by D. P. Prior
Where the box had sat, the ground had dried, and tufts of virgin grass poked through the soil.
He stood and shouldered his bow. “Perhaps you have skills I am not familiar with. I know only that I can see no way to enter the Perfect Peak uninvited, apart from that I have described.”
“It’s a habit of mine to learn everything I can about an enemy before I make a move,” Shadrak said. “Even if you’re right, a quick reccy won’t be wasted.”
“Indeed,” Gilbrum said. “I can see how such scrupulosity would make you a formidable foe; but what of you two?” He looked from Rhiannon to Shader. “What is your purpose in this? Forgive my asking, only your allegiance to this Nous of yours raises questions. The dwarves were deceived, and now they are impotent, afraid of where their actions might lead. Are you certain of what your Nous wants?”
Shader chewed his bottom lip and rubbed his thumb over the pommel of the gladius.
“As sure as I can be,” Rhiannon said. “Way I see it, Gandaw wants to wreck everything, so if Nous is worth his salt, he’s bound to want us to kick his—”
“What else can we do?” Shader asked. “If Nous wants us to permit the unmaking of the worlds, he has given no sign.” Nor would he, Shader knew. The ways of Nous were always frustratingly vague, hence the years of moral theology just to comprehend what a just and loving deity might desire. “If we do nothing, when we have the power to act, we would be complicit in Gandaw’s destruction of Creation.”
“Like the dwarves,” Gilbrum said.
“Like Nous, useless scut.” Shadrak pulled out a knife and started to scrape beneath his thumbnail.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rhiannon asked.
“Nous grants us free will,” Shader said, more dismissively than he’d intended, his focus never wavering from Gilbrum. “He is lord of love.” He is love. Adeptus Ludo had never tired of hammering that point home. “He would not desire the Unweaving.”
“But what response would he make?” Gilbrum asked. “Would he want you to kill to prevent it?”
“What do you think?” There was vitriol in Rhiannon’s tone.
Gilbrum offered her a hand up. “My people say the answer to fear is love, and yet we still have a use for arrows.”
“I say we kill the shogger,” Rhiannon said.
“Looks like we agree on something, then,” Shadrak said, springing to his feet.
“Well, that’s just… Not sure how I feel about that.” Rhiannon shifted the sword on her back, ran a hand through her hair, and wandered away toward the undergrowth.
Shader tensed when he saw Shadrak follow her, but the two stopped and started speaking—or rather Shadrak did the talking, and Rhiannon just rolled her shoulders, making more eye contact with the buzzing insects than with the assassin.
Gilbrum crouched beside Shader, keeping his voice low. “There is love between you and the woman?”
Shader felt his face tighten. He fought the urge to glance at Rhiannon, and instead held Gilbrum’s gaze. “Not like… Not the sort of…”
Gilbrum put a hand on his shoulder. His eyes rippled like emerald ponds. “This conflict is unnatural,” he said. “Be careful, my friend, there is the taste of deception in all this.”
In all what? Shader wanted to ask, but Gilbrum removed his hand and set off once more.
The elf led them at a brisk pace, the undergrowth recoiling wherever he set his feet, but creeping back as soon as the companions had passed.
Shader became aware of a pulse thrumming through the soles of his boots. Gilbrum explained this was the heart of the Sour Marsh. He halted the group and held up his hand. A faint susurrus rose from the boggy ground and whispered through the trees.
“Listen,” Gilbrum said, holding his open palm above the earth. “The breath of the marsh. As I told you, it is a creature, all its parts extensions of one organic whole; and it is sentient, utterly evil.”
Shader had the disquieting feeling the ground might suddenly shift beneath him, or open up to swallow him whole.
“That box of yours,” Shadrak said. “Couldn’t help noticing, but when the fire was burning, it reclaimed the land in some way.”
“That is its purpose,” Gilbrum said. “But the Sour Marsh is too vast, its infection too advanced. It smothers each new growth within hours. My task is futile, and yet I am sworn to keep trying. At best, I will slow the death of Aethir by a few hundred years, but in time, it will come.”
“If Gandaw doesn’t get there first,” Rhiannon said.
“Yeah, but it’s different with Gandaw,” Shadrak said. “From what I’ve seen, he ain’t no brainless wrecker.”
“Really?” Rhiannon said. “And just what have you seen?”
Shadrak answered with a glare, the blades in his baldrics sparkling when he let his cloak fall open.
“You are right,” Gilbrum said. “His evil is intolerance.”
“Has my sympathy there,” Rhiannon said.
“He can’t abide imperfection,” Shader said. “Apparently, Ain wasn’t quite up to the task of creation.”
“Got you,” Rhiannon said. “Gandaw’s going to straighten things out. Lucky old us.”
“Maybe he has a point,” Shadrak said. “If this crap spewing over the mountains is anything to go by.”
“Oh, of course.” Rhiannon applauded, a rictus grin revealing her teeth. “And don’t forget the rest of the scum that infects Creation. You know, cheats, cowards, rapists; and let’s not forget back-stabbing midgets.”
“That’s enough, Rhiannon,” Shader said.
She turned on him, face reddening. “Don’t you shogging tell me—”
“Shut it.” Shader winced as he said the words.
Rhiannon spun away from him and punched a tree. “Shog!” she swore, rubbing her hand.
Gilbrum shook his head and set off once more. Shadrak was close on his tail, but Shader hung back a little way, making sure Rhiannon was still with them. Each time she nearly caught up, she stopped until Shader put more distance between them, and then she’d start walking again. Not once did she meet his gaze.
Shader’s hand crept into his coat pocket, fingers stroking the cover of his Liber. He longed to open its pages in the hope of gleaning some inspiration, some wisdom, but right now, he viewed the scriptures with a cynicism that would have made Gandaw seem like a luminary. What kind of hope could he find in a book cobbled together by a creature as foul as the Liche Lord of Verusia? How could an entire religion have sprung from its pages? Out of all his Templum tutors, only Adeptus Ludo had raised the issue of inconsistencies in the Liber, disparate elements that made no sense unless interpreted from within the context of a ‘golden thread’ Ludo claimed ran through the scriptures, retaining some long-forgotten teaching. Creation might once have been a good; the Liber may have once been pure; but right now, it seemed to Shader both were irretrievably compromised. Maybe it was better if Gandaw had his way. Surely he couldn’t make a worse job of it than Nous.
With a resolve he had to impose upon himself, he quickened his pace to catch up with Gilbrum. His concern for Rhiannon now vacillated between anger and indifference, both of which, he was all too aware, would dissolve like phantoms in the mist if he were to delve more than skin-deep.
“This Skeyr Magnus,” he said. “What is it he wants?”
Gilbrum’s eyes remained on the path ahead, and he spoke as if distracted. “To be a new Gandaw, perhaps. Power, like most. But his ambitions are born of fear. It is the way of all creatures. You know this, and you know the answer, but it is both too simple and too difficult.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“Love, my friend. It has always been about love. This Nous of yours obscures that truth, I think. The dwarves fell for the same reason.”
“You blame Nous for the dwarves’ betrayal of the Hybrids?”
“I do not,” Gilbrum said. “For as I said before, I know nothing of Nous. But I do know about the Deceiver, the father of the Creator.�
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“The Demiurgos?”
Gilbrum nodded. “It was he who led Otto Blightey astray, and Gandaw was Blightey’s pupil.”
“What?” Shader said. “I thought they were in opposition. Blightey’s a liche, a necromancer…”
“The antithesis of Gandaw’s science?” Gilbrum said with a raised eyebrow. “It was Gandaw who found a way to bring Blightey back from the Abyss. The Archon had banished the Liche Lord’s skull there, locked in a casket of scarolite. But even that was not strong enough to hold it. It broke free and drifted through the Abyss, finding its way to Gehenna at the heart of Aethir. There, it threatened the Creator. Blightey’s skull has a terrible power, which even the gods fear. He secured a new body and stole the invulnerable armor the Cynocephalus had forged for his own warding. Thus protected, he waded through the acidic waters of the black river that spans the Abyss, until he discovered the means to reach out to Earth through the subtleties of dreams. This was how he himself had first been swayed by the demon known as the Dweller.”
Shader stiffened, and fought down the memory of lashing tentacles, the despair as Shadrak’s blade plunged into his back and the Dweller rolled over him.
“Blightey found what he was looking for in Sektis Gandaw: curiosity, ambition, a mind both ripe and receptive. He promised great things, persuaded the homunculi of Gehenna to instruct Gandaw until one day he would have the means to generate a corridor between Earth and the Abyss.”
“But they later fought,” Shader said, “and Blightey was driven back into Verusia.” Where his evil still grew like a cancer, inexorably creeping toward the wider world, with only the Templum to drive it back, again and again.
Gilbrum gestured for them to stop before a knotted wall of mangroves. “My point is that the Liche Lord and the Technocrat were both deceived by the Abyss, one way or the other. Deception is insidious. It takes root where its presence is not suspected. The dwarves of Arx Gravis learnt this to their horror, and this is why they are afraid to act: they lost faith in their scriptures, and now they no longer trust their own judgment.”
“So what can be done?” Shader asked. How could the truth in the Liber be separated from the lies? Was the task even possible anymore? How could his own reasoning be trusted, if it was founded upon Nousian morality?
“I cannot say,” Gilbrum said. “But if this Nous of yours is anything like the god once worshipped by the dwarves, then you must act as he would act.”
“And how is that?” Shader said.
“With love.”
Shadrak was watching them from the shadows of a crooked tree, its limbs intertwined with its neighbor’s to form a braided overhang.
“My mother would’ve liked you,” he said without any warmth. “Simple truths for simple people; but those are the dangerous truths, the ones more complicated men will pay people like me to suppress. But you, Gilbrum, ain’t exactly a simple man. Why is it you look at me every time you mention these homunculi?”
Gilbrum faced Shadrak’s crimson stare. “The homunculi were begotten, not made. They are creatures formed of the substance of the Demiurgos himself.”
“Figures,” Rhiannon said, striding back to hover over them like she couldn’t wait to get on.
Shadrak shot daggers at her but then turned back to Gilbrum. “And you connect me with them? Why? Coz I’m short? I was raised in Sahul, I tell you. I’m as human as they come.”
Gilbrum stood absolutely still, his cloak a mélange of greens and browns that gave him the appearance of a lichen-covered trunk. “What about your parents?”
“None of your business.”
“Did you even know them?”
Silver flashed from beneath Shadrak’s cloak.
Shader’s gladius batted the dagger aside before he’d even registered its flight.
Gilbrum remained impassive.
Shadrak was visibly stunned by the speed of Shader’s reaction. He fumbled with a pouch but then stiffened as a black blade pressed against his throat.
“Touchy little shogger, aren’t you?” Rhiannon said.
“Foster mother,” Shadrak said softly. “I knew my…” He broke off and fixed his eyes on Gilbrum. “With all this talk of deception, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that you’re nothing but the dream of a mad god, the bastard son of the Demiurgos, by incest, if I heard it right from that scutting bard.” He shot Rhiannon a look, and she tensed.
The elf stooped to pick up Shadrak’s dagger, reversed it, and handed it back to him.
Shader nodded to Rhiannon, and she stepped away, thrusting the black sword into the ground and leaning on it.
Shadrak’s expression was concealed by his hood, but he sheathed his dagger and crossed his arms.
Gilbrum scanned the trees, tilting his head back slightly to sniff the air. “They have left us. Skeyr Magnus and his lizard-men. It seems they fear to approach the Perfect Peak.”
“We’re close?” Shader asked.
“We’ve arrived.” Gilbrum parted a tangle of vines between two mangroves and invited him to look.
The Sour Marsh gave way abruptly to bleached sand that spread into the distance, merging with the cobalt horizon. A oily river of sludge ran around the edge of the desert like a moat. Dark vapors effused from its surface, and for as far as Shader could see, malformed limbs splashed free of the goo and groped blindly before slipping from sight.
A mile or so from where they stood, a lone mountain jutted from the sand, perfectly symmetrical and black as coal, save for the veins of malachite picked out by the glare of the twin suns. A cloud of dirt covered the peak, and at intervals of a few seconds, jags of lightning flashed through the smog. Where they touched the sky, threads of discoloration spread like cracks in a mirror.
Glints of silver zipped and whirled around the base of the mountain, rising and swooping with astonishing speed.
Gilbrum’s cloak whitened to match the desert. He crouched to scoop up some sand and let it run through his fingers. “The Dead Lands,” he said. “Not sand, but bone.”
“Bone?” Rhiannon wrinkled her nose.
Gilbrum stood and made a visor with his hand, peering at the black mountain. “Nothing lives here,” he said. “Gandaw made sure of that before he built the Perfect Peak.”
Shadrak’s eyes tracked the movements of the silver objects flitting around the base. “They follow a set pattern,” he said. “But I’ll wager that’ll change the moment we approach.”
“We’ll never know if we just stand here all day gawping,” Rhiannon said. She stepped away from the border of the Sour Marsh toward the river of sludge.
Shader made to follow, but Gilbrum put a restraining hand on his shoulder. One of the silver shapes was speeding away from the mountain so quickly that, by the time Shader had blinked, he could see it clearly as a metallic sphere, spinning and reflecting sunlight from its surface.
Rhiannon froze where she stood.
The sphere came to a hover mere yards from her and began to circle her at head height. A slim metal tube emerged from its shell and pointed at her chest. In that instant, Gilbrum released an arrow. The tube twitched and spurted red flame, and the arrow turned to ash.
Shader lunged for Rhiannon, grabbed her wrist, and tugged her toward the marsh. The sphere sped past them and resumed its circling.
Shader drew the gladius without a thought, its blade meeting a second stream of fire and deflecting it into a tree. The trunk fizzed and blackened, then split down the middle. The nozzle swiveled in his direction, but a thunderous crack sounded, and the sphere spun backward before dumping itself in the dust.
“Get back,” Shadrak said, pointing toward the mountain with his smoking pistol.
Two more spheres were racing straight for them.
Shader dragged Rhiannon back toward Gilbrum and the cover of the trees. Shadrak followed them, walking backward, with the little black weapon covering the spheres. Once they were all back within the the marsh, the spheres broke off and returned to their patrol
of the mountain.
“Anyone got a plan to get past those things, now would be a good time,” Rhiannon said, throwing herself to the ground like a sulking child.
“We go underground,” Shadrak said. “If what Mr. Pointy Ears says is true, we pay these dwarves a visit.”
“Then we need to find Arx Gravis,” Shader said. “Let’s just pray we have time.”
“I’ll leave the praying to you,” Shadrak said.
Gilbrum’s shoulders slumped, and his eyes grew dull. “I cannot lead you there. It is far beyond the bounds of the Sour Marsh. You must journey east, and yes, you must pray. The cloud and the lightning above the Perfect Peak were not there before. I fear you are right: the Unweaving has commenced.”
“Do you have a map? Landmarks for us to look out for?” Shader asked.
“I am sorry,” Gilbrum said.
“Then how—” Shader’s words stuck in his throat as he saw they were being watched.
“Nous is merciful to sinners, Deacon Shader.” Dave the Slave shuffled out of the undergrowth, his twisted frame the avatar of an angry god. “You are still his right hand, despite your failure to act.”
Ice crept up Shader’s spine. It wasn’t the first time the hunchback had appeared out of nowhere. He should have been used to it, what with Aristodeus popping up all over the place, but in both cases, it had the feel of wrongness to it. Of course, it was possible, as the Voice of Nous, Dave had some divinely bestowed power. Possible, but not very likely.
Gilbrum’s eyes widened, and he spoke in a low voice to Shader. “There is the taste of deception about this creature. I would not—”
“Nous has shown me the way to Arx Gravis,” Dave said. “Come with me, if you would redeem yourself.”
The hunchback limped away through the marsh, murmuring under his breath, but whether he was praying or cursing, Shader couldn’t tell.
“Don’t worry,” Shadrak said. “I already got a dozen ways to kill the creep. I say we follow.”
Gilbrum nodded. “Go, but be mindful that the dwarves are afraid to act. Even if they remember the tunnels, they may not grant you access.”
“Doesn’t anyone care that doomsday’s underway?” Rhiannon said. “What is it with this place?”
