My gaze slid back to the stone, an otherwise unremarkable black plinth save for its golden veins, pulsing with even greater life now. This is its gift, I understood. Lies.
“Oh, don’t be angry,” Kehlbrand told me, smiling as he came forward to clap a hand to my shoulder. “In your heart, you knew it would always be this way.” His grip tightened into one of sympathetic reassurance. “There’ll be wives aplenty when we take the southlands. I hear the Merchant King Lian Sha has an entire wing of his palace filled with the most comely concubines.”
Just a dog, the leering cur’s tone informed me. To be thrown scraps from the Darkblade’s table.
A warrior’s instinct is a valuable thing, similar in many ways to that of the coward, for it is at its keenest in moments of extreme danger. I knew as Kehlbrand laughed and shook my shoulder with brotherly affection that he would kill me in a heartbeat should my next words be anything but those expected of his most faithful hound.
“As the Darkblade commands,” I said, lowering my head.
Memories came swiftly after that, tumbling into one another like ragged sheets caught by a whirlwind. The great victory over the Merchant King’s host, their lines breaking apart under the assault of Luralyn’s Gifted family, the ecstasy of slaughter that followed. The return to the Great Tor and the arrival of the Jade Princess in company with the healer and the Thief of Names, the one Kehlbrand had expected for so long. I was long used to ascertaining the danger posed by potential enemies and found this one disconcertingly enigmatic. Tall and strong to be sure, but not so much as I. Possessed of a keen mind and shrewd cunning also, but I did not feel myself to be in any way awed by his acumen, nor, in truth, did I fear him. Perhaps this is what doomed me, for if I had, I might have actually beaten him.
The song of the Jade Princess came next, the truth it held as horribly inescapable as before. Although the stone’s gift gave me the ability to hear lies, making me somewhat rich in trinkets when I employed it at the gambling tent, it did nothing to reveal the extent of the lies I told myself. I had consoled my wounded pride at Kehlbrand’s slights by making much of the respect he had shown me since. The Stahlhast do not reckon wealth the way the southlanders do. Although we value gold and sundry treasures, true wealth lies in renown, and by now my legend was outshone only by that of the Darkblade and his divinely blessed sister. It became a shield against my doubts, a comforting fur to wrap myself in whenever the leering cur’s voice returned to taunt me. But, against the song of the Jade Princess, there could be no shield.
It is all a lie. I could see it now as her song slipped effortlessly past my defences, invading my soul, the tune both beautiful and terrible. All his acclaim, all his gifts, the pretence of brotherhood going all the way back to boyhood. Lies. The song forced me to regard him with new eyes, forced me to see the artifice in every expression, the calculation that lay behind every word. Amongst it all I discerned only two truths: his love for Luralyn and his belief in his own godhood. A lying god but, in his own mind, also a living one.
The memory came to an abrupt halt the moment Kehlbrand struck down the Jade Princess, sparing me the spectacle of my duel with Al Sorna. I felt myself to be fixed somehow, ensnared. For what seemed an age I saw nothing, heard nothing and felt nothing beyond the sense of confinement. I fancied I could hear the raging thump of my heart, but soon came to understand that it was merely the memory of a pulse, for I no longer possessed a heart, nor a body to house one. Despite my reputation, fear had not been any more absent from my life than from that of any other man who repeatedly faced death. But I had always possessed the ability to master it, control it, channel it into rage that would blossom when the battle became joined. Yet here there was no battle; there was only the knowledge of being trapped, like a fly cursed to endless squirming in the spider’s web. Fear quickly became terror, the kind of terror that swallows a man whole and sets him screaming, but I had no mouth with which to scream.
The roar came then, brief but angry, and rich in impatience. I discerned no words in it, but somehow intuited its command immediately: QUIET!
My vision returned as I felt myself twisted in the web, a faint grunt of curiosity thrumming my being. Two eyes resolved out of the gloom, eyes I had seen before, narrowed in scrutiny. It will eat me! The thought bubbled to the surface of my mind from the raging torrent of fear. I could feel its hunger, as depthless as before. But the tiger apparently saw little sustenance in my soul, for its jaws remained closed. The relief this birthed in me vanished quickly, however, for its eyes loomed closer, cold and unblinking. It roared again, louder and longer this time, and once again the command was clear: I WILL RETURN YOU! AND YOU WILL FEED ME!
Its will enveloped me like a giant fist encircling a gnat, squeezing hard. Then came the feeling of being wrenched once more, torn free of the web and cast away, a mote of dust tumbling through a formless void, falling and falling until something caught me once again, another web, but this one crafted from pain. It flooded me, coalescing into fiery orbs that lengthened and stretched, becoming limbs. More pain followed quickly, flaring bright into a heart that began to labour even as newly forged ribs closed around it. Tendrils of agony became veins, and a curtain of fire fell upon the naked muscles of a new body, a different body, forming itself into skin. The pain abated as the body solidified around my soul, but didn’t diminish completely, lingering in my gut like a hot, angry flame.
I cried out in both joy and distress, rejoicing at the knowledge that I now possessed a voice with which to shout. Also, I had skin to feel the hard stone beneath my body and the caress of chilled air. But any joy soon evaporated at the realisation that the pain in my belly was building, spreading with a ferocity I knew would soon kill me.
“The antidote!” a curt, familiar voice instructed. “Hurry!”
The sting of something acrid on my tongue, choking me into convulsions as it made its way down my throat. Another, brief burst of agony deep within then it was gone, quenched by whatever foulness I had swallowed.
“Open your eyes,” the same voice said, and I felt the grip of strong fingers on my jaw. Tears streamed in thick torrents as I blinked, gasping at the harshness of the light from a flaming torch held close to my face. He loomed over me, eyes staring into mine, hard and demanding in their inquisition.
“Do you have a message for me?” he asked, speaking the language of the southlands then blinking in surprise when I answered in the Stahlhast tongue, the words harsh and seemingly ill fitting in the mouth that formed them.
“Kehlbrand . . .” I croaked. “Brother?”
His hand slipped from my face as he rose to his full height, the harsh scrutiny on his face twisting into a smile of welcome. Whatever the nature of my recent travails, the stone’s gift had somehow contrived to remain entangled in my soul, for I heard the lie he spoke as clear as a tolling bell. “Welcome back, Obvar.” It returned my dog to me, the leering cur translated. Perhaps, finally, he’ll prove himself useful.
The great fortress city of Keshin-Kho lay under an ashen grey miasma that seemed immune to the stiff northerly wind sweeping off the Iron Steppe. The streets were void of inhabitants save for wandering bands of Stahlhast, Tuhla and Redeemed, all busy in search of loot. Some corpses lay here and there but most had been cleared away in the two days since the city’s fall. I could, however, discern the ferocity of the battle from the many blackened ruins still adding smoke to the lingering shroud above.