Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,38

No one remembers his name.

Morlock was shrewd, on occasion, but he didn’t think of himself as brave. Some drunks, perhaps, display courage, but Morlock wasn’t that type. He drank because he was afraid, of life and of death. It hadn’t always been that way. Once Morlock had been a hero, at least in the eyes of some—in any case, he’d been a more useful sort of person than he was now. But that part of him was used up. So he jeered at himself: only a coward would drink and drink because he was afraid of the pain life held.

Viklorn continued to rob and kill throughout the region. You had to call it robbery, for he took stuff and destroyed what he couldn’t take. But he was likely to leave what he took by the roadside or in an open field. He stole because part of him was still Viklorn, a robber. But there was not enough of the man left to remember what robbers robbed for, what use they made of the things they took. Increasingly, he simply killed and killed, destroying with fire what he could not kill with Andhrakar.

“Why did you make that damn spear?” the barkeep asked Morlock one night, before he was too drunk to answer sensibly.

“I had my reasons,” Morlock answered sensibly.

Later that night, Leen, the owner of the Broken Fist and the man to whom Morlock had entrusted the invention of the still, sat down beside him. Now that Leen was wealthy, he never stood behind the bar himself; he was so short that he had trouble seeing over it. Back in the days when he couldn’t afford to hire help, he’d kept a series of boxes behind the bar, and it had been fun to watch him deftly leaping from box to box. And if he ever needed to climb over the bar to take care of an unruly customer, he saw to it that the customer would never be a problem again. Morlock rather liked him, although he understood that to Leen he was just another gullible drunk.

“Morlock,” Leen began.

“Leen.”

“Morlock, what do you think you can do about Viklorn and Andhrakar?”

“Leen,” Morlock answered sensibly (but just barely), “what do you think I can do about Viklorn and Andhrakar?”

Leen stood up and walked away. The faces scattered around the barroom, never friendly, turned to Morlock afterward with especial distaste. Morlock, never sensitive, was uncomfortable enough to leave while he was still conscious, an unusual event.

He was back at the usual time the next day, but the Broken Fist was closed. Closed permanently: the door and window-shutters of the inn were nailed shut. He asked a passing townswoman, who told him that Leen had packed up in the night.

“People say he’s moved north to Sarkunden,” she said. “I’m going south, myself. People say Viklorn’s already been there: why would he go back?”

Morlock brushed aside people and their concerns and stuck to the essential point. “Leen went to Sarkunden—a thousand miles away?” he shouted. “Is he insane? What am I supposed to drink?”

The townswoman made a suggestion. Morlock declined (the fluid she mentioned was not an intoxicant), and went back to his cave.

For a day or so, Morlock suffered the delirium that comes sometimes at the end of a drunken binge. Finally he fell asleep and dreamt a prophetic dream. (Among his other wasted talents, Morlock was a seer.)

In the dream, Morlock saw himself confronting Viklorn and Andhrakar. Viklorn was a tall pirate with eyes as red as a weasel’s. He wore dirty, pale, untanned leather with golden fittings, and a gold clip kept his shaggy blond hair out of his face. He said nothing; they fought silently, except for the sound of Andhrakar’s deadly unbreakable blade clashing against Morlock’s sword. Andhrakar dripped with fresh blood, but it was still hungry for life, and soon it began to sing, faintly at first, but then louder and louder. Viklorn laughed, excited and pleased, and Morlock awoke with a curse in his mouth.

This was bad, he thought, sitting up. Never in a thousand years would he have chosen to fight someone armed with Andhrakar. But, although he might be not especially brave (a phrase Morlock preferred, when sober, to the franker coward), he wasn’t stupid. He would fight Viklorn: so the vision told him. He needed to act swiftly if the meeting was to be on his own terms.

He consulted a crow he knew in the neighborhood, who promised to locate Viklorn for him. He spent