The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 14b - Sir Bannus in Glory

Twelve men had been evicted from the room Sir Bannus commandeered, and all dozen beds lay stacked against the walls. Their mattresses had been heaped in the middle of the room like a hedge-boar's midden, at the foot of which lay a clutter of grease-streaked platters, stripped ox bones, and discarded mugs of blood draughts.

The immortal Sir Bannus sprawled across the summit of this mountain like a drunken god, as gloriously nude as a court painting of some West Isle scene in the days before the Cleansing. His body was a shocking topography of popping veins, impossible muscle, and quantities of ropy purple scars: the wounds of twenty lifetimes in battle, all healed with the Blood of the Phyros. It was a scene few in Arkendia had witnessed since the Cleansing, but one quite common before it - a glutted god, his blood rage cooled with flesh and draughts, sated, half-fallen, half-reclining, like a sleeping lion.

Pieces of outlandish Diurn armor adorned the edges of the room, and against one wall stood the monstrous Phyros sword, Basilisk. A lacy bit of white cloth concealed Sir Bannus's face, draped there, perhaps, as a scented souvenir of the innkeeper's girl.

A faint suck of breath from Ellentane. He closed the doors quietly behind, and remained in Jamus's shadow as if he'd disappear there.

"Welcome back to Arkendia, Sir Bannus," the prince murmured. "It has been...eighty years, has it not? Before my father's birth."

The immortal remained, lolling magnificently, horribly, arms thrown wide, face turned to the rafters. After what seemed like an eternity, the graveled basso finally welled from the massive chest like a cataract of grief. "Liar. You lie. This is not Arkendia. This is some other land. Ruled by women, peopled by dogs. I do not know this land."

"It has indeed changed in your absence."

"This is not Arkendia. In Arkendia, my order is revered. Our will is law. We are worshipped with fear."

"Gone now. All has changed."

The immortal clutched his head with both scar-knotted hands, as if trying to hold his mind together, or keep out an unwanted truth. "Are there none left now?" he cried in anguish. "None of my order? Is it possible? All slain? All hiding? And do the peasant priests strut openly, unchecked like wild dogs? Arkendia! O, father of gods, where have you gone?"

"Arkendia is not gone, Sir Bannus, only weakened, as with a disease. But the source of the disease - their queen - is weak also, which gives us hope, and opportunity."

The Phyros-rider lifted the lace from his face and peered from one eye at the grandson of Jormus Mont Pellion, his one-time liege lord. Jamus recognized immediately the signs of madness. The visage was a wreckage of scars. Not the scars of battle - even the battles of twenty lifetimes would not account for this, if one bothered with a helmet - this was gratuitous scarification. Self-mutilation.

Jamus had seen it in his grandfather, the last immortal of his family. In ten years' time he'd fallen from incisive intellect and sound, reliable judgment, to morbid meditations and self-dismemberment. At banquets, he removed fingers and displayed them on forks. "Am I not still I, without this?" he would ask. Ears came next, and his nose, and, most horribly, his eyes and left hand, discarded in odd places around the palace, and left for others to find, like the leavings of a molting serpent. "If I remove my face, am I not still I? Is there any meaning in this vessel at all? This world?"

Yet his grandfather had enough sanity left to sense his own end, and prepared to offer himself in sacrifice. He constructed a blood throne of complicated troughs and runnels, according to an inner knowledge. On it he opened his veins and from the paths the Blood chose in the runnels he made a powerful augury.