Sword of Caledor

Chapter TWO





The rain pattered down lightly on the canopy of leaves, dripping down to turn the track to mud. The birds were subdued and the light was dim. In some ways it felt like they were walking under the greenish surface of the sea. Tyrion’s legs were spattered with runny earth and it was work just to lift them from the sucking, squelching path.

Teclis pushed on through the jungle following Leiber. He had no trouble with the path. His feet seemed to float above it and he left only the faintest imprint in its surface. Such were the benefits of magic, Tyrion thought sourly. He walked beside his brother, ready to intervene if there was an attack. Teclis might be a powerful magician but his reflexes were nothing like as quick. A dagger in the back kills the mightiest mage was a proverb in which Tyrion had implicit faith.

He fought to contain his own excitement. After decades of searching it seemed like the end of their quest was finally in sight. They had finally tracked down Sunfang. Or rather his brother had.

Teclis had spent years in the library at Hoeth searching through collections of obscure manuscripts for some clues as to the whereabouts of Aenarion’s lost blade, the legendary weapon forged for him by the Archmage Caledor amid the volcanic fires of Vaul’s Anvil, a companion piece to the armour the mage had made for the first Phoenix King.

Aenarion had put the blade aside once he had taken up the Sword of Khaine and its burden of damnation and ultimate power. He had given it to Furion, one of his most trusted lieutenants who had in turn passed it on to his descendants.

The Witch King of Naggaroth, with his customary hunger for all the possessions of his father, had coveted the weapon. Furion’s family had refused him it. Over the course of time, agents of the Witch King had made many attempts to acquire the blade, and always failed.

In the end, Nathanis, the last descendant of Furion had sailed for the Old World on a trading trip. He had arrived there but never returned with his ship. There were tales of an elven adventurer fighting in the lands of the Empire armed with a magical sword that shot bolts of flame. He had visited the fabled forest of the wood elves and fought alongside wardancers and backwoods archers, eventually making his way down to Tilea and the Border Princes and on to Estonia. The elf had died there but his sword had been taken up by a human, or so the tales told. It had passed from father to son down the fast, fleeting generations that humans experienced.

The power of the blade had made its possessors heroes and mighty champions among humans. It had not brought them luck though. Johan Argentes, the last bearer, had become a landless wandering mercenary.

Tyrion and his brother had spent years following this long trail across the Old World, retracing Argentes’s steps, following up all rumours of his whereabouts. The trail had been lost when Argentes had set sail from Estalia aboard an explorer’s ship bound for the uttermost west. Leiber had been the ship’s captain. It had never returned to its home port and it seemed the trail was lost.

Pure chance had brought word of a shipwrecked captain called Leiber washed up in Skeggi. He had been spotted by a trading captain from House Emeraldsea who knew something of the twin’s quest and remembered the name of the lost ship’s master. It was a very long shot, but the twins had followed it up, taking passage on a trading clipper to the coast of Lustria. They had heard another rumour about a human with a fiery sword who had vanished into the interior, searching for the gold of the lost slann cities.

Eventually they had found Leiber who had witnessed Argentes’s disappearance and been the only survivor, and who brought word of Argentes’s loss, staggering out of the jungle half-mad with hunger, thirst and fever.

He had spent months making a map to Zultec and seeking to tempt accomplices with tales of a hoard of treasure big enough to fire the imagination of a hundred pirate kings.

Leiber had agreed to guide the two elves to Zultec in return for gold and their protection. The three of them had organised this expedition and followed the long trail that had led them to this accursed place.

So far, Leiber had proved to be a bold and reliable companion, but Tyrion was not sure of his friends.

Not that it mattered much at the moment; they were all in the same boat, outnumbered and far from home, seeking a ruined metropolis haunted by the last degenerate remains of the once mighty race of lizardmen who had built the place when the world was young.

Tyrion could not keep from grinning. He was hacking his way through the overgrown jungle in search of a lost alien city, where he hoped to find a legendary artefact from the dawn ages of his people.

‘Why do you have that inane smirk on your face?’ his twin asked.

‘I was just thinking that this was exactly the sort of thing we used to talk about doing back in father’s villa when we were boys.’

Teclis smiled back. It was a slow secret smile, a mere sliver like a quarter moon seen through cloud, but coming from him it was like a belly laugh from any other elf. ‘We’ve come a long way from the mountains of Cothique, brother.’

‘That is something of an understatement.’

‘I like to keep in practice at that. A talent unused rusts.’

‘Of course, I did not imagine the mosquitoes. I thought it would be vampires that tried to drink my blood and dragons that tried to bite me to death.’

‘An old swamp witch back in Skeggi told me that the mosquitoes there once drained a baby of blood while it slept. She swore to me it was true. She had seen it with her own eyes. Of course, she also swore to me that the charms she was selling would make me irresistible to women and a mighty warrior.’

‘Stranger things have happened.’

Teclis shrugged. ‘There was no magic in them, brother. Even you could have seen that with your vision.’

‘I have heard it said humans practise a different type of magic.’

‘There is only one type of magic. There are different ways of using it, true enough, but all magic draws its power from the same place and all magical objects radiate a similar aura.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘That would be an excellent idea. If you keep giving me advice about magic, I will have to start giving you my views on warfare and blade work.’

‘Let’s not stoop to absurdities,’ said Tyrion. Leiber gave the sign that it was time to halt for food.



Tyrion slapped the mosquito that had landed on the back of his hand. It exploded in a small burst of blood and flesh, leaving a faint blotch on his tanned skin.

‘How do you do that?’ Leiber asked. It continued to rain, not quite the usual monsoonal downpour that could turn tracks into streams, but a light drizzle that collected on the leaves and overflowed in a million tiny random waterfalls.

They had paused to eat and their lack of motion seemed to be drawing the insects to them. The few remaining humans lay sprawled against the trunk of a huge tree chewing on strips of dried beef. Teclis prepared his drugs, mingling the contents of two silver flasks in an alembic he had produced from inside his pack.

‘Do what?’ Tyrion replied. He looked beyond Leiber into the shadow avenues made by the great trees. He was becoming uneasy and he was not sure why, although he knew enough to trust his instincts in this matter. They had kept him alive in many places where other elves had died.

‘You always hit the buzzing little bastards. Does not matter how bad the light is, whenever one of them bites you, you kill it.’

‘So?’

‘You always kill them. Always. I have never seen you miss. I have never seen you even come close to missing or look like you are making any effort. Sometimes I never even notice the bloodsuckers until the bites swell and when I do try and hit them, the little swine are too fast for me. But they are never too fast for you.’

‘That is because I am an elf and you are a human.’ Even as he said it, Tyrion realised he was making a mistake. It was the sort of failure of diplomacy he would not normally have let happen. His only excuse was that he was tired and his mind had been on other things.

‘And you think elves are better than humans?’ There was an edge to Leiber’s words that Tyrion could not miss. There had been a lot of deaths and a lot of fear lately and they still had not found what they were looking for. Such situations had a way of becoming slowly explosive. He knew this from bitter experience with his own kind. It seemed things were no different with humans. He tried to defuse the situation with a joke.

‘Apparently we are when it comes to swatting mosquitoes.’

Leiber made a rueful grimace and took a pipe from out of the pouch on his waistband and then a flint. He walked over to Teclis’s magically created fire and lit the tobacco that he had stuffed into the bowl of the pipe with a wooden spill. He continued to look into the distance for a long moment, puffing away and then letting the smoke billow out in two streams from his nostrils. Once he had done that he turned to look Tyrion in the eye and said, ‘That is not what I meant and you know it.’

Tyrion felt his own temper rise in a way it would not normally have done. It was the heat and the humidity, he told himself, but there were other things involved as well. He was not used to being talked to this way by humans.

Did this man seriously think that there was any comparison between an elf and a human? Both races had a head and two arms and two legs. In some ways they looked quite similar. But elves lived longer, knew more, did not fall sick, and were not prey to the numerous superstitions that humans were. They were faster, more agile, more intelligent, more beautiful; superior in every possible way.

Leiber was less than a third of Tyrion’s age but already he was starting to look decrepit. His skin was lined. Some of his teeth were missing. The way he squinted told Tyrion that his eyesight was not what it had once been. He looked like an elf might look after half a millennium had passed, and only if the elf were very unlucky.

Of course Tyrion thought he was better – he was just too polite to rub it in. Leiber seemed to be questioning his right to think that way which was, to say the least, impertinent of him.

For a moment Tyrion saw the relationship between all of his people and all of the humans reflected in the way that he thought about Leiber and Leiber thought about him. He wondered if it was worthwhile trying to put his own thoughts into words and explain them to the man, but he realised that it could do no good, could cause only friction. Leiber would simply take it as an insult. Perhaps he would be right to.

After all, the elves were a dying race and it looked like humans would inherit the world. Their civilisation was becoming more powerful by the year, spreading across the globe in an irresistible wave. Already there were probably more humans in the city of Lothern than there were elves, and Lothern was by far the most populous city in elvendom.

He told himself that the ability to breed quickly and irresponsibly was not exactly a sign that the humans were the equals of the elves. They could not create art the way the elves could. They did not know magic the way the elves did. They were not the intellectual equals of the people of Ulthuan.

But did that really matter in the eyes of the gods?

The elves were becoming extinct. The humans were not. Did that mean they were simply better adapted to living in this new and dreadful world? Did it mean that their gods were more powerful than the elven gods? Did it mean anything at all or was he simply speculating uselessly?

This was not really any of his business. He was a warrior not a philosopher. It was his duty to guard his people and he would do that to the best of his ability until the day that he died. He did not have any answers. He would need to leave that to people like his brother. And he was not sure that Teclis could get any better answers than he could himself.

‘Do you think that we are better than you?’ Tyrion asked, because he could not think of anything else to say.

‘You are certainly better than we are at killing mosquitoes, your honour, that’s for sure and I suspect that you are much better at killing almost anything. You have that look about you. And you’re a damn sight prettier than I am, that’s for sure. But I am not sure that you’re a better man than me.’

‘I am not a man at all,’ said Tyrion.

‘That’s not what I meant. Are you braver than me? Are you morally superior? Or were you just born luckier? I sometimes think that the noble in the big castle on the hill is not a better man than the peasant he looks down on. He was just born into better circumstances – ones that ensured that he got better food, a better education and better training with weapons, as well as the weapons themselves.’

Tyrion could see that Leiber was talking about something he had given a lot of thought to. This was a matter that had deeply troubled the human for a long time. He was not really talking about the relationship between men and elves anymore – he was talking about the way humans lived, the way he himself had lived.

‘Why do you ask me this?’ Tyrion asked.

‘Can you see what I’m saying, Prince Tyrion? Can you see what I’m getting at? In my life I have met a lot of noblemen and a lot of them have looked down on me. Argentes for one. And the truth of the matter is that he was not any cleverer than I was, nor any braver nor any better. In the end, he is dead and I am still here. Who is to say who the better man is now?’

Tyrion understood the point being made only too well. And perhaps Leiber was right to make it. Perhaps it was simply the fact that Tyrion had been born in a different place to a different people that made him feel superior.

‘I am still an elf, and you’re still human. It does not matter what either of us think about that, the world remains the same.’

‘Does it though, Prince Tyrion? The world is changing. Who knows what the coming centuries will bring?’

‘Most likely I will still be here to see. Will you?’

Leiber did not have an answer for that. Tyrion had not expected him to. Leiber took another puff on his pipe and regarded Tyrion balefully for a moment, then he smiled and laughed out loud.

‘I should have known I could not get the better of an elf in an argument.’



Teclis took a moment away from concentrating on mixing his potions to listen to what his brother was talking about with Leiber. He needed to concentrate. Like his sight, his hearing was not good at the best of times, and the spell he used to keep the insects and the jungle heat and humidity at bay made it even worse. It flattened out all sound as if he had placed a layer of beeswax in his ears.

He could see that Tyrion was troubled by the human’s words and was giving serious thought to the matter, but his brother was not capable of looking beyond the common prejudice against humans.

Tyrion really did believe himself to be superior to the human and had ample empirical evidence to back this up. By almost any measure, he could prove himself to be better than the man. He was even prepared to admit it to the human when pushed. What he did not see was the simple fact that he was judging the matter by standards set by himself and other elves.

Teclis added a pinch of saltpetre and powdered gryphon bone to the mix and smiled sourly. The potion smelled infernal but it was necessary for keeping his strength up and not just his strength. Without these medicines his sight and hearing would be even worse than they were now. He would be more or less blind and deaf as well as decrepit.

Of course, elves were better looking than humans by any standards. Of course, they were more knowledgeable about lore. Of course, elves were better at all the things that elves were good at than humans were. It was a competition in which all of the rules were made by the elves and all of them reflected to their own advantage.

No elf bothered to think that there might be things that humans knew that elves did not. No elf ever was prepared to admit that already the humans occupied and controlled a greater portion of the globe than the elves ever had and that this process was only likely to continue.

All of the elves imagined that just because they lived longer they enjoyed more favour in the eyes of the gods. Teclis felt sure that humans could judge this contest by their own standards and feel superior to elves if they really wanted to; it was just that so far they had not done so. They were still used to thinking of elves as the Elder Race. They were still dazzled by beauty and culture and magic. But that would not last.

One day, and that day could not be that far off, the humans would see beyond glamour and begin to judge the elves as they deserved to be judged. They would see that the elves were not really so much better than they were, after all.

They would see that the elves were split into two warring factions. They were, in their own way, just as divided as the human realms. Perhaps more so. He could not think of any human kingdoms that were involved in so bitter a fratricidal struggle as Ulthuan and Naggaroth. Or which had been fought for so long.

And the humans did not seem to suffer from the madness that plagued the elves: the strange obsessions, the lust for power, the furious desire to acquire knowledge and magical lore that the elves suffered from.

Of course, these things did affect humans, but not with the same intensity as they affected elves. Some of his own kindred would see that as proof of superiority. The elves felt things more keenly, appreciated things more and moved through the world with much more intensity than humans could.

Teclis was not at all sure that this did make them superior. It merely made them different. In fact, there were times when he believed that the excessive nature of their temperament was a definite disadvantage. They were capable of focusing on one thing exclusively to the point where they would miss other more important things.

He finished swirling his medicine and drank it down. It was bitter and the aftertaste tingled on his tongue. He braced himself for the dizziness he was going to feel as it first took effect.

He thought with some bitterness about his own father, lost in his obsessive pursuit of the secrets of the dragon armour of Aenarion. Prince Arathion had neglected his own children and his own estates and allowed the fortunes of his ancient family to fall into decline as he worked on his own personal obsessions. If Tyrion had not rescued the family finances with his ventures into piracy and trading, they would most likely be living in the gutter now or on the charity of their wealthy Emeraldsea relatives.

There had been times in his childhood when Teclis suspected he had almost died because his father was more interested in the secrets of ancient sorcery than he was in the well-being of his children. And yet, Teclis could not find it in himself to blame his father. He understood only too well the burning hunger that consumed him. He felt the same way about his own pursuit of magical knowledge.

Look at him now – he had followed the trail of an ancient artefact halfway round the world simply because it promised to reveal to him some secrets of how it had been created. He’d undergone a great deal of personal discomfort and boredom, and not a little danger, in pursuit of that knowledge and he’d done it without a second thought.

Of course, he had other reasons. He wanted to help his brother find a weapon that might help him survive when the daemon that pursued them caught up with them, as Teclis feared it inevitably would.

And he also thought that if he could locate the blade and penetrate its mysteries he might find something that would help his father with his own magical research. He should be the last one to blame elves for their obsession; he knew that only too well. But he could not help but feel that elves judged themselves too favourably and humans not favourably enough.

And even knowing this he could not help but look at Leiber and his brother and judge his own kin as the better of the two. He was not immune to the normal prejudices but, at least, he was aware of the fact that he suffered from them.

And he knew the dangers of concentrating too much on one thing, while ignoring his surroundings. Out there innumerable dangers lurked. They might not be as lucky as they had been this time when the next attack came.

Was it the effects of the medicine or was something disturbing those nearby bushes? Even as the thought occurred to him, a long-snouted, tooth-filled monstrous head emerged from the undergrowth.

‘Watch out!’ Leiber shouted. ‘We’ve got company.’

They were under attack.