Darkness settled over General Nikephoros’s residence. Then the darkness beneath the ground crawled out. It climbed the walls, seeped through an open window, melted into the furniture and the bare floorboards, then slipped under a door into the corridor. Following it to the room it sought, the darkness crept through another crack and gathered into a round shape on the floor. Slowly, it swelled.
When it rose, it had the shape of a person.
Before it stood a bed touched by moonlight. Someone lay beneath the covers. The outline of a sword was visible beside him. The person-shaped darkness bent toward the bed. Then its size tripled, covering it. The surroundings grew black, as storm clouds cover the fields and night covers a mountain village.
And a voice sounded.
I plunder. All that lives.
I shall plunder you.
Now you are I.
You may possess anything.
The next instant, Nikephoros sprang up, gripping his sword.
“Get out! I have not yet given permission!”
Beyond the darkness that covered the bed, a round light appeared. It was the moon. When he tried to look away from it and glare into the darkness again, there was no point. The shadow of a cloud that had hidden the moon slipped away.
Nikephoros went quickly to the open window and stood there. Sweat ran down him, soaking his whole body. He had heard the darkness climbing the wall. No actual sound had come, yet somehow he knew. When it took human form, he thought it meant to reveal its true nature. And he resisted. Why?
Throwing off his wet nightclothes and putting on only a gown, Nikephoros picked up a candlestick. In the corridor, he went to the eastern tower, touched the candle to a torch, and descended into the cellar. When he opened the door, the damp air caught at his throat. He set down the candle and shut the door.
There was no one in the room. Not even the officiant. It was a horrifying room whenever one saw it, yet Nikephoros barely noticed the iron bed with bloodstains still on it, or the instruments of torture. His eyes were fixed on the cupboard behind the brazier, and the object standing inside it. A dry branch.
The officiant had first come to him five months before. He had introduced himself and his followers as “the displaced people of Sing.” He explained what Sing was and why they had become exiles. Then he asked Nikephoros to be their king. It was absurd. Until he mentioned the strange wound on Nikephoros’s back.
As far back as he could remember, the wound had always been there. It resembled a tattoo more than an injury, but no one had ever made such a mark on him, so he had simply regarded it as a scar. He did not think much of the fact that his own memories began at about ten, with nothing before then. Once one was past forty, remembering life before ten was probably unusual. But when he recalled the earliest days of childhood, memories sometimes resurfaced: terror of something dreadful, being left alone, being surrounded by people he did not know. Where had his parents and relatives gone then?
When his expression hardened, the officiant bared his own wrist. On it, small though it was, Nikephoros saw the same scar as his, no, the same military mark. A black tree. Only after the officiant said it did he realize how exactly it formed a tree. Countless branches spread over a black trunk. It was not a wound, or a mark that could have appeared on just anyone by chance.
The officiant said the tree was a sign. Proof that the Great One dwelt within. That being slept for now, but once awakened would possess a strength none could withstand. Once, it had held Delphinad wholly beneath its feet. No, not Delphinad, but a great kingdom that included the city. In truth, the name Delphinad had not even existed then. About three thousand years earlier, in a period called the Faceless Age, four ancient kingdoms divided the continent: Pnara in the north, Chandana in the south, Tera in the east, and Sing at the center.
Sing had been the most august, because the Great One dwelt there. All the kingdoms of that age, and even peoples without a king, had bowed toward Sing and offered tribute. Yet Sing collapsed in an instant. It was the moment the Great One departed. The people of Sing had angered him. Many ages passed, and only in the Age of Princes did Delphinad appear. Those who did not remember the past thought a city had been built then, but beneath Delphinad’s feet slept the dead Sing.
The people who knew nothing and laughed and enjoyed themselves had no idea what they were treading upon. They uncovered beautiful cups and swords covered with unknown characters beneath ruined buildings, on riverbanks carved out by water, below graves opened by chance, without imagining where they came from. The officiant said there had been barracks of Sing beneath the general’s residence. Nikephoros told him to prove it.
Over the course of a month, they dug here and found iron tongs, braziers, spikes, manacles, and the like. When the general asked what they were, the officiant smiled and answered, “We have found a torture chamber.”
The excavated objects were old, but they looked rather too sturdy to be three thousand years old. The officiant said the objects of Sing held magic, but Nikephoros remained suspicious. Summoning a mage to examine them was one possibility. But a mage capable of identifying three-thousand-year-old magic would belong to Ayanad, which would make keeping the secret difficult. Instead, the general called a medium.
Though the man was quite renowned, he began trembling before he even reached the excavated chamber. Once inside, he fainted. Upon waking, he fled in a panic without waiting for permission. When Nikephoros later sent someone to question him, the medium said he had never encountered such a place of lingering hatred. At least a thousand people must have died cruel deaths there.
From then on, Nikephoros could no longer dismiss the officiant and his followers as mere swindlers or fanatics. Among the excavated objects, the iron tongs in particular made even him shudder to touch them. Was the medium’s talk influencing him? Perhaps. Yet one day he brought the tongs out of the cellar and kept them in the house. More than ten servants and soldiers who slept inside it had nightmares at the same time. Afterward, he forbade the removal of any excavated object from the cellar, and any further digging.
Perhaps he should have stopped there. But of the more than ten people sleeping near the iron tongs, he alone slept peacefully without nightmares. That fact would not leave him. When he mentioned it to the officiant, the man smiled triumphantly.
“Of course. Why do you suppose the men caught in those tongs died? What would they fear more than anything?”
The Great One.
The officiant called it “His Majesty Vitalis.” Why was such a being within Nikephoros’s body? Because Vitalis was a being who never died forever, the officiant said. When death came, he moved into a new body. Yet he did not steal the other person’s body. Instead, he became a mighty power that fulfilled the new master’s will. His Majesty Vitalis possessed neither self nor personality. In a sense, he was no different from splendid clothes or a crown, yet remained alive without end.
There was only one condition. The person who received His Majesty Vitalis had to become ruler of Sing. Though the kingdom had endured for nearly a thousand years, it had only one king, His Majesty Vitalis.
There must have been countless Majesties Vitalis.
“Then why should a being like that be in my body?”
At that, the officiant laughed. He too was curious, but there was no way to find out. His duty was merely to find His Majesty Vitalis and serve him. Long ago, the officials of Sing had several times needed to seek Vitalis after he disappeared. When the former king’s death was peaceful, finding him was easy. When it was not, everything became obscure, and years might pass with the throne empty. At his death, Vitalis moved into the body of someone nearby, but the successor could not feel at all that such a being had entered him. Just like Nikephoros now.
As time passed, however, the power led the successor down the path of a hero. Within ten years at the latest, he would distinguish himself, and the officials had only to identify the successor among such men. The signs appeared in various forms. But even when a sign existed, many successors could not believe they were such a person. Often, in their disbelief, they resisted strongly. There had even been times when they resisted so fiercely that the ritual was performed by force.
“You, General, will be different from those foolish men.”
Would he? The ritual site, they said, was an altar inside a cave outside Delphinad, but Nikephoros had not yet visited it. Inwardly, he feared what he might see. The officiant and the exiles said they would wait until he had made up his mind, but how long they would wait was unknown.
After the awakening ritual at the altar, the successor would be reborn as the true His Majesty Vitalis. Then, they said, the desire to rule Sing would naturally arise. For some reason, although Vitalis possessed no personality, his awareness of being king was clear. The officiant said this was because a being with such sacred power naturally was king, but Nikephoros could not think of it so simply.
He hesitated. Had the officiant spoken only the truth? Was he hiding something? Was it true that Nikephoros could preserve his own personality after Vitalis came to life?
No one could explain. There were only two choices: believe, or disbelieve. If he chose not to believe, he could drive them out and go on living as before. As before… slowly dying.
The more gifted someone had been, the more he must fear his body withering. Nikephoros’s best days had passed. There would be no new wars in Delphinad. His body would steadily weaken, and people would forget him. One day, he would remain only as a name in a book thrust into the corner of a library, a book no one opened. His men said there was no further glory for him to achieve, but who would know the name Nikephoros even as far north as Mea? A man born in Delphinad could not become a hero that famous, because this was such a damned peaceful city.
And now, he would probably fail to defeat even one back-alley patrol captain. As clever Antonia said, the Shadowhawk was young and in his prime, while he was no more than an old has-been.
Nikephoros’s eyes searched again for the branch in the cupboard. The officiant had brought it a few nights earlier, the night before the attack on Hawk House. He had said he understood the general’s hesitation. The branch had been broken from the tree of the sign. It contained a power too small to bring awakening, yet one that held Vitalis’s strength. He told Nikephoros to experience it first. The feeling of regaining his youth. They said it would last perhaps only a single day.
The officiant’s purpose was plain. He expected that even a small taste of change would be difficult to escape. It was a trap baited with temptation. Knowing the purpose, Nikephoros ought to refuse. He could not be a child drawn by the smell of good food. But the duel was in five days.
The Shadowhawk must be gritting his teeth. Nikephoros had made him do so. He would be strong, just as Garon had been.
On that day, could Nikephoros keep himself from using it?
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