Born of Darkness (William King) - William King Page 0,39

richest man in the world.”

Jonas walked away from the moongate. He went over to stand before a massive suit of armour forged from orichalcum and spiderglass and some black metal alloy. It was made for someone both taller and thinner than he. The face was a demon mask. Black crystal filled the eye-holes in the visor. More moonstones had been set there. It radiated a cold power.

“What is it?” Jonas asked. “What disturbs you?”

“This armour,” Kormak said.

“It belonged to Darkoth Sharktooth, Prince of the Whispering Caves. He killed a dozen mighty knights and three Guardians of the Dawn before Pelageus overcame him. His axe hangs on the wall there.”

Kormak strode over to the huge weapon mounted on wall brackets. The blades were razor-edged and spread an arm-span apart. In the centre was set a rune-worked moonstone. Another was at the tip of the handle. It looked too heavy for a mortal man to lift. An Old One could wield it though.

“Your kingdom’s enemies were mighty,” Kormak said.

“They still are,” said Jonas.

***

Wearing the old man’s shape, Vorkhul limped through the dungeons. Blood-soaked rags covered imitations of festering sores. He kept his eyes human. His other senses were limited in this form. It was possible to make his hearing keener and keep his sense of smell stronger but not to the extent it had been in his more bestial shapes. His leg still hurt where that accursed weapon had bit into it. The wound followed him no matter what shape he wore. There was no escaping it.

Following some impulse from the old man’s consciousness, he wandered upwards, towards light, towards freedom. The price of the knowledge he absorbed was that something of his victim remained with him and enjoyed a short-lived spell of influence.

He did not mind. He felt that he had done this many times before and come to take pleasure in it. A dark undercurrent of memory warned him that doing so might have been the cause of his troubles. No matter how hard he tried to trace that thought to its source, he could not.

Wearing the human’s form allowed him easier access to the old man’s memories. They hovered on the surface of his mind like scum on a stagnant pond.

He savoured the recollection of standing by a small pool on a summer day and watching the tadpoles swim within it. They were tiny teardrops of life, twisting and lashing their way through the water. Some had vestigial limbs. All had tiny black dots for eyes. It was a memory of a day over fifty years ago, a lifetime for a human, an eyeblink for him.

Mortals! So frail and short-lived and so filled with superstition. They worshipped shadows their minds projected on the walls of the world. They were like tadpoles. They changed so quickly, from tiny children to brief maturity to final decrepitude. No wonder they were so afraid.

As he wrestled with the old man’s memories, he felt a mounting sense of loss and horror. Where were the images of his own people? Where were the Eldrim who should have ruled these pitiful short-lived things?

There were no recollections of their glorious magical palaces. Or their sky chariots. Or the sorceries that should have made them feared and adored. There was just the idea of distant lands where the remnants of the Old Ones lorded it over creatures they were little better than.

This was wrongness on a cosmic scale.

The Eldrim could not have fallen so completely. The world could not have changed so much during his imprisonment. The Old Ones were born to rule all lesser beings in the name of the Lady. They were the wisest, the most powerful. They were created to dominate. Nothing was allowed to challenge that. For millennia, nothing had. They had ruled supreme among the Elder Races. Invincible. Immortal.

Those who could not be defeated by force could be infiltrated, subverted, turned against each other and finally absorbed. Politics and religion were just as much weapons as sorcery and arcanotech and fleshsculpting. All were arts in which the Eldrim excelled.

The plundered memories showed him a world that had changed immensely from the one he had known. The Eldrim were a degenerate shadow of what they had once been. The other Elder Races, the mighty Quan, the Serpent Folk, the Kassandri, were remembered only as fearful legends. The Ghul, the Khazduri, the humans, scores of other subservient species, had all rebelled. Everything he had known had been swept away, leaving this barbarous shrunken world.

He dug