Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  Gog shouts in triumph and fear. A second knight comes through the door and swings a spiked mace. Gog dodges back and snarls. A third knight follows, carrying a broad-headed spear to stand at his comrade’s side. Gog draws you, curling you in his left hand.

  The knight lunges with his spear. Gog pivots at the last second, and the spear’s tip grazes the mail over his gut. Gog hacks down with his sword, and the knight’s right leg crumples, his head arching up to expose his neck. You stab into a gap between plate, leather and mail. You rip out, scattering blood that looks almost black in the gloom. Thunder rolls overhead. The remaining knight shouts a challenge and spins his mace – beyond the door wait more metal-clad figures, their pitch torches guttering in the storm.

  Gog knows that his masters have deserted him, that he will die here. He laughs. The knight with the mace brings it up to strike.

  ‘Hold.’

  The voice is not loud but it rises over the shriek of the wind and the hammer of rain. The knight with the mace freezes, and Gog sees his chance. He stabs at the knight’s face, but a sword blade meets Gog’s lunge and turns it aside.

  Another figure has entered the tower. Gold armour-plates cover the figure from his throat to his feet. A cloak of scarlet and orange ripples at his back. He wears no helm, though a crown of silver leaves and golden feathers circles his dark hair above a lean face. The drawn sword in the figure’s hand is flame-touched silver.

  Gog looks into the crowned figure’s eyes, for a second they are the green of the sea. He knows those eyes, though he has never seen them before. Lightning strikes somewhere close by, and in the eye-blink of brightness the golden figure’s eyes turn liquid black.

  Only now does Gog hear the wind’s voice again; it is faint, as if it is shouting from a great distance. It is screaming with rage, calling out for blood. Gog shivers. He feels pressure building in his skull. He grips you tighter in his off-hand, and mutters a sound that cracks his teeth. The blood on your blade begins to hiss and steam. Gog’s shadow is crawling across the floor. The rain begins to fall as hail. The crowned figure is utterly still, his face as unforgiving as carven marble.

  Gog’s sword slashes for him, but the figure meets the blow as the thunder rolls, and Gog’s blade shatters. Sharp fragments of steel spin through the air. Gog turns without pausing – you sweep out towards the crowned figure and your edge scores across the gold. Your tip finds a join between two plates and punches forwards. Gog roars with triumph.

  In that instant, your point catches on flawless silver ring-mail. The crowned figure speaks a single word that rolls with the thunder’s echo.

  Gog falls to his knees with a crack of shattering bones. You almost fall from his fingers, as his hands grope at the rain-slick flagstones. The figure looks down at him, drops of rain catching in the chalices, feathers and roses engraved upon the golden armour. He turns his sword so that it is pointing down at Gog’s neck.

  You feel Gog’s fingers tighten on your handle. He can still hear the distant screams of the wind – the voices are calling for blood, for an offering, for a final payment in exchange for his unnaturally long life. Gog knows that he has only one last blow to land, and that he must give a death to the voices beyond the shadows.

  The sword above Gog twitches. You move first, plunging up through Gog’s throat and into his brain. He looks up at the crowned figure with cold, dead eyes and then slumps sideways.

  The figure lowers his unbloodied blade, as rot spreads across the dead flesh – the delayed ruin of a stretched life coming to claim its due. Gog’s skull begins to crumble around you. Muscle, blood and brain turns to foul jelly. The crowned man watches the body dissolve. His expression is unreadable. He knows that something has been stolen from his victory, but does not know what.

  After a long moment he turns and walks from the broken tower. A circle of knights wait for him, holding wind-rippled torches. One of the knights bows his head.

  ‘We will have to wait for the storm to pass before we set the fires, my liege,’ says the knight. The crowned figure shakes his head and walks on.

  A pillar of lightning reaches down from the clouds above and strikes the ruined masonry, thunder mingling with the scream of exploding wood and cracking stone. The knights shield their faces, but they will carry the after-image of the thunderbolt in their eyes for many hours.

  You feel the touch of the lightning, but it does not break you. You lie serenely in the tower’s ruin, as shattered stone and embers bury you and the storm rolls on in the sky above.

  Third

  You sleep beneath the earth. You dream in a bed of ashes. Only poisoned plants grow on the ground above you, and men shun the heap of broken rock that was once a tower. The bone of your handle rots; roots curl around your blade like crooked fingers. Floods spread and drain. Cities rise in wood and stone, and end in fire. Wars churn the ground to mud, and blood soaks down to disturb your fitful slumber. Furnaces and factories darken the sky with smoke: iron and the turning wheel remaking the world. Men discover new truths and forget the old ways.

  Kingdoms and empires spread and contract. Seas and oceans drain to basins of dust. The heavens are conquered and the gods found to be absent from the firmament.

  Night falls. The fears of the past crawl out once more from the dark. People huddle close around the cooling coals of civilisation. The hoped-for dawn becomes a joke chuckled by the wind as it blows through the bones of dead continents.

  Then – just when it seems that it was finally an impossibility – illumination comes.

  The light touches you as fingers scrape away the mud. The light is not the light of the sun but the harsh, white glare of stab-lights. The grubby fingers pause as they expose your hard shape. All trace of blood has long since rotted from your surface; the ring-mail and shattered sword have rusted to almost nothing, and Gog’s body dissolved into the earth. Only you remain, a sliver of cold blackness in the filth.

  A bare, warm index finger runs down your blade, feeling the ripples and pattern of your making. The finger pauses; it belongs to a man called Jakkil Hakoan. He is young, and thinks that he is clever.

  The cavern is ice cold, leeched of heat by the machine towers which feed warmth to the upper hive levels, but Jakkil sweats anyway. His round face and hands are exposed and chapped, but it does not matter to him – he needs his hands to feel the earth, and he would be as good as blind if he wore a helmet. His enviro-suit was from the bottom of the pile, and its temperature control is broken. It keeps him warm, true, but too warm; it makes him feel like he is in a tropical jungle rather than four kilometres beneath the hive’s surface crust.

  He has never seen a jungle, at least not a real one. He has seen pict images, of course. He has reviewed the data, and read all of the accounts of the great jungles of the past. There are jungles on other worlds that lie beyond the sphere of Sol’s sun. He hopes he will see them one day. It is a wish that has kept him labouring in the lower ranks of three Conservatory expeditions. The excavation of the Albian sub-caverns is just the latest step on his road of ambition. Jakkil Hakoan wants to go places, to see their pasts, to own something of their mysteries. He does not care for the Conservatory’s higher purpose – he just cares where it can take him.

  He licks his thumb and smears the soil from a spot on your blade. His eyes focus on the mottled grey-black of your form. The pale layers that run through you look like clouds hung against a night sky. Jakkil looks at his thumb, at the dirt smudged across his skin, and then back to you. He shivers despite the cocooning heat of his suit. He feels as if he has made a connection with the past, as if he has reached back through the Long Night to touch the soul of someone dead before men reached the stars. He licks his thin lips, and pulls you from the mud.

  Your edge draws a bead of blood from his palm. He hisses with surprise.

  A voice shouts across the cavern floor. ‘Found something, Hakoan?’

&nbs
p; Jakkil swears silently to himself, and folds you into the pouch on his thigh. He glances to his right – Magritte is working in the trench ten metres away. She seems intent on the small patch of ground before her. He turns to his left to see two figures standing at the lip of the trench. Their enviro-suits are a dull grey with gloss-black heat pipes and clear crystal visors. They are the seniors, the overseers of the excavation. Both have an earnest intensity to their faces which Jakkil despises. A cluster of juniors hang behind them like birds waiting for a farmer to drop a grain of corn from his hand.

  ‘Well?’ says the one who calls himself Navid Murza.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Jakkil. ‘I thought I saw something in the burn-layer, but it was just a stone.’ He holds up an irregular grey fragment he has just taken from the trench wall. He waits, and for once he is glad that the suit is making him sweat.

  Murza’s eyes flick over the stone. Jakkil does not like the cleverness in that look.

  ‘You yelped,’ says the other one. Hawser is his name. Kasper Hawser. Some of the juniors say that there is something funny about it, like it’s a joke. Jakkil does not get the joke, and does not like Hawser. ‘We thought that you had found something note-worthy,’ he continues.

  Jakkil grins, and holds up his palm to show the cut and thin smear of blood.

  ‘Cut my hand on a rock splinter.’

  Hawser looks at the hand, frowns, and then turns away. Murza pauses for a moment longer, still looking at the stone in Jakkil’s hand. Then he shrugs and follows Hawser without a word. Jakkil lets out a breath and looks around at Magritte. She looks away before their eyes meet.

  Unconsciously his hand goes to the pouch where you sit.

  Magritte comes to him later, when he is in his quarters, rolling some cheap spirit around his mouth and staring at the rusted ceiling. The room is small, the smallest in the hab unit hung by cables from the hive cavern’s roof, a gridiron of closed corridors and block-shaped wings – there is not much space and Jakkil has the smallest portion of it.

  He is sitting on a narrow bunk with his back to the condensation-covered wall. He has some books and a couple of battered dataslates on a small shelf. A small bird made of pink alabaster sits on a low table of pressed metal beside another half-empty bottle. Clothes lie in grubby heaps on the floor. The room smells of sweat, alcohol, and a lack of care.

  Magritte knocks twice, and waits for Jakkil to grunt in response before pushing the door open. Cropped orange-red hair hangs lankly to the base of her neck; her face narrows to a sharp nose and small chin. Some might think her pretty in a gaunt, pale sort of way, but there is also something that puts most people off without them knowing why. Like Jakkil, she is wearing an ochre one-piece overall.

  Jakkil nods a greeting. Magritte closes the door and stands with her back resting against it. She looks at him in silence. He glances up at her face and away gain. Her eyes are hard grey, like stone. Like clouded flint.

  ‘Where is it?’ she says.

  ‘What?’ he says, and shrugs.

  ‘The find you took from the site. Where is it?’

  ‘I don–’

  ‘I watched you pick it up, Jak. I saw you palm it.’ She is still staring at him. He does not know whether she is angry or not. ‘I’m not going to say anything. Trust me. I just want to see it.’

  He pauses, and then takes another gulp of spirit from his chipped cup.

  ‘Why?’

  She laughs.

  ‘You’re kidding right? It’s something real after six months of sifting dirt, and finding just variation in the soil structure.’ The tone of her voice changes and she emphasises the pronunciation of her words. ‘Remarkable indications of pre-astral ascent agricultural cycles are as dull as the rest of the damned mud.’

  Jakkil laughs, half in relief and half because it is a rather good imitation of Navid Murza at his most patronising. He reaches under the pile of clothes. You emerge into the light.

  Magritte goes still as you glint in Jakkil’s hand. He does not see the flash of hunger in her eyes; he is too busy staring at you himself.

  Magritte reaches out towards you. Jakkil flinches and she pauses.

  ‘Please?’ she says, and opens her palm towards you. Jakkil hesitates, and then places you in Magritte’s hand. Her touch is gentle, like the touch of your maker.

  ‘A killing blade,’ she says softly.

  ‘What?’ says Jakkil.

  ‘This was not made as a tool. The blade is too narrow, the edge too fine.’ Magritte holds you up so that the dirty light catches on your edge. ‘It was made to slice and stab, not to butcher meat or trim wood. It was made to murder. That is its essence, its significance.’

  ‘Significance? It’s just an artefact.’

  Magritte laughs without humour. Something in the sound makes Jakkil nervous. He puts his beaker of spirit down on the floor.

  ‘The difference between a mundane object and an extraordinary one is what it does – what it was meant to do. If an object is put to a particular ritualised use, it acquires ritual significance. It acquires power.’

  Jakkil laughs, a thin mist of liquor sprays from his lips. Magritte looks up at him. Jakkil’s laugh and grin drains away.

  ‘You are serious, aren’t you?’

  She nods once.

  ‘Objects have power.’ She holds you up. ‘Why did you take this from the site?’ Jakkil shakes his head, and begins to splutter a confused justification.

  Magritte cuts him off before he gets past a syllable.

  ‘You took this because its age had significance for you. It made you into a thief, Jak. That is power.’

  ‘But, ritual significance?’ Jakkil tries smiling again. ‘That sounds like you are talking about magick. Sorcery.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Magritte, and the word spreads ice through Jakkil’s blood. Magritte is staring at you; you lie against her fingers and feel her rising pulse. When she begins to talk again it is in a low whisper, as though she were talking just to herself. ‘It’s why they sent me – to find things like this. To find things that have significance.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Who sent you? You’re just another junior conservator.’

  ‘No, Jak. No. I am Cognitae.’

  ‘Cognitae?’ Jakkil snorts. ‘Does that even mean anything?’

  ‘Secrets, Jak, it means secrets. The universe is made of secrets. There are secrets all around us, waiting for us to rediscover them. But you have to find them, and you have to pay a price.’ Magritte opens her mouth. The gesture looks like a smile, but it is not.

  Jakkil reaches to take you back from her, but she pulls her hand away. A tense pause fills the space between them.

  Jakkil lunges forward, scrabbling at Magritte’s overall. She pulls back and closes her hands around you. You cut her palm deeply, slicing down to the bone, forcing a shriek. Blood squeezes between her fingers, and Jakkil grunts alcohol-filled breaths as he pries at her hands. Magritte is strong, but Jakkil is twice her weight. He slams her against the walls, driving her breath from her lungs, but still she keeps hold of you.

  You cut deeper into her hands and fingers. Jakkil releases his grip and punches her in the face. More blood splatters from her nose. Her eyes are blurred and she gasps for air. Jakkil brings his hand back to strike again.

  She kicks up between his legs, once, very hard. Jakkil crumples away from her with a wordless shout of pain.

  Magritte takes a shaking breath and opens her hands. Bright, wet, blood scatters from her fingers. You are slicked black with her blood. She looks down to Jakkil lying curled and whimpering on the floor. Someone might have heard his cry, someone might be coming. She knows what must be done. It is appropriate as well as necessary. A ritual act.

  She wraps her cut hand in a sheet from Jakkil’s bunk, swathing it in thick layers of grubby fabric. She grips the base of your blade ag
ain. The blood starts to seep through the material as she tightens her hold upon you. Jakkil tries to rise but she kicks him down again. She kneels beside him, and takes hold of his chin with her left hand. He tries to push her away but she slams his head down on the floor, and he goes limp. She yanks his chin up. You ram point first into the side of his neck and saw across his throat. Jakkil’s eyes snap wide for a moment and then become like glass. Magritte mutters in words almost as old as you. Blood bubbles out of the cut and spreads over the floor in a treacle-slow pool.

  She stands. Her breath is misting in the air; the moisture upon the walls has turned to frost. She shivers, then wipes you on her sleeve and slips you into a pocket. Then she goes to the door. She has many days of running ahead, of losing herself in the black forests of Albia. She knows that people will hunt her but she does not care. She has you, and you will pay for the secrets she craves.

  Fourth

  You go to the stars. You touch the red dust of Mars and the seas of Prospero. A decade passes under the light of strange suns. You have a new handle made by a blind artificer on Zuritz – crimson lacquer and gold thread cover its surface, like blood clotted to a gloss sheen.

  You kill for Magritte many times. She is no longer Cognitae, not truly. She is a wanderer, a creature of hunger searching out secrets in the shadows of a hundred worlds. She wears many masks and steals secrets from those who have not been blinded by the Emperor’s false illumination. She learns much, but knows only that she has not found what she truly seeks, a truth she can feel moving ahead of her, always just out of sight. It is there, she knows, hiding behind the masks of so many secrets, dancing like a distant light in the mist. She chases that light until, when she had almost given up, the truth finds her.

  In a warren of caves cut into a dry valley wall on a world called Tharn, she finds a people who hide from the sun and stare into fires until they can speak unspeakable names. Star-shaped brands cover their bodies, and grey shrouds hide their desert-dried flesh. They know the secret she has sought – Magritte can sense it.