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  He glanced up.

  The king stood over him, the crown once more atop the monstrous man’s golden head, the key now elsewhere, likely handed off to one of the cowled priests.

  Marnok did not wear a look of sympathy. “You could have been king,” he said. Then he stomped.

  The large sandal caught Bayne across the temple. The move had been faster than possible of any other man, including Bayne himself who was amazingly swift and strong. The blow rocked him back against the column behind.

  The warrior tried to roll over to sit up again.

  But there was another blow. This time a fist.

  Then another.

  And another.

  A constant barrage of hammering fists and kicking feet and flailing arms. It seemed as if it would never end, as if all the world had become nothing but pounding and punching and hitting and smashing. A mortal would have been smashed by the first blow, would have been a bloody pulp by the third blow, little more than a large stain of red by the end.

  But Bayne was not mortal. He knew that now. And his healing abilities and his steel bones and whatever other factors Marnok had included in his creation long ago kept the warrior from dying and even from much of the pain.

  Still, along with his vision, he lost track of time. There was blackness coming and going, sometimes around the edges of his sight and sometimes enveloping him whole. His few moments of consciousness were full of heavy grunts followed by flesh smacking flesh as if a butcher chopping a side of beef. At times Bayne could feel the blood trickling from his many wounds. At other times he could feel nothing.

  Then finally, after the longest of eons, the beating came to an end.

  The warrior lay on his back, somehow moved to the middle of the long chamber, his body layered in the brown of bruises and splayed across the red carpet now sopping and stained nearly black.

  The king towered over Bayne, Marnok actually huffing from tiredness, bent over with his hands on his knees.

  The first thing the swordsman noticed upon full consciousness was the sovereign was back to his full size, the muscles in his arm sweating and large enough to do a giant proud, the veins protruding beneath the skin as if the burrows of worms.

  Bayne chose to move. And found himself nude and fettered.

  He stared from each of his writs to his ankles. Once more stone shackles as thick as a man’s arm had been placed upon his limbs. Too, a wide band of steel had been wrapped about his waist. This time, however, there were no chains. Instead, iron spikes as wide as spears had been driven through broad-walled eyes in the shackles, pinning his appendages to the ground.

  Bayne tested the iron spikes, attempting to lift his arms and legs.

  Nothing. Not even a budging.

  A shadow moved. It was the king. He was standing tall again, no longer breathing heavy. His casual face had been replaced with an austere set of features, his jaw locked, his eyes firm and steady, a vessel beating in his temple. The massive figure loomed over the confined figure of the warrior.

  “You had an opportunity,” Marnok said with a bite in his voice, “but instead you decided upon selfishness and anarchy. So be it. I will have my freedom regardless.”

  Bayne tried to speak, but found his mouth full of blood. He spat a scarf of red, then coughed. Finally, “What are you to do?”

  Marnok smiled. It was a smile of true selfishness and anarchy, though there was a hint of fear and weariness in the corners of his mouth. “I will leave this place. I will leave these people, our people, to their own devices. As I have said, I have served my time. The only other who could be appointed was yourself, and as you have turned traitor … what shall happen shall happen. These mortals will be on their own.”

  Now Bayne laughed. He twisted his bald head back as far as he could, rubbing against the wet rug, and gave out a hardy guffaw.

  “There is nothing comedic about this situation,” the king said.

  “Oh, but there is,” Bayne said. “You have sat here for thousands of years, seeking an escape. Then when you believe you have found one in me, I have failed you. And then you do exactly as I eventually would have done. Left this world to its own ends. If not amusing, there is at least irony to be found here.”

  The lips of the king went pale and firm, forming into a straight line. “You will not be laughing much longer, Aris-Bayne.”

  The warrior’s eyes flared. “There is nothing you can do to me that has not already been done, Marnok.”

  “Oh, but there is,” the king said. “For one, I could destroy you. Lava would suffice. But I will not do this. I want you to live for eternity, to suffer a thousand wounds, to remember this day above all others as the day your tortures began.”

  “I have already been tortured!” Bayne shouted. “My very life was denied me! I had no notion of the past. And what you have shown me is nothing if not despicable. I am a god of war, was made into a god of war, and war is all I have known. But for Valdra! She who was taken from me before I even knew her! She who was used by an other-worldy god to tantalize me with hope! But now I know there is no hope. Valdra is dead. I have no past in which to return, no future in which to look forward. There is nothing for me! Nowhere to go!”

  The warrior heaved at these words, tugging and pulling, testing his stone manacles once more. To no end. Other than to tire himself, to bring red drops of sweat to his brow and harshness to his breathing.

  Marnok snickered. “I have only begun with you.”

  The king clapped his hands.

  Off to Bayne’s right could be heard a thick scraping sound, as if of something heavy and metallic being slid across the marble floor. His head jerked around to spy Marnok’s threat, but to no avail. He could not tilt his head far enough, nor stretch his gaze to meet his doom, his torture.

  The sovereign clapped his hands once more, and appearing at the edges of Bayne’s vision was one of the hooded priests, tall and slender, in his ancient hands curled a lengthy leather whip the end of which burned with fire and dripped some auburn, viscid fluid.

  There was a sizzling, a burning, and Bayne twisted his neck to see what had caused this. It was the whip, the flaming solution from its tip, dripping down to burn like acid into the stained red rug of the throne room. Round splotches spread beneath the fall of that acidic liquid, burning black around the edges and sending up a faint smoke with a redolence of branded flesh.

  “Your fate,” the king said.

  The warrior’s eyes went to Marnok. “It is to be burning, then?”

  Bayne watched the ruler calm now, his grin narrow and wide, the giant man’s eyes broad in an almost ecstatic joy.

  “My choices were to kill you or imprison you,” Marnok said, “or to send you back from where you came. I have decided upon the final solution. But I will not allow for your return to this world.”

  He motioned toward the priest holding the whip. “Thus I have a remedy, an eldritch solution to scourge your body of the magic embedded in your DNA that would allow you to return to this world upon nearing death. No more surprise visits from you, Aris-Bayne. You will be barred from your home world forever.”

  “You will pour this fluid onto me?” Bayne asked.

  “Of course not,” the king said. “We will sear it into your flesh.”

  The king turned to the priest. “Begin.”

  The iron-tipped end of the whip slunk out from the priest’s hands as if a serpent seeking prey. It darted about on the carpet, skittering this way and that.

  Flash!

  Iron and leather bit deep into skin, burrowing through muscle and down to rake against bone.

  Teeth ground into one another in the big warrior’s mouth, his tongue dry and sticking against the roof of his mouth as fire and lightning clawed through the arm that had been struck.

  The whip slid back along the rug, leaving a trail of red.

  Then the true pain began.

  Merely a drop of Marnok’s acid had been left behind by the lashing, but it was more than eno
ugh to send Bayne’s mind reeling, impelling him into before unimaginable levels of pain and horror. A million invisible ants with iron pincers gnawed upon the flesh of his struck arm, tearing away at the skin and lacerating and mangling and mauling the raw, exposed muscle, only pausing upon reaching the steel humerus. Even there, the anguish did not end. Liquid flames poured throughout the inner workings of Bayne’s body, sending forth shivering waves of affliction and agony into the vessels and fibers and sinews and tendons that made up the large man’s frame. His mind burned, was ablaze with more pain than he would have believed possible, more pain than any could withstand.

  It was enough to lodge him into unconsciousness, that singular blow from the whip.

  When Bayne awoke, he was sweating and feverish, his vision shaky, his flesh cold. Quivers worked their way through his limbs, rubbing flesh against his stone fetters and scarring his ankles and wrists where encircled.

  As the warrior’s eyesight focused, though still blurred from tears of anguish, he found the king and priest continued to stand over him, the snake of leather coiling and uncoiling at the cloaked figure’s side as if something alive.

  Marnok grinned. “But one stroke and you are nearly unmanned. That is a shame for you, Aris-Bayne, because that was nearly the beginning.”

  The king nodded.

  The whip sprang back.

  Then snapped forward, biting once more into skin, this time strafing across Bayne’s chest. A thousand javelins of ice-encrusted steel gouged his lungs. The tusks of some wild beast rooted within his stomach, ripping apart intestines and crunching through to his spine. A rain of daggers, blades of diamond, impaled him throughout his body and skewered through mere flesh and mind into the dank cellars, the deepest pits of a soul.

  The tortured was given no chance for recovery this time. The whip loomed again, then struck again. And again. And again. A thousand times was that metal-tipped stinger driven into tissue, the leather wrappings splattering blood as if it were darkest wine sprayed about. Each blow was worse than the one before, each bearing acid beneath the flesh to burn away all that was a man, a proud and strong and nearly invincible immortal man.

  The agony stretched forth into infinity, never ending, burning at Bayne’s core and stabbing into it. For the rest of his days, as long as he would live, wherever he would be, this torture would always be with him. It was a rape of his soul, splintering him, dividing him from what he had been and what he would become.

  If Bayne had prayed to a god, he would have thanked that god for the bliss of swooning that soon found him, propelling him into the darkness of oblivion.

  An eon passed, an eon of what felt to be black death.

  There was nothing.

  Then there was existence.

  The first sensation was light, bright, slicing into his skull, a sensation of darts poking into the depths of his brain. Then the pain spread across his body like molten iron flowing over him and into the crevices of his skin. He still lay on his back. He still was bound. And everywhere that anything touched him, his raw back against the rug or his wrists and ankles against the stone clamps, it was as if acid ate away at him, burning and tearing.

  Bayne sucked in air, trying to scream. But his lips were covered with a thick leather strap, padding of some kind stuffed into his mouth. He choked then, coughing and spurting fluid from his nose. He could barely breath.

  And the agony. It would not end. He had never experienced such pain. He had been stabbed and burnt and wounded in many manners, but Bayne had never known sensations such as this. It was a living hell that would not end.

  All he could do was hope for death to finish the suffering.

  An image blocking the light. Marnok.

  “Now you are ready to be returned,” the king said, the earlier smile gone from his face. “Prepare yourself, Aris-Bayne, for your home will soon be lost to you forever.”

  His eyes streaked red and bulging from their sockets, Bayne witnessed another of the priests, perhaps the one who had tortured him. The cowled character appeared on the edges of the afflicted warrior’s sight. The priest lifted his hands and from the dark hole of his face came whispered words that made no sense yet had an eerie, rhyming quality to them.

  Then more light, painful light, light that burned and sucked the remaining air from his lungs. Light that blinded and left no sensation, not even the pain. For which Bayne was thankful.

  Falling.

  Crumbling.

  Breaking apart.

  An explosion. A crash.

  Warmth to the flesh.

  A breeze.

  The scent of grass.

  Bayne opened his eyes to find himself laying on his side, curled nearly into a ball on a floor of tall, flattened grass nearly the color of an emerald.

  He breathed in at last, thankful for the air. Then noticed the pain, the searing, had mostly left him. There was still the ghost of the torture within him, a reminder of what had been.

  He was alive.

  But where am I?

  He sat up, the jingling of his gear proving his chain shirt and two-handed sword had been returned to him. He stared down at the links across his chest, the large blade in the grass next to him. He lifted his arms to touch his chest, to affirm to himself he was free.

  His arms.

  The skin. It was … gone.

  He twisted his wrists and hands about, staring with a widening gaze at where his flesh had once been. Now there was nothing but scar tissue, lines upon lines of scars upon scars, red streaks that were raised. Long, permanent blemishes that evidenced his pain and the ghost of pain.

  His sturdy fingers sought his face, finding features dimpled and hollowed.

  Leaning forward, he tugged at the ends of his breeches, pulling them out of his boots. The legs, too, were now nothing more than lines of disfigurement.

  Not an inch of undamaged hide remained upon his frame.

  For the first time in his existence, Bayne leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his bald and now scarred head gripped in his mighty hands, and he cried.

  The defilement of his physical body did not disturb him, though the memories of his torture still ate away at his mind. He had traveled far, seen much, and for his experiences he had gained nothing. This was what tore at him.

  His own past was nothing of which to be proud.

  And of that he still held few true memories.

  Even Valdra was lost to him, before he had even known her.

  He had been bested by Marnok, a figure pathetic beyond his physical capabilities. Here had been a king who could have lead his people to true heights, but instead taught them laws of indulgence only to abandon them when he had grown tired of them.

  Bayne could have changed things in Marnok’s world, his own world.

  Yet now, he was banished forever, banished to where he did not know. Marnok had spoken of being returned. Did that mean to Ursia, Bayne’s second home? A world where he had known nothing but constant drudgery and often enough challenge by lesser men? A world where there is no peace?

  The swordsman rolled onto his knees and forced himself to stand, the last of his tears flying from his eyes. He stared about. Once more he found himself upright in a field of green. Once more he stood beneath a glaring sun above. Once more he was alone. In the distance, along the horizon, were lines of trees.

  Then, there, a mountain. To Bayne’s left. It seemed familiar. Was it the mountain he had climbed? Would Pedrague still be waiting for him there? Does it matter?

  He picked up his sword, turned and marched in the direction of the mountain, no longer marching toward the past, but marching toward the future. A future he would create for himself.

  And no one, kings nor gods nor priests, will stand in my way. This he promised to himself.

  Under the Mountain

  Part III of The Sword of Bayne

  42 years After Ashal (A.A.)

  Part I: The Shepherd

  The mountain stood before him, and he stood befor
e the mountain. He had been here once before, almost in the exact same spot. He still wore the same shirt of chain links, and he still carried a long, two-handed sword upon his back. As before, his muscles continued to bulge beneath the flesh of his sleeveless shirt, and his domed head glinted beneath the bright of the day’s sun.

  But that was all that was the same. Much had changed.

  The flesh of Bayne kul Kanon was no longer without blemish. Now he was a monstrosity to look upon, every inch of his skin layered in rows upon rows and lines upon lines of scar tissue, remainders of an otherworldly whipping at the urging of a mad god.

  His eyes, always shaded and hard, were now dark and sunken. Within the warrior’s visage was more than strength of body and mind, more than the steel of nerve it took to kill and wage war. Now there was a twinge of eldritch madness, of torture and pain and wrongdoing.

  Before this mountain stood not the same Bayne kul Kanon who had stood there once upon a time.

  Too, Bayne himself was not the only change to the scenery.

  At the base of a mountain sat what once had been a settlement so small it could quite not have been called a village. Bayne had thought of it as the village that was not a village. It was in ruins. What once had been a half dozen structures that had been little more than hovels were now skeletons of gray logs reaching for the sky. Here and there were the shattered remains of slate roofs and broken doors and hay so old and defiled as to be blackened.

  Even at a distance Bayne could make out the remains of the place. Yet he had visited the village that was not a village and spoken with one of its inhabitants not long ago. Perhaps weeks? The swordsman was not sure of the passage of time as he had traveled much, and bitterly had been unconscious during some of his sojourn. Regardless of any exactness about the passing of time, he had not been gone from this location so long that it could have fallen to ruin, and there were no recent signs of war that would lead one to believe the settlement had been ransacked.