Manipulating the Tomb of Xadaer had not taken much in the way of blood or power. I was not drained as I had been after fighting Lynqxaemass, or after helping Derrek part the Eastern Veil. But it had taken every iota of concentration that I could muster, sustained for hours on end. My exhaustion was no less complete for being mundane, and carrying no risk that I might fall over dead. I was aware of Derrek caring for me, and of Elana caring for Sir Rennin, and of Lord Sir Orland managing the camp. I did not have the strength to be grateful. I fell asleep there atop my half-shrunk wizard’s chest, dinner in my lap, cold despite the heat of the desert and the fire.
I awoke in my tent, my wizard’s chest at my back. My idiot heart was sad that I could not recall Derrek – it had probably been Derrek – carrying me here and tucking me into my bedroll. My head ached and my mouth was dry. Outside my tent, I could hear voices talking quietly – Derrek, I thought, and Orland. I considered going back to sleep, but my bladder was calling.
I rose, adjusted my Vencari tunic, which had bunched around half-backwards in my sleep so that it gaped hilariously up the front, and crawled out of my tent to face the world.
To my surprise, the sun was only a few fingers over the distant eastward mountains. The air was as cool as it had been at any point since we had come to the Holy Lands. It was, as I had thought, Derrek and Orland who were already up. The two large men were tending the small cook fire, cradling teacups in their hands. Derrek raised his hand in silent greeting. Orland nodded his big, shaggy head. I waved back, and dashed off to the far corner we had designated as the latrine.
When I returned, there was a cup of tea waiting for me.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the tea and sitting on a relatively flat piece of ground in between the men. “And good morning.”
“Good morning to you, as well,” said Derrek, quietly. “How are you feeling?”
“Nothing a good bed and a hearty breakfast won’t fix,” I said.
“Sadly,” said Orland with a wry smile, “neither of those is in the offing.”
I laughed softly.
“No,” I agreed. “Not for many, many miles. In the meantime, I’ll settle for the jungle loam and a fresh-killed mountain goat. Assuming that Rennin is up to travel, soon?”
“Within the hour,” Rennin’s voice came from behind me, a little rough. “I’m as eager for softer ground and fresher food as you are.”
For a moment I was afraid that I had offended, but Orland’s laugh was companionable and Elana’s, which also came from behind me, was fond. Rennin even clapped me on the shoulder as he came around to claim his own seat at the fire, Elana clinging tight to his side.
“How do you feel?” I asked him.
“I feel as though some part of me is still in the tomb,” Rennin said. His eyes glazed over and his voice grew distant. “It’s cold. And it’s dark. And I don’t know what to do.”
Elana squeezed his hand, then filled it with a hot mug of tea.
“That feeling should pass,” said Derrek, with some sympathy. “If it does not, there are purifications we can perform when next we come to fresh-running water.”
We would all need to be purified, I thought, but didn’t say. This cursed land and the dead who dwealt here had left their taint upon every one of us, even before we violated a tomb.
Derrek and Orland struck camp while Rennin, Elana, and I ate our breakfast and drank our tea. The meal was small, but it went a long way to restoring my body and spirit. I wanted desperately to ask Rennin what he had seen and experienced in the Tomb. I was painfully curious to examine the sword that he had brought back. Both urges seemed impolitic and insensitive, given his current condition.
As he had promised, though, Rennin was ready to travel within the hour. His head and face were shadowed with stubble, but he’d buckled on his dusty armor with meticulous care. His shield was strapped to his back, over his pack, with his old xiphos’ hilt protruding over his left shoulder and the hilt of the Blade of Xadaer rising over his right.
Our journey back across the charnel plain was a little swifter than our first pass. We had already found the Tomb, and knew that few, if any physical threats awaited us beyond deprivation. The slope of the land was subtle, but our tired legs were grateful for the downward grade of the march homeward. The hike from the river valley to the Tomb of Xadaer had been a full three days, dawn to dusk. The journey back brought us to the river before noon on the third day. Bit by bit, over the course of those days, Rennin revealed to us what he had seen.
“The antechamber of the Tomb was about what I expected,” he said at some point that first morning, unprompted. “Shallow relief carvings depicting the hero at war and at peace. What I wasn’t expecting was for the door to close itself behind me, or for the ceiling to shine like a clear sky.
“There was a raised section in the middle of the room, piled with small votive treasures and the desiccated remains of food offerings, just like a modern hero’s tomb.”
Here, he had paused, looking to me and to Derrek. Derrek had nodded.
“The prophets of Shiithaia and Althaeruh both brought the practice of hero-worship with them. Illustrian hero-cults looked more like Namoran ancestor veneration, but Rasyri heroes were worshiped like minor gods. It does not surprise me that these demigod heroes had cults during the First Age.”
Rennin nodded slowly.
“That makes sense,” he said. “Why else would the tombs have doors?”
He turned inward again, silent for some hours. The rest of us kept our own silence, trying to give him peace since we could not give him solitude. When he spoke next, he picked up where he had left off.
“I expected the door to the inner sanctum to be hidden, or locked, or trapped. It took me a few minutes to work up the nerve to just pull the handle. The next room was like the first, just … bigger, more. The ceiling was a summer sky. The walls were covered in painted frescoes, but half hidden by piles of treasures. Not just common votives, but real treasure: tripods, vessels, jewels, the works.”
He paused. I wondered if he had been tempted to take any of it. I would have been. Then he went on.
“The only part of the floor that was clear was a path down the middle, leading from the doorway to a golden sun-disk hanging on the far wall. I remembered what Derrek said. I didn’t go more than two steps into the room. I just knelt before the sun and prayed. Nothing happened immediately, but … Then the ceiling turned to a night sky, and the floor opened up into a staircase down.”
He paused again.
“The room at the bottom of the stairs was … strange.” He sounded haunted. “It was dark, but I could still see the floor, and the sarcophagus. But only barely. Then, on the far side of the sarcophagus was a statue of Xadaer holding the sword. He … the statue … Xadaer … talked to me.”
Another pause, this one stronger somehow. We stopped our march downland, hovering around Rennin to hear his story. His eyes were open but distant. He held the straps of his pack in a white-knuckle grip.
“It wasn’t words,” he said. “Not exactly. Or not just words. There were images and feelings. I saw the canyon when it was still alive. I saw a great city full of … people. They were people, not monsters, even though they were alien, even monstrous, like the other demigods we saw on the tomb. But most of them, even the most monstrous, weren’t soldiers or warriors, they were just people living their lives.”
Rennin took a shuddering breath.
“There were also visions of battles,” he went on. “Carnage the likes of which I’ve never seen. Hundreds, thousands of soldiers pitted against thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of abominations. As inhuman as some of the demigods were, these were true monstrosities. The battles went on for months. The wars went on for decades. Maybe centuries.”
He shook his head, then his whole body, then began marching. We took his cue and resumed our westward journey.
If the physical passage was easier, spiritually it felt much more difficult. The charnel plain was all the more grim for having traversed it once, and for having violated one of the many tombs. The haunted howling of the wind seemed to go longer, chilling our bones even as my human companions struggled not to overheat while keeping the sun off of their tender skin. When the wind stilled, the corpse and weapon-laden ground seemed to whisper to us.
“Lie down,” it said. “Your stores are empty. Give up. Join us.”
Perhaps Rennin had the worst of it, but we were all stained from merely walking here. We would all need whatever purifications Derrek and I could devise.
Our food did, indeed, run out the second day. Our plans had never included the possibility of a week without hunting or foraging, though perhaps they should have. And though we had made efforts throughout our journey to cure more jerky and dry what spring berries we could find, those efforts had not accounted for the humidity or the daily rains of the Holy Lands, or the miasma of the charnel plain. Even protected inside our wizard’s chests, much of what we had set aside had spoiled.
We rationed our water carefully. We veiled our faces and spoke less each day. We cursed the water lost to steam when we made tea, but feared the risk of waterborne illness enough that we reconned it worthwhile. Our plans had never included a week in the desert, either, but it had been much easier to leave our emergency water cache untouched in the Draddial and on the same day we discovered that the last of our food had gone sour we were forced to break open the first of the amphorae that I had stored in my wizard’s chest.
That night, Rennin drew the blade for us to see, and passed it to Derrek and I to inspect.
“Xadaer was waiting there,” he said, “to give someone his blade.”
Derrek took the sword from him with a trembling hand, his face a mask of wonder and awe.
“I don’t think that it was meant to lie dormant so long,” Rennin went on. “I think that he was relieved to pass the burden.”
Derrek held the khopesh gently while Rennin spoke, testing the heft then holding it close to his face to examine the script. Though he was a much larger man than Rennin, the thing still looked oversized in his hand – not like poor Veralar’s giant blade, but still out of scale.
“I still do not understand how you knew of it,” Rennin said, “or how you set it as the key without having the thing at hand.”
Derrek held the sword upright in a two-handed grip. He set his shoulders and closed his eyes briefly and for a mad, terrible moment, I thought that he might swing. Then his lips twitched into an inscrutable smile, and he passed the sword to me.
“Swords and thrones and monsters are not the only relics of past ages,” Derrek said. “More precious still, to those few who can read them, are the tablets and inscriptions that have survived the aeons hidden in libraries and treasure vaults, copied from cave walls and fallen monoliths, from sheets of gold or lead, from vellum and papyrus, parchment and paper.”
The Blade of Xadaer was an oversized and elaborate red bronze khopesh, its blade alone longer than Rennin’s entire arm. The pommel was cast in the form of a lion’s head. The hilt was wrapped in some kind of hide, miraculously intact after millennia. The guard was minimal and geometric. The blade emerged from the guard and ran straight for two hands before jogging down and forward, only to swoop out and back up in a wicked crescent with a backward-barbed point. Heavenscript and geometric patterns crawled up and down the blade, deeply stamped and then inlaid with gold.
All in all, it was not quite what I expected. It was heavier, for one: half again or twice the weight of a similar blade made of steel. Thick ridges ran to either side of the engraved and inlaid fuller, tapering out to the razor edge in a concave curve. And yet, though I could feel that it was heavier than a sword should be, it was as if the blade held itself up, leaving just enough of the burden in my hand that I might effectively wield it.
“In the Golden Tome of Jul Jalbor,” Derrek went on, “I found an account of the funeral procession, when Xadaer and his companions were laid to rest after a great battle. Following the account of the procession was a litany of the treasures each hero was buried with. That litany included the Blade of Xadaer, including its true name – Iaoroai – by which I invoked it during the making of the aegis.”
Hearing its name spoken aloud, the blade trembled in my hand. The characters running up and down the fuller and the hilt briefly glowed. It was awe inspiring. A thing of the First Age, crafted by the daughter of the sun for her warrior nephew. I could recall the scene from the reliefs outside the tomb: the six armed smith-goddess handing the blade to the hero, the city at his back, the smithy at hers.
I had never heard of the Golden Tome of Jul Jalbor. That was not entirely surprising, as my studies had always been more practical and theoretical than historical or theological, but I would have to correct that at some point in the future. Fortunately, assuming I survived this adventure and the war that would follow, I would have the time.
How old was Derrek Rowan, I wondered? It was so hard for me to tell with humans. He looked of an age with Elana or Rennin, but by his public deeds alone he had to have at least a decade on them. Thirty-five? Forty? Fifty? Could he be of an age with Orland, though he looked young enough to be Orland’s son? Or as old as Veralar? Of an age with me? Could he already be halfway through his mortal life?
“Iaoroai,” Rennin repeated the name, sounding out each syllable carefully. The language of the Compact rarely strung so many vowels together so closely, and it was a struggle for him. My mother tongue, by contrast, had many such words. “Yes. Yes, the statue … Xadaer … said that word to me, but I didn’t quite grasp it.”
He looked to me, then, and reached out his hand. I returned the sword to him hilt-first, holding the blade carefully. It trembled in my grasp, threatening to bite, then stilled as Rennin took it from me. He cradled it in his arms, briefly, as he had when he first emerged from the tomb. Then he returned the blade to its sheath.
On the morning of third day from the Tomb, out of food and low on water, we left the black and parched charnel ground and descended to the river valley from which we had come. The sun was high in the west, casting wild shadows through the rock and down into the canyon below us. The wind, our constant and cursed companion, died at last. We could smell the water and the wet granite below us, the verdant jungle still days upland to the west.
Free of the cursed grave-land, I could feel the stain of deathly miasma upon myself and my companions as I had not been able to while we were still in the company of ghosts. I felt drawn and sickly. Thin, not just with hunger, but like reused parchment scraped too many times clean of ink.
I could see it on my companions. It clung to them like inky clouds, trailing off like thick slime. It weighed upon them like stones hung ‘round their necks, pulling them down.
I was glad, then, that there seemed to be no other people in this place. We had no red elk skull masks with which to warn onlookers that we were contaminated, nothing but our cloaks and my Black Mask to hide our faces lest we spread the miasma.
Late in the afternoon, we came at last to the river. It was thin, awaiting renewal with the next monsoon, but it was fresh and running.
“Stop here,” I said, before my companions could rush to it. “Wait.”
They stopped and turned to me, Orland and Rennin looking particularly desperate and confused.
“Derrek,” I said. “You are the least stained of us. You did not breach the Tomb, and have only touched the Blade, not Rennin. You must go first and purify yourself so you can then purify the rest of us.”
He nodded, slow and deep.
“Yes,” he said simply. It had almost certainly been his plan, I had just spoken first. But, perhaps a token of his improved regard for me, he said nothing else. He just pulled his pack from his shoulders and knelt with a sigh, extracting his wizard’s chest from its cleverly constructed place and drawing it to its full size.
“You must all face away from me,” he said. “When I am ready, I will call you down, one by one. Pray, and ready yourselves.”
We did as he asked, so I could not watch to see what he pulled from his wizard’s chest. That was fine. I would see it soon enough.
Silence reigned for long minutes, broken only by the quiet rustle of his rummaging and the padding of sandaled feet on rocky ground, then I heard him begin to chant quietly. I could not quite place the language. I heard a splash, then more chanting. Another splash, then more chanting. A third and final splash, then silence.
After a long pause, he called my name softly: “Khanaarre.”
I rose and turned, descending the rocky slope to where he stood dressed in a clean white knee-length chiton, clinging to his wet body such that it threatened to reveal the secrets it would normally have concealed. Beside him sat his wizard’s chest, draped with three similar tunics. At his feet was a short tripod heaped with smoking incense. In his hand was a long-handled ladle. I stopped as I passed the pile of his own discarded clothes, intuiting what was needed, and stripped, folding my own garments beside his.
“Kneel,” he said softly when I approached him. I knelt.
He chanted over me softly, billowing the perfumed smoke toward me with his hands. I could hear his words clearly, now, but still could not place the language. Some dialect of the heavenly spirit-tongue?
The chant paused, and I closed my eyes, guessing what was coming. The water over my head was still a shock. I shuddered, cold despite the heat of the Holy Lands and the late afternoon.
His chanting resumed. I felt warmth return to my body as he billowed more smoke over me. It was not an elven purification, but then … we had no sacred spring in which to be submerged. I could feel it working. I kept my eyes closed, knowing there would be more water.
Soon enough I was proven right. He paused, then poured another heavy ladle of water over my head, this time more slowly. I let out a deep sigh of relief, feeling the inky miasma trailing away.
A final round of quiet chanting and fumigation drove out the last of the stain. When we both knew I was clean, he bid me to rise, and helped me pin and tie the chiton around my body.
“Sit over there,” he told me. “We can cleanse our clothing and hunt for dinner when the others have been purified. Wait until we’ve all been purified to drink from the stream.”
I nodded, not quite ready to speak, and took myself to the edge of the cliff overlooking the great canyon. It was mostly shrouded in shadow, now, but I could see the last of the sun glinting off the long river. The waterfall beside me was far from its only tributary.
There had been people here, once, long, long ago. We had all seen hints of their lives inscribed on the sides of the tombs we had passed. Rennin had seen visions of their markeplaces as well as of their armies. I wondered where they had gone.
There were scholars who believed that the demigods of the Heroic Ages had all died in the wars against the Enemy of All, and that the gods had crafted mortals to replace their literal children. But others, myself among them, were skeptical: even if those early races of immortals had perished, surely the gods had not stopped fucking? Surely there had been new generations of demigods. The so-called blasphemer Arcmedus der Allan was neither the first nor the last to argue that the various prophets were the literal children of the gods they heralded.
Elana was the first to join me. She spoke my name softly, placed a gentle hand on my shoulder, then sat beside me on the cliff’s edge. Orland came next, announcing himself with a grunt and settling himself on a flat rock some yards back from the edge. Finally, Rennin came and sat beside Elana – the Blade of Xadaer out of his reach for the first time since he had brought it from the Tomb. Derrek did not join us for another half an hour – purifying our discarded clothes, presumably. When he did, he settled himself at my left hand.
It was a heady feeling to be seated in companionable silence between two of the most powerful people in the world.
The sun was setting quickly behind us, stretching and deepening the shadows that fell down the canyon. The quest for the sword was victorious. All we had to do now was make it safely home.
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