Free A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales by Scott Fitzgerald Gray Page B

that he is wrong in all that he knows. He is wrong in all he feels
in the long years of observing the Quick Ones and the pattern their short lives
make against the slow passage of seasons.
    The Quick Ones move from life to death in a single heartbeat of
the world, and they slay each other with a focus that he has always understood
to mean they embrace death. It has been clear to his reckoning always that the
Quick Ones welcome death’s release, and the chance to become one with the world
from which they arise and to which they return. Death the end and beginning of
the cycle of all seasons.
    He is wrong. He knows now. The Quick Ones do not embrace death.
    They fear it.
    For a season, he ponders.
    In the time that another winter approaches, then passes, he
decides.
    All the possible futures he perceives. All the endless exchanges
of madness and war that branch off as ripples from this spot.
    All the death that surrounds each vision of the blade, each facet
of the future and past splintering like ice. Steel and stone and blood lock
together in a delicate and deadly embrace across the chasm of time. Within the
spirit of the Blood Knight that lives now only within his memory, he senses
shadow that threads through him, freezing all the innermost veins of the liquid
of life.
    His is the old magic. But in the space beyond all history, there
lives a magic that is older still.
    It is a thing that he and his kind do not dwell on, do not think
about. A thing they turn their senses from, always unknowable. This is the
sword’s magic, he realizes. The deep magic that is older than he, older than
any living thing.
    It is the deep magic that forges the grey blade long ago, imbuing
it with the shadow that will scour the world if that magic is ever unleashed.
The deep magic has no equal anymore, no force of life or spellcraft in all
Isheridar that might stand against it.
    Except for one.
    Old magic lingers in these secret places of the world, the
Quick Ones say. He hears their songs. Knows that this place that is his is one
such place they sing of.
    For the first time, he thinks on how very old he is.
    He thinks on the world that is older still, and on the Quick Ones
who partake of so little of that world in the short time given to them. He
thinks about the death they face, and the history that reaches beyond life.
    He thinks on the endless death that twists out from this place,
this time, because the presence of the grey blade here creates a single future
that will not be denied. The quest of the Green Priestess, the sacrifice of the
Blood Knight. No difference made. The Green Priestess falls, the Blood Knight
falls, and the rift between these two is never breached. Cut by long years
between them and the door of death that closes off their perceptions.
    There stands a future beyond which he cannot feel. There stands a
place that seethes with the noise of storm wind across the dry grasslands, that
burns with the heat of the unseen earth that will consume all the wide world in
the end.
    This is the end of each future in which only death unfolds each
time the grey blade is seized, claimed by another that will turn its power to
destruction in the name of the hunger that the deep magic brings.
    All futures save one. An impossible place where the Green
Priestess and the Blood Knight are made to see the things each knew. Things the
other should have known.
     
    He reaches deep within himself.
     
    He summons all the old magic that is in this place. He creates a
moment beyond which he cannot stretch his endless thought. A moment beyond all
the long centuries of his awareness and the farthest expanses of all the
futures he can touch. A single future that he will shape. A possibility that is
all he is. All he can be.
    The Blood Knight’s dedication burns bright in the dead heart of
every oath ever uttered in the Empire’s name, and in the knowledge of a
darkness hidden from the world at the cost of blood and in the name of the
common good. In the