Revenant

by Bevan McGuiness

  It was as if he had stepped into a different world. Immediately he crossed the threshold, he was enveloped in sounds and smells that had somehow not been able to pass beyond the door to the outside. The chanting that he had heard outside changed character into a rapid, angry, snarling rhythm that had more in common with caged animals than people. The normal smells of a city at night were replaced by a thick animal stench. For a moment, Slave stood motionless, assimilating the changes.

  There was sorcery involved, of that there was no doubt. He closed his eyes against the light of the passage. His senses, already alert, flooded his mind with information. The guard he had just killed was no more human than the others he had killed at the barrier in the street below, and had been waiting there for some time. At least ten people — for want of a better term — were chanting with increasing speed and vehemence on the other side of a door directly ahead that was warded with some sort of chemical, not unlike Myele Powder.

  Slave opened his eyes and started moving towards the door at the end of the passage. He heard Myrrhini trying to walk quietly behind him. The walls either side of the corridor were made of a pale wood that Slave had never seen before, inlaid with a complex pattern of interwoven snakes and lizards carved from a much darker wood. The animals were incredibly detailed and lifelike, and seemed to writhe and slither as the torchlight flickered and danced. Slave’s and Myrrhini’s shadows added to the movement, making the walls seethe with life. Overhead, the ceiling was high and slightly vaulted. Smoke gathered in the top of the curve, giving the ceiling a strange, insubstantial appearance as the smoke curled and drifted in the breeze of their passage.

  At the end of the corridor, the door was heavy and carved with the same design as the walls. Slave felt the wood. It was smooth and cool, more like stone than wood. There was no handle and the hinges suggested it would open inward with a push. Slave knelt to examine the line of powder laid across the base of the door. It was not Myele Powder, but would serve a similar purpose, probably exploding if trodden on. From behind the door, the sounds of chanting continued, still growing louder and faster. If something was going to happen, it would happen very soon, or those chanting would falter from exhaustion. Slave pushed the door open.

  A rush of sound and smell washed over them. It was so strong, so overwhelming that, for a heartbeat, Slave was unable to think or process any of the sensory flood. He stood, shocked and immobile, until Myrrhini rested her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Where are we?’ she whispered.

  Slave shook himself to clear his mind then looked around at the impossible vista before them.

  If he had suspected there was sorcery involved before, no vestige of doubt could possibly remain as he stared down on a vast, domed chamber from a narrow ledge halfway up the dome. Beneath them, at least twenty paces below, was a gathering of people, all clad in black robes, all swaying in unison, chanting in strange, bestial voices. The whole chamber, Slave realised, was lit from above by a glowing orange disc that hovered just below the highest point of the room. The walls were covered in the same intricate carvings of snakes and lizards. The whole chamber was redolent with a heady mixture of incense and raw, animal stench.

  Dominating the group of robed figures was a massive statue that rose above them. It was vaguely reptilian, with a scaled body and wings that extended out and back. Its head, atop a long, sinuous neck, ended in jaws lined with wickedly pointed teeth. Its eyes were huge, even given the size of the statue. They glinted in the orange light. If they were as they seemed — single diamonds — they would be worth whole cities.

  Slave and Myrrhini were standing on a simple ledge about three paces long, two paces wide, ringed with railings. Hanging from the left side was a rope ladder that extended to the floor below. Slave looked to check no one was guarding the bottom of the ladder before starting down. Myrrhini stepped out off the ledge and floated down beside him. As the wall was curved, they came to ground several paces out from it, but the chamber was big enough that even out from the wall, they were still in darkness.

  Down here, the noise and the stench were worse. Slave found himself almost gagging while Myrrhini dropped to her knees with her arms wrapped around her chest, as if struggling to breathe. He was about to leave her, but decided against it. Even as he made the decision, he knew he could not explain it, any more than he could have explained anything he had done since arriving in the harbour. Something was drawing him on, something deeper than knowledge, something that was affecting him on an instinctive level. He put the thoughts aside to free his mind to focus on the situation at hand — a situation he did not understand.

  Myrrhini looked up as he knelt beside her. Her eyes caught the glow of the orange orb, making the flames that danced deep within the sockets take on a strangely disturbing hue. Her face was pale and wan, showing the strain it was taking to stop herself coughing out loud. She had one hand pressed to her mouth and her chest was heaving. Her other arm was stretched out behind her, braced on the ground as if holding her up.

  ‘What is this place?’ she whispered. Her voice was muffled behind her hand.

  ‘Ancient temple of some sort. Probably an outlawed religion.’

  ‘How can you …’ Her voice trailed away as her eyes unfocused. She gazed ahead to where the chanting people continued to whip themselves into a frenzy. Slave watched her eyes, seeing the orange-hued flames writhe as if in pain.

  Myrrhini stared into the crowd, Seeing things that were never as they seemed. She abruptly shook herself, not unlike an animal coming out of water.

  ‘We need to get out of here, now,’ she hissed.

  Slave rose quickly to his feet, but her warning had come too late, as three figures clad in enveloping robes loomed out of the shadows around them. All three were armed with spears lowered towards Slave. For a moment, Slave wondered how he had missed their approach, despite the loud chanting and thick smell of this place. He raised his hands slowly, away from his body, to show he held no weapon.

  Slave’s instincts screamed at him. Wrong. Something wrong. He lowered his hands again, prompting a response from the dark-clad figure nearest him. It thrust its spear towards Slave’s face. Not right.

  In an instant, everything snapped together in a flash of understanding. Slave spat in anger.

  ‘Sorcery,’ he snarled. His anger flared then, powerful and unexpectedly fast. He had his Claw out and moving before Myrrhini could draw a breath. The softly glowing weapon passed through the dark figure without resistance, leaving it wavering like a shadow on water. Slave continued his attack, swinging around, slicing through the others in the same way, leaving them undamaged as well.

  ‘Illusions,’ he hissed. His anger continued to swell, beginning to fill his mind, sending tendrils of black across his vision. Slave felt his mind start to lose cohesion, his reason splintering as insensate rage hammered at his consciousness. There were maybe a few heartbeats left before he exploded into manic violence. He grabbed Myrrhini by the arm and dragged her to her feet. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Get out of here as fast as you can and do not come —’

  His voice failed, shifting into guttural snarling as the black filled his eyes. All sense faded from his mind. The Warrior’s Claw erupted into brilliant white light, scattering shadows, exploding the three phantom figures into nothingness. Myrrhini cried aloud, seeing Slave roar and rage as he had done so long before in the slavers’ cage on the northern tundra.

  Slave stood for a moment, screaming his defiance before charging into the crowd of chanting, swaying people. His Claw sent arrows of blinding light across the assembled mob, cutting through figures like a scythe through wheat. Bodies tumbled, cloven apart by the light, screaming in their death throes. Slave sliced through them, his voice raised above the screams and shouts, no longer unintelligibly roaring, now speaking — no, singing — clearly.

  The Slave of Sondelle overtaken with rage and unable to control the violence unleashed by the Revenant’s gift was hacking apart an enclave of w
orshippers of Kielevinenrohkimainen. With every stroke of his Claw, every searing beam of light, he raised his voice in a barbaric hymn of praise to the Revenant.

  Myrrhini looked down on the unspeakable savagery from her vantage point, hovering high near the curved roof of the vast dome. This was what she had Seen in the moments before the phantom guards had appeared. These people here were not quite human, not quite Mertian, not quite shapeshifters, but something of a hybrid. They were being changed here, but whether they were Mertians becoming vlekkenvorm or vlekkenvorm being made human, she could not tell. Either way, the thing her people had summoned to this world was building its army here, within the walls of the ancient city of Asnuevium.

  And the last remaining Beq of the Scaren was destroying it, singing in the joy of the slaughter. His arms were a blur in the dim mix of light and shadow, but Myrrhini was sure she was seeing multiple Claws wielded by Slave. As first, she thought it was simply his breathtaking speed, but the longer she watched, the more convinced she became. The ancient enchanted weapon was unmistakeably acting as more than one. Claws flashed, spinning through the air to embed in screaming bodies, only to vanish as soon as they had done their dread work. Both of Slave’s hands held identical Claws, each one cutting a bloody swathe through those gathered in the chamber.

  When he first fell on them from behind, the response was to fight back, to repel this rude interloper, but within moments, the mood shifted. As the bodies fell, a realisation seemed to sweep through those remaining that this was no ordinary assault, and this was no ordinary attacker. A simple desire to pull back became a massed retreat. People were trampled underfoot as those nearest the singing, silver-eyed fiend — who, it appeared, could be touched by neither weapon nor hand — fell back. And still he came after them, tearing them apart from behind.

  Panic set in, changing the tone of the screams from pain and anger to terror. The robed people pushed against each other, scrambling to escape. Slave waded on, killing and maiming, all the while singing the hymn of savage praise to the Revenant.

  A flicker of something at the edge of Myrrhini’s vision made her tear her gaze away from the madness that was the Slave of Sondelle. She looked to where the fleeing worshippers broke like a tide on the massive statue that had been the object of their reverence. For an instant, but only an instant, she thought she had noticed it start to rock, as if about to tumble. But far from rocking, it was growing, spreading its wings. Its mouth opened further and its eyes flashed, no longer with reflected light, but with an intense yellow light that rivalled the near-blinding splinters of white light spraying out from the Claw. At a point in time, far too brief to notice, too fleeting to see, a white beam from the Claw met a yellow beam from the statue’s eyes. In that moment, the statue gave a shudder. Like a bird hatching, the stone cracked, shattered and fell to reveal a thing out of nightmares. In shock, the worshippers stopped and stared. Slave’s song of savage joy continued, sounding jarringly loud.

  The beast rose to a height of at least ten paces, with six long, snake-like arms that writhed and flicked around a heavy black body standing on two massive legs. The head was more like that of a bull than anything else, with thick, powerful horns extending up and out from just above the three glowing yellow eyes. A wide maw gaped open to reveal dozens of brown, pointed fangs. The whole being dripped a viscous ooze onto the stone floor where it sizzled, sending up tendrils of sickly orange smoke. Around it, the robed people who moments before had been bowing at its feet fell back in horror as the ooze burned those who were too slow to move away. The screaming began again.

  All the while, Slave had not ceased his slaughter. He was bathed in blood, his voice becoming hoarse with his song, but his preternatural speed and strength were showing no signs of waning. Bodies fell before him.

  A sensation — like a sound but not a sound — erupted from the beast, ripping across the chamber, sending anyone still standing tumbling to the ground. Everyone except Slave. As if the sound that was no sound had blasted his mind free of the black rage, Slave stopped and lowered his Claw. His chest heaved while blood dripped from his body onto the stone floor. The beast raised all of its writhing, rippling arms and thrust its head forward, maw wide open, looking as though it were bellowing with all its might, but no sound emerged.

  There might not have been any sound, but bodies and other debris were blown away from the monster as if by a wind. They rolled and bounced away, sending streamers of blood and viscera into the air. Even hovering so high above, Myrrhini was buffeted as if by a strong wind. Only Slave remained unmoved by the silent blast.

  He stood motionless until the wave of air had crashed past him, then he raised his blood-coated Claw above his head. Speaking now, Slave walked towards the monster. Myrrhini had heard the language before, a long time ago in the Place of the Acolytes. It was a language Joukahainen had spoken. It was the forbidden language of the sorcerers of the Scaren.

  How did Slave know that language?

  Was he a sorcerer?

  Unless of course this was part of the ‘gift’ of the Revenant.

  Her musings were cut short by another silent blast from the creature. Once again, bodies and debris were sent flying across the chamber, once again Slave appeared unmoved. He continued his advance towards the beast with his Claw held high. Whether it was due to the blasts of wind or some other cause, the weapon was now clean of blood, shining with its own light and reflecting that of the glowing disc. The mix of blinding white and sooty orange made it seem dirty somehow, like a jewel sullied with ash.

  Slave kept walking until he was within striking range of the six arms. He was still speaking in the rasping tones of the ancient language as he moved. Myrrhini could not take her eyes from the tableau — the last Beq of her people’s mortal enemies advancing on an avatar of her people’s greatest folly. Her vision into Eztli-Ichtaca suddenly flared with intensity, overlaying what she could see with disturbing images of possible futures. She could almost feel her eyes of the Quanhtli burning with redoubled fire, sending all about her into troubled disarray. Everywhere she looked, destinies teetered, switching from one possibility to others, flashing through the range with dizzying speed. Her mind recoiled from the vista. She raised her hands to cover her eyes, but of course all a blindfold did was block her human vision, leaving behind only the view into Eztli-Ichtaca.

  Springing into unsullied relief, the mystical world reached out for her mind. She tried to look away, but the conflicting destinies drew her in, ensnaring her with their tangled skein of the impossible, the possible, the probable and the unimaginable all inextricably interwoven. Myrrhini was about to scream aloud from the pain when a silver flash caught her attention. She tried to focus on it, to push away the competing destinies in order to examine the silver.

  The flash of silver became an eruption, a blossoming of silver that burst forth, enveloping everything, blotting out the madness and laying the truth bare. Standing motionless was Slave, his Claw in his hand, his silver eye the source of the silver flood. As she watched, the silver stream issuing from his eye took on a shape. It grew and grew, becoming what Myrrhini feared it had to be.

  It took on its full shape and looked around with an expression of pure chaos on its bestial face. For a moment, it appeared content, but then its gaze fell upon Myrrhini. It gave a vast bellow of rage and stretched its wings, preparing to rise into the sky.

  Myrrhini was struck with visceral terror under its stare. She hung in the sky, alone before the unfettered rage of this beast whose only apparent purpose was destruction. It rose, but, shockingly, it was wrenched back down. It crashed to the ground, sending ripples that spread outward through the silver. The cries it uttered shifted in character from rage to frustration to pain, and finally to fear as a small black spot appeared in its chest. The spot expanded until it encompassed the whole silver world that had poured out of Slave’s eye. Myrrhini found herself, in a matter of heartbeats, standing in the midst of total dark.

  ‘Is this t
he circle of peace you Saw?’ Slave asked quietly from behind her.

  Myrrhini spun around to see him standing there. His Claw was in his left hand, his silver eye was glowing softly, providing enough light to make out his features. She gave a small cry and fell into his arms. He caught her and held her tightly as her consciousness fled.

  29

  Keshik spat with anger. The Tulugma Habigga were skilled, but Slave and Myrrhini had lost them moments after entering the city. It was galling enough that Slave had done it with ease — the man was barely human — but for Myrrhini to vanish like smoke was intolerable.

  He was left with the humiliating decision of going back to the ship, heading into the city without Slave, waiting here for the man to come and get them, or trying to find him. In the darkness, Keshik sighed, knowing he really only had one choice. Either go on or go back. Slave could not be found once he had vanished and Keshik would not wait to be collected like a mewling infant.

  And he would not go back.

  The so-called guards who were detailed to stand watch over the gate were less observant than the gate they were protecting. Keshik felt they might benefit from some field training to help their concentration, so he gestured to Yan-la, the closest Habigga. With a simple series of hand movements, Keshik gave him instructions to deliver a stinging rebuke to the lazy guards. Yan-la gave a flicker of a smile before sliding away into the dark. Keshik watched until the guard who had relieved himself against the wall gave a strangled cry and fell to the ground.

  When his fellows gathered around him, Yan-la’s perfectly weighted throw deposited a flask of Apros Smoke into their midst. The choking orange vapours rose in a noxious cloud, making the two guards who could still move reel back in paroxysms of harsh coughing. They would be incapacitated for quite a while, certainly long enough for Keshik and the Habigga to slip past and enter the city unmolested.

  This was a city in fear. Keshik saw the signs everywhere. Chinks of light appeared in windows, only to quickly vanish as the occupants peered out, then ducked back behind the shutters. Evidently there were those who prowled the streets of this city, hunting for prey. Keshik led the Habigga along a street that ran roughly parallel to the main street, heading towards the centre of Asnuevium.