The Mysterious Disappearance Of Blinkus Horomay Blinkus Horomay was the senior armorer for the Malennite Horde on its abortive first attempt to conquer the distant kingdom of King Lingus the White-Skinned. On the day that he walked the gangplank across a short stretch of foul harbor water and boarded his private galley to set sail for the greatest campaign ever planned in the history of the Sultanate, Horomay was already a man of fame and stature. His name was known throughout the Sultan's Court and to the very Sultan, himself. This was because Malennicium was a land where craftsmanship was prized above all other things, and in this respect Blinkus Horomay had reached the very pinnacle of esteem. The Sultan's decision to challenge the numerically-superior forces of the Empire of Lingus was based, to a large extent, on the armory's ability to produce large numbers of blue-steel blades, the quality of which was unmatched anywhere else in the world. It was known within the Sultan's war council that the majority of soldiers in the Lingus Guard still carried brittle bronze blades; the art of forging steel was as yet a novelty on the new continent. To virtually everyone who laid eyes on Blinkus Horomay, his confident demeanor, his distinctive apparel, and the sheer size of his retinue belied the humble nature of his roots. And to those who didn't know the inner man--a company that included nearly every citizen of the Sultanate--his reputation was formidable. Having spent his youth learning rudimentary metalworking skills under the tutelage of his blacksmith father in the far reaches of the Northern Desert, Horomay had traveled to the citadel of Malennicium at the age of 16 to begin a ten-year apprenticeship with one of the distinguished sword smiths of the day, Ivan Siblik. Siblik was seventy years old on the day he took Blinkus as an apprentice, and his once-powerful hands were crippled by rheumatism. Added to this malady was the fact that he had gone completely blind. But despite these handicaps, which had ended his days as a working sword smith, Siblik remained a consummate artisan whose love for his craft was matched only by his skill as a teacher. The old man was fully aware that young Blinkus would be his final student, his last chance to pass on those things he had learned during his sixty years at the forge, and he took to the task with a religious fervor. He taught Horomay all there was to know about the art of Malenniscene sword-making, from selecting the proper grade of ore to designing and crafting the most decorative of accouterments. During his apprenticeship to Siblik, Blinkus Horomay learned much more than the art of crafting a fine steel blade. Besides being a skilled sword smith and teacher, Siblik was also a highly sensitive man with a deep love for learning and a respect for nature the likes of which Horomay had seen in no other man. And Ivan took great pains to pass these qualities on to his protégé. By the end of his happy apprenticeship to the old man, Blinkus had learned to view each and every finished blade with wonder and gratitude--as a shining miracle of creation wrought through God-given skill out of the course, but precious, materials provided him by a beneficent Mother Earth. But Siblik's chosen profession on the one hand, and his great love of nature on the other, were the source of a deep philosophical dichotomy that the sword smith kept hidden to all but a chosen few. One day in the eighth year of their association, the seventy-eight year-old teacher took the twenty-four year-old apprentice to a lonely hillside on the outskirts of Malennicium. As they sat side-by-side on a flat boulder in the shade of an ancient fig tree, the master related a story. "There once be a time, young master," he said shakily, his gnarled fingers tapping arhythmically at the worn knob on the end of his walking stick, "that old Siblik wanted nothing more than to fight alongside the tall, straight warriors of the horde." He wrinkled his brow and nose and moved the lids of his atrophied eyes as if trying to remember how to blink. "But I be always too small in stature, you see, and this cursed infirmity in my knee kept me always from my goal. Such be the will of God. "So, as was my lot, I be taken at the age of ten into apprenticeship with my master, Mustafa Zeyd, who taught me well and good the art of turning out a blade of steel. And this be to my liking, as you might guess. What better occupation for a failed warrior, after all, than to furnish those he so admires with the tools of their trade? And this I did with great fervor, I warrant, and never rested full in the belief that I was giving them the best of which I was capable. So ever practice, did I. Yea, after turning out my portion of labor for Mustafa each day, then did I re-stoke the forge and smelt down the day's failed blades to work and temper the steel late into the night in the hope that nature's ore might one day reveal unto me the secret of its making. And this it did, in its own good time, until Siblik could produce a passable fine blade with which to equip the Sultan's Horde in its forays against the numerous infidel armies that infest God's earth. "Yet, despite my skill in fashioning swords of durability and beauty, still did I misunderstand the true nature of my art." Siblik paused briefly to inhale the refreshing air of a passing breeze. "But this, too, did I learn eventually. Under the most foul of circumstances. "I was returning to the smithy one fine morning having completed an errand for Master Zeyd," he said quietly, his voice acquiring a note of sadness. "I happened to pass by one the brothels that stand near the entrance to the covered market on the southeast edge of the city near the Temple of Zulm. From the inside of this brothel did I hear the loudest of clamors. Aye, there was the sound of several harlots wailing like so many alley cats. And amidst that caterwauling did I hear the booming sound of a manly voice railing in a jealous rage. "One particular prostitute, over whom the man had deemed to assume ownership, had apparently chosen to offer her questionable favors to another. 'She's mine,' yelled the male voice, 'I paid for her and she's mine!' Right at that moment did I see a powerfully built warrior in the garb of the Sultan's Palace Guard pull a whippet of a girl from the side entrance of the brothel by her elbow. She was naked as the day she was born, and her hair was a'tousled and her eyes were all groggy as if she'd been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep. Pretty as a wild flower, was she, and by the undeveloped state of her bosom, her lack of womanly hips, and the want of hair on her loins, I judged her to be no more than twelve years of age. "This unlikely couple was followed out immediately by four-and-ten howling hags in silk gowns of riotous color and facial adornment so heavy as to be hurtful to the eye. They was ripping at the guard's mail and tunic and flailing at him with all manner of household implements in order that they might effect the return of their charge. And one of them, with a well-aimed blow from an iron poker, managed to dislodge the warrior's helm and open an evil gash on his temple. "Thus staggered, and surrounded like a weasel in a swarm of snapping terriers, then did the warrior realize that he had no hope of liberating his lady. And when he saw that the toothless witch of a madam had dispatched one of her bevy to the constabulary, he then knew that his time was short. But stricken as he was by an ill-advised lust, mistaken as it was for ardor, and being under the mind-deceiving influence of either rum or the hemp weed, he decided then and there to make his stand. "Our jealous warrior, by all appearances, thought that if he couldn't have the little harlot...why, then nobody else could, either. So he unsheathed his sword with a single, practiced sweep of his arm and proceeded to dismember her on the spot. It was a gruesome sight, indeed! And when the blood started to fly and the body parts started to litter the ground, the hags desisted with their wailing and backed away from the disturbed man with considerable speed." Siblik paused for a moment and went over the scene with his mind's eye. He shook his head and went on with the story. "Up till that moment I'd never seen death," said he. "At least not death of unnatural causes. I was appalled. I stood there and simply stared at the carcass--or the parts of it--lying here and there in a great pool of congealing blood, and I had the hardest time believing that those morbid chunks of meat and bone had only moments earlier been a vital and pretty young girl. The mess looked like unwanted leftovers that might have been chucked from the back of a butcher's cart and left for the dogs. "Anyway, four or five men showed up from the constabulary right quickly...before the warrior even had a chance to consider escape. They took him into custody and started investigating the crime on the spot--such was the speed of justice in those earlier days of the Sultanate. They first interviewed the women of the brothel; this was no mean task, let me tell you, because their lips started a'moving and their tongues started a'wagging the moment the constables made their arrival at the scene. Once the investigators had finished with the tedious task of prying the facts from the hysterical women, they interviewed me. They pointed at the ground and asked if that was the victim--as if anyone else in the immediate surroundings looked as bad as she did. 'Aye,' says I. 'It be the victim.' "And then they pointed to the soldier--they had him bound tight to a railing using some silky kerchiefs lent to them by the whores--and asked me if he was the perpetrator. Again I says 'aye.' But that should have been obvious, too, because he was almost as bloody as the victim herself...only he had all his parts in the right places at the time. "Finally they held up the sword. The thing was covered in drying blood from tip to hilt, and the stuff was caked into the runnel and.... They asked me if it was the murder weapon. It was at that point that I broke down and began weeping like an infant." Horomay watched a tear squeeze its way out from beneath Ivan Siblik's tortured eyelid. "I started weeping because I recognized the sword immediately. I recognized it as one of my own manufacture. It bore the mark of Mustafa Zeyd, aye, but it was a blade that I had worked with my own hands. To the eye of a smith, such things are unmistakable. "And it was only then that I understood what my craft was truly about. Not about art. Not about pride in workmanship. No. Those things are illusory. Those things only exist in the small mind of a smith--a smith who rarely ventures out beyond the protective confines of his workshop. "The nature of the craft, as I understood it at that very moment, was utility. Death and blood. That's what swords are for, after all." It had all seemed very notional to Blinkus Horomay as he sat there that day listening politely to his master's ale. The story about the little whore seemed rather eccentric to the younger man--irrelevant, even. But over the ensuing twenty-odd years, he was never quite able to erase the episode from his memory; the look of twisted anguish on the old man's face and the way his voice crackled with emotion as he related the tale had made the desired impression. And then one day, almost seven months into the Sultan's first campaign against the army of Lingus and more than two decades after the death of Ivan Siblik, Blinkus Horomay finally understood what his master had tried to tell him so long ago under the fig tree on the hilltop outside the walls of Malennicium. The campaign had been going badly. Very badly, indeed. The front-line commanders of the Expeditionary Corps had learned the hard way that the forces of King Lingus were not the lazy, fat ne'er-do-wells the Sultan's military advisors-- themselves lazy, fat ne'er-do-wells--had described. The surprise of the initial onslaught had had the desired effect: it sent Lingus' army reeling back into the eastern hinterlands of the continent. But in a matter of only two months, the forces of Lingus had recovered their composure and were able to mount serious counterattacks at strategic points along the front lines of the Expeditionary Corps. The Corps began making localized retrograde movements three months later; by the seventh month of the campaign the surviving units of the invading army had been forced back into a small pocket surrounding the beachhead at Centralia where the Malennite galleys had let the first landing units ashore weeks earlier. It was in the Centralia pocket that Blinkus Horomay, whose people and equipment had been positioned with the support trains as far back from the front lines as was humanly possible, got his first glimpse of what battle was really like. From the vantagepoint of a hilltop keep in downtown Centralia, he looked out over the coastal plain where tattered rear guard elements struggled valiantly to cover the frantic evacuation of Corps units from the beaches behind them. The scene was at once awe-inspiring and terrifying. Fresh cavalry units from Lingus' army, their pennants flapping colorfully in the morning sunlight and the sound of their bugle calls echoing far afield, swept across the yellow flatland in tight formations to plunge recklessly into hard pockets of resistance that the King's grenadiers had been unable to dispatch. The scent of blood still fresh in their nostrils, King Lingus' forward commanders had thrown their vastly superior manpower at the enemy with the sort of profligacy that can only be practiced by those certain of victory. Horomay had been dismayed and sickened by the carnage suffered on both sides. As he stood atop his hilltop perch, a stiff easterly wind carrying the sounds of the battle to him, he heard the metallic clanking of lance, spear, and sword against shield, helmet, and mail. He heard the grievous, horrified cries of the pierced and shattered. There were men down there, he realized suddenly. Simple men--peasants, really--like his father, who couldn't possibly comprehend the nature of the events that had brought them to this remote shore to die in such large numbers. Shaken, he turned away from the gruesome scene toward the shoreline and watched the bobbing masts and the merry blue-and-white striped sails of the assembled galleys with a detached eye. Files of defeated soldiers surged out toward the craft through the surf and, from a distance, they looked like so many phalanxes of ants swarming over sticky lumps of sugar on a hot summer's day. The wind brought more clanking and crashing sounds up from the battlefield behind Horomay--the clanking and crashing of armor and blades...armor and blades whose manufacture it had been Horomay's lot to oversee. And then there were more cries of agony and death.... Suddenly nauseated, he ran to the edge of the roof and, leaning out over the void between two parapets, he vomited into space. Only now did he fully understand the lesson Ivan Siblik had tried to teach him so many years ago. And learned at such an unholy cost! Horomay turned from the rooftop wall of the keep with a new look of purpose in his eyes, walked serenely toward the open hatchway that opened onto the roof, mounted the ladder that led down into the interior of the structure, and simply divorced himself from all things to which he had heretofore devoted his life. Later, when questioned about Horomay's mysterious disappearance, his subalterns had difficulty remembering the last time that they had seen their master. They remembered the harried moments just after Blinkus received orders to evacuate the armory--the way he had scurried to and fro barking out instructions and helping his men load tools and tents and weapons onto the carts. They remembered how he had taken leave of his entourage to get a better view of the traffic situation from a nearby keep. After that there was nothing. Nothing, that is, except for the testimony of a quiet young nobleman with a temporary commission to work as an information- gatherer in the services of the Corps' quartermaster. Befriended by Horomay early in the campaign, he had visited the sword smith's quarters on numerous occasions to share a pot of tea and some idle conversation. And despite the oath of secrecy he had taken upon joining the quartermaster's office, he saw no harm in telling Horomay about some of the interesting--and seemingly inconsequential-- things he had learned while interrogating captured enemy soldiers. Especially scintillating had been similar accounts by several veteran officers and noncoms regarding a past encounter with some very strange renegades that had fortified themselves in a temple in the Southern Blodkin Mountains. The nobleman told Blinkus everything he knew about this odd gathering of warrior-monks, and his eyes sparkled with skeptical amusement as he described their idolatrous belief in a so-called "moon god" and their eccentric outlook on the temporal world in general. According to the separate accounts of the captives, the renegades, while exceedingly skilled in the martial arts, refused their services to the Lingus Guard. Theirs was a creed of passivity, it seemed, and the only thing that could provoke them into a fight was a direct threat to their mountain enclave--something the Guard had attempted to do, unsuccessfully, on several occasions over a period of decades. These peace-lovers, it was said, preached a previously unheard-of doctrine they called "equality," and their ranks were filled by a colorful assortment of cast-off rogues from every corner and every race of Lingus’ broad kingdom. Fearing for his life, the quartermaster's assistant was not nearly as loquacious when questioned about Horomay's disappearance. In the end, the military authorities assumed that the Corps armorer had been lost in the chaos of the evacuation--had died in the hands of the rapidly advancing forces of King Lingus. From that day onward, the forces of the Sultan of Malennicium had regarded Blinkus Horomay as a fallen war hero. Later, when the surviving units had made their way home and the battle wounds had finally healed, a statue was commissioned in Horomay's honor. That statue would stand in perpetuity gathering pigeon dung in the Plaza of Victory (a dubious name in the minds of campaign veterans) at the entrance of the Temple of Zulm. Few remembered the thriving covered market that used to stand on the now-open expanse of the plaza. And even fewer still remembered the shabby old brothel that had once stood on the very spot where the Sultan of Malennicium had chosen to erect a monument to the greatest armorer the Horde had ever known.
Copyright © 2005 Stan Vose |