“I felt it,” she went on, frowning. “It hurt a great deal. But, as you can see, no blood, no marks. I do wonder, your highness, if it is actually possible for me to die, and I find that scares me more than any thought that has ever entered my head.”

  Various pointless reassurances, and a few somewhat cruel witticisms, came to mind as he regarded her downcast features. Even stricken by sorrowful reflection, her face retained the same near-absurd beauty that marked her as something beyond human, something that might grow to be monstrous should the demon in her blade ever claim purchase on her soul. But, then, that had also been true of him for many years now.

  “Should we survive this,” he said, “I’ve little doubt that this mission of ours will test that theory to its ultimate conclusion.”

  A smile ghosted across her lips. “Such rousing speeches you give, your highness. I can see why they made you a king.”

  Guyime grunted a very slight laugh. “I must confer with Lexius.”

  “That sound,” she said, the humour slipping from her face. “When our swords met. What was that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never crossed swords with a cursed blade before.”

  “They heard it, the dead. It had some effect on them, made them hesitate.”

  “Then we can use it, and three blades clashing may produce something even more powerful. I’m sure Lexius may have a thought or two that may be relevant.”

  As he made his way to the stairwell leading to the crypt, he was distracted by the sight of Galvin’s sweat-covered form. It was a testament to the squire’s remarkable fortitude that he had clung to life for so long, but, judging by increasingly ragged breaths and the faltering heave of his chest, the end would come soon. Father Lothare sat at his side, continuing to press a damp, cooling cloth to the dying man’s fevered brow. Galvin spoke in slurred, confused murmurs, his face a shade of grey that bore more than a passing resemblance to the ravening creatures outside.

  “Will…” Galvin groaned, head lolling as he blinked unseeing eyes. “Will you hear my…unburdening, Father?”

  “Of course I will, my son,” Lothare assured him, taking the squire’s hand. “We’ll forgo the formalities, eh? Just speak your heart and know the Risen will forgive all.”

  “They…might,” Galvin whispered. “But will he? Will she… Elsinora?”

  The weight with which he spoke the name caused Guyime to pause. Much can be heard in the speaking of a single name; longing, loss, regret, devotion. Guyime heard it all now, as he had once heard it in his own voice when speaking of the wife he had lost to the church’s flames.

  “You’ll make your peace with all,” Lothare said. “In the High Realms.”

  “She’ll know I failed…” Galvin’s sagging features took on a sudden animation, guilt and fear adding a glimmer to the previously dulled eyes. “She’ll blame herself. For indulging Anselm…for making me promise to keep him safe. But she need not, Father. I would have come even if…she hadn’t wished it. But she wept so the day we left…wept for her hateful mother that set us on this path. Wept for Anselm and his blind devotion…wept for us. For the love we shared…and hid… I don’t want her to weep, Father.”

  A soft exhalation drew Guyime’s gaze to Anselm, standing nearby and staring at Galvin, eyes unblinking and face drained of emotion. It was clear he had heard every word.

  “I have done…wrong, Father,” Galvin pleaded, hands clutching at the sleeves of the priest’s robe. “Betrayed my only true friend…the man I call brother. So many times… I wanted to tell him…but I feared what he would do. To himself…to her…”

  Beset by a sense of intrusion, and seeing a dark glower begin to mar the knight’s brow, Guyime turned away to descend the steps to the crypt. If Anselm chose to murder his squire it would, in truth, be a mercy.

  At first glance he wondered if Lexius had fled the crypt and the keep, for the scholar was nowhere to be seen. A shuffling of fabric and scrape of metal on stone, however, drew him to the far end of the chamber. He found Lexius on his hands and knees, using the point of the Kraken’s Tooth to chip away at the base of the oldest tomb.

  “It was just a slight misalignment,” the scholar explained, glancing up at Guyime before resuming his labour. “And the dimensions of this sarcophagus are fractionally larger than the others. Everything else in this crypt is striking in its uniformity. There had to be a reason.”

  Sinking to his haunches, Guyime saw that Lexius had succeeded in chipping away sufficient stone to reveal a narrow but discernible gap between the tomb’s base and the flagstones. He glimpsed only blank darkness beneath the opening but it also exuded a musty redolence tinged with the tell-tale acrid sting he knew all too well.

  “A tomb beneath a tomb,” he said, drawing the Nameless Blade and joining its unyielding steel to Lexius’s efforts. Several moments of labour succeeded in widening the gap but, even with the cursed blades, it was clear digging an aperture of sufficient size required days of work.

  Shifting his attention to the sarcophagus, Guyime ran a hand over its ancient stone flank before trying an experimental shove. He expected little and assumed he would have to fetch Orsena to move the thing, so started in surprise when it pivoted an inch to the left, exposing yet more of the gap.

  “It’s not a tomb,” Lexius said with a sigh of self-recrimination. “It’s a door.”

  Together they pushed at the sarcophagus, revealing an opening of ample dimensions to accommodate entry. Taking a torch, Guyime dipped it into the gloomy orifice, the flickering light playing over a set of heavily cobwebbed steps descending into a dusty void. He was no stranger to dark and forbidding places, but this one gave him pause. Even without Lakorath’s demonic insight he was familiar enough with the unique prickling to the skin and churning of the guts that bespoke a spectral presence below.

  “I should fetch the others,” Lexius said, squinting into the shadows.

  “Orsena’s strength is needed to hold the door and, if there’s a sword to be found here, it would be best if Seeker is kept from it.”

  “In case she’s tempted to claim it, I assume?”

  “Quite.” Guyime snorted a breath and started down the steps. “She would endure any burden to save Ekiri, but I’ll not abide her suffering the weight of a cursed blade.”

  Although a dense matrix of cobwebs covered the steps, it was clear to him that a channel had been carved through it not so long ago. The thickness of the grey, gossamer curtains above his head indicated that whoever had walked this passage recently was not so tall as he.

  “Whatever lies here,” he said, stooping under a low vaulted ceiling, dusty tendrils hissing in the torchlight, “Ekiri already found it.”

  “Guided by the Crystal Dagger, no doubt,” Lexius added. “It seems her demon knows more than yours, my lord.”

  A caustic joke regarding Lakorath’s wealth of ignorance rose then faded from Guyime’s lips. It was certainly true that, for so ancient a being, the demon repeatedly displayed a remarkable lack of knowledge. However, Guyime knew this to result mostly from indifference, and the insight Lakorath did choose to share was often copious and in fact a fraction of the huge well of knowledge he possessed. If the demon inhabiting the Crystal Dagger did know more, it made it a fearsome adversary indeed.

  A few steps on the low ceiling rose as the short passage gave way to a far larger chamber. The prickle to Guyime’s skin increased as he entered, even though the shadows remained undimmed. The torchlight flickered on ancient, rough-hewn foundations upon which Blackfyre Keep had been built. They formed a circle of wide pillars around a central depression. Moving deeper, Guyime’s torch revealed a coffin in the centre of the chamber. This was no finely crafted tomb like those above, but a plain box of old, part-rotted wood, yet its occupant was far from decayed.

  The figure lay in knightly armour that shone bright in the torch’s flame, unmarred by spider’s web or dust. Gauntleted hands rested on the breastplate, beneath which there lay a sword. Its ancient design was evident to Guyime’s educated eye; a single-edged blade, slightly curved forward from a bronze hilt, guard and handle. It was a sword seen on fragments of pottery from the legendary days before the rise of Valkeris. This, he had no doubt, was the Necromancer’s Glaive.

  Yet, it was not this mythical object that most captured his attention, but the face of its owner, for it was a face he knew.

  “Ihlene,” Guyime breathed. Although her features showed no sign of life, she remained the image of the woman he had last seen dying on Saint Maree’s field, hands clutched to a gushing wound in her belly. Her jet black hair had the same sheen, her features strangely serene in their aquiline beauty, so at odds to the fierce woman he had known, a beauty enhanced rather than marred by the scar on her forehead.

  “You know this woman?” Lexius asked as Guyime raised then withdrew a tentative hand from her face.

  “This is Lady Ihlene Hardeysa,” he replied, a faint smile playing across his lips despite the impossibility of it all. “The Steel Thorn Rose, they called her. She was at my side…the Ravager’s side throughout all his battles, and glorious was she in her fury. She died at Saint Maree’s field. That enchanted painting in Orsena’s Galleria did a fair job of depicting it.”

  “Then how can she be here, holding that sword…?”

  The scholar’s voice dwindled as a new sound filled the chamber, a soft, sibilant scrape over the stones punctuated by a rattle Guyime recognised as bone on granite. It seemed to come from all around. Guyime and Lexius whirled to cast their torchlight about the chamber, seeing only wisps of fluttering cobwebs. The sound abruptly stopped then, leaving an interval of utter silence until it was broken by a voice that was more a dusty breeze.

  “Is that you, sire?”

  Despite its strangeness, despite its plainly unnatural origin, Guyime knew this voice. The cadence of it, the kindness of it, unmistakable even now. Slowly, he turned, bringing the torch round to illuminate a figure crafted from the detritus of this tomb. Cobwebs and dust swirled to form limbs, torso and neck, atop which there sat a head of sorts. The dirt-flecked gossamer arranged itself to form a face, although Guyime could see the age-brown bone and teeth of a skull and jaw behind it. The cobweb mask shifted and twitched until it settled into another face he knew.

  “Lorent…” Guyime took a step towards the thing before faltering to a halt. For a second he could only stare at this obscene spectre, this parody of perhaps the only man he had ever honestly named a hero. “You…” He stammered, swallowed and forced the words from his lips. “You came then, as you always said you would. You came to claim Blackfyre Keep.”

  “I did, sire. And brought my love to be my lady.” Lorent’s ghostly arm cast floating motes into the still air as it gestured to Ihlene’s uncorrupted body. “See how beautiful she is. Also, how still.” The shifting, barely substantial face formed into a expression of boundless sorrow. “Strange, is it not, sire, how our ambitions came to nothing in the end? You won a kingdom only to cast it away. I won her heart, only to cradle her as she lay dying. She told me, you know. Before her last breath. She told me she loved me…”

  Lorent’s breeze-like voice subsided as he lost himself in a reverie of the dead but un-decayed woman in the coffin. Guyime didn’t want to think how many years his friend’s ghost had spent in this endeavour, how long he had lingered alone and heartbroken in this hollow in the earth.

  “The sword, Lorent,” he prompted. “I must know about the sword.”

  “It’s a vile thing, sire. Worse even than that blade you found in Sallish. A terrible, cursed thing… I uncovered it here, in the bowels of this ruin I thought might make a home. Old tales of Orwin Blackfyre and his many dark deeds led me to it. A blade that could raise the dead, so the old folk hereabouts told me. In the madness of my grief, I thought it would raise her. I was a fool, sire. The worst of fools…”

  Lorent’s ghost shifted, the cobwebs and dust blossoming into a cloud then reforming into the sight of a kneeling man, a gossamer hand playing over Ihlene’s unmoving face. “The creature within the blade whispered to me, made promises…all lies, but I so wanted to believe. So I took up the sword, and called upon the demon to restore Ihlene to me, and he did. It banished the corruption that had marred her corpse, made her whole again, but not alive. The woman that climbed from this coffin was but a beauteous corpse, eyes glowing with green malice, set on the slaughter and cruelty that is the delight of the thing that raised it.

  “I knew my sin, then, sire. I knew what I had done. All the madness slipped away as I beheld Ihlene as she never was. By will alone I contained the demon in the sword. Though it railed at me, punished me with many agonies, still I held it in check and sealed the tomb so that neither it nor I, nor Ihlene, would ever escape this place. With a final effort of will, I sank the cursed blade into my own chest, lay upon Ihlene’s body and pressed it into her hands just as all life left me.

  “Here we lay, entwined together for years uncounted, whilst my body withered to bone and then dust and she, imbued with the sword’s malice, remained unchanged. This was our fate in the end, her a corpse and I a ghost, for the old tales had some truth to them. A witch did once curse this keep, angered by the cruelties of Orwin Blackfyre. His ghost still clings to these stones but it is a withered, barely aware thing. For that is the destiny of those cursed to exist beyond death: bereft of feeling we slip into the shadows to become a flicker on the edge of mortal vision. I, however, have not withered, for Ihlene sustains me. Her beauty and my own despair are my sustenance. What worse fate than to linger in this place forever, an eternal witness to all I lost?”

  “Until Ekiri came,” Guyime said. “The girl with the crystal dagger. She came here, did she not?”

  “I did not hear her name, for she spoke with a voice not her own. A demon voice. It was plain to me that she had failed where I had succeeded, her will had not contained the demon in the blade. But I couldn’t fault her for it. I felt the power of that demon, Kalthraxis it named itself, and doubt even you could have contested it, sire.”

  Lorent’s ghost shifted again, spectral hands playing over the Necromancer’s Glaive. “The thing in this feared it too, I could sense it. What manner of Infernus-spawn can instill terror in another demon? Kalthraxis laughed at it, taunted it. ‘Thou wilt be of service, brother,’ it told the Glaive. ‘Rejoice in the knowledge that, for but once in thine entire miserable existence, I shall bless thee with the gift of importance.’ Then it laughed… All the horrors I have witnessed, and yet that laugh chills even my absent heart.”

  “What…” Lexius began, coughing before managing to phrase his question. A stalwart soul at most times, it seemed the act of conversing with a ghost sufficed to unnerve him. “What did it do? How did it awaken the sword’s power?”

  “Why, merely by touching it, good sir,” Lorent replied. “That is all. There was a command in that touch, I could feel it. The demon in the Glaive was as bound by its will as that girl. The power it unleashed pained me, for it was the touch of death given substance, a great blossoming of it like an oil-soaked beacon fire surging at the first kiss of the torch.”

  From far above there came a sudden, indistinct sound. Guyime couldn’t tell if it was a shout, a clamour of combat, or the barred door to the tower finally giving way. “It must be mastered,” he said, settling a steady, determined eye on the Necromancer’s Glaive.

  “My lord…” Lexius cautioned as Guyime reached out to grasp the cursed blade.

  “To contain the demon, the sword needs a wielder,” he said. “This much I know. If it’s my fate to carry two cursed blades, so be it.”

  His finger barely made contact with the Glaive’s gleaming bronze pommel before a vibrating thrum of energy seized his arm and cast it away. Spun by the force of it, Guyime collided with a foundation pillar, grunting as pain coursed its way from his limb to his chest where it flared briefly before fading.

  “The curse that binds the demon will not tolerate the sharing of a mortal soul, sire,” Lorent’s ghost told him, his barely substantial features taking on a grim aspect. “An un-cursed hand must wield this blade.”

  Guyime and Lexius exchanged glances as another dim but alarming noise echoed from above. “Seeker or Lorweth,” Lexius said, a potent glimmer of shame showing in his magnified eyes.

  “No,” Guyime growled back, struggling to his feet.

  “There’s no other way, my lord. A mortal hand must take up this blade, a hand not already cursed to carry one of the Seven Swords.”

  “Then let it be mine,” a soft, toneless voice stated. Guyime’s eyes snapped towards the sight of Anselm emerging from the shadows. The knight’s gaze was fixed upon the ancient weapon lying in Ihlene’s hands, his expression mingling utter despair with implacable resolve.

  “You don’t know what this is, boy,” Guyime told him.

  “I’ve heard enough to know it’s the only way to save us.” Anselm approached the coffin with an unhurried assurance, Guyime seeing no sign of fear or hesitation in his bearing. “So, Captain,” the knight added in a low murmur, “this is what you came for. Father Lothare tried to warn me there was a hidden purpose in your loyalty. It appears you owe me some coin, having obtained it by false pretences.”

  “You can have every coin in my purse if you leave this place now.”

  A bitter sigh escaped Anselm’s lips as he crouched beside Ihlene’s body, gaze still fixed upon the Necromancer’s Glaive. “The wights gave up trying to force the door,” he said. “Now they scale the tower walls. Piled on top of each other like ants, a few squeezed through the arrow slits. We killed them but soon this horde of dead will reach the top and then there will be no holding them.” His voice faded to a whisper as he extended a hand to the sword’s hilt.