The Warrior Matron, Conclusion

If you haven't read earlier episodes, you can find them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

And now, the conclusion of...

PASSED LIVES

© Paul Kupperberg

Kahna ate some more of her cold provisions as she continued her journey to the First City on foot. Several miles along, well past the staggering army’s advance, she found a stray horse, saddled and bearing the colors of the City of the Stars. His reins hung to the ground as he drank from a stream. She guessed the beast had fled the battle after his master had fallen to a demon, but it was calm now and didn’t shy from her. She took the reins and, letting the horse drink its fill, talked soothingly to it.

It was only when she tried to mount him that the horse grew skittish. She started singing to calm it, a soothing tune that was, at first, a wordless melody. But then she recognized it and the words came back to her and she began to sing it. The lullaby her mother sang to her, the one she sang to every one of her many, many children.

Kahna turned her head, embarrassed least even the horse see her eyes fill with tears.

* * *

The horse finally let Kahna mount him and she pointed his nose on the road toward the First City. She let him go easy at first, getting used to her weight on his back and her hand on the reins. But soon enough, she had him at a trot, and she was determined to make her destination before nightfall. She was certain she would find Thalis there, one way or another, and be reunited to fix this thing and get on with lives that had been interrupted more that eight centuries earlier.

What would Thalis see when he looked into her eyes, now those of a different woman than the one he last knew?

Once, he told her he saw in those eyes a reflection of his own soul.

If she was indeed who she knew herself to be and not some deluded mad woman, that is what he would see again. Not the tired, sagging face, the thickened body and gray-streaked hair of a middle-aged smith’s wife, but Kahna, his soul mate.

But she knew that each time she looked in the mirror, she would see Malasa.

* * *

Kahna approached the walls of the First City on foot, under the cover of darkness. She began smelling the sea late in the afternoon and, by the time the sun had dropped, she could hear the pounding surf and feel a fine, cooling mist.

She let the horse go and, by the simple act of draping a blanket around her shoulders like a shawl, her sword and shield were hidden and she was effectively disguised as a harmless old woman.

Kahna had deliberately chosen a small gate on the leeward side of the City. As she recalled, it was seldom used and often unguarded, but that had been centuries ago. The entire city might have changed in the time she had been away...

Except time moved slowly for Atlantis, this mighty empire that had stood 50,000 years and might yet see 50,000 more. That which did change did not do so with haste, not even the watch schedule of forgotten portals.

The gate was little more than a doorway that opened onto the back of a row of densely packed dwellings, stinking from garbage and smoke. There was no one about, but Kahna had expected that. Whatever was happening in the City, the merchant and craftsman, the servant and shop clerk would flee from it or hide in their cellars until the danger had passed. Only arrogant royals and stoic soldiers stayed behind while demonic forces came wreaking havoc.

And the mage, she added quickly. The mage was always there until the very end as well. All she need do was first find him and bring him there.

Keeping a hand on the hilt of her sword under her shawl, Kahna made her way through the dark streets of the First City. She stayed close to the homes and shops, joining with their shadows to keep out of sight. She saw no one, but periodically, things passed by overhead that cast large and evilly distorted shadows on the street, accompanied by otherworldly squeals and chitters.

She needed the palace. If the Guard had managed to hold the palace, she would learn much from the commanders and advisors inside the heavily fortified heart of the First City. Kahna smiled to herself, wondering how she would convince the Royal Guard to let her pass. Or generals to reveal their secrets to a housewife claiming to be a reincarnated warrior.

Kahna took a longer but less visible route to the palace. She made her way through alleyways and back streets, circling open areas to avoid crossing in the light. The streets were as quiet as death, patrolled from the air by the same winged monsters she had fought through the night.

Kahna paused on the fringe of the great park that surrounded the darkened palace. The landscape was level and, before it had been pitted and charred by combat, meticulously planted and maintained. The park was wide open, intentionally created to give attackers intent on stealth no hiding places. Whether the palace was held by friend or foe, she was certain any attempt to cross the encircling park would most likely meet with an attack.

She stood in the shadow of a tall, leafy tree on the park’s edge, watching the tall, graceful spire of the palace as she pondered her situation.

Kahna heard a noise and froze in place. Footsteps, shuffling down the street! They were drawing nearer, making no attempt to be silent. Not daring to draw her sword, Kahna slid one of Khar’s daggers out from under her sleeve and slowly raised it, her ears tracking the approaching intruder.

And then she was there, but it was neither demon or soldier who, gasping, drew to a stop when she spotted Kahna. It was a woman, like her. Like Malasa. Middle-aged, worn and haggard, unraveled by her life, wrapped in a dark shawl against the night chill.

“Who are you?” Kahna demanded, her tone harsher than she had intended.

The woman was wide-eyed. She could only stammer, “I, I had not expected...everyone else has fled or is in hiding...!”

Kahna pulled the woman into the shadow of the tree. “You should be doing the same,” she scolded. “What are you doing out here?”

The woman began to tremble and her eyes filled. “Tyrla...my daughter...she’s only a child, but she’s missing, you see,” she sobbed. “I’ve been looking for her everywhere... the first night the demons came...I lost her in the mob....”

Kahna tried to quiet her. “You need to find shelter,” she hissed.

The woman shook off Kahna’s hand. “I can’t,” she said and Kahna was taken aback by the sudden steel in her voice. “They killed my husband and took my children. She is all I have left.”

The woman pushed past Kahna and continued on her way, muttering, “All I have left!”

Kahna stayed in the shadows, not moving until the woman was out of her hearing. Then she turned her gaze back to the palace. There, high above streets torn by demonic warfare, the doors on the king’s balcony had swung open, golden light from within spilling out like a beacon in the night.

A lone figure stood on the balcony, bathed in the lights warm glow.

She took a step forward, narrowing her eyes. The figure was tall and lean, with long flowing hair tied at the neck. He raised his hands high above his head and she saw the light around him grow brighter.

“Thalis,” she whispered.

So...he magician did not need his warrior lover after all! She was surprised that she felt nothing at this revelation. Well, at least she had arrived in time to join him in the endgame with whatever otherworldly foe he now prepared with his magic to dispatch.

She took another step, into the light and the open park.

But the scream made her stop and whirl, drawing her sword and crying out.

Thalis, high above the city, did not hear the woman’s scream.

She looked frantically around. She heard the sounds of chattering demons, the scrape of talons on the walk and ran towards them, sword in hand. A prayer caught in her throat, a prayer for the missing child and her poor mother. A prayer for what she would see when she found the woman.

Dark shapes with leathery wings were melting into the night sky as she burst onto the scene. There was little left of the woman, jagged and bloody pieces of raw red and cracked bones, recognizable only by the dark shawl thrown across a nearby bush.

She sank to her knees next to the remains and, for reasons that would not become clear to her until morning, she knelt there through the night, crying and praying.

All the while, the night sky was made bright as day by the magic spells that would decide the fate of Atlantis.

* * *

By noon, she passed the army she had left the day before as it rode for the First City. She did not bother to tell them it was over.

She had left her weapons and armor on the street alongside the woman and walked from the City through the main gate. She would not need them where she was going.

Not in this lifetime.

But if the past was any indication, the future would hold opportunities aplenty to save the world again. And lives enough to be reunited with Thalis.

But for now Malasa yet had two young ones to shepherd into maturity and a husband with whom she had long hoped to grow old waiting at home.

-- END --

The Warrior Matron, Part 7

Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6! Now read on:

PASSED LIVES

© Paul Kupperberg

The demon army withdrew as the sun began to set. The soldiers of Atlantis staggered about the battlefield, giving aid to fallen comrades and dispatching the wounded among their foes. Kahna did what she could, binding wounds, offering water to the casualties, holding the hand of a young man, a boy more than a man, really, as he died from his wounds, tears streaking his face. She wondered how his mother would feel when she received the news, then quickly banished the thought from her mind.

As she made her way across the battlefield, among the dead both human and demonic, Kahna gathered what she needed from those who had fallen. A scabbard and belt for her sword, a sleeve of armored mail to protect her sword arm, a small round shield of metal, covered in layers of thick hide. Miraculously, she found her bedroll on the side of the road. She never saw the horse again.

The armies of Atlantis regrouped up the road, away from the blood and carnage. There would be no time to bury the dead now.

Kahna sat with a dazed and silent group of infantry from the City of the Mists, warming themselves before a small fire as they made of meal of dried meats and leather-tough biscuits. A clatter of hoofs roused Kahna from her post-battle exhaustion and she looked to see the commander of the army of the City of the Stars and his lieutenants rein up their horses near her campfire.

The commander regarded her. “You are the old woman who fights like a well-trained youth,” he said to her.

Her companions leapt to their feet in the presence of so lofty a personage. Kahna did not rise. “I suppose I am,” she said wearily.

“From where do you hail, mother?” asked one of the lieutenants.

“From the City of the Stars and the City of the Archers,” she said. “Take your pick. And,” she added, staring darkly at the fresh faced officer, “I am not your mother.”

The boy flinched and his commander pretended not to notice. “I hear you are much the warrior,” sniffed the commander. “I hear, too, that you call yourself Kahna and seek the presence of our lord, the mage Thalis.”

“All true.”

“What exactly is your business with Lord Thalis?” the commander said, finally asking the question that had brought him here.

“It is my business,” she said.

The commander raised an eyebrow, then glanced briefly at each of his lieutenants. “I see,” he said.

“Have you much experience battling demons, commander?” she asked before he could think of a way to rephrase his question.

He blinked. “Well...no,” he said. “Have you?”

She nodded. “Enough to know they like to attack in the night, especially after first softening up their foes.”

The commander blinked again.

In the night, the first shrill war cries of the demon army were met with the blaring of trumpets and the roar of the men of the Atlantean army.

* * *

Kahna could not describe the beasts she fought through the night. They were large, with leathery skin as tough as armor. She would catch only the briefest glimpse of them in the flickering light of a torch or a body aflame from eldritch fires, but she did not care what they looked like. All she knew was that they died when cut and did not seem to be particularly clever in the ways of combat. They would come screaming in from the darkness, all but announcing their presence and she would thrust her sword at them, taking their heads, severing limbs, slicing open their bellies, robbing them of whatever manner of life they may have possessed.

Not that it mattered. They were cannon fodder, of course. Savage, snarling monsters sent to weaken and decimate the human troops before they reached the First City. The Darkness fairly crawled with such beasts, all waiting the opportunity to break free to feast on humanity. No doubt the armies racing to defend Atlantis from all points on the compass were being thus met. Whoever, whatever, commanded this hellish army, had sprung wide the gates of Hell and set loose all that was evil and dark.

Kahna battled well past the hour she felt she could fight no longer.

* * *

Kahna slept as one dead, her head resting on her unopened bedroll and her sword, still sticky from the blood and gore of combat, near at hand.

By dawn’s light, the demon army withdrew. They left behind only the rapidly decaying remains of their defeated and the masses of human dead. From her brief survey of the battlefield, it seemed as many as half the soldiers she had marched with the previous day had lost their lives to the demons. The number of demonic dead was even greater, but that did not matter. Their population was near limitless, with only the magical barriers between the Darkness and the mundane world preventing them from overrunning mankind. Rare was the power that could breach those barriers, but such a power now held the First City hostage.

As she slept, near paralyzed with exhaustion, Kahna dreamed. The battle between man and demon raged around her, but she held no sword, no weapon of any kind. Across the field where she walked, thick with blood red mud and fallen warriors, two young girls, sobbing in fear, called out to her. Kahna wanted to go to them, but her way was blocked by the swirl of combat. A step in the wrong direction would mean her death.

But those poor children...

They clung to one other, faces smeared with tears and dirt and gore. Demonic forms fell around them. Soldiers on horseback jumped over their huddled forms. Swords and arrows and spears whistled through the air mere inches from them. No one else seemed to notice or care they were there. Kahna had to save them, but did she dare change her course and go to them?

“Mama,” the children screamed in horror, a decapitated head landing at their feet.

Kahna closed her eyes and turned her head so she would not have to watch them suffer any longer.

“Mama!” Their voices pierced the din of battle.

Kahna awoke with a start, screaming out the names of Malasa’s children.

Shaking, she decided she had slept enough for now.

To be concluded!

The Warrior Matron, Part 6

The saga continues! Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 are here:

PASSED LIVES

© Paul Kupperberg

She left early the next morning, before the sun came up. Khar pretended to be asleep and she pretended to believe him. She packed what little she would need, a bedroll, her cloak, a skin rug, a few extra pieces of sturdy, warm clothing, provisions and personal items.

And her sword, riding in a leather sheath belted to the saddle and close at hand. As well, she went through Khar’s workshop and picked out a mismatched set of daggers, one to strap to her forearm, another to snug in her boot.

Malasa’s last act brought her to the bed shared by Shartra and Vannga. She had promised she would not leave without first awakening them. She had lied, the thought of having to say farewell to her babies too overwhelming to even contemplate. Just looking at them, so innocent in sleep, tore at Malasa’s heart. It was best it be done this way, that Malasa step from this house and ride away before the sun could show she was gone. The tears and the pain would still be there, but this way she did not have to see them etched on the faces of her children, to carry their heartbreak forever with her.

She kissed them, lightly lest she wake them, and Shartra stirred only briefly to wipe away Malasa’s tear as it fell on her cheek.

* * *

She rode southwest, for the First City.

* * *

Kahna rode into a detachment of the king’s soldiers from the City of the Scorpion on the road to the First City.

“Ho, grandmother soldier,” a young man in armor called with laughter from horseback.

“Do you need someone to help lift your sword, little mother?” mocked another.

“Did your little one forget his bedroll, mama?” laughed a third.

“Where do you ride?” she demanded of an amused sergeant.

“To the First City, mother,” he told her. “Ride along with us if you will, but know it’s to battle we march.”

Kahna nodded. “I can take care of myself, boy.”

The sergeant barked out a laugh. “I’m sure you can, mother,” he said. “Just don’t get in the way if trouble breaks out.”

Kahna smiled. “I won’t be in the way.”

* * *

The Scorpion City’s line soon joined a contingent from the City of the Mists, itself already merged with a battalion from the City of the Mages.

Soon enough the warriors of all the cities knew about “mother,” the sword wielding old woman who raced to every new arrival demanding intelligence on the Lord High Mage of the Realm.

From a bearded archer, she learned Thalis was said to have embarked on a quest to recover an ancient and powerful talisman to aid in his war on the demons. A cavalryman who claimed to have fought off demon hoards with the sorcerer on the Plains of Drlyss claimed Thalis had been captured, most likely by the minions of Celepha. A lancer scoffed at the notion of a water goddesses’ reach extending to the dusty Drlyss plains, positing instead that Thalis had entered the Darkness to fight the evil at its heart, while still another bitterly insisted the Mage had turned traitor and joined with the demons.

Nothing but gossip and rumor, Kahna knew. In truth, what would the trooper in the line know about the comings and goings of the land’s mightiest sorcerer?

She would just have to wait until they made the First City.

Kahna would have her answer then.

* * *

Two days out from the First City, the road was choked with refugees fleeing the war wracked capitol. Families carrying what they could hold, merchants with hastily loaded wagons, all seeking to be away from the madness that the seat of the realm had become. The city on the edge of the sea was overrun with hellspawn, the Guard helpless before their number, the temples of the Twelve Gods aflame, the King enslaved...

Kahna’s stomach tensed at the thought of the chaos that awaited up the road, but it was in anticipation of the adventure, not fear. She grasped the hilt of the sword sheathed to her saddle and grinned.

This, she thought with grim satisfaction, was reason enough for living.

* * *

It was an army gathered from across the continent that surged toward the First City under increasingly darkening skies. But a day’s march from its gates, it was plain to see that a sorcerous storm sat over the city, black clouds thrashing the air with mystic lightning, lashing it with thick, sulphurous rains.

Kahna rode alongside cavalry from the City of the Mists, wrapped in a hooded cloak against the chill. She was so tired of the riding and of her thoughts swirling about the battle that lay ahead and the fate of Thalis, but of course that was all she could think on. She smiled, remembering a little game Shartra had once showed them. “Whatever you do,” the girl had told her parents, “do not think about a pink horse! Not one bit!” and for the rest of the day, all either Malasa or Khar could think of was that accursed pink horse.

The warrior priestess was thinking of the farm-wife’s pink horse when the first warning shouts went up and the alarm shrilled from the horns of the trumpeters. Kahna grasped her sword, reveling at the sound of steel singing against the leather as she pulled it free of the sheath. Only once it was in her hand and raised did she look around for the cause of the alarm.

They filled the sky from the west, creatures of all sizes and shapes, none of them even remotely human. With swords and spears, maces and clubs, talons and fangs, they swooped down on the Atlantean army, slashing and beating at the startled and scared soldiers. Screams of terror and pain melded with showers of blow and the metallic beat of weapons striking weapons and armor.

Kahna wheeled her horse around, bringing up the sword Malasa’s husband had made for her just in time to block a spear thrust at her by a winged and furred beast with blood red eyes. She smashed the jagged spear from its clawed paws and then slashed across its face. It screeched like a battered child and feel away from her, clutching its ruined face.

She charged forward, screaming so she could hear herself above the din of combat, hacking at whatever came in her path. A beast more bat than man leapt onto her horse behind her, trying to wrest Kahna from the saddle. Her mount reared up and Kahna clung to the reins with her sword hand while the other reached over her shoulder and clawed at the monster’s face.

Something small and leathery and smelling unimaginably foul barreled into her and unseated her from her horse. Kahna hit the ground but was almost instantly back on her feet, the small thing impaled on her sword. Arrows filled the air, hoofs trampled the ground around her, swords and spears flashed and man and demon alike screamed in horror and pain as they died.

Kahna did not think about death. At least not her own. Blood of different colors and pieces of things once living but that she could not identify flew about her. She was in battle again, her heart pounding in her chest, her breath ragged gasps torn from her throat with each thrust of her blood slicked blade. The creatures kept coming. The soldiers of Atlantis fought and died all about her.

She saw the sergeant from the Scorpion army who had warned her not to get in the way in the event of trouble fall as a creature as big as two men hacked him in two with a broadsword as wide a floor plank.

Kahna could tell her body had lived near fifty years, but the heaviness in her limbs did not slow her down. She was a warrior again and, as gore from the foes that fell before her sword splashed her face, she began to laugh.

Gods, she had missed this!

The Warrior Matron, Part 5

Still more from this unpublished short story. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 are here:

"PASSED LIVES"

© Paul Kupperberg

When she rode up to the barn Khar was there to help her with the horse.

He smiled but his eyes were frightened and bloodshot. “I wondered if you were coming home,” he said with a nervous laugh.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He hung up the saddle and returned with a bucket of feed. He pretended to busy himself with that while Malasa made busy brushing the horse.

“The girls,” he said at last. “They were worried, Malasa.”

“I didn’t mean to be a bother to anyone,” she said, softly. “This is nothing, nothing I’ve planned, Khar.”

His head jerked in her direction. “What didn’t you plan?”

She reached into her saddlebag and brought out the cloth wrapped ingot. She handed it to Khar, who took it as though afraid it was something that could hurt him.

He unwrapped the package. “Steel?” he asked, blinking in confusion.

“Yes,” she said. “To make a sword.”

He blinked several more times. “Why do I need a sword?”

“It is for me, Khar,” she explained, unable to look him in the eyes. “I will need it for the journey I have to make.”

Malasa’s heart ached. Poor Khar was so bewildered, as though asked to decide a question of life and death in a language he did not speak.

“Malasa,” he stammered. “I don’t understand.”

She touched his cheek. “I’m not sure I do either, Khar,” she said. “But I was wrong about the eclipse. It was a...calling, a summoning. I don’t know where it will take me or even why I must go...I just know that I must.”

She told him only a part of the truth. And he, believer in omens, worshipper of a pantheon of gods that watched over their human charges, could accept that a celestial event was a divine summons for his middle-aged wife to embark on a quest with a sword at her side.

Khar took a deep breath. “But...why you, Malasa?”

Because, she thought, I am suddenly, thirty years after we wed, a different woman. Because that woman loves another, an immortal warrior to whom she was bound, heart and soul, through as many ages and lives as it took until they were united for eternity.

But she only shrugged in helplessness and began to cry. “Because of who I am,” she said and let him hold her until they both stopped crying, some time later.

* * *

She listened to the ring of Khar’s hammer on the steel he was fashioning, day by day, into a sword. He explained how the steel had to be shaped and turned repeatedly, heated and hammered over and over onto itself into near invisibly thin layers. It was a long process, to be done right, he said. It was to be the finest blade he had ever forged, he told her. Malasa would ride off with a weapon formed with skill and finished with love, to ward off any evil she might encounter on her journey.

Khar was in no hurry to complete the task.

She, waiting nervously, let him work at his own speed.

* * *

Vannga asked, “Can’t I go with you, mama?”

She was standing with her back to the child. The little girl’s words froze her. “No,” she said at last, in as calm and as reasonable a voice as she could manage. “Mama has to do this alone, baby.”

“I wouldn’t be any trouble, I promise,” the little girl said in a voice choking with sadness.

“I know you wouldn’t, Vannga,” she said. “But I can’t take you with me.”

“When will you come back?”

The question came as a whisper, the voice of a heart broken child. She shuddered, Kahna fighting desperately to maintain control of Malasa’s emotions.

“As soon as I can, Vannga,” she said. “Mama will come home as soon as she’s able.”

* * *

From a passing peddler whose horse Khar shoed, they learned that the First City had come under siege by demonic forces from the Darkness. The other Cities were rallying to her defense, but this was really a matter for the mages, not men.

“What of Thalis?” she asked, somewhat too eagerly.

The peddler did not know, only that the Lord High Mage had not yet made his presence known on the battlefield, last news that had reached him.

“What do you know of this Thalis?” Khar asked.

She said, “He’s the mightiest sorcerer in the realm. He’s no doubt in trouble...again, and as usual, when he’s needed most.”

“I’d say you know too much,” he said, surprised.

“Khar,” she said.

“Damn it, woman, I’ve been more tolerant than any man alive. You say you’ve been summoned and I do not question you. You come home in need of a sword and I make one. You claim a mission and I bid you go, no matter with deepest reluctance. But what do you give me in return? You tell me nothing and when I ask questions you reply with half answers.”

She shrugged. “I don’t have all the answers yet myself,” she said.

He shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”

* * *

The next day, Khar gave her the sword. It was, she thought, the most beautiful thing she had seen in this life. Its blade, as long as her arm, was wide and tapered from the middle down to double--edged sharpness. Khar had polished it until it gleamed like the sun and wrapped the handle under the wide guard with firm leather straps.

She took the sword, scarcely breathing, folding her hand around the hilt and slowly, hesitantly, waved it before her. It felt...Malasa had never in her life held a sword, yet this felt right. Its weight was familiar in her grasp, it balanced in her fist like an extension of her arm. She grew bolder in her movements, slashing the air, thrusting at imagined foes, parrying phantom jabs. And she laughed, loud and with bloodthirsty pleasure, the way Kahna would do in combat.

She would go armed into battle, in search of Thalis, to save him again so that he could save Atlantis in turn. It had always seemed a sad thing to her that the one man upon whose power Atlantis’ continued existence relied was so often at the brink of personal catastrophe.

Wordlessly, Khar left her to the swordplay. She did not see him leave.

The Warrior Matron, Part 4

More from this unpublished short story. Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 are here:

"PASSED LIVES"

© Paul Kupperberg

Malasa wasn’t hungry but she knew she needed to eat, so Kahna sought out a fondly remembered inn at the foot of King’s Street. She was surprised and delighted to find the Star and Arrow yet stood, its weathered doors open for business.

She stepped inside, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dim, smoky light. It was as she remembered, a cramped hole in the wall crowded with battered tables and benches at which drank and ate and sang and cursed a throng of the cream of Atlantean scum. Thalis, Kahna remembered with a smile, had a fondness for the commonest of the common and their lowly diversions. He held no love for his fellow aristocrats and found those of noble birth to be royal bores. But give him a workingman’s inn, a flagon of cheap ale and the company of soldiers and laborers and he was content. She suspected he had consorted with the ladies of questionable repute who frequented these places as well. But only before he found Kahna. After that, there were no others in his bed or in his heart.

At least until she had died.

Malasa found a vacant place at a table in the back of the inn. The innkeeper slapped a meal before her of some manner of meat and a slab of black bread on a dented tin plate that Kahna might well had eaten from in centuries past. She called for a draught of whatever had been in the most recently opened cask, and let her shoulders slump back against the wall and closed her eyes.

“Evenin darlin,” a voice croaked near her ear.

Malasa opened her eyes and found herself looking into a scarred and twisted face. She gasped, bolting upright. The face stared at her, unblinking, expectant, then moved closer.

“I’ll be joinin you, then,” he said and squeezed onto the bench beside her. She could smell him, rank and foul like the barnyard in the heat of the sun. He leered at her. “If you’ll not be mindin.”

“I do,” she whispered, afraid. All of a sudden, Malasa did not know what had come over her. What had possessed her to come in a place like this, alone? She was a farmer woman, a mother. She did not belong here.

He reached across her, letting a gnarled hand brush against her breast, for the bread on her plate. “Ahh, be nice to old Wylk,” he said. He brought the hard crust to his mouth. “By Crghas, I swear old Wylk’ll be nice to you.” He laughed, a wet, raspy and horrible sound that made Malasa shudder and Kahna angry.

Wylk cupped her face in his coarse hand. “What say ye, woman?”

“What do I say?” Malasa’s face twisted into a snarl as her hand closed around the handle of the knife on the table before her. Before she knew what she was doing, Kahna had brought it up and pressed the dull but still effective blade against his throat.

“I say,” she hissed, “I know many ways to kill and I’ve never minded employing any of them.”

Wylk screamed, throwing himself back off the bench. He landed, sprawled on his ass and reaching for the spot of blood on his that marked where she had nicked him. She stood and held the knife for all to see. “Anything else, little man?”

Wylk scrambled to his feet, his eyes never leaving the blade, and scurried away from her.

No one else bothered her for the rest of her meal.

* * *

Malasa stopped at a stall lighted by torches and displaying bricks of metal of different weights and hues on a silk covered counter. She ran her fingers over the shiny smooth surfaces.

“What do you seek, madame?” the one-eyed proprietor asked.

“Steel,” she said.

He nodded and asked, “Steel for cookware?”

“For a sword,” Kahna told him. “Your finest quality.”

The one-eyed man bowed his head in acknowledgement and went to the rear of his stall. He returned several moments later, a silvery bright steel ingot dancing with the light of the torches.

“My finest,” he said in a voice as smooth as his wares. “Strong, guaranteed to hold an edge.”

Kahna nodded.

“If I may,” he continued, “I could recommend a swordsmith of some skill who could craft a fine weapon from such a....”

“My husband is a smith,” she said, wondering who was speaking.

The one-eyed man said, “Of course.”

* * *

Malasa slept in the hay of her husband’s brother’s stables and rode out at first light. The block of steel was wrapped in oilcloth and stowed safely in her saddlebag.

Midway through her journey, her horse plodding without guidance along the westward road, she understood what that piece of steel meant. It was her decision. The moment Kahna awoke in her mind, she knew she would have to make the choice.

Malasa or Kahna.

Wife of a country smith or consort and companion of the Lord of the House of Ghehan, Highest Priest of the Worship, Lord High Mage of Atlantis and the First City, Counselor to the King of the Twelve Houses.

Kahna could not see that there had really been any choice at all.

The Warrior Matron, Part 3

More of this unpublished short story. Part 1 and Part 2 are here:

“Passed Lives”

© Paul Kupperberg

Malasa took the road east. It was half a day’s ride into the City of the Stars. Less than an hour into her journey, the spires of the City poked up from the horizon. Slim elegant spires, as bright and shimmering as starlight grew taller as the evening drew closer. The sky was dotted with the aircraft of the rich and noble.

Malasa did not notice the passage of time or the mighty city that hove into view before her. She thought instead of the eclipse. And of the lie she had told Khar. She had called him a fool for fearing the eclipse, but really, how was he to know any better? For all his kindness, his intelligence for a man of his station, Khar shared the base superstitions of a peasant. He sees that which he does not understand and thus ascribes some supernatural, and no doubt ominous, cause to it. Blotting out the sun surely foretells imminent doom. He couldn’t know that the gods were not the least bit interested in his life or death. Their attentions were turned to matters cosmic and often beyond mortal comprehension. Kahna had stood before them, defied them, battled them, felt their scorn, only to survive because she was too insignificant to be worth killing. That their actions ever crossed with those of mortals was only of the greatest coincidence. That they might answer prayers or change any one mortal’s life out of anything but wretched self-interest was laughable.

Khar had seen an omen of disaster.

Malasa told him the eclipse was just that, an eclipse. He did not believe her when she said that truth had been a lie. Perhaps she had not granted him credit enough for wisdom.

An eclipse was nothing more than the passage of one body between two others, casting a shadow across space.

The event itself did not cause ill to befall the world.

It did, however, announce that the Powers were at their apogee and the schemes of gods and demagogues and mages alike were soon to commence.

* * *

As evening fell, Malasa rode through the East Gate of the City of the Stars, between twin ranks of Guard. Kahna’s heart swelled at the sight of them, strong young men and women in their gleaming armor over crisp uniforms. Their posture was as rigid as their battle staffs, shined to mirror perfection and planted firmly on the ground. Once she had been one of them, a soldier in the Palace Guard of the City of the Archer, in the reign of Ahr’ghan II. She remembered what it was like to buckle on the armor, march as one with an army of her peers, sharing in their strength and reveling in their numbers. How many years ago was it?

“Guardsman,” she called.

“Aye?” one answered turning only his eyes to her.

“What is the year?”

“Last I looked, it was still 5276, in the reign of Shiad VI.” The guardswoman to his left snorted in derision at the ignorant peasant.

Malasa ignored her and said, to herself and in disbelief, “More than eight hundred years.” She dug her heels into the horse’s side, urging him forward. “Eight hundred years.”

She wondered if, in all that time, this was the only time she had come back.

* * *

The marketplace seemed to find new life in the early hours of darkness. Exhausted by the days commerce, the vast, tight maze of streets and shops that twisted up the gentle slope of Palace Hill would fall quiet, merchants and peddlers toppling off legs grown numb from standing dawn to dusk, gasping for breathe and recovery as they shuttered their businesses and crept home to dinner and sleep. Then, come the night, and the market opened anew for businesses best conducted under the cover of darkness and in the shadows of morality.

Malasa left the horse at the livery owned by the husband of Khar’s sister and, refusing their repeated offer of a bed for the night, wandered into the torch lit marketplace.

Malasa seldom came to the City. All that they needed to live, really, was available to them where they were. They grew their own food, raised their own livestock, trading the surplus with neighbors for whatever else they needed. Khar shoed horses, repaired farming implements and craftsmen’s tools for services or goods and, even sometimes, a little gold. Save for the raw materials of his trade, the metals and coal for his hearth, they needed nothing from the City of the Stars.

Kahna knew the marketplace intimately, or at least she had eight centuries past. But she found as she wandered the serpentine streets that while the faces of the merchants and facades of the stalls and shops had changed from what she remembered, the marketplace remained as it had been. A new generation of gamblers and tricksters and whores and thieves crawled these streets seeking victims among the unwary, but the stink of stale ale and the stench of desperation were the same as it had ever been. Kahna felt right at home. Malasa had been frightened since she had ridden off from home.

The Warrior Matron, Part 2

On August 8, I ran the first segment of an unpublished short story from 2002, “Passed Lives.” Here’s some more:

“Passed Lives”

© Paul Kupperberg

The blackness slid across the face of the sun and, as Malasa had promised, emerged whole and unchanged at the end. Khar had fallen to his knees, spending the next hour of the day that became night in prayer to Atlannis and any other deity he thought might be open to hearing his pleas of salvation for himself and his family.

Malasa watched him through the window after, at last, stifling her laughter and finding the words to comfort and calm the children. The moment had passed, her awakening leaving her both unsettled and strangely calmed, as though the forty-seven years of this life had been something she had only imagined, a brief interruption in reality. But that was not true. Khar, this house, the fourteen children she had birthed, the three she had buried before their first years had passed, her life up to this instant...hardly an hallucination.

And yet...

She set the children to preparing fresh bread for their supper. Ordinarily, they baked only once a week, on the eve of the resting day, but she wanted to distract them from the waning sun. Khar seemed rooted to the ground, unwilling to cease his prayers until he either believed the danger had passed or he found himself face-to-face with the gods.

...Malasa could no more deny the life she lead than she could the one, from so long ago, that the sight of the eclipsing sun had awakened. She remembered them both, vividly, the details of whichever one her mind happened to light upon the more strongly remembered, until memory leapt from the one back to the other. She was Kahna, the tenth generation warrior priestess of the Emerald Temple of the City of the Archer. She was Malasa, wife of Khar of the City of the Stars. She had lived as the former many centuries past. She lived now as the latter. And now, suddenly, after the passage of too many years, that previous existence had come back to her, whole and fully remembered as though she lived it still.

“Why now?” Malasa whispered as the last vestige of darkness slipped away from the sun and the day became whole again.

In a dark corner of her mind, in the part that was now Kahna, she believed she knew and that knowledge made her shudder.

* * *

In the night, with the house’s great room glowing in near light from the banked embers in the hearth, Khar stirred in bed and whispered her name.

“Yes, Khar?” she said, quiet so that the girls were not awakened.

“How did you know?” he asked in a tone that said he was not accustomed to his wife knowing what he did not.

“How did I know what?” she answered, pretending to have been awoken from a sound sleep. Malasa could scarce breathe, having waited all day for him to ask this question, knowing there was no sane answer she could give him.
“
About the sun,” he said.

Malasa moved her shoulders. “I didn’t,” she said. “I lied, so the children wouldn’t be frightened.”

His voice came softly out of the darkness. “No,” he said. “No, you didn’t. I know you, Malasa. After a lifetime together, I can read your every tone. You spoke the truth.”

“I’m tired, Khar,” she said.

“I thought we were doomed,” Khar said. He shifted in bed, pressing his body against hers. She could smell the smoke and tang of metal that clung to him no matter well how he scrubbed himself clean every night. He pushed aside her long hair, auburn streaked with gray, and kissed the back of her neck. “I was scared,” he said in strangled voice. “To lose you.” Another kiss. “Our children.” His hand crept up her hip.

“No, Khar,” she said without moving. “Please, not tonight.”

Khar was silent, then said, “You’ve never denied me before, Malasa.”

Malasa drew the heavy wool cover to her chin, her eyes wide open and staring at something that was not in the room.

“Malasa?”

“I can’t tonight, just not tonight, Khar,” she whispered.

Khar exhaled heavily and withdrew to his side of the bed. “Sleep well, Malasa,” he said.

“Sleep well,” she said. But Malasa was sure there would be no sleep for her. She had much to think upon now that it was dark and quiet and she could be alone with her thoughts. She could think about what it was to be Kahna, to be Malasa, two women sharing a single mind. To wonder why, in the eclipsed light of the noonday sun she was suddenly made to know that hers was Kahna’s soul reborn. And how, in the name of Crghas and the Darkness, she would ever explain it to Khar and the children.

And most troubling of all, the matter that had her wracked with guilt, shivering with longing. How was she to find Thalis? And what he would see when Kahna stood before him, old and worn to a gray tatter by Malasa’s life?

What would he see, the lover she had last seen so many centuries ago?

* * *

The day after the eclipse, the priests proclaimed a time of prayer and meditation. Malasa, like the rest of the citizens of the City ignored them and went about their business. Perhaps a priest or a nobleman might spare a day to commune with unhearing gods, but she could not. Khar did not speak of the previous day, but Malasa caught him casting furrow-browed looks in her direction all morning. Shartra and Vannga spent their time in the corner or across the yard from their mother, watching her and whispering to one another.

After the midday meal, Malasa could stand it no more.

She stood in the door of Khar’s smithing shack. “I am going to the City,” she told him.

He frowned. “It’s late to start off now, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “There is bread and meat for your evening meal. I’ll stay the night at an inn and return in the morning.”

Khar’s frown deepened, a black smudge across his sweat and soot stained forehead. “Malasa,” he started to say.

She looked at him, Malasa loving her husband of thirty years, Kahna not knowing him at all. “I will be home tomorrow, Khar,” she said. She turned and began walking away. She stopped and without turning back to look at him added, “I promise.”

Then she was gone. A little while later, Khar heard the sound of hoofs clattering across the yard, then fading as his wife rode away, out of all hearing and sight.

The Warrior Matron

Submitted to an anthology, this short story, completed in November 2002, didn’t make the final cut. Like the excerpt from “Walk Upon the Waters” posted on July 30, this is another post-comic book Arion Lord of Atlantis story (the names have been changed, of course). The premise here takes the sword & sorcery conceit of the reincarnated warrior and, I hope, turns it on its ear a bit. Here ar the first 1,000 words or so:

“Passed Lives”

© Paul Kupperberg
Arion Lord of Atlantis © DC Comics

As Malasa brought the blade down on the creature’s neck, darkness began to nibble away at the sun. The chicken’s brief squawk of fear was cut short in the blur of blood from its severed neck, its taut feathered body struggling in her grasp even as its startled eyed head bounced to the dusty ground. Malasa had turned her head to the sky, averting her eyes from the splash of blood, when she saw the wedge of blackness beginning to creep across the face of the sun.

She peered through squinted lids, sure her eyes were somehow deceiving her. The sun, giver of all light and warmth, surely it could not be going dark, not now. It was late morning, the sun barely midway through its daily journey across the sky while Malasa and her family attended to chores on their small farm outside the edge of the City of the Stars. Her husband, Khar, the smith, was nearby in his shed, patiently heating the head of an axe in need of repair in his blazing hearth. Their two youngest, the bulk of their little herd having moved on in marriage or apprenticeship, Shartra and Vannga sat in the shade of the house’s overhanging roof, chattering away as they mended bedding with large needles and coarse thread.

The barrel-chested, dark-bearded Khar dropped his long-handled tongs, losing the damaged axe head in the fire. “By Crghas,” he breathed. The crust of darkness at the sun’s western edge had notched deeper into the otherwise blazing orb, moving slug-like, almost imperceptibly, to the east. It was no illusion, else it be one shared by them all.

Vannga, Malasa’s baby, put aside her needle and crossed to where her mother stood, the lifeless fowl now racing away its last moments of existence unnoticed in circles at her feet. “Mama?” the auburn haired eight year old said, slipping into her mother’s arms.

Malasa looked to Khar, but the burly blacksmith was no help, a gape-jawed and glassy-eyed witness to the death of the sun.

“I don’t,” Malasa started to say and then she stopped. Her hand on her frightened child’s face, she looked at the rapidly dwindling sun in the darkening sky. She knew something about this, she realized with a start. It was as a name known but, for the moment, unremembered. But what could she, an old woman, mother of many, have ever known, could have forgotten, about such things?

Then, she said, in a calm voice to reassure the trembling child, “It’s called an eclipse, Vannga. It is merely the shadow of the moon falling upon a vastly more distant sun.” She stroked Vannga’s face. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Khar’s eyes flicked her way, his brow wrinkling. “Say what, woman?”

Malasa turned her gaze his way. “I said it’s an eclipse. It will be over in a few minutes. It isn’t a sign or a portent. It’s harmless.” She smiled, but she was confused.

Khar pointed a trembling finger to the sky. “That is the maw of the Dark Gods, devouring the sun,” he cried. Rooted to her seat with fear, Shartra erupted in tears.

“Oh, don’t be such an ass, Khar,” Malasa scolded. “You’re scaring the children.”

Khar’s face was turning scarlet, his eyes bulging. One quarter of the sun had been consumed by darkness. “Why shouldn’t they fear, woman? The world is coming to an end,” he rasped.

Malasa made a sound of disgust and, taking Vannga’s hand, stomped towards the house. “Then pray or repent or whatever you need do, Khar. And when you’re done being a fool...” she pointed at the carcass of the chicken, finally spent and sprawled twitching on the ground. “Bring in your dinner.”

Malasa hurried Vannga into the house, then hustled the crying Shartra in behind her. She closed the door, then stood with her back pressed against it for several minutes, her eyes squeezed shut. How in the name of the Darkness had this knowledge come to her?

She did not know.

And then she did.

A startled, boisterous laugh exploded from Malasa. Her daughters stood watching her, frightened and confused. No doubt they thought the sight of the vanishing sun had driven away her sanity. And who was Malasa to say they were wrong? She had gone, in the drawing of a breathe, from their sturdy, reliable mother to a baying clown, wracked with laughter even as doom spread its dark fingers over Atlantis. This thought struck her as funnier still. It was but an eclipse, a naturally occurring phenomenon with no more meaning than a hand passing in front of the flame of a candle. And yet to the peasants who labored in the fields of the City of the Stars, it was as if the Dreamer herself had appeared before them to accompany them over into the Darkness.

“Mama, what is it? What’s so funny?” eleven year old Shartra said, her voice quivering, her face wet with tears.

Malasa fought to regain her composure, knowing her behavior was more frightening to the children than the blackening sun. But it had been such a long time. She had lived half of someone else’s life...

And, oh gods, had she really called poor Khar an ass and a fool? She put a hand over her mouth and tried suppressing a renewal of convulsive laughter. Malasa, wed to the smith Khar since she was little more than a girl herself, with near thirty years of marriage and eleven children between them, would never have spoken to her husband in such a disrespectful manner.

But Kahna, warrior priestess of the City of the Archer...she would have no such prohibition.

The Last Arion Story

I created a sword & sorcery comic book series for DC called Arion, Lord of Atlantis which ran from 1982 to 1985. I’ve always been particularly fond of Arion and company, which I got to write again in the '90s, but never felt as though I’d been able to properly resolve the characters and their stories. In 2000, I found the opportunity with a short story I contributed to Oceans of Magic, an anthology edited by Brian M. Thomsen and Martin Greenberg. In it, the aged immortal sorcerer supreme of Atlantis takes to sea aboard his ensorcelled ship, the Yar, sailing off for the final battle against his ancient foe, Celepha. The story, finished in May 2000, was my closure:

WALK UPON THE WATERS

© 2000 Paul Kupperberg

Thalis dreamed of Kahna.

She was the Amazon, tall and muscular, skin the color of burnished bronze, hair braided in a tight tail that hung to within inches of the floor. She was the most beautiful, the most dangerous, the most desirable woman he had ever known. Even before he saw in her startling sightless gray eyes the same soul reflected back that he had seen three time previous. He whispered, “Kahna,” and she whispered, “Thalis,” and they were together again.

She stood in his dream on the terrace outside his quarters. The sun was rising and the morning breeze was warm. Her arms were wrapped across her chest but as the sun rose, its golden light bathing the First City’s gleaming towers in a light so brilliant as to be painful, she slowly spread wide her arms, raising on her toes, turning her face to the sun and laughing like a delighted child.

Thalis lay in his bed, watching through the doorway the golden light wash over her golden skin, the silk of her robe shining like white fire in the morning sun.

As he watched, he was content to live forever, if only so the memory of the moment would never, ever die.

* * *

At sundown on the second day, Celepha sent creatures to attack the Yar.

They were three, exploding from the roiling waters to surround the heaving ship. They were twice the height of the Yar's main mast, waterbeasts dark and featureless save for gaping, dripping maws lined with coral teeth sharp enough to rend wood and metal. The first of the beasts closed its jaws around the ship's railing and the serpent roared in rage and pain.

Thalis strode from beneath deck, staff in hand, and screamed an incantation of fire at the beast. The spell surged through him and the great staff, and tore a gash in the fabric of reality that separated this world from the Darkness, releasing a torrent of eldritch fire that turned the raging thing into a howling column of steam. He turned the staff on the second beast, releasing the magical bonds that held the waters to this shape even as it swooped down with its jaws wide to snatch the old sorcerer from the rain washed deck. The attack died in a torrent of sea water that sent Thalis crashing to the planks.

The third and final beast found its throat caught in the teeth of the serpent and it bellowed and thrashed as it tried to escape Yar's grasp. The serpent held firm, until the beast decided to return to its primal form rather than face humiliating defeat. It collapsed into water, washing back into the sea that birthed it.

Thalis regained his footing and, wiping the stinging salt of the sea from his eyes, held high his staff to the thundering clouds, and screamed, "I am coming, Celepha!"

Lightning flashed, making night as bright as day. Thunder shook the very air around the ship.

"Celepha mocks us still," growled the serpent, its great head whipping back and forth.

Thalis tightened his fist around his staff. "Celepha toys with us," he said. He knew what she too must know. He was one old man, weary of life and of living. What did a god have to fear from one such as him?

* * *

Thalis's staff was carved of the wood of the first tree felled to build the First City.

The gods had gathered members of the Twelve Tribes inhabiting the world and brought them to the place on the edge of the Great Sea and decreed that upon that spot was to be constructed the First City of Atlantis. A craftsman named Argon had taken his axe to the great tree and felled it with twelve blows, grunting the name of each tribe as his blade bit into the wood.

The tree fell. A piece of wood as thick as a grown man's forearm and near three lengths tall splintered off the tree when it fell to the ground. Thalis took up the splinter.

"Here is the nexus of all the magic of the One," Wynsgar nodded in approval at the place the gods had directed them to. "Atlantis shall grow great and powerful here. Its people will spread out across the world, but its heart will ever thus beat here, upon the lands that the gods have gifted us."

Thalis took out his knife and began to carve at the top of the staff the visage of Atlannis, first of the twelve deities. When he finished the carving, Atlannis smiled out at him. Over the years, the visages of the rest of the pantheon joined Atlannis on the staff.

Now, so many thousands of years later, he feared to look at the staff lest he find the mother of all the gods no longer smiling.

* * *

Thalis huddled in a chair in the cabin wrapped in furs and coverlets. He would not, could not bring himself to lay on the berth. How could that be right, without Kahna to share it with him?

"Yar," he whispered.

"Yes, Thalis," replied his old friend.

"I cannot sleep," the old man said.

"Perhaps that is best," the ship said softly, in a voice like sea spray through the riggings. "Think of the dreams you will miss."

Thalis closed his eyes. He saw swimming before him the faces of thousands. Of Kahna, of Gith, of Shanar, of Wynsgar, of countless others he had known, had loved, had lost. His life had surged through the ages, bloody with violence and destruction. He had received his share of wounds, had faced death too many times to remember, but he was still here.

How many had he lead into brutal, ugly deaths?

He could count each and every face, passing like specters from the Darkness before him now. Then he would know how many.

His eyes snapped open, banishing the ghosts. He sighed. "Ahh, well. There will be time for sleep later."