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 fashioned 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 shifted 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 thrashings. 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.

"You're going to be alone for a while, Mama. I don't know how long I'll be gone. Draen and Pennel will look in on you. But you need to start taking care of yourself again." He squeezed her hands more tightly. "I miss them, too. But we still have to live."

The only weapons he carried were his bow and hunting knife. He would have preferred a sword or crossbow, but the Fedron family had no such weapons and he didn't have the money to buy them, so that was that. The demon that killed Rukee was enormous, based on Tremmel's description and the slab they found in the tunnels. He would need a better weapon at some point, but for now these would do.

Draen and Pennel knew he was leaving and tried to talk him out of it, but once he made up his mind, there was no changing it. He did not say good-bye to anyone except his mother. He had no desire to have them try one last time to convince him to stay. This was something that needed to be done. The thing that killed his brother was going to pay.

Tremmel had looked back and watched the demon strike down Rukee. He said it had walked southward before disappearing. That was all Tyne had to go on. It was not much, but it would suffice.

He set off south.

He kept to well-traveled paths and roads. He needed information, and the only way to get it was to ask others what they knew. He could not find what he was seeking if he kept away from people.

He reached the Moriteri Pike when he was a day's walk from the capital. The road was crowded compared to what he'd traveled so far. He stopped at inns, when he found them, to ask if anyone had seen the demon. He spent nothing if he could get away with it; if the barkeep or a patron wanted coin for their answer, or if they pressed him to buy a drink or meal, he weighed heavily whether to pay from his meager sack of silver and bronze coins. Most of the time he did not.

One night he paid two copper pennies to a barkeep who whispered that he had seen an apparition himself some months ago; for his trouble, Tyne got an outlandish tale that so enraged him he walked out before he lost control and drove his knife through the fat b.a.s.t.a.r.d's eye.

He asked anyone he pa.s.sed on the road if they had heard about the demon stalking the world. A few had heard rumors and tales of a gold-skinned monstrosity, but could offer no details of what had happened or where the encounters occurred. There were enough details, though, to convince him he was headed in the right direction.

A guard at the gates of Moriteri had no news of a demonic creature; instead, the man prattled on about the sorcerer who had recently joined the King's Court, a man who had come seemingly from nowhere and was now the king's most trusted advisor. "Strange goings on," said the guard with a shake of his head. "Strange enough without no demon causin' trouble."

Tyne cared nothing for the king or his sorcerer. Rullio was a weak ruler, as were all the kings and queens who had come before him since the time of the empire's collapse. Strong rulers would reclaim what the empire had lost. Rullio and his ilk had no pride, no love of their kingdom and its rich history. Helcarea needed a ruler with the strength of will to demand that his people become what they once were: the greatest in the world. And to winnow out those who would not follow.

But Tyne knew that would not happen while Rullio sat upon the throne. From what he had heard, the king cared for his concubines and horses more than ruling the kingdom and trying to rekindle its past glory. It shamed him to have such a worthless man as his king.

Tyne did not enter the city. He felt that if something so monstrous and deadly had entered Moriteri, word of the terror and death it caused would be everywhere.

He continued his journey south, asking his questions to anyone who would listen. Just across the border in Ellohar he spoke to a man who claimed his brother had been killed by a bronze-skinned monster whose mouth was filled with fire. "The b.l.o.o.d.y thing appeared out of nowhere while my brother was workin' to dig out a tree stump," said the man. He leaned against the rake he'd been using and mopped at his sweaty forehead with a worn, damp rag. "Then it touched him and Ullos just fell over dead."

"So you saw it yourself?" The hair on Tyne's arms stood on end.

The man nodded, oblivious to Tyne's excitement. "d.a.m.ned thing was big as a tree."

"Where was this? Which way did it go after it...touched your brother?"

The man eyed Tyne suspiciously. "Why do you care? Are you lookin' to die?"

Tyne narrowed his gaze. "The demon you saw came out of the ground in the Bronze Demon Hills and killed my younger brother. When we went into its crypt, one of my friends was driven mad and killed himself. Now I'm going to kill it, but I have to find it first."

The man gave Tyne an appraising look. "Boy, turn around and go home. You don't look like you've seen your twentieth year. This thing can kill with a touch. Your flimsy bow won't even scratch it. If you find it, all you'll end up doin' is dyin'."

Tyne felt himself redden, but did not argue with the man. He needed only one thing. "Which way did it go?" he repeated. He tried to put iron in his voice, to make it impossible for the man to deny him. "Was it still heading south?"

At first he wasn't sure the man would reply. Then he shook his head, sighed, and said, "I don't really know. It started off toward the southeast, but after it went a few hundred feet it disappeared just like that." He snapped his fingers in front of Tyne's face. "Like it was made of smoke, or had never really been there. Just somethin' I imagined. But my brother was still dead."

He kept his course to the southeast, following the Serel Road. No one he spoke to after the man whose brother had been killed had even heard rumors of such a creature. It seemed that when it vanished from the man's sight it vanished from the world itself. The trail had truly gone cold.

He was not discouraged. He'd known before he set out that the task would be hard. Too much time had pa.s.sed. He should have gone after the creature with all the fury of the G.o.ds the moment Tremmel told them what had happened. But Tremmel had been alive then, and had needed his older brother more than ever. Tyne had been the glue holding his family together. He and others searched, but not far enough, and not long enough.

A dense forest came into view in the distance to his left. He did not know its name, but as it remained in his view day after day, he realized it was immense. It drew closer to the Serel Road until the road and forest were separated by only a few hundred yards of open ground.

It rained one afternoon, a light steady drizzle that soon soaked him to his skin. He made camp that night just inside the edge of the forest, beneath the dense canopy high above him. He managed to light a fire and keep it lit through most of the evening.

He dozed off after a meager meal. He heard something in his sleep and awoke to find a man rummaging through his pack. The rain had stopped. A half-moon hung low in the sky, shining in his face like an omen.

He'd fallen asleep with his back against a tree, and now jumped to his feet and pulled out his knife. But the other man was too fast, and before Tyne could take a step, the stranger had raised his sword.

"Ah, steady there, lad. I'd not want to skewer you 'cause you did something rash." The man spoke with a thick accent he did not recognize.

Tyne shook with rage and indignation. He'd never been robbed before, and felt violated in a way he never could have imagined.

"Toss the knife to me," said the man as he stuffed Tyne's sack of coins into a pocket in his tattered cloak.

Tyne did not move. He studied the man before him. Older, perhaps thirty, with long blond hair plastered to his head by the rain. Bulkier than himself, with broad shoulders and a thick middle. A scraggly beard covered his cheeks and jaw like patches of moss on a tree.

"I said toss the knife to me. You don't want to disobey me, lad. The One G.o.d guides my hand. Do as I say and you'll find yourself richly rewarded."

"So you'll give back what you've stolen?" Tyne put as much contempt into his voice as he could. He made no move to hand over the knife.

The man's face pinched in anger. "What I'm taking are contributions toward the work of the One G.o.d. You'll acknowledge him, boy, or I'll put you to the sword. There is a darkness coming, and the only way to defeat it is to convert all of Osseria to belief in the One G.o.d. You serve us, or you serve the Adversary. There is no middle ground."

"There are no G.o.ds but those of Helcarea. This is what I think of you and your G.o.d of thieves." Tyne spat on the ground, then tightened his grip on the knife.

The man snarled. "You'll regret that, boy. I won't kill you; that would be too easy. But you'll scream for your mother before I'm done, and you'll beg to worship the G.o.d of G.o.ds."

Tyne remained still and did not speak. He knew the man was trying to provoke a reaction, which he was determined to deny him.

The man grasped the hilt of his sword with his other hand and charged.

For his greater size and bl.u.s.ter, the man was clumsy and obvious in his attack. With his lithe frame, Tyne was easily able to sidestep his thrust. Tyne chopped back with his knife as the thief slid past and opened a deep gash along the man's hand and forearm.

The thief screamed in rage. "Now I am going to kill you, you f.u.c.king wh.o.r.eson!"

Despite the hatred roiling inside him, Tyne remained silent. He waited deftly on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, ready to shift left or right depending on how the man attacked him next.

The man tried to shake some of the blood from his hand but only succeeded in getting more of it on his palm and fingers. His grip on the sword grew unsure because of the slick blood on the hilt.

"I'll cut out your heart and feed it to my dogs," said the thief. "Oh, yes. I have friends close by. They'll be here soon, and when we're done with you the biggest piece left will be the size of your shriveled little p.r.i.c.k."

Tyne felt a thread of fear seep through the anger and hate. He'd never fought for his life like this. If the man were telling the truth about others, he needed to finish this fight and be gone.

The man lunged at him again. Tyne took a step back as if retreating, but then planted his right foot hard and sprang forward, deflecting the sword with the edge of his knife. Steel screamed as the two weapons sc.r.a.ped along one another.

Tyne shifted his knife to his left hand and wrapped his right arm around the man's hands, holding them in the crook of his elbow and forcing the sword to remain behind him where it could do no harm. The man thrashed about madly, screaming. Tyne knew he would lose his hold in a moment, but that was all the time he needed.

With his left hand, he drove his knife into the side of the man's neck.