Enk collected himself and entered his residence, ignoring the chaos in his heart. He huffed his way down the gloomy hallway. The lamps that lined the dark wood panels sat unlit, desolate for lack of Merka’s tender ministrations. Her absence would invariably lead to the spread and multiplying of such sins and ruin would finally claim this place in full.
Unintelligent murmurs swelled, seeped out past the dining room door, sounds mixed with curious smells.
Fear fluttered, clutched at his chest.
Could something else have gone wrong?
The young scion gingerly rubbed at his temple and swallowed, cautioned himself to take care, warned himself that he was still weak from his earlier heroics. Yet still he opened the door.
Enk had grown up knowing his mother was beautiful, but had long become numb to this fact. And all those who stood impotent before her charm, he derided out of habit, mocked out of reflex. Yet from time to time the truth of her would creep upon him, and it would be as if he glimpsed her for the first.
This was one of those times.
The blasphemy of her vision stole his breath. Dressed like a parody of a penitent, she sat at the table with a coif upon her head. Where shades of brown and black would have been proper, she wore only white. Her gown hung open at the bosom and her exposed nipples gleamed with vile candlelight. A repudiation of the mourning period Merka’s passing demanded.
And though Enk had long ago given up belief in the Church, he still found his fingers twisting to ward off evil. He caught himself and lowered his hand.
Mother smiled, her cheeks flushed with intoxication. “Oh, Enk, you’re finally home. Join us.”
Us? Enk blinked, noticing Captain Utu Levin for the first time. The Captain sat across from Phebe with eyes like knives, sipping from a tall glass. The space in between the two were lined with candles and platters of steaming food, each curling the air with its own thin tendrils.
“Utu brought his manservant over to cook for us,” Mother continued.
“Yes, join us, boy.” The Captain’s voice called the young scion to a halt, stopping him before he had time to retreat.
Enk fumed silently. He wanted nothing more than to escape the horror of his mother’s presence, but the man’s tone made that an impossibility. His pride would not let him slink from such a naked challenge. He would not be cowered. Not in his father’s house!
As if lead had been packed into his bones, Enk made his way toward them and took a seat at the table, all too aware of his father’s painted glare. Phebe rose from her chair—so fucking mercurial!
“Allow me, Darling” she said, slapping his hand from an empty plate. The air swelled with the scent of ripen peaches.
Enk scarce had the wherewithal to complain, so disgusted was he by the way she seemed to purposely rub her bosom against his back as she fretted about him with motherly coos. When she returned to her seat, he stared down at a plate fashioned with everything he hated—a milling mass of green peas mixed with the worse cuts of meat, layered in brown gravy. Though everything had changed from those days of privileged youth, they still played, he and Mother, only now theirs was a much darker game. One where the only way to keep score was to count the scars on your soul.
“Aren’t you going to thank your mother, boy?” Utu asked, his crooked teeth stained red.
Enk glared down at his plate, refused to acknowledge the Captain’s comment in any way. This was a bad idea; he should not have joined them for dinner. Merka’s death had left him much too fragile to contest wills with anyone.
He felt like a glass figurine.
One with the beginnings of a hairline crack.
Utu snorted. “Did I mention, I saw your boy today, love?”
“Oh. Where?” Mother asked.
“Somewhere he shouldn’t have been. There was almost a riot in the Shade, and he almost got himself shot.”
“What were you doing in the Shade, Dear?”
Enk remained silent, forked soggy peas into his mouth and chewed and chewed. It tasted as he had expected, like shame and humiliation. He swallowed and swallowed, all without expression.
“Answer her, boy!” The table trembled, rocked by a human palm.
Enk slowly lifted his head, regarded Utu with an unflinching stare. The pallor of the Captain’s face darkened. After a sombre tick, Enk smeared his disdain into a thin smile, relishing the way the man bristled and cursed under his breath.
“You’ll have to wait a long time,” Enk told him, “before the likes of me obeys the likes of you, Captain.”
“Enk, be nice.” Phebe giggled.
Utu laughed, snarled, laughed. His shoulders shook and his back bent, dangerous edges gleaming in his hellish eyes. Then he dabbed a napkin at his lips and unfolded from his chair.
Enk relaxed, a sense of security easing his tense muscles.
He was ready for any threat with a wild lore all of his own.
A portal lay open.
Utu disappeared behind Enk’s chair and reappeared at the other side, strolling toward Phebe. He sent Enk not a single glance.
Enk’s smile waned, overwhelmed by a sudden dread.
A mistake. . . .
He had made a terrible mistake.
“How is it possible?” Utu asked, running a knuckle along Phebe’s cheek, brushing back a blue strain of hair from her face.
Mother smiled. “How’s what possible?”
“For you to look even more divine by candlelight?” Utu pressed a thumb to Mother’s lips, and her pink tongue snaked out to welcome it, taking the offered digit into her—
Enk averted his gaze. His blood roared in his ears. The veins in his jaw throbbed. He had underestimated Utu! The Captain was no dumb brute; he knew how to cut, how to wound.
The table jumped and rattled.
“Utu, my boy. . . .” Mother muttered, her voice drunk with need.
“Let the little fucker watch.”
The widening of a hairline crack across something fragile.
The last fragment of a glass heart.
A legion of horrors washed over Enk. Moans and sudden gasps of exultation. The endless slapping of flesh against flesh. The creak and groan of wooden limbs. The longer Enk sat silently, the deeper each sound inked its way into his soul.
Cruel laughter. “Look at me, boy!”
Tears swam in Enk’s eyes. Each breath was a difficult one. The surrounding air was every bit as thick as the gravy on his plate. This was a unique twist to the old game, a new low.
“Look!”
Enk turned and looked upon eternal torment.
Long nails, painted red and black, clicked and scratched the table top, bare ass-cheeks thrusting backward into the crotch of a leering fool, and grinning through it all, Mother, her face awash with incestuous delights. Her eyes like holes in forever.
A diabolical scene.
The hum and whine of an inner fire.
“What do you see, Darling?” she asked in a half purr.
Utu slashed a hand across her backside. “Yes, tell us.” Bliss rented the air, laughter mixed with whorish coos. “What do you see, boy?”
Enk howled.
Loins clutched in tandem, hearts thumped as one.
Perspectives reversed.
Suddenly, Enk peered down at himself through another’s eyes. Furnace-like warmth welcomed him, enveloped him tighter and tighter. Hazy thoughts swam at the periphery, the hint of sulfur clogged nostrils. Using another’s hands, he gripped Mother’s hips, dug chipped nails into her tender flesh.
“What do you see?”
A distorted echo that reverberated within as well as without, a sound that seemed to revel in the twist and throttle of nightmarish hues.
Disgust pimpled his back.
He yanked a knife from the table and slid it across his—Utu’s throat. Pain and pleasure frothed. Fluids gushed. Shrieking rose out of shrieking, screaming out of screaming.
Enk jerked in his chair, once again housed in his own flesh, his eyes
locked on her, the Whore of Dilgan. A twisted soul trapped beneath a slab of meat, slicked in squirting scarlet, wailing for the horror of it, clawing about the yawning bright, nails like painted pedipalps.
Momma.
Chapter Thirteen
Price of Power
Kalum crouched half-naked in the gloom of his tent, gripping his shoulders with sweaty hands. His skin itched, and the blackness spun, touched by flashes of purple only he could perceive. He gasped and gathered the ethereal fragments—the otherworldly totem that bound his soul to the Lesser Name. Only then did his star inked tattoos cease their twitching. A distant howl rose from within, lifted from abysmal depths. The cry of a caged and starved entity. The murmur of a Hellkin.
There was a time when Kalum had once believed that daemonology would be the source of his doom, when he had looked upon the corrupted Warlocks of his homeland with a kind of horror. But fate had led him away from Murgaon and into the arms of an all too similar kind of calamity.
Sweat dampened his brow and back. His fingers trembled, hooked by the craving for more Dust. Gold, Red, Blue—they all called to him. Life seemed veiled in a dark curtain without their splendor coursing through him, in a way plundering the depths of the Fires Below had never achieved. And he knew, knew. . . .
It would not be long now.
Kalum clutched his shoulders tighter. The urge for more Dust overwhelmed all in the end, no Lord-Inquisitor escaped its pull forever. Each new line sniffed drew him ever closer to oblivion, to eternal damnation.
Something encroached . . . footsteps approaching his tent.
He cocked his head. “What is it?”
The footsteps stalled at the front of his tent.
“Worship Osei has summoned you, sir,” a man called, his voice hesitant. “She . . . said to bring Sister Fana with you when you come.”
“Understood. Dismissed.”
A shrieking gust whipped the sides of the tent and existence seemed to wail. Kalum shivered, listening to noises too piercing to be caused by mere wind. Then the howls stilled, and the night’s other sounds crept back into hearing. The soldier’s retreating footsteps. The creak of distant branches. A stomach grumbling.
Kalum straightened to his full height, compelled more by habit than a sense of duty. He donned his black-and-gold uniform, secured his sword and cavalry pistol at his waist, ran twitching fingers along the glass vials in his inner coat pocket.
Yes, not long now.
The thought brought an odd sense of calm. All things ended—all men died. Well, all men but the Immortal-Emperor, and one day perhaps even he would know death’s embrace.
The night welcomed Kalum when he stepped outside, teased his cheeks and scalp with icy tendrils, tugged at his cuffs and sleeves. He savored the coolness, taking in the slumbering camp. Neat rows of white tents gleamed then darkened, brightened by the lamps two patrolling soldiers held aloft. The black-and-silver coated men froze as they noted Kalum’s presence.
Kalum nodded at them. Even after all these years, it still seemed odd that a division of the Guardians of the Flame was his to command. He was more than some barbarian clasped to the breast of Empire; he was a heathen elevated to the highest echelons—a Lord-Inquisitor of the Church of the Holy Ark, though he had not a touch of any of the noble bloodlines.
The soldiers saluted him and resumed their march through the camp, leaving the darkness more desolate for the absence of their lamps.
Kalum struck out at an angle, avoiding the skittering lights of more patrols. He looped around half a dozen tents before he found the one he sought. Moved by some unnameable instinct, he ducked inside the tent and crept toward a prone figure wrapped in a dark blanket.
What am I doing?
Soft snores filtered through the enclosed space, ringing as though across a vaulted ceiling. And somehow he knew he had asked the wrong question.
What had taken him so long to do this?
As though all the world’s wonder loomed before him, Kalum peered down at the nun’s angular aspect, so childlike in her repose. Even clothed in darkness, she tugged at the edge of his mind with a promise that made the Lesser Name purr in anticipation. She gleamed oh, so beautifully, but that was not the reason—not the only reason.
Sister Fana Mugimi was. . . .
A legend made flesh.
A Sophic Nun.
Kalum ran a calloused finger above her forehead, almost touching her but not quite. She shifted and snuggled deeper into her blanket, her blood-colored hair pitch black in the gloom. His throat constricted.
The Cunt Witches of Empire, he reminded himself, that was what the Sophic Nuns were called beyond the Cobalt Gate. Before the invention of gunpowder and cannons, they were what kept the Gilgian Empire safe. Now, they were much reduced and rarely seen, numbering in only the hundreds, if rumors were to be believed.
Kalum leaned forward and drank deeper on Fana’s feminine scent. The ever pressing need for Dust receded, replaced by an even darker hunger, one that went down into his very marrow. He longed to touch her, to press his lips into her own, to—
She can burn you into cinder!
The gaps between moments seemed to expand, and Kalum hung in guarded silence, his finger quivering above Fana’s face. Though the Empire had forgotten, the Ancient World certainly had not! The descendants of the Hundred Clans stilled regaled their youth with the horror of unholy intonations mouthed by mortal daughters, still filled young minds with nightmares of those who spoke with Mada’s Voice—the deity the Imperials worshiped as God.
Kalum lowered his hand to his side.
“I know you’re awake,” he whispered to the dark, voice rough with suppressed desire. He wiped the moisture from his brow, glanced at the strange chest tucked at the side of the tent.
Her eyes opened, eyes of the deepest jade.
“Your breathing shifted between my third and second step,” Kalum continued, smoother. Calmer.
“You’re a wonder, Lord-Inquisitor,” Fana said in her usual detached way, her voice lacking all hint of passion. “I see now why Worship Osei treasures you so.”
“Speaking of which, we have been summoned.”
Fana threw off her blanket and climbed to her feet, stark naked. She watched him observe her, watched his eyes soak in her shadowy contours. Pale white to his dark, scarred to his smooth, she stood indifferent to his gaze.
Without warning, terror yanked him forward, and, one stumbling step later, he found himself tracing in the air the strange shapes that marred her skin, shapes that appeared as if they had been burned into her with hot irons.
“Who did this to you?” There was anger in Kalum’s voice, a fire that raged at the fact that such perfection would be so soiled. “Tell me so I may tear out there eyes!”
Fana tilted her head and studied herself. Both of her nipples had been melted into things of identical angles and vertices.
“Each of these marks I chose willingly,” she said.
“Why?”
“What a strange question for a Warlock to ask.”
Kalum staggered back. “A former Warlock. I’m one no longer.”
Fana watched him without expression, but her jade-fire eyes seemed to mock the lie, seemed to say that some bargains once struck could never be undone.
“There’s always a price, Lord-Inquisitor,” she whispered. “I simply wear mine while yours lies hidden.”
“I see,” he said. And he did see, far more than he wanted to. With effort, he swallowed and added, “I’ll wait for you outside.”
Kalum retreated, fled from things both past and present. The cool wind smacked at him, reduced the fire in his face to a comfortable buzz. He contemplated his shuddering hands.
Which one of his obsessions would destroy him first?
The Nun or the Dust?
Kalum snorted, choked on wry laughter. He clutched at the wooden grip of his cavalry pistol. A group of patrolling soldiers glanced in his direction.
Of course, there was
a third option. Why choose one?
He laughed louder.
■■■
The soothing tones of rustling tents.
Kalum’s heart thumbed heavily for peering at Fana from the corner of his eye. She moved at his side, walking the path toward the heart of the sleeping camp, bathed in the faded light of ancient constellations. Tall for a woman. Freckled-faced. Scarlet hair hidden behind an ivory coif. Breast and hips reduced to nothing but hazy impressions by the cloth of her dark tunic. Eyes every bit as verdant as emerald blades of grass.
“I heard laughter earlier,” she said, fondling her prayer beads. “Did I imagine it?”
He cleared his throat. “No, you didn’t.”
“What had you so amused?”
“Life, Sister Fana. Life.”
She blinked, said nothing.
They walked on.
He could not help but marvel at the spotted piety of her countenance, made even more radiant by the scattered rays piercing the hanging veil. His eyes jerked to the Worship’s large tent and the two soldiers standing guard outside it.
This had to end. He had to—
“Do you ever think of venturing back to the Ancient East?” she asked.
Kalum jerked to a stop before the entrance of the Worship’s blue tent. The soldiers saluted, but he ignored them and studied Fana with greater care.
“What is it?” she asked.
Kalum frowned down at her. “You’ve spoken more words to me in the last five minutes than you have in the last month you’ve been with us.”
“You exaggerate, Lord-Inquisitor.”
“Perhaps, but not by much.”
Fana strode into the Worship’s tent, not bothering to reply. The soldier on the right side of the tent flap, a man with a thin mustache and beady eyes, glanced at her backside as she entered.
The Lord-Inquisitor hissed.
The beady-eyed man snapped to attention, scanning Kalum’s scowling visage. Crimson splotches bloomed in his pale cheeks.
“Ogling nuns now are we?” Kalum asked, doing his best to keep the snarl from his voice but failing.
“I. . . .” The black-and-silver coated man wilted under the prick of Kalum’s glare.
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