Part 1 (1/2)

The Commanding Stone.

The Osserian Saga.

David Forbes.

Prologue.

The small coffin swayed gently as it descended into the grave. The earth is swallowing him up. The grave looked like a raw, open wound, a physical reminder of the pain Tyne Fedron felt in his soul at the loss of his youngest brother.

Tremmel's grave was next to his brother Rukee's, who had died less than a year earlier. Anger and outrage roiled through Tyne's guts as he thought about Tremmel's death at the hands of the thing that had risen from the Bronze Demon Hills. Tyne himself had not seen the demon, but Tremmel had witnessed the crimson lightning that had opened a hole in the ground, out of which the demon had come. Tremmel had fled at the sight, frightened out of his mind, but for some reason Rukee had stayed. And died for it. When they found him, there was no wound upon his body, but dead he was, cold and stiff, his eyes open and staring.

It had taken a long time to get the full story from Tremmel. The youngest of the Fedron boys was so frightened he could not speak; when he finally found his voice a day later, all that emerged was a terrible keening sound mixed with Rukee's name.

Tyne had gone in search of Rukee before Tremmel recovered. He found his brother's body just off the road that led past the Bronze Demon Hills, near old man Hilagren's farm. Tyne had dimly taken note of the smoldering hole in the side of one of the hills, but in his grief he gave it no more thought. With the help of his friends Marchus and Draen, who had accompanied him on his search, he brought Rukee's body back to their mother.

Loesta Fedron had lost a husband four years past, but had managed to keep the family farm going with the help of her sons and a gift of gold coins from her brother Brulchee, a merchant who dealt in furs throughout Formale. After her husband's drowning death in the Uron River, Loesta refused a number of suitors who pursued her hand. She confided to her oldest son Tyne that they wanted either her land, a woman for their beds, or both, and she would be d.a.m.ned if she would spit on her husband's memory by giving such weak men what they wanted.

”We are Helcareans,” she told him. ”The blood of Helca flows in our veins. We're descended from mighty warriors of old, men who placed their boot heels on every kingdom in Osseria and forged an empire from the struggling, kicking lot of them. Never forget that. We are a strong people, the strongest in the world. We can't act weak. We can't be weak. That's why the empire fell. Because weak men with no vision, no purpose, came to rule it. Mark my words, Tyne, the empire will rise again one day, but only if we are strong enough to show we are worthy of it.”

When Tremmel recovered enough to tell them what had happened to Rukee, Tyne immediately led a group of men from the nearby homesteads and the town of Konfatine to the Bronze Demon Hills. The hole in the hillside was still there, mocking him. He'd marched to it without hesitation while the others faltered, fearing the hills and the legends surrounding them. Weak men, he realized. Weak and unworthy of their heritage, their birthright.

His own display of courage-he reached the hole alone, carrying only a long hunting knife-shamed the other men into following. When they reached him, they spread out around the yawning pit, a shaft into the hill so deep its bottom was swallowed in inky blackness. Twilight was settling over the land, and none of them wanted to be there when night came.

”Marchus, light a torch,” he said. He dropped the flaming brand into the opening. It fell twenty feet through charred dirt, rock, and clay before coming to rest on the stone floor of a tunnel.

”G.o.ds preserve us,” muttered Draen. ”What is that down there?”

”We're going to find out,” said Tyne. ”Give me some rope.”

”You're not going...” Marchus could not finish. In that moment, Tyne despised his friend for his cowardice.

”Of course I am,” said Tyne. ”Whatever killed Rukee came from there. And now it's up here, with us. Maybe there's something down there that can tell us what it is or how to kill it. Someone stay up here to keep watch and help with the rope. The rest are coming with me.” His tone made it clear there would be no discussion or debate.

He expected half of them to turn and run home like whipped dogs, but to his surprise they obeyed him. Even Marchus. The youngest of them, a wide-eyed boy of thirteen named Iskarea, remained above ground.

After securing a rope to the black, twisted trunk of a nearby tree, they followed Tyne into the pit.

Later, Tyne could recall little of what they found underground, as if something in the very air prevented him from retaining what he saw. The others suffered from a similar lack of memory. What remained were impressions punctuated with vivid images, some of which made little sense to them. Tyne's memory of that time was very much like a dream.

He remembered long tunnels that twisted throughout the hills like a labyrinth, broken at regular intervals by stairs that led deeper and deeper into the earth. Smaller tunnels branched off into a blackness so deep, so impenetrable, that even he dared not enter them. The very air in those pa.s.sages seemed to emanate threat and danger; his blood ran cold just to stand at the entrance to them, and he felt that if he were to take but a few more steps forward, his heart would burst within his ribs. The torch he thrust into the first such pa.s.sage they reached guttered and nearly failed before he withdrew it, as if some invisible presence were hungry for its light and heat.

He remembered strange glyphs and symbols carved upon the walls, though he could not recall any details of them. The impression they left upon him was one of wrongness, of things carved by inhuman hands for purposes dark and unknowable.

One of his clearer memories was of Marchus rubbing his temple and muttering, ”There's something trying to get into my head.”

”What are you talking about?” asked Draen.

”Whispers...something talking to me...” Marchus sounded almost drunk, and he was unsteady on his feet.

”Shut up,” said Kargin, the iron smith from Konfatine. ”I don't hear nothin'.”

Tyne worried that in this haunted place something unsavory was indeed happening to Marchus. ”Can you understand what the whispers are saying?”

”Shut up!” shouted Kargin. ”There ain't no b.l.o.o.d.y whispers!”

Marchus shook his head and mumbled something Tyne did not understand. Tyne was about to ask him to repeat himself when they turned a corner and came across ma.s.sive double doors fas.h.i.+oned from black stone, each at least a foot thick. The doors had been thrown open from within, but Tyne could see nothing of whatever lay beyond them.

He drew a breath and crossed the threshold.

Inside he found a round room whose walls were covered with more of the strange symbols. He sensed a kind of energy radiating from them, that the alien words or ideas they conveyed were drenched with power.

His torchlight fell upon a ma.s.sive slab in the center of the room. A stone table a dozen feet long and half that in width, with the impression of a ma.s.sive body on it, an area darkened relative to the rest of the stone.

He trembled with fury as he stared at the resting place of the demon that had killed his brother. Why had it awakened? Why now?

”This is not a place made by men,” whispered Draen. ”It's cursed, d.a.m.ned. We should leave before-”

Marchus let out a wordless howl of pain and doubled over, clutching his head. His scream was almost painfully loud in the closed s.p.a.ce. ”Make them stop, make them stop!”

He shrieked and raised his head. Tyne gasped. Marchus's eyes were bleeding. No mere trickles of blood, but thick runnels, as if his eyes had been skewered.

Marchus began to thrash, and Tyne saw that his ears were bleeding as well. In the flickering torchlight it was a ghastly, nightmarish scene.

Marchus s.h.i.+fted his knife in his hand. Tyne had a sudden premonition of what was about to happen. ”Hold him down!” he shouted.

But it was too late. Marchus drove the knife into his ear with incredible force. It penetrated his skull nearly to the hilt; the tip punched out the other side of his face in a hot spray of blood.

Draen and several others screamed in horror. Tyne rushed forward and caught Marchus's convulsing body before he struck the floor. Tyne heard himself calling Marchus's name over and over, but his voice sounded distant, dreamlike, the flimsy wail of a ghost.

He remembered nothing of their journey out of the tunnels beneath the hills. His next recollection was climbing from the pit, covered in Marchus's blood, burning with a desire to kill the thing that had murdered his brother and now his friend. The desire was so strong, so deep, he wondered if he would ever feel anything else again.

And now he was burying his youngest brother next to Rukee, not far from Marchus's grave. He wondered how the G.o.ds could be so cruel. Tremmel had survived his encounter with the demon, only to be struck down by blood fever. He lingered for two unbearable weeks, his small body wracked with convulsions that grew so violent he broke his arms and several ribs with his thras.h.i.+ngs. The membranes along his gums, fingernails, and r.e.c.t.u.m had all turned black, thinned, then bled. Toward the end, the amount of blood was so great they could not clean it away fast enough. They could only try to hold him down while he convulsed and screamed, lying in a stinking pool of his own dark blood and waste.

Losing yet another son, and in such a terrible way, was too much for even Loesta Fedron to bear. Something inside her broke when Tremmel drew his last breath. She'd hardly spoken since. She shuffled around their house like an undead creature of legend, as if the very things that made her human had been extinguished like a snuffed candle, leaving an empty husk that continued to act alive through inertia alone.

The small coffin reached the bottom of the grave and settled into its place of eternal rest. Tyne stood next to his mother with his arm around her shoulders. He held her tightly; without his support, he feared she would slump to the ground. She made soft whimpering noises as she stared at the coffin. Tyne did not think she was aware of what she was doing, or anyone around her.

”Tremmel, oh my Tremmel...” His mother barely moved her lips to speak, and it took Tyne a moment to understand what she was saying.

A week pa.s.sed. It was strangely quiet without Tremmel's constant screams and shrieks. Tyne dreamed of the Bronze Demon Hills and the nightmare tunnels they had found beneath them. He woke often after dreaming of Marchus driving his knife into his ear, or seeing some vast dark shape lying upon the stone table in the darkness, about to stir to life.

”Mama, I'm leaving,” he announced one morning. Loesta Fedron was standing outside their thatch-roofed house, staring blankly into the distance. He did not know how long she'd been there. He found her in odd places more and more, standing still as a scarecrow or slumped against a wall or post, her head down as if she'd fallen asleep on her feet.

She did not look at him. He moved so he was directly in front of her, but he could see that she was not aware of his presence. Her eyes stared through him at something he could not see. A part of his heart broke then as he thought about all he had lost; but another part hardened, driven by overwhelming anger and rage at what had happened to his family.

”I'm going to go find the thing that killed Rukee and I'm going to kill it,” he said. ”I know we went looking after he died, but it was long gone, and we didn't go far enough. That won't stop me now. I'll go as far as I have to.” He took her hands. They were cold, rigid, as if carved from stone. She did not return his grip.