Bane of Malekith (Tyrion and Teclis Book 3) by William King

Author:William King [King, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

She walked along a beach of black sand. Black gulls shrieked overhead, sometimes coming to rest on oddly shaped dunes. It took her a few moments to realise that the dunes were made of skulls, bones and ancient rotting armour. She was looking for something or someone she had lost a long time ago. She had been looking for ages and she had not found it. She feared she never would, no matter how hard she tried.

‘Morathi…’ The voice might have been the cold wind that blew in from the sea; it was just as monotonous, just as cold and just as cutting. Her cloak fluttered in the wind. A strand of her curly black hair escaped from beneath her hood. She turned around and could not see who spoke.

‘Morathi…’ She glanced back over her shoulder and still no one was there. Perhaps it was a ghost who taunted her. This was a haunted land. She felt the nearness of the Black Sword. It was a hideous presence, terrifying in its fatal potential and yet oddly reassuring. It reminded her of Aenarion. Its aura had always marked his presence. He had not been separated from the weapon in all the time she had known him.

Perhaps that was what brought her here so often. Perhaps something of him still lingered, unable to part from the blade even in death. She felt a certain bitterness. She had always thought the blade was more his mistress than she was. It was a more terrible rival than any mere elf woman could have been.

‘Morathi…’ She thought she had identified the source of the voice now, and began to follow it through the dunes of bones and wreckage, determined to confront whoever was its source and make it pay for mocking her.

She found him standing amid the rubble of some ancient broken shrine. The stone face of Khaela Mensha Khaine looked down upon him as he studied his reflection in the stagnant, scummy waters of the font. His back was to her but even before he turned to face her, she knew him.

His skin was near translucent. The muscles writhed below it like worms in a corpse. His eyes were mere pools of black light. His fingers were claws. He looked like an animated skeleton smeared with a thin layer of flesh. The expression on his face was a calm madness personified.

‘Death does not agree with you, Caledor,’ Morathi said. His lips quirked in a quiet, mad smile.

‘I did not need you to tell me that, Morathi. He tells me that himself.’ She studied him closely. His limbs twitched. He licked his lips. He looked shrunken and twisted and lonely.

‘You have gone mad, old ghost. Avaunt, begone and trouble my dreams no more.’

‘This is more than a dream, Morathi. You know that. You sleep surrounded by wards to shield your thoughts. And yet I am here. Why do you think that is?’

‘You grow lonely in your dotage, perhaps.’

‘You are in my land now, Morathi. In the place I made.

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