He glanced at her, said nothing.
Rautos spoke. ‘See that hind foot, Taxilian? It is the only one on a pedestal.’
The two men headed off in that direction.
Breath walked up to Asane. ‘Spin that cocoon, woman, make yourself somewhere you can hide inside. Until you’re nothing but a rotted husk. Don’t think you can crawl back out. Don’t think you can show us all your bright, painted wings. Your hopes, Asane, your dreams and secrets—all hollow.’ She held up a thin spidery hand. ‘I can crush it all, so easily—’
Last stepped up to her, then pushed her back so that she stumbled. ‘I grow tired of listening to you,’ he said. ‘Leave her alone.’
Breath cackled and danced away.
‘Thank you,’ said Asane. ‘She is so … hurtful.’
But Last faced her and said, ‘This is not a place for fears, Asane. Conquer yours, and do it soon.’
Nearby, Nappet snickered. ‘Dumb farmer’s maybe not so dumb after all. Doesn’t make him any less ugly though, does it?’ He laughed.
As Rautos and Taxilian drew closer to the hind limb they could see that the pedestal was rectangular, like the foundation of a temple. The vertical wall facing them, as tall as they were, bore the faint remnants of a frieze, framed in an elaborate border. All too eroded to interpret. But no sign of an entranceway.
‘We are confounded again,’ Rautos said.
‘I do not think so,’ Taxilian replied. ‘You look wrongly, friend. You search out what rises in front of you. You scan right and left, you crane your sight upward. Yes, the city encourages such deception. The dragon invites it, perched as it is. And yet …’ He pointed.
Rautos followed the line of that lone finger, and grunted in surprise. At the base of the pedestal, windblown sands formed a hollow. ‘The way in is downward.’
Sheb joined them. ‘We need to dig.’
‘I think so,’ agreed Taxilian. ‘Call the others, Sheb.’
‘I don’t take orders from you. Errant piss on you highborn bastards.’
‘I’m not highborn,’ said Taxilian.
Sheb sneered. ‘You make like you are, which is just as bad. Get back down where you belong, Taxilian, and if you can’t manage on your own then I’ll help and that’s a promise.’
‘I just have some learning, Sheb—why does that threaten you so?’
Sheb rested a hand on one of his daggers. ‘I don’t like pretenders and that’s what you are. You think big words make you smarter, better. You like the way Rautos here respects you, you think he sees you as an equal. But you’re wrong in that—you ain’t his equal. He’s just humouring you, Taxilian. You’re a clever pet.’
‘This is how Letherii think,’ said Rautos, sighing. ‘It’s what keeps everyone in their place, upward, downward—even as people claim they despise the system they end up doing all they can to keep it in place.’
Taxilian sighed in turn. ‘I do understand that, Rautos. Stability helps remind you of where you stand. Affirms you’ve got a legitimate place in society, for good or ill.’
‘Listen to you two shit-eaters.’
By this time the others had arrived. Taxilian pointed at the depression. ‘We think we’ve found a way in, but we’ll have to dig.’
Last approached with a shovel in his hands. ‘I’ll start.’
The ghost hovered, watching. Off to the west, the sun was settling into horizon’s lurid vein. When Last needed a rest, Taxilian took his place. Then Nappet, followed by Sheb. Rautos tried then, but by this point the pit was deep and he had difficulty making his way down, and an even harder time flinging the sand high enough to keep it from sifting back. His stint did not last long before, with a snarl, Sheb told him to get out and leave the task to the lowborns who knew this business. Last and Taxilian struggled to lift Rautos out of the pit.
In the dusty gloom below, the excavation had revealed one edge of stone facing, the huge blocks set without mortar.
The argument from earlier disturbed the ghost, although he was not sure why it was so. He was past such silly things, after all. The games of station, so bitter, so self-destructive—it all seemed such a waste of time and energy, the curse of people who could look outward but never inward. Was that a measure of intelligence? Were such hapless victims simply dimwitted, incapable of introspection and honest self-judgement? Or was it a quality of low intelligence that its possessor instinctively fled the potentially deadly turmoil of knowing too many truths about oneself?
Yes, it was this notion—of self-delusion—that left him feeling strangely anxious, exposed and vulnerable. He could see its worth, after all. When the self was a monster—who wouldn’t hide from such a thing? Who wouldn’t run when it loomed close? Close enough to smell, to taste? Yes, even the lowest beast knew the value of not knowing itself too well.
‘I’ve reached the floor,’ announced Sheb, straightening. When the others crowded to the uncertain edge, he snarled, ‘Keep your distance, fools! You want to bury me?’
‘Tempting,’ said Nappet. ‘But then we’d have to dig out your miserable corpse.’
The shovel scraped on flagstones. After a time Sheb said, ‘Got the top of the doorway here in front of me—it’s low … but wide. There’s a ramp, no steps.’
Yes, thought the ghost, that is as it should be.
Sheb wasn’t interested in handing off the task, now that he could see the way in. He dug swiftly, grunting with every upward heave of heavy, damp sand. ‘I can smell the water,’ he gasped. ‘Could be the tunnel’s flooded—but at least we won’t die of thirst, will we?’
‘I’m not going down there,’ said Breath, ‘if there’s water in the tunnel. I’m not. You’ll all drown.’
The ramp angled downward for another six or seven paces, enough to leave Sheb exhausted. Nappet took over and a short time later, with dusk gathering at their backs, a thrust of the shovel plunged into empty space. They were through.
The tunnel beyond was damp, the air sweet with rotting mould and sour with something fouler. The water pooled on the floor was less than a finger’s width deep, slippery underfoot. The darkness was absolute.
Everyone lit lanterns. Watching this, the ghost found himself frightened yet again. As with all the other accoutrements; as with the sudden appearance of the shovel, he was missing essential details—they could not simply veer into existence as needed, after all. Reality didn’t work that way. No, it must be that he was blind to things, a vision cursed to be selective, yielding only that which was needed, that which was relevant to the moment. For all he knew, he suddenly realized, there might be a train of wagons accompanying this group. There might be servants. Bodyguards. An army. The real world, he comprehended with a shock, was not what he saw, not what he interacted with instant by instant. The real world was unknowable.
He thought he might howl. He thought he might give voice to his horror, his abject revelation. For, if indeed the world was unknowable, then so too were the forces acting upon him, and how could one guard against that?
Frozen, unable to move. Until the group descended into the tunnel, and then yet another discovery assailed him, as chains dragged him down into the pit, pulling him—shrieking now—into the passageway.
He was not free.
He was bound to the lives of these strange people, not one of whom knew he even existed. He was their slave, yet rendered so useless that he had no voice, no body, no identity beyond this fragile mockery of self—and how long could such a entity survive, when it was invisible to everyone else? When even the stone walls and pools of slimy water did not acknowledge his arrival?
Was this, then, the torment of all ghosts?
The possibility was so terrible, so awful, that he recoiled. How could mortal souls deserve such eternal penitence? What vast crime did the mere act of living commit? Or had he been personally consigned to this fate? By some god or goddess cruel in judgement, devoid of all mercy?
At that thought, even as he flailed about in the wake of his masters, he f
elt a sudden rage. A blast of indignation. What god or goddess dares to presume the right to judge me? That is arrogance too vast to have been earned.
Whoever you are, I will find you. I swear it. I will find you and I will cut you down. Humble you. Down to your knees. How dare you! How dare you judge anyone, when you ever hide your face? When you strip away all possible truth of your existence? Your wilful presence?
Hiding from me, whoever—whatever—you are, is a childish game. An unworthy game. Face your child. Face all your children. Show me the veracity of your right to cast judgement upon me.
Do this, and I will accept you.
Remain hidden, even as you consign my soul to suffering, and I will hunt you down.
I will hunt you down.
The ramp climbed until it reached a broad, low-ceilinged chamber.
Crowded with reptilian corpses. Rotting, reeking, in pools of thick ichor and rank blood. Twenty, perhaps more.
K’Chain Che’Malle. The makers of this city.
Each one throat-cut. Executed like goats on an altar.
Beyond them, a spiralling ramp climbed steeply upward. No one said a thing as they picked careful, independent paths through the slaughter. Taxilian in the lead, they began the ascent.
The ghost watched as Breath paused to bend down and run a finger through decaying blood. She slipped that finger into her mouth, and smiled.
Book Two
Eaters of
Diamonds
and Gems
I heard a story
Of a river
Which is where water flows over the ground
glistening in the sun
It’s a legend
And untrue
In the story the water is clear and that’s
why it’s untrue
We all know
Water Is the colour
Of blood
People make up legends
To teach lessons
So I think The story is about us
About a river of blood
And one day
We’ll run clear
OF A RIVER
BADALLE
Chapter Seven
The horrid creatures jostle in their line
A row of shields and a row of painted faces
They marched out of my mouth
As slayers are wont to do
When no one was looking busy as they were
With their precious banners and standards
And with the music of stepping in time As the righteous are wont to do
Now see all these shiny weapons so eager
To clash in the discord of stunned agreement
Blind as millipedes in the mud
As between lovers words may do
In the murky depths swans slip like seals
Scaling the ice walls of cold’s prison
All we dream is without tether
CONFESSIONS OF THE CONDEMNED
BANATHOS OF BLUEROSE
T
he errant walked the flooded tunnel, remembering the bodies that had once drifted there, shifting like logs, flesh turning to jelly. Now on occasion, in pushing a foot forward, he kicked aside unseen bones. Darkness promised no solitude, no true abandonment, no final resting place. Darkness was nothing more than a home for the forgotten. Which was why sarcophagi had lids and crypts were sealed under stone and barrows beneath heaped earth. Darkness was the vision behind shuttered eyes, little more than the dismissal of light when details ceased to be relevant.
He could find such a world. All he needed to do was close his one remaining eye. It should work. He did not understand why it didn’t. The water, bitter cold, lapped round his thighs. He welcomed its gift of numbness. The air was foul, but he was used to that. There should be nothing to hold him here, chaining him to this moment.
Events were unfolding, so many events, and not all of them shifting to his touch, twisting to his will. Anger was giving way to fear. He had sought out the altar Feather Witch had consecrated in his name. He had expected to find her soul, her fleshless will curling in sinew currents round the submerged rubble, but there had been nothing, no one. Where had she gone?
He could still feel her hair beneath his hand, the muted struggles as some remnant of her sanity groped for air, for one more moment of life. His palm tingled with the echo of her faint convulsions beginning in that moment when she surrendered and filled her lungs with water, once, twice, like a newborn trying out the gifts of an unknown world, only to retreat, fade away, and slide like an eel back into the darkness, where the first thing forgotten was oneself.
This should not be haunting him. His act had been one of mercy. Gangrenous, insane, she’d had little time left. It had been the gentlest of nudges, not at all motivated by vengeance or disgust. Still, she might well have cursed him in that last exhaled, soured breath.
Her soul should be swimming these black waters. But the Errant knew that he had been alone. The altar chamber had offered him little more than desolation.
Wading, the tunnel’s slimy floor descending with each step, his feet suddenly lost all grip and the water rose yet higher, past his chest, closing over his shoulders and lapping at his throat. The top of his head brushed the gritty stone of the tunnel’s ceiling, and then he was under, blinking the sting from his eye.
He pushed onward through the murk, until the water turned salty, and light, reflecting down from a vague surface fathoms overhead, flashed like dulled, smeared memories of lightning. He could feel the heavy tugs of wayward currents and he knew that a storm did indeed rage, there upon the ceiling of this world, but it could do little to him down here. Scraping through thick mud, he walked the ocean floor.
Nothing decayed in this place, and all that had not been crushed to dust by the immense pressures now lay scattered beneath monochrome draperies of silt, like furniture in a vast, abandoned room. Everything about this realm invited horror. Time lost its way here, wandering until the ceaseless rain of detritus weighed it down, brought it to its knees, and then buried it. Anything—anyone—could fall to the same fate. The danger, the risk, was very real. No creature of sentience could withstand this place for long. Futility delivered its crushing symphony and the dread music was eternal.
He found himself walking down the length of a vast skeleton, jagged uneven ribs rising like the columns of a colonnade to either side, a roofless temple sagging under its own senseless burden. He passed the snaking line of boulders that was the immense creature’s spine. Four scapulae formed broad concave platforms just ahead, from which bizarre long bones radiated out like toppled pillars. He could just make out, in the gloom, the massive crown of the back of the monster’s skull. Here, then, awaited another kind of temple. Precious store of self, a space insisting on its occupation, an existence that demanded acknowledgement of its own presence.
The Errant sympathized with the notion. Such delicate conceits assembled the bones of the soul, after all. He moved past the last of the scapulae, noting the effect of some crushing, no doubt crippling impact. The bone looked like a giant broken plate.
Coming alongside the skull, he saw that the cave of its nearest orbital socket was shattered, above and behind an elongated, partly collapsed snout crowded with serrated teeth. The Elder God paused and studied that damage for some time. He could not imagine what this beast had been; he suspected it was a child of these deep currents, a swimmer through ancient ages, entirely uncomprehending that its time was past. He wondered if mercy had delivered that death blow.
Ah, but he could not fight his own nature, could he? Most of his nudges were fatal ones, after all. The impetus might find many justifications, and clearly mercy numbered among them. This was, he told himself, a momentary obsession. The feel of her hair under his hand … a lapse of conscience, then, this tremor of remorse. It would pass.
He pushed on, knowing that at last, he’d found the right trail.
There were places that could only be found by invitation, by the fickle gen
erosity of the forces that gave them shape, that made them what they were. Such barriers defied the hungers and needs of most seekers. But he had learned the secret paths long, long ago. He required no invitations, and no force could stand in the way of his hunger.
The dull gleam of the light in the tower reached him before he could make out anything else, and he flinched at seeing that single mocking eye floating in the gloom. Currents swept fiercely around him as he drew closer, buffeting his body as if desperate to turn him aside. Silts swirled up, seeking to blind him. But he fixed his gaze on that fitful glow, and before long he could make out the squat, blockish house, the black, gnarled branches of the trees in the yard, and then the low stone wall.
Dunes of silt were heaped up against the tower side of the Azath. The mounds in the yard were sculpted, half-devoured, exposing the roots of the leaning trees. As the Errant stepped on to the snaking flagstones of the path, he could see bones scattered out from those sundered barrows. Yes, they had escaped their prisons at long last, but death had arrived first.
Patience was the curse of longevity. It could lure its ageless victim into somnolence, until flesh itself rotted off, and the skull rolled free.
He reached the door. Pushed it open.
The currents within the narrow entranceway swept over him warm as tears. As the portal closed behind him, the Errant gestured. A moment later he was standing on dry stone. Hovering faint on the air around him was the smell of woodsmoke. A wavering globe of lantern light approached from the corridor beyond.
The threadbare figure that stepped into view sent a pang through the Errant. Memories murky as the sea-bottom spun up to momentarily blind him. The gaunt Forkrul Assail was hunched at the shoulders, as if every proof of justice had bowed him down, left him broken. His pallid face was a mass of wrinkles, like crushed leather. Tortured eyes fixed on the Errant for a moment, and then the Assail turned away. ‘Fire and wine await us, Errastas—come, you know the way.’
They walked through the double doors at the conjunction of the corridors, into the dry heat of the hearth room. The Assail gestured at a sideboard as he hobbled to one of the chairs flanking the fireplace. Ignoring the invitation to drink—for the moment—the Errant walked to the other chair and settled into it.
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