adolescent love and tribe-versus-tribe affairs, beyond their ken to fix easily and beyond his scope of practice to fix. In short, Odain had been found squandering water that belonged to his people in a misguided attempt to gift it to another young boy. When discovered, he made the ungraceful mistake of breaking etiquette. Somehow, defiance must have seemed more attractive than obeisance and apology. He was unwelcome amongst his family until the amount of stolen liquid was replaced, alongside an added interest: his own body weight in collected water. “Don't know why he came so far north. What is this place?”

“Disani's Well,” Croaked the woman.

In a wavering voice and with trembling arms, she directed him to a small lid of broken cobble and sandstone mortar beyond her tiny camp. Standing, Seydon glanced about. During some unknowable time, the well had sat defended by high fortress walls, a concentric fist of layered fortifications expanding outward to a point. Skeletal remains, piled ridges of half buried blocks, outlined the foundations of the castle-proper, its basements filled in by wandering dunes. The Dunaan paced to the well lid and peered down: a two hundred meter drop whistled up a dry wind, with darkness floating at the bottom. Splendour lingered in the air, however. Blood and wine were too suffused into the sand prairie, unseen yet permanent in their stains. His Taurannik amulet vibrated minutely, tasting old ghosts wandering about the buried courtyard.

“Once, Disani's Keep,” Said the woman. “But like others when Tash-Taral would not be beat, would not be conquered, she took her horde and fled back into the night beyond. What remains is but a gateway to a broken kingdom, claimed by the living damned.”

“A kingdom?” Seydon asked, the well pit swallowing echoes.

A rheumy hand pointed northward. Black capped mountains, like rotten peg-teeth browned with a patina of carbon soot, rose and gnawed into the cloudless sky. Further ridges bunched and jostled behind the foreground palisades. He imagined the stone was somehow sucking down any ambient lambency; a cool, dark shroud clung over the peaks.

“In there and beyond,” Said the woman. “Ruined fiefdoms occupied by the detritus left over in the wake of their lords' retreat.”

“Odain went there,” Seydon sighed into his hand, rubbing at his short beard. “...Did he speak to you?”

“In the frightened, desperate mewling of a child forced to confront his sudden adulthood,” The woman, flicking dust out of her nostrils, piped another mouthful of perfumed smoke out of the hookah. “He asked of me, of the well, if the fractured remembrances and lying stories of his people were at all right about what waits in the mountains. The boy took what satisfaction he could out of my answers, and gathered his wits then left. Like many others. The road will prove his worth. ...As it will prove yours.”

The Dunaan stared her down.

“Come. Temptation gnaws. You're duty bound to safeguard the boy and take him home, but whether or not you discover him alive, you'll trace the road until it takes you to the end. That is the allure of the Bowl of Fire. Ah~! But that's already too much. ...Oohhh, I'd suppose you're a few days behind the thief. Maybe in that scorpion you ride,” She blinked, still settled in her narcotic dream, staring into the dune sea of light as her consciousness melted to become a part of it. “You'll stand good odds of catching him before he slips up. ...Or not. Fare well, Dark Thing...”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

II

Itchedi Outlook

Odain's footprints were a week and two days old, stamped over a worn trail that resembled a snake run. Seydon found them, and a small mound where feces had been buried, by the remains of a small fire-pit dug and lined with loose cobble sticky with the leftovers of a cooked meal. Wandering dhole hounds had been through, rummaging bones and mouse dens. Between their paw tracks, Odain had spent his night pacing until exhaustion. At dawn, so he figured, the thief woke, packed, and set off on a miles long march into increasingly craggy, barren terrain.

The Gregale woke and Seydon climbed into the steerage cockpit, casting a glance at the strange old hermit. She'd gone back to her lean-to of corrugated sheeting and was napping through the noonday heat. That precious silver hookah was doused, in arms reach behind her small bed pad, jumbled with small belongings in miniature wood crates. A seer, he thought? Maybe an oracle. Tash-Taral boasted a few: all esoteric and unfathomable, their minds destroyed by decades of punishing drug diets. A force kept her anchored to Disani's Well. Greeting, admonishing, and taunting new comers that arrived to challenge the thin road leading off into the mountains. He couldn't stay and pick her insights. Odain was gone, tracking north and into danger. With luck, the Gregale would make up eight days trudging bare foot in a tenth of the time.

Acceleration was done by a fine trigger fitted behind the molded steering wheel. Seydon cranked the A/C settings and squeezed a mote of power into the heavy wheels. The war-car lurched, caught traction in the fine sand grit, and began growling louder and louder with each gear change. In a holographic mirror, Disani's Well receded into beige plume, clouded out behind the Gregale. A would-be oasis. He concentrated on matching the car's course with the erratic turns in the ancient sandstone road, driving blind save for a topographic radar. No matter where the road meandered, it was quick to right itself and turn back towards the tundra mountains. Temperature readings gauged for the cabin, engine, and outside environ blinked on a scrolling readout in the corner of Seydon's vision.

Dune waves, topping as high as eighty meters and greater, stood immobile as he drove past. Castles in their own right. The road elevated, taking the car out of the sand basins and seas dominating the majority of Tash-Tarals cruddy landscape, cutting into stone exposure that rose like the hump of a rising continent. Seydon was forced to decelerate, brusquely taking mean hair-pin turns in a narrowing canyon the roadway followed. The suspension gasped whenever the Gregale leapt over the spines of fallen basalt and granite columns, their pillar bases lining either side of the shallow gorge. Between each sixth and seventh base were hybrid statuettes, humanoid forms married heinously with bizarre bestial features, clothed in draping acanthus, eyeless and watching.

Once, Seydon braked and parted the canopy plating, staring out. From one preserved column swung a whole, human skeleton. It was shackled by iron bits nailed through the radio-ulnar bones and attached with ringlet chains, still kept modest by an animal skin loin cloth. Birds had come and pecked out its teeth, sucking the marrow out of the jawbone. The Dunnan waited. ...Almost expectantly, the wolfshead amulet at his sternum shook gently. The skeleton stirred. A naked skull creaked by degrees and peered on down the canyon road. The wind picked up until it shrilled and keened. One fleshless arm broke free of its confinement and pointed, finger trembling, onward. Light burned from the amulet's smokestone eyes, then dimmed. The arm dropped and fell out of its socket. Seydon resealed the cockpit, driving on. And hoped his Water Thief hadn't gotten himself killed wandering up into the sandless wastes.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Architecture divorced itself from a slope of knife-sharp rock and blended with steep foundations of sun bleached stone. It was a castled aqueduct, like a half finished bridge converted into a once splendid keep, faces inset with meticulous brick facades, crenellated walkways striding in front of worn architraves, narrow slit windows black and daunting.

The road both ended and began into a flight of thin steps. The Gregale braked, sloughed through a brief drift, the cockpit roof disengaging with a mechanized slide. Seydon freed himself out of the seat webbing and paused to stand on the roof of the war-car. The outlook castle glowered overhead as capes of mist roiled onto abandoned battlements. It's top was a modest basilica roof, surrounded by guarding spires, most broke with their smashed remains pooled across the causeway stairs below. For a world so atrociously hot, the Dunaan felt cold. The wind stirred again and buffeted at his back. There was no sign of Odain but for a gut inclination he'd made his way here. Seydon stared up at the castle, feeling eyes at every slanted window, the knuckles in his hands tightening.

He leapt down off the Gregale's raised trunk and opened the broad compartment. Shelves of waiting equipment eased out of their recesses, picked or discarded, Seydon choosing from an array of prepared, home-made alchemic grenades and potion decoctions. Winterfang and Razorlight, the brother swords bequeathed to him at the end of his nascent tutelage, were retrieved from a foam lined trunk set beneath the shelf trays. The 'kit rule' for this occasion was 'General Purpose'. The outlook castle was a lair of unknown. Difficult to correctly anticipate the kind of trouble that would be waiting as he traced Odain's path. Stamina and metabolic boosters, one vial to overwork his already highly clocked 'healing factor', Falling Comet and Worrt's Copper bombs. Incendiary and poisonous respectively. For added measure, he carefully stuffed a Midvinter Dream into a coat pocket.

Beside the casing holding his blades, was another thick casket, bound by kevlar strapping and duranium clasps. Seydon fed a small chip-key into a lock aperture and eased it's lid open. A magnificent crossbow done in Ankarress wood, electrum, and Shi'do catgut. Gleaming, with collapsible limbs, it fitted weightlessly in his hands. A small hip-quiver with spare bolt-drums attached to his belt.

A final triple check over his person: swords, harnessing, potions, bombs, alchemy bag, crossbow, and a check up over the heavier D'oemir outfit clutching snugly over his frame. Combination of Dunaan design esthetics with a touch of Valkyri tastes, with a long coat of quadanium chainmail running from under his ribs to a hem of reinforced akk-dog hide, the breast a hard pectoral strip of leather and uller bone inlays. Enough for extended tracking. Seydon slung the crossbow in a catch beside the paired scabbards, locked the Gregale down, and sauntered up the long, broken causeway.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

A gatehouse with a narrow courtyard nestled beside the rock forms and high foundation stilts of the outlook. Seydon approached a tall archway, partially deconstructed by time and some fierce wind erosion, casting chunks of imported ferrocrete down and formed an impromptu barrier. Slowing, he took light hover behind an upturned block, peering past the guardhouse.

The slender yard stretched to half the length of the outlook, lined with collapsing prefab sheds and the skeletal framing of a disused, cannibalized garage. Hoist chains turned in the breeze, hanging from rusting rafters, squeaking a sharp, baleful sound. He counted four air-cars left over to rot. Metallic refuse, plating, the components of heavy-bore turbofan engines, what looked like an inertial compensator torch-cut from an absent starship, carpeted and piled on dead grass. Stepping through the gate, a rug of sand-rats fled out from under Seydon's boots. He counted his paces, one hand reaching back for Winterfang, tensed at something sensed in the air. And then he stopped in a waiting pose and drew the blade free.

Things rose, waking out of the trash. Butlers. Maids. Housecarls and groundskeepers. In loosely tattered uniforms emblazoned with a fading filial crest, black crushed velvet dyed grey by dust and ash. And dead. Quite dead, Seydon felt, with faces drawn tight by muscle rictus and bodies dried out, impossibly lean. Macabre functions somehow preserved rudimentary locomotive ability and a thin skein of consciousness. They regarded the Dunaan with hollowed eye sockets. Then collected their weaponry: ungainly saw blades, kitchen knives, semi-automatic slug revolvers. Shots spun past Seydon and ricocheted off the guardhouse walls. He cocked Winterfang into a guard, then waded forward.

They crowded in, three at a time, contesting the silver in the witcher's sword. Death preserved inhuman cunning and speed. Saw-toothed edges and chipped knives stabbed and swung in. He addressed their blows, sword turning like lightning in his hands, chaining counter-blows through snap-parries and killing his way through the courtyard mob. A pirouette cut knocked a head free. The next neatly relieved another body of its left arm, following with a hack through its narrow waist and spine. Its undead allies became entangled with its falling, flailing torso trunk. Seydon back-stepped, raised a hand in a precise sign, and released a gout of pyromantic Force energy at their bodies. Skin and bone dryer than tinder went up like bonfires.

A soft quiet with the weight of mountains descended on the yard. Their contest was finished. Seydon gently picked his way through two dozen bodies arranged in dislocated poses on the trashy earth. The few that smouldered were cooking themselves out, marrow glowing into hot cinder, a collective sigh rising with low, bitter smelling smoke.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Water thieves were a pariah caste that culled its select operators from the clever, daring, and suicidal across Tash-Taral. Odain was little different. Sheathing Winterfang, Seydon switched his order of mental operation, resuming the track he'd put on the boy. Odain had approached the gatehouse, paused... but where he'd set off to next? ...There, Seydon spotted, faint scuffing in the coarse lichen on the outer courtyard wall made by bare feet. He simply scaled up and over into the yard, landed on a rat bed made from torn out speeder chair upholstery. Next, keeping his back to the rock forming the outlook's craggy foundations, inched his way toward a set of broad double-doors marking entry into the outlook itself. ...He'd even managed to scale up, grease one set of hinges with a honey-scented unguent, and then pried the door open. A meagre slip but enough for his skinny frame to pass through, slathered in more honey-unguent, bypassing the waiting dead in the yard entirely.

He put his hands to the heavy metal slab and braced his boot heels against the flagstones. The door swung outward with his pull, skidding a fine cloud of dust under its frame, grinding and pulping stone. Seydon returned Winterfang to his hands, staring through the frame and jamb, into a muted interior doused by grey lambency. He stepped forward against a cool air draft and into the outlook proper.

First was a high antechamber, flexed with additional closet recesses, still hung with bare coat hangers and forgotten footwear. Odain had come through and ran his hands along high marble chair rails, disturbing the dust coat. Seydon knelt a moment, reading the boy's slow, bare sole footprints treading on a fine rug. The water thief had gone north, in spite of a standing tribal bounty requiring the return of their stolen drinking reserves with the added interest of Odain complimenting said bounty with a water boon that weighed as much as he did. He'd have had better luck buying or stealing a desalination turbine from Jaken Port, setting up camp by one of the few salt lakes, and spend a few weeks pumping and purifying the brine. Why north, he wondered? Why seek out Disani's Well and follow an obscure roadway into the mountains? What was here that he could use as barter?

The anteroom opened through a set of teak doors into the guest foyer. Even Seydon's eyes had trouble picking through the dark. Pieces of floating light, islands of set candles melting into the mosaic floor, offered some sense of shape and layout. The ghost of a giant staircase waiting poised in the centre of the lobby, musty banisters still glinting with wood polish, tall walls blanketed with burgundy and jet curtains, wreathes of delicately folded metals, origami sculptures with shadow playing harshly over oblique paper angles, blind arcades still set with undisturbed touches of gold and bronze. The Dunaan breathed in the dust, going slow and keeping Winterfang poised high.

More desiccated servants shambled through the gloom, tripping over the terraced candles, silencing the burning wicks. They were Disani's loyal staff, Seydon decided, imbued through arcane procedures into being slaved to her abandoned castle. Bereft of every sensation, excepting duty. Thin hands drew their sharpened kitchen hatchets and scavenged bayonets, some armed with the same brand of meagre pistol their felled comrades confronted the witcher with in the yard beyond. A shot boomed. The fat slug rebounded off Winterfang's steel and smashed through the nose of a nearing chef.

They charged, and died. Seydon ripped through them. It was all curt blade work, the Ysian school, economic motion bred with cadence, timing, a robust understanding of human physiology and muscle mechanics, a precise cleave here and a short, killing joust there. The longsword disarmed one staffer of their hand and wrist, wove as their steak knife spun and glittered, opening up their ribcage until the spine severed and left their shoulders floating. He turned the blade about, a wicked backhand stroke, cutting and spinning low through their thighs and ankles, collapsing the body in on itself before it had the chance to flail. Seydon spun, executing a pause, into a diagonal shoulder-to-hip blow that mangled another dried out cadaver.

Just two remained and they attempted a semblance of paired off tactics. One assailed the witcher at his fore, the other skidding around to his backside and leaping, stabbing their bayonet like an ice pick. Missed. Seydon was gone. Their bayonet slashed emptied air, a palm-shove between their shoulder blades tripping them forward and grinding bone on bone with their partner. Entangled, they perished simultaneously, Winterfang quartering off the caps of their skulls.