Stealer of Flesh k-1

by William King

  “What are these things?” Kormak asked.

  “Some of the sages think the pillars channelled magical energy across the land, focused the ley lines of magic so that it made the deserts bloom and springs flow. Others think it formed a barrier against the Old Ones. Some say they were created by the Old Ones as part of their campaign against the Ghul. No one knows. So much knowledge has been lost.”

  “Razhak knows.”

  “He might be the only one left in the world who does now,” Olivia said.

  For a moment, Kormak felt a strange sense of sympathy with the being he hunted. What must it be like to be the last of your kind, to remember things no one else remembered, to know things no one else knew?

  The voices in the air kept gibbering their incomprehensible nonsense, as if ancient spirits were trying to communicate warnings to those who could not understand.

  “Those are not hills,” said Prince Luther, “they are ruins.”

  Kormak could see that he was right. What at first glance looked like rocky hills were, in fact, piles of rubble, the tumbled down remains of gargantuan structures. They ran as far as the horizon. The city of Sunhaven could have fitted into one small corner of Tanyth.

  “How are we going to find the Ghul?” Olivia asked.

  “I know where he is going,” Kormak said.

  “You can remember that.”

  “The spell-engines are at the centre, at the geomantic focus of the city. I will know it when I see it.”

  The chief of the retainers walked over. He looked embarrassed but determined. “Sire, the men have asked me to remind you of our agreement. We have seen you to the outskirts of the lost city. They will proceed no further.”

  Prince Luther stared at him. “I will pay each man who accompanies us a purse of solars, imperial weight.”

  The soldier nodded as if he had expected this. “Dead men spend no gold, sire. And the lads have families and women. We have agreed among ourselves. But I will put your offer to them and see what they have to say. Gold can be wonderfully persuasive.”

  Luther nodded as if he had expected this answer. “You have fulfilled your obligations to me admirably, Benjamin. Wait for us here for three days. If we have not returned by then return to Sunhaven and tell the major domo of my house that if we have not returned in a moon, the rites must be spoken in the family crypt. My father should be informed. He may wish to preside over them.”

  Benjamin nodded. “It shall all be done according to your wishes, sire.”

  He stumped away. Luther looked at Kormak. “It seems we are on our own.”

  “It is what you expected, is it not?”

  “Yes but now the moment of truth has arrived I find I cannot quite face it with the equanimity that I expected.”

  “You do not need to go on if you don’t want to. You have come further than most men would.”

  “I do want to go on,” said Luther. “But I find that I am afraid.”

  “At least you are brave enough to admit it.”

  Luther laughed. “I admire your skill with the paradoxical phrase, Guardian.” He looked at his sister. “How about you Olivia, will you go on?”

  Kormak has the sense that if she refused to go on, Luther would stay behind also. Remaining to protect his sister would give him the excuse to do so while allowing him to retain his self-respect. Kormak had seen many men at these delicate moments before. The whole pattern of people’s lives could be altered by such decisions and they came and went with such speed.

  Olivia appeared to be giving the matter serious consideration but Kormak knew she had already made up her mind. “Yes. I want to see the end of this and I want to see the heart of the city.”

  Benjamin returned. “The lads will accompany you in return for the increased payment. They would probably have come anyway. They feel safer close to the Guardian’s sword and your sister’s magic.”

  “It is alchemy,” Olivia said. “Not magic.”

  Benjamin’s respectful nod hinted at the fact that he had no idea of the difference.

  Luther deflated a little. “Well, that’s it then. We go on.” He sounded disappointed and afraid.

  Kormak shrugged. “Mount up then and let us be away.”

  They rode through the streets. The city looked as if an army of giants had stormed through it, kicking down buildings, setting them alight. Some of the stonework was blackened and cracked. Statues had been defaced. Shards of broken runic crystal lay everywhere.

  “This army resisted the Old Ones for centuries but the First Empire destroyed it in a year,” said Luther.

  “The Old Ones were not really trying,” Kormak said. “It was a game they played to while away the time. They do not think or set goals as mortals do.”

  When the words came out, Kormak knew they were true. The knowledge was a mixture of Razhak’s and his own.

  “They were thorough,” said Olivia.

  “Solareon brooked no opposition to his rule.” Kormak said. “He was a proud, cruel man.”

  “But a great one,” said Luther.

  “A great mage certainly,” said Olivia. Her tone made it clear that one had little to do with the other. “Possibly the greatest human mage of all time.”

  “And chosen by the Sun as well, filled with the Light. How else could he do what he did?”

  “An army of warriors and an army of mages always helps achieve military goals,” said Kormak. “And he had both.”

  He studied the ruined streets all about him. The destruction was on a titanic scale but it had all happened long ago. It was like looking at a stage long after the actors had left. Cataclysmic events had occurred here but in a time so remote as to make them unimportant.

  Incongruously, a Solar centurion’s helmet sat on top of a ruined column, as if its owner had just set it down hours ago and would return to reclaim it.

  “You are smiling, Sir Kormak,” said Olivia.

  “Just when I think I understand something, it slips from my grasp,” he said.

  “It is often the case,” she replied. She glanced around them, shivered and pulled her cloak tight although it was not cold. “This place is not what I expected.”

  “It has a certain shattered grandeur,” said Luther.

  “Yes, but it is remote, unconnected to our world.”

  “The builders of this city were not men,” said Kormak.

  “The destroyers were,” said Luther. He sounded at once exalted and appalled by the idea. “We are used to the idea that we live in the shadow of titans, that we are less than the Old Ones but men did this…”

  “The First Empire was as powerful as any of the Nations of the Old Ones,” said Kormak. “Much was lost when it fell.”

  “Oh, I know, Sir Kormak but it is one thing to know something and another to feel the certainty of its truth.”

  At that moment, the look in his eye reminded Kormak of the old hermit, Luther’s father. It was easy to see the connection of blood between the two of them.

  They came to the junction of two huge streets. A statue still stood. It was blacked and defaced which gave it a demonic look. At first it seemed to resemble a man, but the proportions were wrong. It was broader and the limbs were thicker. The features were doughy, the eyes round pools in the face, the nose tiny, the nostrils mere slits. There was something suggestive of the face of a cat about it.

  “That is what the Ghul originally looked like, I am guessing,” said Luther.

  Kormak nodded. Again he had that nagging sense of familiarity, as if he could put a name to the face if only he tried hard enough to remember. For him this place was doubly haunted, by the ghosts of ancient wars and the ghosts of Razhak’s memories. There was a strange sense of homecoming about all of this.

  More memories came back, of great herds of humans who served the Ghul, who had thought it the greatest of honours to be possessed by them, that somehow they became god-like themselves by surrendering their bodies. In a way, they had achieved a shadow of immortality by doing
so. Razhak had absorbed their memories as he stole their flesh, and thus the pretence of humans joining the ascendant Ghul had been maintained. It was a cruel world, Kormak thought, and always had been.

  Ahead of them now was a massive crystal dome, it sat atop a colossal structure that not even Solareon’s armies had been able to destroy. Within it lights flickered and glowed. As they approached, the air vibrated and there was a scent of ozone.

  “The Temple of the Immortals,” said Kormak and suddenly he knew the real reason the First Empire had spent so many lives taking this place. Solareon and his men had believed that the secret of eternal life had lain within. Obviously they had been disappointed by what they had found or the world would have been much different.

  “We have found what we were looking for,” said Luther. And what exactly was that, Kormak wondered?

  They passed through a gigantic arch into the cool shadows of the temple’s entrance. The damage here was less than that in the rest of the city.

  Why was that, Kormak wondered? Was it because it was further from the walls or for some other reason. Why would this place have been spared when the rest of the city had been ravaged? It was bigger, bulkier, even more enormous than the structures around it but that could not be the only reason.

  “Solareon spared it because he intended to come back and try one last time to fathom its secrets,” Olivia said. Kormak had not realised he had spoken aloud. That was worrying. Something about this place was getting to him. Normally he had more self-control. “He died in the Draconian Wars before he could do so. So Eraclius writes anyway.”

  “It is probably just as well,” Kormak said. “The world would have been very different if he had uncovered the secrets of the Ghul.”

  “Yes, it might have been better,” said Luther. Kormak looked hard at him.

  They emerged from the entrance archway into a glittering hall. It was full of crystal pillars. They were milky and translucent except where their surfaces were scored by glowing runes. Those inscriptions seemed to float on their shimmering surfaces. Once more the air hummed with babbling insane voices. In the distance other sounds could be heard like the rumble of a waterfall, weird ephemeral music, the roaring of great angry beasts. Somehow it all blended together and was obviously all part of the same process even if Kormak could not work out what the connection was. The areas between the pillars were marked by shadows that were not quite shadows. They shimmered oddly and moved in a way that was entirely unconnected with the glow of the lights in the hall. They moved in a furtive sneaking fashion as if they had a life of their own.

  “Stay within the light,” Kormak said. “I do not like the look of those shadows at all.”

  “I was about to say the same thing,” said Luther. His voice sounded subdued and quiet through all the background noise although Kormak knew he was shouting. A hissing, crackling sound came from a distant corner of the chamber, lights flickered and danced.

  “No one whoever visited this place recorded anything like this,” said Olivia.

  “It’s Razhak’s doing,” said Kormak, recalling more of the Ghul’s knowledge. “He has activated the great spell engines. We must seek him in the Chambers of Rebirth.”

  A scream rang out. Kormak turned and saw that one of the men had wandered too close to the glittering shadows. It surged forward like a wave and enshrouded him. He was transformed into a statue sculpted from shadow. His flesh became dark and insubstantial, his eyes pockets of deeper darkness. He leapt towards another man and reached out and the shadow spread from where it touched and began to transform the second victim. His screams were hideous.

  Kormak stepped forward between the shadowman and his next victim. He lashed out with the flat of his blade. Where it touched the shadow receded but the man it had enveloped dropped to the ground. Kormak twisted to strike the second with the same result. The shadows that had surrounded the men skittered away, vanishing as if afraid of the touch of the dwarf-forged blade.

  Kormak touched the victims. Their skin was grey. Their flesh was cold. Their eyes were open but there was no life in them or any sign of intelligence. Even as he watched they lost all animation. It was plain that death had taken them. Kormak looked over at Prince Luther. The Prince made the Elder Sign of the Sun with his hand. It was plain they were both thinking the same thing. The soldiers were paying a high price for their purse of gold.

  They moved towards the centre of the chamber under the glittering dome and Kormak saw that there was a great well there, exactly where he had expected to find it; a ramp spiralled downward around the edge of the well, disappearing deep below the earth. It looked as if a god had tried to bore a hole right through to the centre of the world. Kormak remembered Luther’s story of demons imprisoned beneath the surface of the land and wondered if the Ghul had been trying to release them. Razhak’s memories hinted otherwise but infuriatingly told him nothing more.

  All around the glowing shadows danced, the infernal voices sounded, lights shifted around the crystal pillars. For all the tremendous activity of the place, Kormak was filled with a sense of wrongness, of the idea that this was not how things were supposed to be here.

  “I suppose we are going to have to go down,” said Luther. He did not sound enthusiastic although his eyes were wide with wonder and fright from contemplating their surroundings.

  “You suppose correctly,” said Kormak. He strode down the ramp. The two siblings followed him. The soldiers marched fatalistically in their wake.

  They made their way downwards, every step illuminated by the light pouring through the great crystal dome. They passed entrances that led to other tunnels which ran off as far as the eye could see. A city as great as the one on the surface was buried here, Kormak realised.

  He wondered if it was as ruined as the one above. He did not have time to break off and explore and find out. His borrowed memories told him that he needed to keep going. He knew what Razhak sought and where it had to be. The activity all around told him that the Ghul was close to getting what he had come for. Other recollections told him that there were strange and deadly weapons buried here and other defences Razhak might call on if threatened.

  Benjamin and the remaining soldiers moved along cautiously. Some of the warriors had bows in their hands, others had swords. The ones with the blades stood ready to protect the ones with the ranged weapons in case of surprise attack. Prince Luther had his sword out. Olivia’s hand toyed with something inside the pouch she carried. She clearly had other surprises for any attackers.

  The lights flickered. The air vibrated. The ground shook, not as if it had been hit by an earthquake but rather as if it were a monstrous gong being struck by an invisible but inexorable hammer. Kormak got the sense that the whole ancient city was coming awake.

  He knew that Razhak had something to do with that.

  After long hours of walking they reached the bottom of the well, passed through an arch and entered another great open space. This one was lined with more crystalline towers between which chain lightning flickered.

  Around the edges of the space were glass jars full of milky fluid. As he got closer Kormak saw that there were things floating within the fluid, the shrivelled corpses of the ancient race to which he knew Razhak belonged. The jars had been cracked and discolouration around the floor of many of them told Kormak that strange chemicals had leaked onto the ground.

  In the centre of the chamber a huge platform stood supported on a crystal pillar. At the edge of it was a massive pulsing crystal; beside it stood Razhak, still wearing the body of Scar. The flesh was starting to peel from the huge orcish frame in places. The sight of him made the soldiers flinch.

  In his hand, he held something that looked like a spear tipped with a glowing crystal that resembled that from which the glowing pillars were made. The air around Razhak shimmered with light.

  “Guardian!” The voice came from all around, seemingly part of the vibrations in the air. Kormak felt it rumbling within his chest as well as h
eard it with his ears. “You have arrived at last. And you have brought me some more vessels. I am grateful. I had thought I was going to die here, but there is yet a chance for me to live.”

  “Today is the day your life ends,” Kormak said. He was not sure whether his shout could be heard above the noise of the spell-engines but Razhak seemed to have no trouble understanding him.

  “I had thought so too, Guardian. Our ancient enemies did their work well. They have broken the god-machines. They have smashed the spell-engines. They no longer function. I had thought to remake myself, to reweave the thread of my existence but it cannot be done. Your insect forebears destroyed things they cannot even begin to comprehend out of malice and envy. Of course, you understand that all too well, don’t you?”

  Kormak took in what the Ghul was saying. Razhak had no way of strengthening his spirit-fires. He was as mortal in his own way as Kormak now. He might be able to leap bodies and steal part of their energy but he could not find enough energy to stave off extinction indefinitely. In fact, if they left now, he would simply starve as he burned through the remaining life-energy in Scar’s body.

  Or perhaps that was what he wanted them to believe. Perhaps it was not so. Perhaps he had different reasons for saying this. Kormak could not take the chance of letting him escape. Razhak laughed. There was a tinge of madness to it as well as the alien mirth of one who had never been a man.

  “I am going to kill you, Guardian,” he said. “You have hounded me too long. I am ending this now. I will slay you if it’s the last thing I do. You have, you will be pleased to know, reduced me to your own level.”

  He raised the spear. Chained lightning danced around its tip. Kormak pushed Olivia and Luther into the shadow of a pillar as a bolt of pure electrical energy leapt at the spot where they had been. Sparks erupted where the surge of power struck. One of the soldiers stood there watching as the lightning came closer. It touched him. He screamed, eyes opening wide, skin turning briefly white and sloughing away. In a moment, only a blackened corpse in partially melted armour stood there.