“Ain’s teeth!” Shader rolled from the bed and snatched up the gladius. “Get back to the Abyss, demon!”
She held her breasts, offering them to him, eyes wide and innocent, black hair tumbling about her shoulders.
“Back succubus! Get out or taste cold steel!”
She purred and crawled towards him, tongue running around her lips.
Shader screamed, the gladius punching through her face and exiting the back of her head.
* * *
“Frater?” Tap, tap, tap. “Frater, are you all right?”
Shader sat up, staring straight at the gilt Monas on the wall of his cell. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tried to get his bearings.
Tap, tap, tap. “Frater Deacon?”
“I’m fine. A bad dream, that’s all.”
He waited until the footsteps retreated down the corridor before standing. Reaching beneath the bed, he pulled out his swords, strapping them to his waist and frowning at the Monas before heading to the refectory.
Frater Elphus paused in his reading, but failed to meet Shader’s eyes as he entered. All the brothers noted, each in their own way, his carrying of weapons. The Gray Abbot simply played with his porridge.
“Investigator Shin sends his greetings.” Shader leaned across the lectern until his face almost touched Elphus’s. “Said he found you a great help.”
Elphus coughed and fussed with the pages, eyes darting from Shader to the Gray Abbot.
“Leaving so soon?” Frater Alfred asked, liver-spotted head bobbing above his bowl. Alfred’s counsel had all been for nothing: a litany of his own failings as a novice and the suggestion that if he could pull through then so could Shader.
“I am what Ain made me, Frater. Thankfully, you’re made of sterner stuff.”
Frater Trellian, beard like fly-struck fleece, spread his hands. “Given time, you’d settle.”
“Maybe, Frater, but I don’t think so. I find no stillness in prayer. My dreams are all too human, and the only time I feel complete is with this.” He half drew the gladius.
The brothers muttered amongst themselves, heads shaking, spoons clattering against bowls.
“I’m a reluctant swordsman and a restless monk: neither one thing nor the other. May Ain have mercy.”
Frater Elphus coughed. Alfred and Trellian raised their hands in apology. Shader glared.
As Elphus pointedly resumed the reading, Shader slopped porridge into a bowl, sprinkled some salt, and then joined the monks at table. Thirty-two brothers sat down to breakfast; thirty-three if Elphus were to be counted. He would eat later, having taken his turn as lector for the meal. Ten years ago the numbers had been almost double that.
“Hagalle is suspicious of us,” the Gray Abbot said, apparently reading his mind. “Sahul is not kind to Nousians.” The other monks mumbled their agreement. “Sarum is the only city with a Nousian templum, and Pardes remains the sole house for religious.”
“Unless you count Gladelvi,” said Frater Gardol, the librarian, black skin betraying his Dreamer blood.
The Gray Abbot frowned. “Frater Jarmin takes great risks there. Let’s pray it turns out well.”
Elphus coughed again.
“Sahul was the Old Faith’s last refuge before the Reckoning,” Frater Darian said, a glob of porridge clinging to his bony chin. “The only land that would accept the foundation of Pardes.”
“Hagalle’s issue is with Aeterna,” Gardol said. “He sees it as the seat of power in the world, the repository of knowledge that was elsewhere destroyed by Huntsman’s magic.”
At the mention of the Dreamer shaman, many of the monks touched their foreheads. The Gray Abbot pushed his bowl away.
“Hagalle’s eye may be on Aeterna, but he’s not ready for war,” Shader said, recalling the galleons he’d seen under construction at Port Sarum. “He has enough problems at home, I’d say.”
“Really?” Gardol squinted at him with jaundiced eyes. “What would the Keeper of the Archon’s sword advise him to do?”
“Hagalle has a very tenuous grip on his empire. Jorakum is too far removed to be an effective capital, and the western sea routes are clogged with mawgs. Hagalle knows he must raise a large enough fleet to deal with them before he can reassert himself in the East. Aeterna has nothing to fear from Sahul. She dominates the oceans and her legions control the continents.”
“Except for Verusia,” the Gray Abbot said. “And Quilonia.”
“True, but if I were Hagalle I’d be looking to strengthen my position in Sahul before going after Aeterna. Drive the mawgs from our shores and then invade the Anglesh Isles. With control of the seas, he could swiftly bring the Eastern Lords back into line and re-take New Ithaka. Next, I’d turn on Ashanta and use her wealth to re-arm.”
Gardol gave a slow handclap. “Very good. Thank Ain you’re one of us.”
“May I continue, Pater Abbot?” Elphus asked, looking up from the lectern and rolling his eyes.
The Gray Abbot chastised him with a barely perceptible flick of his index finger before returning it to the stroking of his upper lip.
The other monks continued with their breakfasts, clanking spoons against bowls and, it seemed to Shader, slurping their porridge with intentional noisiness.
Elphus resumed the reading through clenched teeth, as looks of mirth passed between the brothers.
* * *
Yesterday’s rain had left a bright sheen on the trees and the grassy tufts poking through the sea of red sand around the abbey. As was the norm for Western Sahul, the weather had reverted swiftly to clear blue skies and a blazing sun. From the parapet, Shader could just about make out the tallest spires of Sarum in the distance, the ground in between flat and featureless, save for the odd gum tree. The woods smudging the hills about Sarum were sparse compared with the forests of Britannia or the mighty Schwarzwald of Trajinot, where he’d led the Seventh Horse on their desperate charge, crushing the ranks of undead and driving them back to the diseased heart of Verusia.
Shader’s thoughts fled to Friston Forest on Britannia’s South Downs, where he’d had a sheltered childhood up until his departure for Aeterna. Friston had been enveloping without being oppressive. Even on gray days, a hint of sunlight bounced off its canopy generating feelings of warmth and belonging.
Had it not been for the mawgs, he probably would have left Pardes anyway and gone home to Britannia. Back then his disillusionment with monastic life had rendered him purposeless, an insidious condition that had gnawed away at his confidence, and more devastatingly, his faith. Funny how such vile creatures could serve as his redeemers. Equally funny, he thought more soberly, how beauty could be the source of his second fall from grace.
Had it all been mapped out for him in advance? And if it had, why would Ain play thus with his soul, offering tantalizing glimpses of certainty and purpose, only to strip them away along with any sense of belief? Other than a stubborn attachment to the teaching of the mystics he had studied in Aeterna: that Ain works through darkness; that faith itself is dark?
Shader’s gaze settled once more on the great monoliths of Sarum protruding from the arid bushland like the death-stiffened fingers of a giant buried by the centuries.
It seemed that, even here, with its mighty towers rendered so small by the distance, Sarum still cast a heavy shadow. Shader recalled how, during his time in the city, the sun had always been at least partially obscured by the buildings, no matter where it stood in the sky. From the abbey, the shadow was of a different kind. He felt it more as a pull, like that of a rusted magnet drawing all manner of decayed and discarded matter towards it.
The cackling-warble of a kookaburra roused him from his reflection. Scanning the woodland to the east of Pardes, he was met with the spectacle of a host of brightly feathered lorikeets launching from the tree tops as a murder of crows descended.
The sun hid itself behind a bank of cloud that surreptitiously crept in from the west, and Shader’s ill humor immediately returne
d. He went back inside through a trapdoor in the roof and made his way down the spiraling stairs. Darkness followed him, a black cloud settling over the abbey. Hurrying to a window, he glanced outside and was astounded to see that night had fallen, where only moments ago he’d stood in the brightness that follows dawn.
The temperature plummeted. A chill wind whistled from nowhere, rattling doors and disturbing the portraits of deceased brothers. Instinctively, reassuringly, Shader’s left hand closed around the hilt of his shortsword, and then he heard a sickening scream from the refectory.
The Gray Abbot!
* * *
As Frater Elphus continued to drone on, the Gray Abbot noticed a pooling of the newly descended darkness upon the refectory table. A small vortex of misty black thread formed from the cloud smothering the abbey. His eyes fixed upon the burgeoning center as it sucked in the fog and, like a potter’s wheel, gave it form.
The figure that coalesced from the shadow grew tall and sprouted skeletal limbs. A mildewed skull twisted into place, the jaws opening to unleash a rancid rush of air in the face of the Gray Abbot. He tried to rise, clutching at the amber-eyed Monas that had for so long been his power. As he brought the symbol up, the figure took on more clarity: a surcoat of faded white; a rusty mail hauberk, and a time-blackened helm formed around the skull. Ember eyes smoldered through narrow eye-slits; searching eyes, somehow familiar. The Gray Abbot froze as he recognized the apparition.
“Callixus!”
The wraith snatched the Monas from his hand, snapping the chain and hissing in triumph.
“Ain preserve us! Callixus!”
Callixus leaned towards him, lifted his visor, and roared.
The Gray Abbot screamed and turned to his confreres for help, despairing when he saw them cowering on the floor, hands over their ears.
Callixus thrust the Monas into his belt, raised his arms and screeched like a banshee. The windows exploded, the stench of decay filling the room. Rotting limbs fumbled at the window frames, and corpses riddled with shards of glass began to clamber into the refectory.
The Gray Abbot gasped at the sight of Frater Elphus clinging to his lectern with rigid fingers, black veins webbing his face as a cadaver sucked at his mouth. Something crashed behind him, and he turned to see Deacon Shader burst into the room, longsword in one hand, gladius in the other.
“By all that’s holy!” Shader pointed the gladius at Callixus. “Everyone out!”
The monks crawled towards the doorway crying out as cold and cyanosed hands tried to pull them back.
Shader leapt at the wraith. His longsword slashed out at its neck, but simply passed through as if it struck air. In the same fluid motion the gladius stabbed forward, skewering its belly. Callixus emitted a shrill cry as masses of insects and larvae spilled forth from his wound. The vortex whipped up around him, and in an instant he dissolved back into fog and shadow, which melted from the room.
The monks scrambled behind Shader, but the Gray Abbot remained rooted to the spot, mind blank, heart racing. The corpse-creatures continued to lumber towards them, white eyes vacant, flayed limbs groping the air. Shader threw himself among them, his longsword arcing viciously to left and right, the gladius thrusting and impaling. Putrid carcasses fell before him, hacked and decapitated, and yet still they came, piling in upon the lone knight and forcing him back through sheer weight of numbers.
* * *
The press of corpses was so great that Shader could no longer see the Gray Abbot. He continued to hack and thrust, arms weakening, breath burning in his lungs as he tried to break through. The creatures came on inexorably until, with a great surge, they slammed him against the wall, sending his swords clattering to the floor. A mouth rank with decay clamped over his own, fetid breath making him retch. Cold hands held him like iron, the corpse shuddering as it began to suck. Shader’s fists hammered pulpy flesh, splattering pus and gore. Ice crept through his veins, mist fell over his eyes, but just as despair took him the cadaver pulled back, flame erupting from its flesh. It thrashed about in a macabre parody of a dance before collapsing in a pile of smoking ash.
Shader scrabbled about for his swords, fingers stiff and numb. The undead were swaying to a gentle chant that came from somewhere behind them. A corridor opened through their ranks and the Gray Abbot walked towards Shader incanting Aeternam words of prayer.
“…sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris…”
Flame licked dead flesh, flared to the ceiling and left nothing but dust in its wake.
“Et ne nos inducas in tentationem…” The Gray Abbot stopped before Shader, placed a hand on his shoulder and sighed. “Thank you, Frater.”
He had aged alarmingly.
Shader rose to his feet; gripped his arm. He met the Gray Abbot’s gaze and recoiled. The face that had always been a well of peace and wisdom was now a haunted mask that told of nothing but loss and despair.
Shader sheathed his swords, feeling the brothers pressing in around him, looking at him like frightened children with nowhere else to turn. The Gray Abbot moaned, his knees buckling. Shader cradled him to the floor, heart hammering a frantic tattoo, mind a nest of angry hornets stinging with shameful thoughts—bloody thoughts; thoughts teeming with vengeance.
THE TEMPLUM OF THE KNOT
Elias drove the cart through the southern suburbs of Sarum, the scarf wrapped about his face offering scant protection from the plague. He was starting to wish he hadn’t used the statue to break through the cordon of imperial troops quarantining the city. Just a gentle use, mind, enough to convince the guards to let them pass. Seemed he was already getting attuned to it, same as he did with any other instrument. Problem was, this time he’d felt a presence, a shadow squatting at the back of his mind. Thought he’d heard something, too: the cry of a bird—but not of any bird he recognized. Perhaps he should have listened. Huntsman had warned him never to use the statue all those centuries ago when Elias had gone searching for the stories of the Dreamers. How did the song go? He plucked a harmonica from his pocket, gave it a good blow to clear the holes. Tunes was the only way he could remember all the old stuff, put himself under the influence just like the punters. Lemons, the lot of them. He hit a lilting melody.
The shaman had been sitting beneath a lone gum tree, laughing as Elias dragged his way into view across the scorching red desert. He’d run out of water hours before and wandered aimlessly as delirium set in. He’d thought he was tripping. Finding someone in the bush was like finding sobriety in a pub. But the old man was real enough, plain as a daisy. Without the shaman’s help he would have snuffed it and his body would have joined the piles of bones bleached by the searing sun.
* * *
“You come to Huntsman for songs, little white fellah?” laughed the Dreamer under the gum tree. “Maybe first you drink.”
With that a fountain sprang up from the barren earth, pooling at Elias’s feet. He threw himself to the ground and drank thirstily.
“Now food.” The shaman clapped his hands.
Seemingly from out of the russet earth, a whole host of near naked brown-skinned Dreamers emerged bearing clay bowls and hemp bags. They set these down next to Elias and began to offer him all manner of roots, shrubs, and grubs (some still moving) that he just crammed into his mouth and swallowed, like it was high tea at granny’s. At last, stuffed to the brim, he sat down with the Dreamers and listened as the shaman told the tale of the Reckoning. Couldn’t get better than that—straight from the horse’s mouth.
The words droned and hummed around Elias, but their meaning escaped him. Strange images, violent, serene, always colorful, flashed before his eyes. At the end of what seemed an eternity, alone once again with the old Dreamer beneath the gum tree, Elias was aware that all the folklore of the Dreamers now resided within him. A library of songs, pictures, experiences—all waiting to be performed, begging to be remembered.
Huntsman produced a package wrapped in paper-bark and opened it, revealing a rearing serpent c
arved from black rock. It was blind and without fangs. For an instant it was wreathed in amber light, but it faded as he passed it to Elias.
“In return for our gift of song,” the shaman said, fixing Elias with a soul-searching stare, “you keep this for me. Will give you big gifts. Keep it hidden, though. Others hunt its power. One day, many years maybe, I come for it.”
* * *
Rhiannon was sleeping fitfully once more, head rocking with each turn of the cartwheels. Hector clomped down streets of shabby single-story houses and boarded-up shops with signs faded by the sun, paint all cracked and peeling. Rotting food clogged the gutters, where crows pecked voraciously and scavenging rats grew ever more daring. The few people Elias saw were furtive, heads wrapped in scarves. Some of them watched the passing cart with forlorn eyes and others tipped their hats or bowed their heads. A few even approached—too quickly for Elias’s liking—motioning for him to stop. Shifty looking ne’er do wells as far as he was concerned. There was as much chance of him stopping as there was of him taking a swim in shark-infested waters. The only other traffic he saw was the death-carts that made their way slowly from door to door.
Turning into Teledor, a couple of blocks from the city center, Elias was surprised to find more activity. People bustled around a scrappy improvised market, haggling over meager portions of food or the dubious wares of a mountebank in a death’s head mask and black robe. The people here had abandoned the vain protection of scarves over mouths and noses and went about their business with fatalistic indifference. Famine seemed their chief concern, a threat against which they still had the power to act.
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