Kahless - Michael Jan Friedman [93]
“A life,” he echoed, hating even the sound of the word.
His lip curling, he swallowed back the bile that rose in his throat. “As I promised you in the wilderness, a life.
Morath managed a thin, pale smile. “I will speak well of you to your ancestors … Kahless, son of Kanjis… .”
Then, with a shudder, his body became an empty husk.
The outlaw stared at the flesh that had once been Morath. He couldn’t believe his friend was dead-and he, Kahless, was still alive. If anything, he had expected it to be the other way around.
Abruptly, all his exertions and his wounds tried to drag him down at once. He bowed his head under the terrible weight of them.
How could it have happened this way? he asked. How?
He was supposed to have gotten rid of all his burdens.
Now he had undertaken more of them than ever. No longer merely a rebel hungry for vengeance, he would become a thrice-cursed king.
With a grimace of disgust, Kahless found the strength to get to his feet. Picking up Morath’s body, he slung it over his shoulder. Then he righted Molor’s mressa table and lowered the body onto it.
Grasping his dk tahg by its handle, he tugged it free of his friend’s chest. Then he tucked it into his belt, still slick with Morath’s blood.
Finally, he turned back to Morath’s body-to the eyes that still stared at him, refusing to release him from his vow. Kahless scowled. Even in death, he thought. Even in death.
He took a deep, shuddering breath. When warriors sang of this day, they would not forget the son of Ondagh.
This, he swore with all his being.
And Kahless would remember too. Morath the warrior and the liberator, who was a better man than Kahless by far. Morath his pursuer and his tormentor, who was more a brother to him than a friend.
Unexpectedly, a wellspring of grief rose up in him, and he raised his voice in a harsh yell-just as he had raised it over the body of Kellein those long months ago. He yelled until he was hoarse with yelling, imagining that his noise was speeding Morath’s soul to the afterlife.
Not that Kahless believed in such things. But Morath did. For his friend’s sake, the outlaw would give in just this once.
There was just one more thing to do while he was up here. Better to do it quickly, Kahless thought, before any more blood was shed.
Molor’s head was lying in a corner of the room, soiled with a mixture of gore and dust. Picking it up by the strands of hair still left on the tyrant’s chin, he pulled aside a curtain to reveal another winding stair-a much shorter one, which led up to a high balcony.
One by one, he ascended the stone steps. The last time the outlaw had negotiated them, he hadn’t been an outlaw at all, but chief among Molor’s warlords. The tyrant had wished to show him what it was like to hold the world in the palm of one’s hand.
Those days were long gone. Now it was Molor he held in his hand, and the world would have to find somewhere else to reside.
As Kahless emerged into the wind and sky, he saw the battle still raging below him on the battlements and in the courtyard. He could hear the strident clamor of sword on sword, the bitter cries of the dying, the urgent shouts of the living.
“Hear me!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs.
Not everyone turned to him at once. But some did.
And as they pointed at him, amazed by the sight, so did others. In place after place, adversaries stepped back from one another, curious as to how the outlaw had reached Molor’s balcony-and what that might mean to them.
Kahless filled his lungs. The wind whipping savagely at his hair, he cried out again.
“The tyrant Molor is dead! There is nothing left to fight for, you hear me? Nothing!”
And then, to substantiate his claim, he lifted Molor’s head so all could see. For a second or two, he let it hang there, a portent of change.
Then, drawing his arm back, he hurled it out over the heart of the battle like a strange and terrible missile. It turned end over end, rolling high and far across the sky, until gravity made its claim at last and the thing plummeted to earth.
“There,