Legend of the King's Sword

[Bergenheim]

Prologue
​

The story begins, as old good stories do, during a dark and stormy night. The Glorious Revolution of 1519 saw the armies of the Canton Lords at the gates of Konigsruhe, cannon dragged behind them through the wintry muck and thick forests that surrounded the high castle walls.

King Laurtrec the Cinder, last crowned monarch of Bergenheim, was desperate. The rains had ruined the cannon he had prepared, the land torpedo traps that mined the way to his castle gates. His love of gunpowder and explosions had been foiled by nature herself.

His remaining royal soldiers stood ready to fight on regardless, clad in shining full-plate armour, a mere fifty-one Knights against five thousand. His hundreds of arquebusiers would prove useless by dawn, and his mercenaries, lacking the honour of later Freikorps of Bergenheim, would desert him likewise.

Dawn would bring death and dishonour, and an end to his line. He had never much cared for the company of women, preferring fine, slender young boys instead. His cousins were all dead, or fled, from an earlier, failed plot to usurp him. Now he stood alone, his page tenderly affixing his armour. He would go to meet them, he decided, and be the kind of warrior king his father had always demanded he be.

He lifted up the sword Morgenrote, forged from the iron of a fallen star, and kissed the pommel delicately. It would carve many a traitor before he fell, he knew.

"Will you stand by me, page?"
"Sir?" the boy asked querulously, terrified and broken to his royal master, in ways both fair and foul.
"Whats your name, boy?" The King asked, a sudden inspiration striking him.
"Its...Otto, sir. Otto Blucher."
"Kneel, Otto."
The Page did so with glazed eyes, used to performing such a duty for his king.
"No, not this time, boy." He placed the flat of his sword delicately on the boy's shoulder.

Otto did not flinch.

"Rise, Sir Otto, of House Blucher. Let you stand by me, as my last knight. You who have served me so well."

Otto looked up at the King with terrified awe.
"Gladly, your majesty A-anything-" he stammered.
The King sighed. "I would grant you my own sword to carry, did I not need it so well. Ah, whoever heard of a Knight without a sword? Go to the armoury, with my blessing. Take any sword you so fancy. It may serve you well come the dawn, if only for a short while."

The boy hid his fear as best he could. "Are you...sure, your majesty?"
"I do not repeat my commands, Sir Otto."
The boy lept to obedience, though his joy was tempered with the knowledge that such fortune would be short-lived, Tomorrow the Canton Lords would take the castle with certainty. Five thousand against five hundred scarce a fifty. With all cannon and shot ruined, and even the crossbows rotten and dampened. Their odds were indeed grim.

The boy's journey to and from the armoury confirmed in him the mounting sense of dread, that this was a hopeless and lost cause. Yet how could be abandon his King? For all the evil the King had done him, had he not also done him a great good? The young man could not reconcile the warring emotions.

So it was that he did not return a good hour or more later, a simple estoc at his belt. He had little skill or training with any kind of sword, but he felt a simple, hefty long-sword would not be disgraced too much by his clumsiness.

When he returned, he was shocked to find the King had already started drinking heavily.

"What kept you boy? I am...I grow weary. Curse this storm, does it never end? How it rages with sound and fury..." The King babbled furiously. He had been drinking steadily all day, but, alone, he had set to bottle after bottle with furious determination, rendering himself sodden with drink. He would not greet the dawn sober, he swore.

"You sent me for a sword, your majesty. To be your Knight?"

"Knight? What madness is this...gah, what's done is done. Knight or knight, get my damn armour off, I need to rest...and take pleasure..."

"But your majesty, I just put your armour on..." The boy felt even his little hopes fading. Had his knighthood been just a passing fancy for this drunken king? Was he to die a mere page, still? An ember of defiance glowed in the young man's heart. Having tasted a little of something greater, if only for a breath of a moment, he could not so easily go back to being the King's...Page.

"Are you defying me?" He ranted. "Insolent boy! They're all insolent! Traitors, everywhere. I ought to thrash you with the flat of my sword.." he drunkenly reached for Morgenrote, raising it high, to strike at the shimmering, moving target in front of him. He no longer saw the Page, only the Enemy.

Otto cried out, and, by some strange instinct, drew the estoc he had just acquired, to ward off the blows.

Morgenrote was a thousand times better a sword. But in the hands of a drunkard, it skittered and clanged against the simple long-sword nonetheless.

He blinked, the loud clang of steel bringing him somewhat to his senses. "You...you dare unsheathe your sword before your King? You...you...villain...Guards..guards...execute this...this...insolent wretch!"

The drunken rages of his King had been endurable before. But the boy could not now bend knee so easy. Could not cringe and beg and whine. With a sword in his hand, and the memory of knighthood on his shoulder, he could not find it in himself to calm the King as he had a thousand times before, with a display of pitiable grovelling.

Instead, he did the only thing he could. Not out of treachery. Not out of hatred, or anger. But simple self-survival.

He slid his sword around the drunk king's guard, and, with a sickening thud, into the King's armpit, exploiting a weakness in his armour. The thin long-sword slid through the gap, and the King coughed blood.

Otto looked into the King's startled eyes, a mirror of his own terror and suprise.

He withdrew the blade, and watched as the King slid to the ground, groaning. "You...I...can't..." he coughed. "Not even...the Dawn?"

Otto was terrified. He did not dare help the King. If the King lived, he would die. If the King died...he would likely also die. The sin of Regicide was unlikely to be forgiven of a mere page, even by the victorious Canton Lords.

But a Knight...fleeing with the deserters...

He took the King's sword, even as Laurtrec looked up at him, gasping his last breath. A sword of this quality would mark him as a real Knight, even if he could find nothing else to do so.

And in the chaos of war, who would notice one more young battle-field knight?

Otto fled his master, sparing him only one backwards glance, as the King crawled feebly to the door, trying to call through blood-choked lips for the Guards.

Otto ran. He might not have escaped, but given so many others were fleeing the King's doomed castle in that dark storm...

He found a group of Landsknechts roping themselves down from the rain-slick battlements, and disappeared into the night, the Sword of Kings on his back. A knightly heirloom, he called it.

A treasure that would be lost to the ages, even as dawn broke, and the Lords found their quarry dead in his bedchambers, soaked in blood and spilled wine...

 

[Bergenheim]

Chapter One: Present Day, The Republic University of Anorstadt(formerly the Royal University of Anorstadt, est 1327)
​

Professor Rickard Langstrom looked out at the mostly empty lecture hall that so often graced his talks this late in the semester. He didn't mind. He enjoyed his work, and telling the same story over and over again went much smoother when there was noone to ask questions or heckle.

"Today, such Artifacts are highly sought after by the top museums and galleries of the world. Perhaps precisely because so much of our heritage has been lost or destroyed, Bergenheim high society has taken to placing an extremely high value on the recovery of all items of historical value, regardless of national provenance. This has ensured that the Museums in Midweis and Anorstadt are some of the most well regarded in the world, with a truly global variety of treasures on display."

He clicked to the next slide, showing grainy pictures of half a dozen of some of the most fabulous treasures, bought over the centuries by wealthy Bergener billionaires, and donated with high prestige to aforementioned galleries.

"Some of course consider such an interest in artifacts to be...unseemly, and many nations have called on Bergenheim's government to intervene and prevent the acquisition of priceless heirlooms and relics that some feel belong elsewhere." Langstrom coughed neutrally. Like all good tenured professors of old Bergener stock, his loyalty lay with his own institutions, and his disdain for such liberal sentiments was nonetheless obvious.

"But perhaps this restless searching after artifacts is not mere greed, or the trophies of a country grown successful through individual effort or private enterprise. Perhaps rather, this yearning reflects a deep cultural void in the heart of Bergener society. Simply put, ever since the Sword vanished, ever since the crown was melted, ever since even the Keys were destroyed...there has been a hunger for totems of Bergen identity. In this modern liberal age, where the material is valued so much, perhaps we have become blind to the spiritual nourishment offered by such present links to the past."

He paused, knowing that he had noone's attention but his own, but feeling the weight and emotion of the sentiment he tried to convey anyway.

"Imagine if you will...standing in the presence of something once handled by an ancestor almost exactly five hundred years ago. Imagine the thrill of being the first to see, to perhaps even touch, something that may have been lost for ages. Imagine if you can, that connection between you and the people who last held it, last used it, who made it..."

He closed his eyes for a second, before sighing.

"I don't suppose its easy to imagine. If you lose your music player, you can always buy a new one. And, five hundred years from now, I doubt any Archaeologist will hold your grubby phone with quite as much reverence as you do now, Miss Perkins."

A bored looking teenage girl in a crop-top, rapidly texting on her phone, looked up, startled.

He sighed. "Alright, thats enough on Early Modern Archaeology for the week. Remember, next week is your semi-finals. Brush up on Steiner, Kravchenko and Vollmuller, you will be tested..."

His words echoed as his class hurriedly exited. He sighed. He knew most of them would get scraping passes at best. His class was seen as an easy way to get credit to supplement more worthy and difficult degrees.

He knew he only had himself to blame. If he was more charismatic, or more harsh with his students...

But he didn't really have the heart to be that kind of teacher. He loved the subject, loved talking about it. It was a shame so few other people seemed to have that kind of interest.

He retired to his well-worn office, throwing his laptop and USB drive on to a messy pile of dog-eared and heavily annotated books. The office smelled strongly of camphor wood, a scent that his lifetime of smoking clove cigarettes and drinking Engellexic Brandy in this office had failed to dampen.

In the corner was the preserved skeleton of the first Professor of Archaeology at this University, and Langstrom nonchalantly hung his jacket up on Ol' Schliemann.

Puting his feet up in a very careless way- he had been treating this two hundred year old furniture as his home for long enough he no longer cared about scuff marks or risking breaking them- he ran his hands over his worn face. Just another ten years, he told himself. Then he could take early retirement from teaching at sixty, and spend the rest of his days doing research or drinking brandy in the Dean's Room with the rest of the old tenured dinosaurs.

He opened one of the old books he had been reading, turning it to a page he had been contemplating for months. Once again, he found himself staring whistfully at its archaic typefont, and the still older grain of half-truths contained within.

In 1575, a dying Knight had taken refuge at the Monastery of Gluckerberg, not far from the University where he now sat. There, he had given his final confession to the Father Abbot, and related the most extraordinary story.

The Confession of Sir Otto was well known in Archaeological circles. First uncovered by Valdemar Schliemann in 1823, it had been poured over, picked apart, speculated upon, and even inspired awful melodramas for centuries since.

Yet no one had been able to figure out the most important, vital detail of Sir Otto's story.

Namely, no one knew where the sword was now. The Von Bluchers as a line had vanished by the 1700s, and it was doubtful wether Otto's heirs had even held that name, given the truth of his origins.

And so, the Sword of the Last King, Morgenrote, remained a tantalising mystery. Many fakes, many false hints, many wasted careers had passed since the heyday, and now even the Legend of the King's Sword was worn thin and forgotten by most.

Yet something deep inside the soul of this quiet archaeologist was a firey passion, no, conviction, that it was out there, somewhere.

He sighed, and closed the book. No, he was no adventurer. He had a life here to worry about, after all.

He opened up his laptop, going to his e-mails, for want of anything better to do. More demands for alimony from his harpy of an ex-wife. Some spam. Another stern warning from the Dean that his class would be cancelled if he didn't improve attendance by the end of next year. Langstrom didn't really care.

Then, as he was about to close the e-mail, he saw one sentence that made him sit up.

"...With no other duties present, we would be forced to review the conditions of your tenure."

He gulped. His tenure was under threat...?

He looked again at the book. And looked again at the e-mail.

He considered his options carefully.

Improve attendance...? He briefly pictured the hell of trying to drum up interest from today's youth for Early Modern Archaeology. Even the nerds preferred Ancient Archaeology, and its promise of summer internships at dig-sites in Southern Himyar or other exotic climes. Dusty archival digging for a fairly obscure period of history that was mostly known about anyway hardly attracted anyone.

That left him only one recourse.

If he was to retain his tenure, he would have to engage in field work once again.

He picked up the Confessions of Sir Otto, and took his coat back from Valdemar Schliemann's skeletal hand.

"I'm going to do it Valdy. I really am." he said, though he felt little conviction. He was fifty years old, divorced, and living mostly in his office. This was insanely ambitious. There were safer ways of retaining his tenure, surely.

He briefly remembered a drunken night in the Dean's Room, which had ended with him pissing in the fish tank.

Then again, maybe this sort of field work was exactly what was needed.

 

[Bergenheim]

Chapter Two​

There was only one person Professor Langstrom could go to, if he was to truly begin this project. As the first twinkling snows began to fall on Anorstadt, he found himself seated most uncomfortably in the tram, a modern electrical vehicle that traversed the mostly mountainous city up and down and served as the main point of public transport for the residents here.

He found himself staring out the window at the high gabled roofs and gently puffing chimneys of the old university town. It looked almost quite idyllic, with the snow falling like this.

The bitter mountain wind hit him like a sheet of knives, even through his thick overcoat, as he left the warm tram. His stop, predictably, was about as far up as you could go and still be in the city, and not the actual mountain-top.

Why Heinrich insisted on living past the snow-line was beyond Langstrom.

He knocked heavily on the old wooden door of the retired professor. "Heinrich? you in?" he shouted. "You better damn be..." he rubbed his hands together furiously to keep warm. Fifty years of this wretched cold, he thought, and it never gets any easier.

No wonder all the kids want to go to Himyar.

The door creaked open, and the wizened, suspicious eyes of Heinrich Konstantin Durer peered at him. The man had to be at least eighty years old, Langstrom thought. He looked a little like some wizened old gnome, only without the beard or floppy red hat.

"Rickard? My god, it is you." The old man coughed, a heavy phlegmatic sound. "What brings you to the Mountaintop, eh?"

"Well, Heinrich, if the mountain won't go to the Prophet..." he grinned. An old joke.
"The Profits will go to the mountain." Heinrich chuckled. In Bergener parlance, "The Goldberg" was often a slang term for the Jews/Banking elite that seemed to run everything from the shadows in the country.

"May I come in? Its cold as it gets out here." He implored.
"Oh? Of course, of course. I was just about to put the kettle on..."

While Heinrich pottered about in his little cottage kitchen, Langstrom warmed his hands desperately by the little log-fire. Trust an old coot like Durer to live in an actual 18th century Bergener cottage. Did the old man keep goats and yodel as well?

"So..." Durer said, sitting down with two steaming mugs of hot chocolate.
"Heinrich..." he began carefully. "Remember that dissertation idea I came to you with about thirty years ago?"
Durer laughed wheezily. "No. I'm mad, not a computer. I assume it must have been something to haul your ass up here thirty years later though..."

"Well, its about the Sword of Laurtrec. Morgenrote. I'm going to find it." he said seriously.

Durer hacked out another laugh, but then he saw Langstrom's serious expression. "Now I do remember. You were twenty years old, fresh out of the Gymnasium, and you wanted to set the world on fire with something shocking, like every young man." He leaned back in his chair creakily, his rheumy eyes casting back into the past.

"A king he was, on carven throne, in many pillared halls of stone."
"The light of sun and star and moon, in sword's glint hewn." Rickard completed. "I memorised the entire Lay of Kings, and in its original Old Germanic. That was quite a summer."
"Did poetry help you find the sword of kings?" Durer asked, bemused.
"No, it didn't." He admitted shamefacedly. "But you liked the effort enough that you gave me a second shot at a real dissertation."
Durer sighed. "Can't do that these days. It's all rules and standards and marking sheets. In my day, a man was a man if he put the effort in. Didn't matter if he burned out later. Ah, academia." He waved his hands idly.
"But I suspect its not simply to reminisce you bring this up. Midlife crisis, eh Rickert? One Last Adventure?"

"Something like that." He said, not wanting to admit that fear for his tenure was the primary motivation for this reckless quest.

"Beneath his feet, beneath the moon." Durer quoted again. "Yes, the Lay is an odd saga, isn't it? You know you weren't quite the first student who thought it held the location of some lost treasure?"
"No?" Rickard said, his attention piqued.
"As gems upon a silver thread, above the shadows of his head." Durer said again. "It was a poem I had an interest in once, myself. But not for the sword, no, that was inspired on your part. I spent a gloomy summer up here, in the Anorim Mountains, looking for the lost King's Vault." Durer laughed. "Not the one they moved to the Midweis National, either. The one ol' Adolfarus the Blackhand himself built, and filled with the gold of Old Tibur and Sunken Izalith. A real legend that! Not Early Modern, though."

"You never told me you did adventuring like that in your youth."
"Well, we were never that close." Heinrich admitted. "You were my student. And now, I suppose, you are my replacement." He sighed, and looked to the snowy window, though the Anorims were hidden from view.

"Is there anything you can do to help me?" Rickard asked gently. "I realise its quite an ask, but maybe you have some contacts from the old days..."
"Old days?" Durer shook his head. "All dead or senile by now, I'm afraid. But..." He stroked his whiskery chin.
"There is one place you could start. I remember this one chap...yes, he was a sword-chaser, too. Came to my office ten years ago, just before I retired."
"I don't remember this."
"You were too busy trying to patch things up with that bitch Emilia. How did that go?" Heinrich laughed. "No, he was a strange one. Some obsessed Engellexic, I think. Wealthy as sin from the slave trade, obsessed with collecting swords. He had some rare ones from Xinhai too. But a Lost Sword is infinitely more valuable than just an old one. I mentioned the Lay to him, but he never got back to me." Durer chuckled. "I'm guessing he had about as much luck as you did."

"Mmm, well its something. Do you remember his name or anything?" It was a long shot, he knew.

"Yes, I think I might have written it and his number in my diary...give me a minute..." Durer pottered off to find his old diaries.

Langstrom sipped his hot chocolate. A trip to Engellex. A place that many students both loathed and secretly desired to go to. All those freshmen fantasies of slave brothels and psychedelic binge-trips. He reminded himself that it was a country like any other, and not some mystical sceptre'd isle populated with dark elves.

Though, given the nature of his quest, it might as well have been....

 

[Bergenheim]

Chapter Three​

The weeks leading up to Christmas were some of the busiest Langstrom had ever faced. The looming prospect of adventure, of a real international academic and historic collaboration in pursuit of the sword, was never far from his mind.

Yet before he could even begin this endeavour, he had to take care of much unfinished business, as well as properly prepare for a visit to Engellex.

Using Durer's old contact details, Rickard managed to locate the eccentric Engellexian Mllionaire who had come calling, all those years ago. He had not received any sort of acknowledgement or response yet, though he had been sure to leave e-mails and phone-calls at all directory addresses he could find.

Perhaps the old dude thinks im just a time-waster. Rickard thought. Ten years is a long time. Maybe he's not so interested in the sword anymore?

He would not be able to do anything until after Christmas, anyway. If this lead didn't pan out well...Rickard had been gathering as much information as he could, from all over the University Library and Internet. Nothing was too weird, obscure or abstract for consideration.

With the last of his lectures now done and the University officially closing for the Christmas period, he raced to his office, to finish marking these midwinter exams and then catch a late evening tram back to his apartment. Tomorrow, he would need to make a visit to his ex-wife's house, if only to see their daughter.

Thoughts of spending Christmas with her were ruthlessly crushed. He had come to terms with the separation, and the terms so enforced. He couldn't be forever looking backward. Besides, little Mari would be a lot prouder of him if he could say he'd done something cool like find a lost sword, right? The more he thought about it, the more he was able to convince himself of the rightness of this idea.

It wasn't a crazy whim brought on by boredom, a midlife crisis, or a stern demand to justify his tenure. It was surely so much more than that.

Rickard raced through the papers, for once not brought down by the sheer, vapid, repetitive blankness of it all. Sometimes he was sure he had marked these exact papers before. If someone was copying, word for word, past papers they'd bought online, well...that was a problem for the Exam Board, he thought, not him. He gave them all undeserved passing grades. They could take their damn minimum effort pass and choke on it, he thought. Any of them who came back in the spring for Early Modern Archaeology 102 were going to be in for a rude surprise.

With his work completed, he felt a strange, lingering sense of uncertainty, as he stood on the threshold, his coat in his arms and his Styrian hat jammed down tight on his head. He looked at the old office, at the preserved skeleton of Valdemar, and for a brief moment wondered if there was something he was overlooking.

"Wish me luck, Valdy. I'm going to find it, I just know I am." he said, grinning from ear to ear. Whatever it was, it could bloody well wait. He was going on an adventure!

Closing and locking the door behind him, he set off on a jaunty stride, whistling a tune to himself.

On the tram ride back home, he put ear-phones in his ears, and began to listen to an album he had downloaded off of PiTunes. The Warreic Heavy metal band "Ui Bolge" had done a 35 minute concept album based on the Lay of Kings back in 1976, and the growling guitar next to the words of the 16th century saga sung in melodic Middle Germanic was pretty impressive.

Vor langer Zeit, als Laternen brannten
Bis heute haben sich unsere Herzen danach gesehnt
Ihr Schicksal ist dem Schneide unbekannt
Was gestohlen wurde, muss zurückgegeben werden

It was an impressive adaptation, to be sure, though some of the phrases had him thinking again. Something about the way they re-interpreted fundamental aspects of the saga, the emphasis placed here, the words used there, tickled the back of his brain. Once again, he had the same feeling he had had as a graduate student, that the poem contained an answer to...something.

He shivered with anticipation, and not the cold, as he turned the key in his apartment door. Soon, he thought. Still, need to find some little gift for Mari. Maybe a teddy bear or something? What did six year old girls even want for Christmas these days?

He opened the door into his darkened, musty, cramped apartment space. He was thus very unprepared for the sofa-side light to be switched on, and a tall, suited stranger to be sat, apparently waiting for him, on his sofa.

"Guten Abend, Lehrer Langstrom. Wie gehts?"