I recalled how he had surprised me by insisting on a return to the Great Tor after the fall of Leshun-Kho. Such a great victory should have brought a night of revels, with all the indulgence that entailed. The hunger my mother had scolded me for had never faded as I grew, and had been joined by other appetites as manhood dawned. But the Darkblade allowed no revelry. When the slaughter was done and Luralyn had made her pick of the captives, he put the city in the hands of a trusted Skeltir with ten thousand warriors to ward against a counterstroke from the south.
“You intend to move on Keshin-Kho?” I had asked, keen anticipation mingling with apprehension in my breast. Although ever eager for battle, the great fortress city was a formidable target, even with our ever-swelling ranks.
“No, old friend,” he told me. “We’re going home. It’s time to prepare.”
“For what?”
I saw his eyes narrow a fraction as he glanced at his sister. Luralyn’s aspect had been somewhat grim since the city’s fall, due I assumed to her squeamishness, which had always struck me as worryingly un-Hast-like. Kehlbrand, however, had never displayed anything but absolute trust in his sister, at least before now. “I’m not entirely sure yet,” he said, climbing into the saddle, “but it will require something of you, a service it pains me to ask of you.”
“You are the Mestra-Skeltir,” I reminded him. Even then I refrained from using his other name, his godly name, something he saw fit to ignore. “Ask for anything, and I’ll give it.”
He settled a steady but otherwise expressionless gaze on me. When he spoke his voice had a faint note of regret, something I rarely heard him express. “A promise I’ll hold you to, saddle brother,” he said.
And so we rode home with the Stahlhast horde at our back. The Tuhla were sent east and west to visit what mischief they could on the border garrisons, but the Stahlhast went north, back to the Great Tor where Kehlbrand bade me follow him to the Sepulchre and what lay beneath.
“Touch it.”
The stone’s surface was flat and black save for the veins of gold that ran through it, veins that seemed to pulse in the light of Kehlbrand’s torch. I recalled Luralyn’s terror of this thing the night we killed the priests and found I couldn’t fault her for it.
“Someone is coming,” Kehlbrand added. “An enemy I know you cannot defeat.”
I lifted my eyes from the stone, fixing a broad smile on my lips to mask the uncertainty provoked by being in such close proximity to the most feared object in Stahlhast lore, an object so sacred the Laws Eternal decreed death for any who looked upon it unless chosen by the priests. But the priests were dead and the Laws Eternal now just a rarely spoken vestige of the time before Kehlbrand’s rise. What use had the Stahlhast for laws when we had the word of the Darkblade, the word of a god?
“There is no man I cannot defeat,” I said.
“Oh, but there is, be sure of that. He stole my name, and soon enough he’ll come to steal everything we have built.” He reached across the stone to grasp my forearm. “Touch it.” His gaze was fierce now, implacable in its command and resolve. It was the face he wore when he became more than the Mestra-Skeltir, the face of the Darkblade. “Touch it and mighty Obvar will become mightier still.”
It is a hard thing to refuse a god’s command, despite my many poorly suppressed doubts as to the truth of his divinity. Before this moment I had often entertained the notion that his mantle of the Darkblade was just another stratagem, a means of winning over those we had once enslaved and those we would soon conquer. If so, it had certainly proven a successful ploy. But, looking into his eyes now, I understood for the first time that Kehlbrand Reyerik had not been playing the role of a god. In his own mind, at least, he was the Darkblade, and in that instant, I too believed. I have come to understand, all these years later, that it is these small moments of weakness that damn us, the brief instances when reason and doubt are overthrown by blind faith and love.
My fingers opened, splaying out as Kehlbrand gave a grim smile of satisfaction and slammed my palm onto the surface of the stone.
It was like touching flame, but the pain was far worse than a mere scalding. It seared its way through the flesh of my hand, through my arm and into the core of my body. White fire exploded in my eyes, accompanied by a roar that deafened my ears to my own scream. The fire faded as quickly as it arrived, and for the briefest second I found myself confronted by a pair of eyes. Black pupils set within yellow orbs flecked with green and surrounded by a pattern of striped fur that was as complex as it was symmetrical. Tiger, my agonised mind realised as the eyes stared into my soul. I heard no words, saw nothing beyond those eyes, but I felt the intent of their owner more keenly than any wound suffered before or since: Hunger. Deep, ravenous, unquenchable hunger.
The eyes blinked and vanished, heralding a grey mist and sudden absence of all sensation. When the mist cleared I found myself on my back, staring up into Kehlbrand’s concerned face. “It was different,” he said, voice soft and contemplative, speaking more to himself than me. “Why was it different?”
“Different?” I asked, groaning and taking his hand as he helped haul me to my feet.
“I have bestowed gifts on many before you, brother. There was confusion, but no pain.” He searched my features with intense and uncomfortable scrutiny, brow furrowed with an uncharacteristic consternation. “Do you feel it? Do you know what it is?”
“Feel it?” Kehlbrand let out a thin sigh of frustration at my baffled expression, causing me to add, “It hurt.”
“And nothing else? You feel nothing else?”
I stood back, drawing in a ragged breath, uncaring of the tainted air of this place. In truth, I felt only the ache of a recently vanished pain. My arms felt as strong as ever, but no stronger. Similarly my vision, now cleared of the grey mist, was sharp but I perceived nothing beyond the solidity of this chamber. “I am . . . myself, brother.”
“No.” He shook his head, brow still creased and his voice coloured by a faint note of anger. “Your tune is different.” He angled his head, voice dropping to a whisper. “I’m not sure I like it.”
He blinked and I found myself unable to suppress a small shudder, for in that moment his eyes so resembled those of the tiger I suffered a spasm of remembered pain. When he spoke again the furrow of his brow had smoothed and his tone was one of casual reflection. “Oh well, I’m sure it’ll make itself known soon enough.”
“Luralyn might know . . .” I began only to be swiftly silenced.
“No,” he said, voice flat with command. “In fact, Obvar, I would prefer it if, henceforth, you avoided my sister’s company completely. She finds you trying at the best of times, and frankly, your attentions have always been unwarranted, even unseemly. She is, after all, the Darkblade’s closest and most cherished kin. She is not for you.”
It was then that I felt it, through the sting of the slight that told me I was unworthy of his sister’s heart, through the anger provoked by his flippant tone, the tone of a master to a slave. Through it all I heard and felt something more. It was as if the words were spoken by two separate mouths at once, one possessed of Kehlbrand’s blithely insulting inflection, the other far more sibilant, like the hiss of a wretched, deceitful cur. The words were identical but the tone left no doubt that every one was a lie, every syllable dripping with falsehood. It told me that, although it was true that Luralyn had always delighted in shunning my advances, this was not why he wished me to avoid her. He fears what she will tell me, and what I might tell her.