“I obey, Lord Kilhorn, O Hand of Death,” the unfortunate old healer named Selmon of Askileon said, awkwardly and uncomfortably managing a half-bow.
The creature known as Kilhorn stood still and silent a long time, deep, rasping breaths the only sign he lived. It was the way with him, Selmon had learned in these past few long years of forced servitude. In all but killing and warfare - if the two can be fully separated as such - it was as if Kilhorn took far longer to react to anything in his environment than a normal man. Yet if his stillness was disturbed, his reaction would be swift and invariably violent. Selmon had long since learned to wait - quietly, inoffensively.
“Lift the shroud of the dead one,” Kilhorn ordered at length. Selmon hastened to obey, at least in body, for in his mind and his heart he dreaded the task. So much of what had been done to the dead man on the dais was already marked with evil, sacrilege even. Kilhorn's continued obsession with the body was just as disturbing, and for Selmon, to have to play the role of custodian and preserver was nearly unbearable.
He approached the dais from the side opposite Kilhorn, carefully lifted the shroud. As the face came into focus in the demi-light of the burning incense, Selmon's heart panged with pity and with anger. He had not known the man long by some standards, but the few months they had spent locked together in the cabin of Kilhorn's ghastly ship had felt like a lifetime. In even the dimmest light, he could trace the lines of the more than a dozen scars that lined that face. Even in his youth, the man had never been what one would call handsome, but he had not been ugly, and “plain” was a word that would never apply to him. It was a warrior's face. A general's face. A king's face.
“The preserving is good,” Kilhorn rasped, interrupting Selmon's thoughts.
“Thank you, Lord Kilhorn,” Selmon mumbled, ducking his head instinctively.
“Go and hide in your corner, healer,” Kilhorn rasped, and Selmon obeyed. Quickly.
From the safety of the corner, he felt brave enough to study Kilhorn out of the corner of his eye. His face was very near one of the censers, and it was one Selmon knew as well - the sharpened teeth, ever-bared in a malevolent grimace; the nose, wide of nostril but barely protruding, as if placed upon the face as an afterthought; the strange skin, rough and brown as tree bark; the narrow, yellowy, inscrutable eyes that never seemed to move from dead forward, and yet seemed always to see all.
Those same eyes were locked upon the face of the one on the dais, and who could say what thoughts formed themselves - if any - behind them as Kilhorn looked upon the face of the slain? Selmon did not have long to think about it, for Kilhorn once more barked a command - this time not in the common tongue of Dwilight, in which he usually spoke to Selmon, but in Darkish, the tongue of the Darkishmen, natives of the Dark Isle in the Far East from among whom House Dodger had sprung in ages past.
“Awaken, dead one, and speak to your killer!” Kilhorn's eyes flashed as he spoke.
Selmon at first was shocked, then nearly amused. A prisoner over time learns to know his captors, and revels in their every minor idiosyncrasy and weakness. Kilhorn's, Selmon had found, was his pride – everything he wanted, he believed he should have, and in the rare occasions that the world said him nay, the rage that would come upon him was impressive to behold. Surely this was one case in which the mighty Kilhorn, self-styled Hand of Death, would be denied.
Long moments passed. Selmon struggled to hold back his coughing, for fear that it would be mistaken as laughter. And yet - did the light seem to grow brighter in the room? Did a quiet humming seem to grow, slowly, as if the very air grew excited with some unspoken anticipation?
Was the image of a body not materializing, sitting in the air above the flesh-and-blood one on the dais as if upon an invisible chair?
Kilhorn grunted with evident frustration. “Hasten and come, dead one,” he spoke again in Darkish, “you are killed and long since King of these lands. Do not keep the Hand of Death waiting, dead one.”
The image did not hasten in materializing, but it had nearly composed itself, and the response was not long in coming. “Hasten and come, eh? What would you threaten he who is already dead with, O Hand of Murder? I am unaccustomed to taking orders in my own “palace” - even if we are many levels below it, and even if another man sits the throne in a different one and bears my crown.”
Selmon's jaw dropped, and he threw both hands over his mouth as a fit of coughing, emboldened by the shock of what he was witnessing, escaped forth. Not just by the words, but by the voice itself, there could be no doubt - he was witnessing the soul of Kellan Dodger given visible form!
Kilhorn's breath hissed forth in an expression of barely-constrained rage, but he held his stone-stillness and stared impassively at the fully-materialized image of his murdered brother. “You speak with much pride for one who died like a slaughtered lamb, dead one. For all your fame and all your victories and all your killing in these lands and afar, you were killed by a greater killer, one who should be more famous and will be more famous in time. Speak with respectfulnesses, dead one.”
The shade of Kellan laughed, leaned back in the invisible chair, and reached out - from somewhere unseen, plucking a spectral raaha joint, already lit. The pungent smell of the narcotic substance filled the room, though no smoke could be seen.
“Murderer,” he sang, smiling - Selmon could see the smile through the back of the spectre's head - “blood is on your shoulders. Kill I today, you cannot kill I tomorrow. Murderer, your insides must be hollow. How does it feel to take the life of your brother?”
It was a take on an old Darkish song that Selmon recognized - he had heard it while in Lord Jonn's service.
Kilhorn was evidently displeased – he was not getting what he wanted out of the conversation, and his eyes were wide and flashing with rage. “Enough of your foolishness, smoking and singing one! I come to speak to you of killing!” he rasped in a louder tone, about the closest he ever got to yelling.
Kellan was nonplussed. “If you wanted to come to me for advice, big brother, it would have been easier to keep me alive. I know things you do not, it is true, things that would have been hidden from me had you kept me locked up here or anywhere as a living man. But I know precious little that will benefit you, and I will speak nothing to you of strategy, now that you have nothing to threaten me with.”
At this Kilhorn's mouth widened into what, for him, passed as a sharp-toothed grin. “Strategy?” he hissed with evident pleasure, “You think I come to speak to you of strategy, dead one? All you ever knew of strategizings came from the one whose name we speak not, and which of us knows him best? Did I not live with him, killer, live with him, inside my mind, speaking to me, ordering me, forcing me to do his will, for decades? Was I not the instrument of his desires in Dwilight, killer? Did I not conquer the lands sometime known as Westfold, only for him to take my place of glory? I did, killer, and he did send me to a backwater desert in the Beluaterra! And did I not do much killing in those lands, while he threw Westfold away in his vanity? Did I, the Masked One, the Hand of Death, killer of men and monsters and daimons and elves, did I not show the killers of Beluaterra and beyond how to kill daimons? Am I not the killer of untold thousands, hundreds of thousands, and victor of more battles than any man left living? Your fame in these lands is meaningless to me, Imperator-King, Supreme Ally-Commanding one! I am the Masked One! I am the Hand of Death! No, I do not come to speak to you of strategy. Of killing, I know all that I need to know and more.”
This was a lot of words for Kilhorn, and even the spectre of Kellan seemed somewhat surprised at his elder brother's sudden effluence. “If you do not come to ask me of war,” he said in between spectral puffs of the spectral joint, “then what? This spliff is only to mock you - it does not affect me in my current state - and if it is the same to you, I would rather return to my sleep.”
“Sleep, yes,” Kilhorn rasped, his eyes once again narrowing into slits. “The famous killer Kellan, after all his killing and burning and looting, the great terror of Xavax and the North, now sleeps. Well, somnolent one, answer me but one question, and I will leave you to your slumberings.”
With this, Kilhorn leaned forward, and the spectre of Kellan leaned forward to meet him in one of the most uncanny conferences to which man has ever been witness. Selmon of Askileon was there, and two Revenants, and none of them will ever speak of what passed in that deep and dark place beneath the edifice known as the Greenstone Tower, former “palace” of the Imperator-King Kellan, who loved war and smoke more than crowns and titles. Selmon, for his part, did not hear the question, but he crept closer, and he heard the answer, and saw the look upon the face of the shade of Kellan Dodger as he gave it. It was a look of surprise and heartbreaking pity.
“Yes,” was the answer, and Kilhorn reared back, his eyes flashing, teeth bared, hissing with surprise.
“How?” asked the Hand of Death, or of Murder, whichever you would call him.
“You already know,” was Kellan's reply, eyes still full of pity, and perhaps, somehow, even a bit of love for this creature who was his brother, who he had barely known, and who had kidnapped and murdered him out of spite and jealousy and an all-consuming desire for killing. As he spoke, his image began to fade.
Kilhorn practically yowled in frustration and alarm, jumping forward to grasp uselessly at the immaterial form as it disappeared. “I don't know! I don't know! Tell me, dead one! Tell me, little brother!” But Kellan was already gone.
Kilhorn sank into himself, clawed hands gripping at the edge of the dais, rasping breaths racking his hunched-over frame as he stared madly into the dead face of the brother he had murdered. Then suddenly he composed himself, shot a glance at Selmon as if daring him to judge his sudden outburst.
“Keep the body preserved, healer,” he commanded. “I will return.” And with that he wheeled and left through the door he had entered from. The Revenants followed, and the one who turned to close and lock the door did not look at Selmon as he did so.
A wheezing cough racked Selmon of Askileon's aged frame, and he sank to his knees, overwhelmed by many things.
