Sword of Caledor

Chapter THREE





Wet leaves slapped Tyrion in the face, obscuring his vision. Something heavy and scaly and rain-slick slammed into him. Its momentum bowled him over.

Instinctively, he let himself go with the flow of the motion. Landing on his back in the soggy mulch, he kept rolling and kicked out with his feet, pushing the thing off.

Fang-filled jaws snapped shut in front of his face. Something slammed into his leg with bruising force. He caught sight of something green and vaguely humanoid. He continued his roll and somersaulted upright.

On his feet now, blade in hand, Tyrion sought enemies.

His attacker disappeared into the undergrowth. It looked like a big humanoid lizard, running upright, balancing itself with its long tail. The head was something like that of a dragon, with enormous powerful jaws and massive teeth that looked easily capable of tearing flesh right to the bone.

It was one of the legendary servants of the slann. A warrior of some sort, although very primitively armed. In one scaly hand it clutched a stone axe tipped with coloured feathers. Only luck had stopped the thing from braining him. As he watched, the thing’s skin changed colour, scaly patterns altering so that it blended in with its surroundings. That chameleon-like camouflage was what had allowed it to get so close.

Tyrion’s heart beat faster. His breathing deepened. He had a sense that he was lucky to be alive. Judging from the crunching noises nearby some of his own people had not been so lucky.

He looked around to see how Teclis was doing.

The glow of a protective spell surrounded his brother. A group of the lizardmen circled him, snapping at him with their massive jaws and striking at him with their axes. His alchemical gear lay discarded at his feet. His fire was scattered. So far, Teclis’s spells had warded off their blows but it was only a matter of time before they managed to do him some harm.

Tyrion sprang forward, lashing out with his sword. His first blow separated the head from one lizardman’s body. His blade caught another in the chest. Greenish blood flowed and the air took on an odd coppery tang.

The lizardman shrieked, the sound of its voice like the hissing of a boiling kettle until the note went too high to be audible to his ears. Tyrion twisted his blade, turning it until it grated against rib. He leaned forward, hoping to hit the heart but not sure of the layout of the internal organs that a lizardman might possess.

Of one thing he was certain – he was causing his victim a great deal of pain, judging by the way it screeched. Its tail curled around, threatening to hit him with the force of a bludgeon. He leapt over the blow, even as two of the lizardman’s companions closed in from either side.

Tyrion caught one in the throat with his sword, where the windpipe ought to be. Something crunched under the blow and the lizardman fell backwards, mouth open in a silent scream, no sound being emitted from its broken voice box, then the pommel of his blade connected with the snout of the other lizardman with sickening force. It too halted momentarily, stunned.

Tyrion split its skull with his sword and then wheeled to stab the other as it clutched at its slashed throat.

With the force of a striking thunderbolt he smashed into the melee, dancing through the swirl of combat with impossible grace. Every time he struck a lizardman fell. Within heartbeats he had turned the course of the battle and slaughtered half a dozen more of the cold-blooded ones. The rest of them fled off into the undergrowth, shrieking and bellowing like beasts.

Something flickered in the corner of his vision. A dart erupted from the bushes heading straight at him with eye-blurring velocity. He plucked it from the air, careful to avoid its sharpened obsidian point. He had no doubt that the black goo smeared on the blade was a deadly poison. He hurled the thing point first into the bushes from which it had come, but whatever had fired it was gone. The dart stuck quivering in the bole of a great tree.

Around him, the humans went around finishing off the wounded lizardmen, smashing their skulls or stabbing them through the eye or heart. They were brutal, driven by fear.

A lot of their cruelty came from that fear. Tyrion disliked this. He enjoyed violence but he had never understood this need to abuse defeated foes that many people had. He supposed one thing bred the other. Fear was parent to cruelty.

He looked over to make sure that Teclis was unharmed. The wizard stood there, glaring around him, looking for a target for his spells. The battle had been fought so quickly that he had had no chance to unleash his power.

Tyrion could tell that he was frustrated by that and he could understand why. His brother did not like to feel powerless in any situation – he had experienced too much of that in their youths.

‘They are gone,’ Tyrion said. ‘For the moment.’

‘How can you be certain of that?’ Teclis asked.

‘I can’t,’ said Tyrion. ‘But normally when you kill things to the point where they run away, they don’t come back quickly. Of course, with these slann creatures you can never be sure. They are too alien.’

‘Those were skinks,’ said Teclis. ‘That’s what they were called. According to the Chronicles of Beltharius, they are servants of the slann, not the slann themselves.’

‘I’ll take your word for that,’ said Tyrion.

‘You would do well to do so,’ said Teclis. His brother sounded keen to assert himself, even if only by displaying superior knowledge. ‘Beltharius is the only elf to have left any records of visiting an actual lizardman city, and he barely survived that.’

Beltharius was the captain of the explorers who had visited the Golden Pyramid of Pahuax back in the reign of Bel Shanaar. He had been one of the few to fight his way out of the city when the great toad-god that ruled it had turned nasty.

The tale was well known, but his brother had spent a great deal of time in the library at Hoeth, studying the actual journals Beltharius had kept. Before they had made this trip he had studied every scrap of information the elves had ever compiled about the jungles of Lustria and its inhabitants. With his usual thoroughness he had turned himself into an expert on the matter.

Tyrion glanced around to see how the humans were doing. One of them was on the ground, dead, his skull crushed by one of those stone axes. It had been left buried in his forehead.

‘Bastards!’ Leiber said. ‘Those scaly bastards killed him. They killed Fritz.’

‘These lands are sacred to them,’ said Teclis.

Tyrion shook his head. This was not the sort of thing that Teclis ought to be saying to the humans right now. They were upset by the loss of their comrade and they were on edge, ready for violence. It would not take much to turn them against the elves, or cause a violent argument and Tyrion had no great wish to kill the humans and still less of a desire to be killed by them.

‘We need to move on,’ said Tyrion.

‘We need to bury Fritz,’ said Leiber.

‘We could all die if we don’t get out of this place,’ said Tyrion. ‘Those skinks will be back with friends soon, and there will be a lot more of them than us.’

Leiber looked as if he wanted to argue but he could see the sense of Tyrion’s words. His companions looked torn between their anger and their fear. The way Fritz’s dead eyes stared at the sky was a compelling argument for Tyrion’s case. None of them wanted to end up that way. Heads nodded.

‘Dead men spend no gold,’ said Teclis sardonically. Tyrion could have cursed him. Now was not the time for his gallows humour, but that argument too held considerable force.

‘All right, let’s go get us some treasure,’ said Leiber. There was a note of aggression in his voice that Tyrion did not like at all. It was possible that before too long it would not just be the skinks that would be numbered among their enemies.



The rain poured down, turning the track to flowing mud. It splattered off the leaves and splashed down from the giant trees in small waterfalls and the noise of it covered the normal small sounds of the surrounding woods.

Tyrion envied his brother’s magic even more. His tunic was soaked. His hair was plastered against his skull. The insides of his boots squelched. The rain did not touch Teclis. It stopped a finger’s breadth from his form, leaving him looking dry and calm.

Leiber spluttered and coughed as he led them along the track. Red mud stuck to his bare feet and made it look as if he was wearing a glistening set of magical stockings. The other humans tramped along with slumped shoulders and miserable expressions in their eyes. They looked as if they wanted to be anywhere but here.

The ruins emerged slowly from the jungle. At first Tyrion was not sure that they were not simply large outcroppings or hills. It took some effort to discern the shapes of the tumbled down buildings in the undergrowth, but if he looked closely, he could see lichen-blotched, time-eroded statues and the chipped remains of monstrous stone blocks partially buried in moss and peaty earth. Great trees had grown around them and sometimes through them, the power of their long slow growth tumbling even the heavy stonework.

‘There must have been an earthquake here,’ Tyrion said in elvish to Teclis. His twin looked thoughtful.

‘Or monstrously powerful sorcery. They say the forces of Chaos struck these cities with mighty magics during the first incursion. For a long time, the slann and their lizardmen slaves bore the brunt of the Dark Gods’ attacks.’

The ground squelched underfoot. It was as if they were moving through the limits of a great swamp.

‘Flooded?’ Tyrion asked.

Teclis nodded. ‘Seems most likely.’

‘Let’s hope the whole city is not under water then.’

‘It would not be the first slann city to be so.’

‘You do not reassure me, brother.’

‘We still have to find what we came here for,’ said Teclis. ‘We still need to find the sword.’

Tyrion sprang upwards and grabbed a vine. It was wet and slippery, but he was agile even by the standards of elves and he had soon pulled himself up into the lower branches of the trees. From there he used his dagger as a piton and climbed as high as he could go.

He was hoping for a good view of his surroundings, and even through the downpour he managed one. Although these trees were not as tall as some of the millennia old giants of the deep forest, they were still far taller than the mast of an ocean-going ship. What he saw was as awesome as it was disheartening.

They had found Zultec.

The old slann city stretched to the horizon. Less than a league away were a number of ziggurats, partially overgrown but the size of small hills. They had been hidden by the jungle until he climbed above it. He counted at least a score and gave up. He knew that there would most likely be smaller ruins hidden among the wreckage. They had found the city but it might take years to search it for what they sought, assuming it was even there. He scrambled back down the tree and told Teclis what he had seen. His brother smiled. He did not look at all put out by Tyrion’s discovery.

‘Zultec is not all that huge by the standards of slann temple cities,’ he said. ‘This was a mere satellite town of Pahuax according to Beltharius.’

‘If this was a small town, their cities must be gigantic indeed,’ said Tyrion.

‘They are.’

‘What now, brother?’

‘You have shown what brawn and eyes can do here. I will show you the uses magic can be put to.’

‘I would be grateful if you could,’ Tyrion said. ‘I do not fancy spending the rest of my life searching this place for Sunfang. There is a woman in Lothern I am anxious to get back to.’

‘I am not so sure her husband will be that keen,’ said Teclis.

Tyrion shrugged. One of the reasons they had set out on this quest was to let that particular scandal die down. Lady Valeria’s husband was a powerful ally of House Emeraldsea and he doted on her the way she doted on Tyrion. A duel would not have done anyone any good. It would have damaged a powerful faction in politics.

The humans were looking at them again, wondering what they were saying. Tyrion turned to them and said, ‘It is Zultec, no doubt about it. Unless there is another huge slann city we have not heard of hereabouts.’

He turned to Teclis and said in elvish, ‘Sorry, I meant to say small slann village.’

‘I told you we would find it, didn’t I?’ Despite the wet misery of the rain, and the sunken look of their surroundings, Leiber could not keep the triumph from his voice. He sounded like a man who had come close to realising a lifelong dream. Tyrion could not deny the human his moment of triumph.

‘You were right, Leiber,’ he said.

Leiber smiled again, showing his missing teeth and blackened stumps. ‘We are all rich, lads,’ he said. ‘The slann gold is almost ours.’

There was nothing like the prospect of wealth for cheering humans up, Tyrion thought. Even soaked to the skin and swatting at mosquitoes, they looked happy at Leiber’s announcement and ready to run off into the nearest ruins to seek for treasure. Tyrion could not really blame them. For the most part their lives were short and miserable and gold helped humans find comfort in their hovels.

‘The really big pyramids start about half a league away,’ Tyrion told them, to add to the good cheer.

‘What about the monsters that attacked you the last time you were here?’ Teclis asked, always ready to spread a little gloom when things started to get too light-hearted.

Leiber nodded at this. ‘We should move slowly and cautiously and try not to raise any ruckus. Once we find the gold we’ll make a grab for it and do a runner.’

‘You are supposed to help us find what we are looking for. That’s what you are getting paid for,’ said Teclis.

‘That’s what I meant,’ said Leiber. ‘We’re all looking for treasure.’

‘We’re looking for a very specific treasure,’ said Tyrion. ‘And we won’t be leaving until we find it.’

‘Argentes died here. His burning sword will be here still. You’ll find it.’

‘Let us hope so,’ said Tyrion. ‘And let us hope no lizardman has made off with it. That will make finding it a lot harder.’

That did not lighten the mood any either, Tyrion thought. Maybe he was acquiring some of Teclis’s talent for depressing people. The humans looked at him as if he had just announced a plan to start cutting off their noses one at a time.

‘You might never leave if the lizards find you,’ said Leiber. It was a good point.

‘We’ll all do better if we stick together,’ Teclis said.

‘No lie there,’ said Leiber. ‘We could all leave our bones bleaching in this jungle if we are not careful.’

‘Can you remember where Argentes fell?’ Teclis asked. There was an urgency in his voice too now. He was excited by the fact they were close to their goal.

‘It was a lot closer to the centre, I think, in a pyramid much bigger than these ones,’ Leiber said.

‘Then we’d better get moving.’



They made their way through the streets of Zultec, pushing through the undergrowth and hacking their way through the bushes when they became too dense. All of them were nervous now as well as excited. All of them feared that death might spring upon them from the shadows at any time, and all of them held themselves ready to meet that threat. It would be a terrible thing to be slain so close to their goal.

Tyrion studied their surroundings. It would be an excellent setting for an ambush. The jungle and the ruins of ancient buildings provided so much cover. The sound of the rain would drown out any stealthy approach made by aggressors, aided and abetted by the natural noises of the jungle itself – the chattering of the monkeys, the screaming of the birds, the distant roar of the big predatory carnosaurs as they sought prey.

He did not like this place.

It had an atmosphere to it that made him uneasy and there were very few places in this world that had that effect on him. He was an elf; he was used to living in places that had an aura of antiquity. But they had been built by his own people.

This was more ancient than any place in Ulthuan and it had not been built by anything remotely like the elves. Minds, alien almost beyond his comprehension, had conceived the strange geometry of the architecture. He could look at structures created by humans and dwarfs and he could see that they were the product of a sensibility at least close to his own. Such was not the case here.

These buildings have been created by beings that thought in a very different way, according to a very different system. There was a pattern here but he could just not tell what it was. He doubted that he ever would be able to.

It had something to do with numbers. The builders had obviously been obsessed by them. If he counted the number of statues on the sides of each building, as he found himself unconsciously doing, he got the sense that they fitted into some numerical pattern, although he could not tell what that pattern was. He suspected it had something to do with basic mathematical formulae, but he could not tell what that formula was.

Perhaps Teclis could; he had a gift for solving such puzzles. His mind was more flexible. Perhaps he could gain some insight into the minds of the alien creatures who had built this place.

Looking at his brother, he was sure that Teclis was gnawing away at the problem. He had a look on his face that Tyrion recognised; he was confronted with something that he did not understand but he was determined to do so. If anyone could get to the bottom of this mystery, Teclis could. All it would take was time, and, being elves, they had plenty of that.

The humans’ expressions were very revealing too. Leiber resembled a man on the verge of religious conversion. He was very close to achieving some long-held dream. He looked excited and intense. His gaze darted around their surroundings, seeming to take everything in, as if he wanted to memorise every single detail of every single building and every single object that they encountered.

The other men simply looked scared and greedy and torn between those two emotions. They too were excited to be here, but would have preferred to be somewhere else. They were dwarfed by the sheer scale of their surroundings, by these monumental, crumbling ruins emerging from the sticky humid jungle.

If he felt out of place here, Tyrion thought, what must these humans be thinking? Their civilisation was much younger than the elves and they believed the ancient slann to be daemons, in the same way that they believed almost every race but themselves to be daemons or descended from them. They thought that this was a place in which they could lose their souls if they died here. Maybe they were right. Who knew what was possible with the magic of the ancients?

Tyrion was astonished by their bravery. He never usually gave much thought to courage. He never really felt much fear himself, merely some prodding instinct which told him that his survival was in question and that he had better do something about it.

What must it be like to live with an emotion that could leave you paralysed at the moment of maximum danger?

He knew he was unusual even among elves for his inability to feel fear. Teclis certainly knew what it was and his friends back home in Ulthuan did too. He sometimes felt that there must be something missing in him, when he could not share in so common an emotion.

Perhaps it was all part of the curse of being descended from Aenarion. Perhaps this was the legacy that his great ancestor had passed on to him, like the killing rages that sometimes overwhelmed him in the heat of battle. It was said that Aenarion had felt no fear, that he had been willing to risk his life without a second thought on behalf of his people and his friends.

Tyrion pushed that thought to one side; he did not like to compare himself to Aenarion in any way. Too many other people were already doing that.

Everyone told him how much he looked like the great statue of Aenarion in Lothern harbour although he had never been able to see the resemblance himself. And back home in the city of Lothern and in other parts of the kingdoms, there were already those who compared him to the legendary Phoenix King.

That he and Teclis had defeated the Keeper of Secrets N’Kari had made him something of a celebrity among the elves. And certainly their deeds since they had overcome that potent daemon had won them a great deal of fame.

They had travelled to the four corners of the world while still very young, searching for Sunfang and ancient magical knowledge. Tyrion had already taken a distinguished part in several famous battles. He had raided the coasts of Naggaroth and sailed as far as the Citadel of the Dawn. He had been victorious in scores of duels and survived numerous attempts on his life. He was talked about in every corner of Ulthuan and many places beyond wherever elves gathered.

He had already heard himself mentioned as a potential candidate for the next Phoenix King even though Finubar’s reign had only just begun less than two centuries ago. It was a truism of politics that the election of the next Phoenix King began with the coronation of the current one but it was one thing to listen to those platitudes, it was another thing entirely to find yourself the subject of one of them.

He smiled. Perhaps he was deceiving even himself. Perhaps he had believed them all along. Perhaps this was the reason why he was seeking Aenarion’s sword. It would be another link in the chain that connected him with his ancestor in the public mind, and in politics that could be a very important thing indeed.

He admitted it. It was certainly possible that one of the reasons he was here was to advance his political career.

What young male did not dream of becoming Phoenix King?

In most of the cases it was an empty dream but Tyrion knew that this was not so for himself. He had the potential to be a candidate backed by one of the great merchant houses of Lothern. If he acquired sufficient acclaim from his adventures, that would count for a great deal with many others who had some say in the process of selection. After all, had not Finubar himself built his reputation on his deeds in the Old World?

He shook his head; it was funny how these ideas intruded into your mind in the strangest of places. Here he was in the ruins of an ancient city that had been destroyed while Lothern had been a collection of small wooden huts around an empty bay and he was thinking about the consequences of his actions here when he got back home.

He forced himself to concentrate on his surroundings. None of these speculations would matter if he was cut down by some monster’s blade here in Zultec.

They passed on through the shadows of the titanic stone buildings, under the glare of massive stylised heads that looked as if they were modelled on some bizarre combination of human, daemon and toad. They moved along massive causeways which ran through gigantic ponds, in whose murky waters strange and frightening shapes swam.

A shadow fell upon them. Looking up Tyrion saw a monstrous bat-winged flying lizard pass overhead. It screeched once as if in warning and then soared off, rising on the thermals until it was merely a distant point that vanished into the clouds. Tyrion wondered why it had not attacked them. Perhaps it was not hungry. Or perhaps it was spying on them for the benefit of some unseen master.

‘I see an opening here,’ said Teclis, pointing to an entrance that had appeared in the side of a crumbling step pyramid they had just passed. ‘Let us get out of the rain and I will try a divination.’

The humans looked worried, as if he had just announced he was going to summon a daemon. Tyrion hoped there was not going to be any trouble.