Ghosts of Mehan'Gir Read online

  Ghosts of Mehan’Gir

  L J Chappell

  GHOSTS OF MEHAN’GIR

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2019 L J Chappell

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Diana Buidoso

  Published by Asquith Publishing

  Contents

  A Map of the Inner Sea

  A Map of Western Mehan’Gir

  A Map of Corvak

  Chapter One – Echoes of the North

  Chapter Two – Illusions of Home

  Chapter Three – In the Shadow of Corvak

  Chapter Four – Twilight Warriors

  Chapter Five – Walking in Shadows

  Glossary of Names and Places

  A Map of the Inner Sea

  showing some places mentioned in the text

  A Map of Western Mehan’Gir

  showing some places mentioned in the text

  A Map of Corvak

  showing the Boundary and the Four Dams

  What has gone before …

  The human called Lanvik has been rescued from a prison cell in the far north by Kiergard Slorn and his Company of mercenaries. He was accused of being both a murderer and a mage, but has no memory of either. Slorn is in the north to retrieve the Emerald Crown, one of the Four Trophies of the Dead God which are rumoured to bring great power.

  They travel to the Inner Sea to deliver Vander of Arrento, whom they have also rescued, to his secret love – the lady Aruel of the Fassiori. Matters go badly and they are forced to flee, together with Vander and Aruel.

  Lanvik is irresistibly pulled towards nearby Uvellia and Kiergard Slorn persuades the others to accompany him there, hoping that the journey may eventually lead them to the Land of Mists: home of mages and legendary resting place of the Glass Sword. When they reach Uvellia, late at night, Lanvik leaves the others and wanders through the town.

  Pireon, a boy-priest from ancient Corvak who witnessed Kiergard Slorn removing the Emerald Crown, is travelling slowly homewards overland. He spends his days obsessed with resentment towards his older brother Dach and with thoughts of Ajiila, one of the Temple dancers.

  The assassin Foxblade, who was contracted to kill Lanvik’s purported victim, has reported her failure to her superiors. She has been given a new contract from the same client: she is to kill a human, at an address in a town called Uvellia …

  Chapter One

  Echoes of the North

  1

  He had no memory of who he was, where he was or how he came to be there.

  He waited for the confusion of waking to lift, until he could separate dream from memory, but the emptiness in his mind stubbornly refused to dissipate. He opened his eyes.

  He was lying on cold, damp cobblestones – a street.

  Who am I? And what am I doing here? he wondered, still waiting for memories to awaken and fill the holes in his mind. The memories stayed away. Am I injured? He struggled to his feet, wiped his hands on his trousers and gingerly felt his head. There were no tender areas, and no blood on his hands when he inspected them afterwards.

  He could hear the sea nearby, so he was near the coast. There was a warm breeze and, although the cobbles told of a recent shower, he could still taste the humidity. So he was somewhere warm and damp, and dark – it was night.

  He stretched and discovered that his shoulders were sore. That would be from lying on the hard cobbles and was nothing to worry about. Probably.

  This is Uvellia, he remembered: Uvellia on the island of Little Tirassa. And I came here with friends. No, perhaps not friends. But I came here with other people.

  And my name is Lanvik.

  No, that wasn’t his name: that was what they called him. They called him that because … and suddenly he remembered that he had lost his memory, and that thought made him smile.

  He had memories again – they didn’t trickle back one by one and they didn’t suddenly crowd in, but they gradually returned together: as if mist had lifted to reveal a view. But those memories only stretched back seven weeks, to a prison cell in the far north. There, they had accused him of being a wizard and a murderer and they had probably been preparing to execute him. He had been freed by Kiergard Slorn and his Company of mercenaries and thieves, and together, they had rescued Vander of Arrento, who would otherwise have been sacrificed at the Festival of the Emerald Crown.

  The Emerald Crown … he could see it in his mind: Kiergard Slorn had also taken the Emerald Crown. That had been his real reason for being there, in the north.

  Vander and his beloved Aruel had joined the Company as well. She had stolen the State Jewels of Arrento to pay for his rescue and her family, the ruling Fassiori, had discovered the fact. And after that they had come here, to Uvellia, because Lanvik had remembered the name; because it had seemed urgent to come here; because it might have provided some clues about who he really was.

  Other than the events of the last seven weeks, he couldn’t remember anything at all …

  There was nothing about his childhood or his family.

  He was supposed to be a mage, but he had no staff and he knew no magecraft.

  After arriving here, they had agreed to stay on the boat until daylight, he remembered: the Company’s boat – Magda’s Choice. But his head had hurt so badly that he needed help, he needed to see someone about it, had needed to find a doctor. He had stumbled through the streets of Uvellia until he found himself outside a doctor’s practice.

  But then what?

  Frustratingly, he couldn’t remember.

  His headache was gone now, so perhaps the doctor had helped him. But why had he woken up in the street in the middle of the night?

  If he focussed then he should surely be able to remember the way back. Uvellia was a small place, and he had a clear memory of what the doctor’s window looked like – there had been a torso, the torso of a mannequin, and small boxes and bottles. He tried to let his mind relax: after all, he had found the place earlier without consciously trying to, so perhaps he could do so again. It had been further uphill, he was sure – further from the harbour, but not far from where he had just woken up.

  He stood up, and felt something rigid and awkward in his jacket pocket. It was a short sword – no, not a sword: a dagger of some sort. Why did he have a dagger? He didn’t normally carry a dagger, and he couldn’t remember picking it up anywhere.

  He had no clear feeling about which direction to go so, not really trusting his instincts to simply find the way again, he began to search the narrow, steep and twisting lanes of Uvellia. In his head, he sectioned off the area around him and walked in gradually larger and larger loops; returning over and over again to where he had woken up – he was sure that couldn’t be far from where he had seen the doctor.

  Fifteen minutes later he found the shop. Painted above the window was a sign: “Doctor Gossine Medical Practitioner” – yes, this was a place.

  The door was shut and it was completely dark inside. He turned the handle of the door: it was unlocked, so he pushed it and went inside. As he stepped over the threshold, he remembered that there had been a man here, a Human, an old doctor who had walked out of some back room carrying an oil lamp and who had addressed him by a different name: “Kai Elidar”.

  A little bell rang as the door closed, startling him.

  There was barely a hint of light penetrating from outside. He waited for his eyes to adjust further, and gradually made out a counter facing the door. There had been a lamp on that counter, but it was gone now, and no-one walked through the door at the back to greet him. Perhaps the doctor was asleep.

  Perhaps the doctor and his family lived here, and they were all sleeping.

  Suddenly, Lanvik felt like an intruder. He shoul
d have knocked.

  He wondered if he should knock now, or call out. But if no-one had come when the little bell rang, then why would anyone come if he shouted?

  Instead, he carefully walked round to the back of the counter. There was a door there, slightly ajar, and he pushed it open with his palm. It led to a small office with a desk in the middle and chairs on either side: a consulting room perhaps. There were papers strewn all across the floor; two upturned chairs at haphazard angles; a toppled bookcase, with its contents in an uneven heap beneath it. The room had been wrecked.

  This time, Lanvik did call out: ‘Hello?’ There was no reply.

  There were further doors on either side and he could see a flickering yellow light around the edges of the door on the right. He walked over and opened it.

  The room beyond had also been ransacked.

  An oil-lamp stood on a shelf on the wall. Lanvik turned it up and looked around. Drawers had been emptied onto the floor; books and files taken off shelves; any loose items seemed to have been picked up, examined, and discarded.

  Lying in the midst of the resultant clutter was the body of the doctor he had met earlier. The man was dead: that was obvious both from the unnatural angle at which he was lying and also from the gaping and bloody hole in the back of his skull. Lanvik involuntarily took a step backwards when he saw it and sucked in his breath sharply. After a moment, he stepped forwards again and kneeled down beside the body to turn it over. Yes, it was the doctor that he remembered meeting. The doctor who had seemed to know him, who had called him “Kai Elidar”.

  He had heard that when people died, they kept their last expression. He had no idea if that was true and couldn’t remember ever studying anyone’s expression after they had died, but this man’s face was contorted and afraid. He had the look of someone who was still in the middle of a struggle, a fight. From the position he had been lying, Lanvik couldn’t see anything that he might have struck his head against if he had accidentally fallen – there were no tables or desks at the right height. It seemed that the man had been deliberately killed.

  Without any warning, a figure stepped out of the darkness in the corner of the room: she was Madarinn, a Dark Elf, tall and thin and dressed in black.

  Lanvik started, causing the lamp in his hand to swing and the shadows in the room to dance up and down the walls. She hadn’t been there a moment earlier, he was sure. He had lifted the lamp and looked around, surely?

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked him. ‘Why are you here?’

  He stood up. ‘I could ask you the same.’

  ‘I came here to kill this man,’ she said, ‘but he was already dead when I got here.’ There was something precise about the way she spoke that reminded him of Kiergard Slorn.

  ‘You’re an assassin?’

  ‘I don’t like the term assassin,’ the tall Elf said.

  ‘What do you prefer?’

  ‘Killer,’ she smiled. ‘It has less … artifice. You were about to tell me why you are here.’

  This is someone playing the part of an assassin, he thought. Even the little pause she put in before the word “artifice”: this is someone creating an image. Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t a real assassin.

  What should he tell her?

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to know why this man is already dead.’

  There was no point deceiving her: perhaps they could share information.

  ‘I was here earlier,’ he said. ‘And he was alive, then. But I can’t remember anything between coming into his shop and waking up outside, on the street.’

  ‘When were you here?’

  ‘I woke up ten or fifteen minutes ago, maybe. But I don’t know how long I’d been lying there. What about you?’

  As he spoke, he stepped back from the body: the way his jacket moved, he felt the weight of the dagger in his pocket. He should bring it out, he thought. At the moment he was completely at the mercy of this dramatic assassin – if she decided to kill him on some whim, there would be nothing he could do about it. At least if he had a weapon in his hand then that should stop her from casually killing him, shouldn’t it? Should allow him to retreat?

  He reached into the pocket with his right hand, but she was beside him quicker than he could have imagined, and the dagger was hers.

  She studied it as she walked away from him to lean against the side of a table. He had seen her face briefly illuminated by the light of the lamp: she was extremely young – twenty, perhaps; certainly no more than twenty-five.

  ‘This is an Elf weapon,’ she told him. ‘The grip is completely wrong for you. If you’re going to start fighting people, then you should find something better.’

  ‘I’m not planning to do any fighting,’ he assured her.

  ‘In that case, this dagger is perfect for you.’

  ‘I thought I might be safer if I had it in my hand,’ he explained.

  ‘Safer from me?’

  ‘From you, yes,’ he confirmed.

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘You wouldn’t be any safer from me.’ She tossed the dagger back to him: he stepped aside and let it clatter to the floor, rather than trying to catch it.

  Part of him was insulted by the fact that she thought him so ineffective that she had returned his weapon, but he had seen the way she moved and the speed she moved at. She was absolutely right – having the dagger in his hand wouldn’t protect him in any way from her. If anything, he might be slightly more likely to accidentally cut himself with it. He put it back in his pocket.

  ‘We should have a look around,’ she said.

  ‘We?’

  ‘We both have an interest in this man: we both want to find out what happened, so let us see what we can discover. As far as I can tell, we have no reason to be enemies.’

  ‘I’ll lock the door,’ he said.

  He took the oil lamp and walked back to the front room. There was a key in the lock on the inside: he turned it until he heard a bolt secure the door, and had a sudden flash of memory. Not just déjà vu: he was sure he’d done that before – locked the front door when he was here earlier. But why? Why would he have locked the door behind him?

  Back in the room with the body, the assassin had found another lamp and was examining the wound in the man’s skull. Her fingers seemed to be right inside, pulling matted hair and fragments of bone aside, dispassionate in a way that Lanvik wasn’t sure he could have been.

  ‘Anything?’ he asked.

  ‘I was looking for chips of paint, or pieces of whatever struck him, but there are only fragments of the skull.’ As she spoke, she was checking around the man’s neck, behind his temples, his hands and his fingernails. ‘I’m looking for any other injuries,’ she explained. ‘The blow to the head is probably what killed him, but it might have been administered shortly after death to disguise something more subtle or revealing.’

  Eventually she let the body roll back over onto the floor. ‘I can’t see anything else, so we can assume that the head injury killed him. Something heavy, with at least one sharp corner.’

  Lanvik had been looking around the room and had already found a small replica skull with lines dividing its surface into named areas, carved from heavy stone with a square base. There was blood on one corner of the base which, uncomfortably, he could smell.

  ‘Here,’ he showed her.

  She took it and judged its weight in her hand. ‘Yes, almost certainly,’ she agreed. ‘From behind, and in his own office, so it was somebody that he trusted. The killer didn’t use a proper weapon so it was spontaneous, rather than planned. And not that long ago.’

  ‘I don’t understand how there was time for that to happen,’ Lanvik said. ‘What’s the time now?’

  ‘No later than the third hour.’

  ‘Then there was hardly any time after my visit,’ Lanvik shook his head. It seemed that, rather than sleeping in the street for hours, he had simply collapsed and then come round again a few minutes la
ter. ‘I don’t think there was enough time for someone else to come round and for them to argue, maybe struggle. Not without me seeing them.’

  ‘So, what? You think you killed him, then?’

  ‘I think I might have done. But I don’t remember.’

  ‘The idea doesn’t seem to surprise you much: not as much as it probably should. Have the two of you been arguing about things recently? Have you been thinking about killing him?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Oh,’ she nodded. ‘Well, who is he? How did you know him? Did he have any enemies that you can think of?’

  ‘He seemed to know me but, like I said, I don’t remember.’

  She nodded slowly: ‘When you said you didn’t remember, I assumed you just meant this evening. But you don’t mean that, do you? How much don’t you remember?’

  ‘I don’t remember anything at all, except for the last few weeks.’

  ‘Is that normal for you?’

  ‘I don’t know. And I’m not with anyone who’s known me long enough to know.’

  ‘So why were you not surprised by the idea that you might have killed him?’

  ‘I … I think I may have killed before,’ he explained. ‘I’ve been accused of killing in the past. And I’ve had dreams, maybe memories, of a woman backing away from me. Her hands are raised to protect herself and she’s shouting for me to stop. I have a weapon.’ He didn’t want to say that he had a mage’s staff.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that’s about all. Then I wake up.’

  ‘So who is she? Do you know?’

  ‘No. But she’s Human.’

  ‘And because of that dream, you think you might have killed this man?’ She sounded sceptical.

  ‘I remember coming here, and I remember him opening the door. I remember locking the front door behind me, but I don’t know why I would do that. I don’t remember anything after that point, and that was an hour ago – maybe an hour and a half at most. Don’t you think the most likely explanation is that I killed him?’