Rhiannon sat down, her eyes flicking between Shader and Huntsman. “What enemy?” she said. “Who is it?”
Huntsman pressed his finger-tips together beneath his nose. “Sektis Gandaw.”
Shader laughed. “The Technocrat of the Old World? I’d sooner believe his former master, Otto Blightey, had recovered from the bloody nose we gave him at Trajinot and was up to his old tricks again. Sektis Gandaw died at the Reckoning. You of all people should know that.”
Huntsman’s eyes lost their focus. “He disappeared, not died. I stopped him killing my people. Caused Reckoning, ended time of Ancients with power you now protect. Power he has always wanted. Power he would use to end all things.”
Shader’s heart was thumping, his breathing shallow and rapid.
“I had to do it,” Huntsman continued. “My people… My…” He shook himself, brought his gaze back to Shader. “He will unweave all worlds. Become his own god. He fled Reckoning, but my gods knew where. It was once their home. Sektis Gandaw survives in Dreaming, but he has eyes and ears in this world.”
“Aristodeus is using me to stop Sektis Gandaw?” Shader said, his scalp burning, head starting to throb.
Huntsman considered him for a moment. “Tried once himself, he says. Tried and failed. Now he tries through you, but this…” He waved a hand to take in Rhiannon. “…not part of plan. Says he saw you slain; saw all worlds lost. Must be pure, he say, must have focus.”
Shader felt a curtain of blackness fall over his vision. He swayed, heard the sound of a chair moving, and then felt Rhiannon’s arms about him, holding him up.
“What if we tell him to go shog himself?” Rhiannon said. “What if we refuse?”
Huntsman ignored the question. “He walks through time that one; speaks in riddles. I look for his spirit and see nothing. My gods say he lost in Abyss, but what they mean by this I do not know.”
Rhiannon guided Shader into a chair where he sat with his head in his hands.
“He is right to want Gandaw stopped,” Huntsman said, “but other powers, older and darker, play with him—play with us all. Eingana is goddess of higher place. My people believe she holds all in existence with a sinew of her flesh. She is mother of life and bringer of death. All depends on how power is used. Gandaw seeks statue. With it, he will unmake worlds, but even he is an insect compared to powers that move him.”
“The Demiurgos?” Shader asked, looking blankly at the Dreamer.
Huntsman shrugged. “Perhaps. It is more than I see. My gods teach us songs of children falling from darkness. Three children, they say: serpent, light and shadow—Demiurgos who made Abyss from his own mind.”
“Whose children?” Shader asked. “Ain’s? Nous’s?” That’s how the myth went.
Huntsman sniffed. “Maybe some truth there. Maybe only half truth. Even my gods cannot see other side of darkness.”
“This is bullshit,” Rhiannon said. “Fairy stories we can do shog-all about. Just tell me where Sammy is and bugger off back where you came from.”
“You will see him soon,” Huntsman said, and before anyone could react he vanished, leaving a spider scuttling across the floor under the table. Rhiannon tried to give chase, but the spider was too quick, disappearing through a crack in the wall.
“Great,” Rhiannon said. “Shogging great! Now what do we do?”
Shader pushed himself to his feet, one hand clutching the pommel of the gladius. “What we can,” he said, feeling all their actions now had a grim inevitability about them. “What we’re best at.”
“Which is?” Rhiannon asked, crossing her arms.
“In your case, it’s masquerading as a Nousian.”
She visibly flinched at his remark and Shader knew he was being unfair, but couldn’t bring himself to apologize. He knew he should have said something about looking for Sammy, knew that’s what she needed, but it was all too much to take in. All too much.
Rhiannon’s face hardened, her eyes narrowing in a manner that told Shader she wouldn’t be forgetting this any time soon. “And what about you?”
“I’ll do what I always do,” he said, heading for the door and pausing to look over his shoulder at her. “Cut down evil wherever I find it, starting in the morning with Gaston Rayn.”
TO AWAKEN THE LOST
The black carriage bumped and clattered through thick forest beneath a starless sky. Must’ve been Fenrir, north of the city, but it was hard to be sure in the dark. The evening had been overcast and damp, the never ending drizzle sowing familiar seeds of melancholy in Gaston’s heart, something he’d thought was supposed to end with his conversion to Nous. It all seemed so pointless—the feud with his dad, the training with Shader, all the years of friendship with Rhiannon. Now Dad was back to the ground and Mom wasn’t even talking to him. Rhiannon had … well, Gaston had… He couldn’t bear to think about it. And now Shader wanted to kill him. What was it about him? Why did everyone turn against him, sooner or later? The answer was pretty plain, he reckoned. If there was broken link in the chain that needed fixing, it was him. Always had been. If Cadman hadn’t come to pick him up from the barracks, he’d have taken to his bed, slept till the black mood passed. He’d done that a lot before Shader had turned up and given him a new sense of purpose. Hours and hours wallowing in emptiness that gnawed away at his certainties, left him feeling abandoned and good for nothing.
Cadman, sat opposite him in the carriage, tapping rhythmically at his breast pocket and saying nothing to distract Gaston from his thoughts. He merely smiled whenever Gaston looked up. It was probably meant to be reassuring, but Gaston felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickling.
Much as he hated to admit it, Gaston felt the loss of Shader like an amputated limb. For weeks he had grown elated in his company, studying the art of war alongside the Liber and finding it no paradox. If anything, it had been a remedy for his dad’s insipid Nousianism. By training his body to respond without the tardiness of thought, combat became, at its best, an expression of the bliss of spiritual unity; and by forming his mind through the practice of the knots, he’d left no room for morbid ruminations.
The perfection hadn’t always lasted, but with the disciplines of weapons practice and prayer he’d felt he was doing enough to claim the gift of salvation.
Up until the day Shader had left.
Made salvation seem a crock of shit, said his cynicism, if Shader had been willing to sacrifice it for the sake of a woman. Didn’t matter that he’d changed his mind, gone running back to the abbey. Fact was, he hadn’t fully believed. Gaston usually fought off such temptations with an increase in devotion and exercise. As head of the White Order, he couldn’t afford to let his doubts reassert themselves, erode the faith that Nous was for them, that he wouldn’t abandon them. But that threw up a whole bunch of other questions. If Nous looked after his own, why were the knights growing sick? When they’d returned from the templum, a few of them were already feverish, the first signs of swelling and discoloration visible on their skin. Was it lack of faith, or something else? Had Nous abandoned them, or had he never been there in the first place? Here, in Cadman’s carriage, the doubts seemed magnified, and the pervasive gloom outside had done nothing to bolster his defenses.
“Worried about the duel?” Cadman asked, peering over the top of his pince-nez.
Gaston’s stomach twisted, and his heart deflated even further, if that were possible, like a pierced water-skin.
“What’s to worry about?” He did his best to make it sound like he wasn’t bothered. “Shader’s older, slower, and unfocused. He taught me well, but I’ve outgrown him.”
“That’s the spirit.” Cadman reached forward and patted him on the knee. “Time for the pupil to put the master in his place, eh?” A pensive expression came over Cadman’s face and he seemed to wince. Gaston shot him a questioning look, but Cadman just sighed. Then he threw his hands up and beamed as the carriage stopped dead.
“Come,” Cadman said, opening the door and cla
mbering down.
Gaston followed him outside, but could see little besides the outline of the driver sitting stoically beneath the dark covering of night, tall hat like a burned-out chimney.
Cadman led the way through gnarled and knotted trees, branches swaying, reaching, jabbing; leaves rustling, rain running off them like tears. Pushing through thick gorse they came to an enormous dome-shaped mound in the heart of the forest. Cadman wandered around its perimeter, bending down to examine patches of the grassy surface, poking and prodding.
“Eureka!” he said with a clap of his pudgy hands. “Driver!” he hollered through the trees. “Be a good chap and bring a spade.” He beckoned for Gaston to come take a look.
It all appeared the same to Gaston. He put his hand over the area Cadman indicated, but the grass there was just as slick as the rest, the mud soft and loamy. He pushed a finger into the surface, got it as far as the second knuckle, and struck something hard. Cadman was breathing down his neck, put his head over Gaston’s shoulder.
“That, my dear Gaston, is the way in.”
It seemed like metal Gaston was touching. Vibrating metal that sent tiny shocks along his finger. A branch snapped somewhere behind. Gaston almost swallowed his heart and spun away from the mound. Cadman put a hand on his arm and led him to one side. The driver was trudging towards them, a shovel over his shoulder.
“Here,” Cadman said, pointing, before flipping open a metal case, counting the cigarettes inside, and returning it to his pocket.
The driver removed his hat, set it on the ground. Gaston gasped and tried to step back, but Cadman draped an arm around him and gave him a fatherly squeeze. The skin of the driver’s face was waxy and pale, his scalp threaded with lank hair and pocked with hives and blisters. There was a wide cavity at the back of his skull, and through it Gaston caught a glimpse of something moist and spongy. The man, or whatever he was, thrust the spade into the base of the mound and set to work.
Gaston saw a fleeting movement out of the corner of his eye. He shuddered and tried to focus on the driver, who was throwing up great clods of soil at an alarming rate.
Cadman released Gaston and tapped the cigarette case through his breast pocket, as if he were thinking of taking it out for a recount. “What I am about to show you has remained hidden for countless years, centuries even. Remember the Lost?”
Gaston nodded, a chill crawling beneath his skin. Shader had told him the tale of the Elect, the Ipsissimus’s elite corps, who had been sent to aid the Abbey of Pardes against the mawgs over five hundred years ago.
“Well, now they’ve been found. Actually, they were never really lost at all, not in the sense of being misplaced like a favorite hat or a front door key.”
“They ran into something evil and vanished from history,” Gaston said.
“Not so, not so.” Cadman produced a shiny metal device from his pocket and flipped open the top, thumb pressing down with an answering click. A feeble flame sparked up and died, sparked and died, sparked and died. “Not really smoking weather.” Cadman snapped the lid shut and gave a world-weary sigh. “It’s like a Britannish summer: utterly miserable. Still, mustn’t give in, eh? Have to stay cheerful.”
Gaston glimpsed another movement in his peripheral vision. He didn’t dare look, but sensed an icy presence come to rest behind him. Cadman’s eyes darted fleetingly in that direction before he continued.
“Things are not always as they seem, Gaston. Take me, for example. How old would you say I am?”
Gaston shrugged. “Fifty? Sixty?”
“Twenty times that, at the very least,” Cadman replied, his form withering, dissolving as he spoke. Flesh melted away, leaving leathery strips hanging from a mottled skeleton, and Cadman’s fine clothes gave way to tattered robes dappled with mildew.
Gaston gagged and took a step back. Something cold touched his shoulder and he turned to see ember eyes glaring at him from the slit of a great helm. Where the body should have been, a coil of black mist twisted like a corkscrew, coalescing into the form of a tall man in a yellowish-white surcoat above rusty mail, a faded red Monas just visible on the breast.
“Remain still,” it hissed.
“You have nothing to fear from us, Gaston,” the creature that had been Cadman said in a grating voice. “I wish only to show you how appearances can be deceptive. History, too, can deceive us, for it is seldom written without bias. The Lost did not fall prey to evil, they served it. Their mission to Sahul afforded them the opportunity to flee from that evil, but they underestimated the reach of the Ipsissimus’s malevolence. Isn’t that right, Callixus?”
The wraith paused before answering, and when it spoke the words were carefully measured. “My knights and I were damned for failing to carry out the Ipsissimus’s command. We were cursed to an eternity of undeath beneath this very barrow.”
“Indeed,” Cadman said. “You see, Gaston, we have the Lost to thank for the fact that Sahul isn’t just another part of Nousia.”
“The Ipsissimus sent the Elect to aid Pardes,” Gaston said, “not to spearhead the conquest of Sahul.” His mind was reeling with the consequences of believing what he was hearing. Cadman had to be lying, otherwise what did that say about Shader and the White Order? What did it say about Dad? Gaston himself? He winced as his mind replayed what he’d done to Rhiannon; the attack on the imperial troops outside Sarum. By their fruit you will recognize them, it said in the Liber. Was the Templum condemned by its own scriptures? The Ipsissimus a tool of the Demiurgos?
“He is the Father of Lies,” Cadman said, jaw clacking, empty eye-sockets boring into Gaston, pleading for understanding; demanding it. “Why do you think the emperor fears the Templum so much? He knows what the Ipsissimus is planning.”
“The emperor’s a paranoid nut,” Gaston said. “Everyone knows that.”
“But where did that rumor start?” Cadman held up a bony finger. “Ask yourself, my dear Gaston, why it is that the priests of the Templum of the Knot suffer no ill effects from the plague and yet even your own knights, who would no doubt be considered heretics by Aeterna, grow sick. And let’s not forget your founder, the great and holy Deacon Shader, who would have discarded his vows for the flesh of a woman. How deeply do you think he could have held his convictions? You will have noticed, too, that Shader bares no buboes, no putrid sores, no hacking cough. Where do you think this plague comes from? Could it be that Hagalle’s not quite so paranoid after all?”
“What is it you want?” Gaston asked, head pounding, thoughts breaking up like waves over rocks.
“I want to free you, Gaston, from the deceptions of the evil one.”
“You … can … trust the Doctor,” the wraith whispered, voice harsh with effort. “He … rescued me … from this tomb. He will awaken … awaken my knights.” Callixus lost some of his substance, and the glare faded from his eyes.
“Callixus is right,” Cadman said. “I have revealed this to you—” He indicated his decomposing body. “—to show that I hold no secrets. This is as I am, afflicted by the Ipsissimus’s curse. It was envy that drove him to treat me so, for I discovered that which his vile religion was impotent to bestow: immortality.”
“You are immortal?” Gaston asked, thoughts racing with too many questions; hopes and fears mixing, separating, mixing again.
“Thanks to the Reckoning. I would have remained perfect of body also were it not for the curse of that evil hierophant lurking at the heart of Nousia.” Cadman gripped Gaston’s shoulders with skeletal fingers. “I can grant you this same gift of immortality, real eternal life and not just some poetic promise that will amount to nothing but decay and oblivion. All I ask in return is that you aid me in my work.”
“What work?” Snatches of past conversations, the words of scripture, faces, feelings, regrets—so many regrets—swirled around Gaston’s mind in a whirlpool of confusion.
“I seek the power behind the Reckoning: the Statue of Eingana. Already I have two of its components. The othe
rs, I fear, are in the hands of the servants of the evil one. Gaston, if we can reassemble the statue, we can dispel this curse of the Ipsissimus’s and enjoy the true gift of immortality of the flesh. This is what the ancient Paters meant by the resurrection of the body. This! Not the diluted half-truths offered by the creature who now sits on the throne of Aeterna.”
“I don’t know,” Gaston said, reeling with everything he’d heard. He felt like the world had tipped on its axis; like he’d just been struck by lightning. “I need to think.”
“And so you shall, my friend, for the choice must be yours. I will not sink to the methods of enticement employed by so-called Nousians. First, however, will you accompany us into this barrow, seeing as my driver has finished digging?”
The driver had opened up a hole in the side of the hill that was just about large enough for Cadman’s skeletal frame to duck down and scuttle through. Gaston followed at a crouch, but Callixus’s ghostly body merely glided through the mound as if it weren’t there. Once inside, there was more headroom, but it was black as the grave. They stood upon a hard, ungiving floor, the air dank and dusty. Gaston heard a click, and the patch of floor immediately in front of them was illuminated. Cadman was holding a slender tube that shone with the glow of a hundred candles, revealing badly subsided flagstones with veins of silver glinting through the cracks. In response to Gaston’s bemused look, he shrugged and aimed the light at the walls and ceiling.
“I’m surprised it still works. I’ve had it for an eternity. You just can’t get craftsmanship like this anymore.”
They were in a smooth-walled corridor with a peeling fresco of sigils and words in a script Gaston didn’t recognize. Cadman looked as if he were about to explain, but then thought better of it and motioned Gaston further along the corridor until they reached an intersection. Ignoring the continuing tunnel and its off-shoots, Cadman took a couple of careful steps backwards, muttered something under his breath, and then let out a hiss of satisfaction as the floor before him parted to reveal a spiraling metal stairwell.
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