In his soul’s eye, he glimpsed her, Queen Sumiloam leaning like a golden beacon from her box.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘Tell me,’ the rodent continued. ‘Why the mask? Why hide your face in the Pits when no man could mistake your frame?’
The memories came flooding back. He had stood as he always stood in the blood-drenched aftermath of the Incarnal, alone, surrounded by the pulped wreckage of what had once been living. In the Pit, looking out meant looking up. The concentric tiers were so steep that the audience hooked themselves to their seats. They would stand leaning out against the hemp ropes, row after row, forming a sleeve of dendritic gills, and it would seem the Pit was some kind of obscenity from the deepest sea, a cold encrustation about tissue hot and living, filtering whatever nourishment provided by his murderous deeds.
‘It is my other face.’
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
The rat was amused. ‘Aye. All Men need spare faces in Carythusal!’
Even Palatines stood so hooked– the Steep-of-the-Pit, as they called it. Only the balcony of the Surmantic Vigil allowed spectators the luxury of reclining, let alone coming and going at their leisure. And only the guests and family of King Sarothesser IX set foot upon that allegedly sacred floor...
‘You speak of the necessity of deceit,’ Eryelk scoffed. ‘I speak of truth.’
As old as Ancient Shir, they said. The Sranc Pits, a ziggurat gutted for the sake of death.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
The rat’s whiskers twitched in surprise.
‘Truth?’ he snapped. ‘Oh... you mean lies that win.’
They knew him not at all, the Holca realized–or nothing of the Incarnal, at least. They improvised. They had merely seen the Queen cast him her blessor, then had waited the following day to approach him here, at the Third Sun, where the crowds might set him at greater ease–or restrain him.
They–the Scarlet Spires. One could not walk the ways of Carythusal without catching some glimpse of their towers above the burnt-brick ridges of the city. They were impossible to miss, especially when the red enamel plates scaling them caught the sun. He himself saw the highest tower, Marakiz, ablaze every morning on his way to train at the lyceum. From pit to pinnacle, it seemed, Carythusal was drenched in blood. And as much as its inhabitants craved the bloodletting of the Sranc Pits–as much as they celebrated the likes of him (if only from a cautious distance)–they genuinely feared the Scarlet Spires, the greatest and most dreaded sorcerous School in the Three Seas.
‘I despise jnan,’ Erylk lied. Spoken by a foreigner, this meant, Tell me what you want.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘Our Blessed Queen...’ the rat said, his manner even more narrow. ‘How should I put it? She has summoned you to recline upon her favourite couch, hasn’t she?’
‘How should I know?’
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘Would you like me to tell you what it says?’ the sorcerer said, gesturing to the ribbon. Apparently only rats were literate in Carythusal.
‘I can read your chicken tracks,’ the Holca grated. He need not look at his hands to know how the skin reddened.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘So what?’ the rat scoffed. ‘The Queen of Ainon, the infamous wife of Sarothesser IX–the sacred pustule himself!–tosses you her blessor and you... what? Forget to read it?’
They knew him not at all.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
What remained of Thurror Eryelk grinned in the way that made mother’s weep. ‘One cannot forget something suffered by another.’
The rat laughed, chirped some gibberish in a tongue that sounded like cackling geese.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘Oh yes... The other you.’
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘Such a clever rat,’ he grated.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘What did you say?’
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘The rat that burns other rats, that would rule over other rats, become tyrant of the rat nation...’
His voice–his hatred–had become as a grinding mill.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘Silence, cur!’
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘...that would worshipped as the Rat of Rats...’
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
‘Insolence! Do you real–‘
The Purple Coin, they called it, the killing floor...
The bottom of the Pit.
§
Ratakila whirled, seized a passerby, cast him into the astonished sorcerer. He dove on the forward edge of the eye-sheering glare, rolled, leapt toward the nearest of the Third Sun’s columns, hammered the cheek of the swart fool standing there–the one who harboured the pin-prick of oblivion against his breast. The man spun about, trailing blood, spittle, his left eye on a string.
The first of the sorcerous words twisted sound and decency. ‘Umma tulutat ish...’
He wrenched the man’s jerkin up as a rapist might. ‘... kiapris hutirum...’ He gouged the Chorae from the corpse’s navel. ‘... thiri...’ He clenched the iron marble in a great red fist...
‘... totoalas!’
Wricked it loose.
A region of lightning, vertical forks flickering in and out of existence, both blinding and miniature, making the air snap in lieu of thunder. Men fell dead, shaking for a light-skewered instant, slumping. Ranks tripped over benches and tables fleeing the perimeter. The entire tavern scrambled back, away, horrified faces carved in intermittent white. One man tumbled screaming to the floor, battling his blazing robes.
Boma-boma-boma-boma...
The Holca warrior barrelled through it unscathed, his famed greatsword, Vampire, drawn and swinging.
Teeth closed across glaring light.
§
Again.
‘Uh! Even the mask reeks.’
‘Aye. Sulphur...’
Feminine voices, young and old.
‘Sorcery?’
‘That is why we did what we did.’
He was what he was, once again.
‘He breathes like a bull...’
‘Enough. Silly girl, why do you gape so?’
The Incarnal always returned what it took.
‘His very look offends the eye.’
‘And draws it.’
The World always came seeping back.
‘He is not natural.’
‘No. He is Holca.’
Sometimes more simple, sometimes more complicated.
‘Holca?’
Always wet and mangled.
‘You are an ignorant child. A whore should know her Men!’
He had been running. He could feel memory of it. The pinch deep in his breast. The warmth in his thighs.
‘This kind in particular...’
He could not so much as twitch, yet he felt the flutter of chill fingers across his abdomen.
‘He isn’t a Man... He cannot be!’
He smelled incense... No. Perfume. Perfume and the scent of air... burning. Pillows as supple as sod.
‘He can and he is. The Holca reside high on the Wernma, the highest, where the Sranc rule the nights.’
What had happened?
‘In ancient times a child was born to them, a child possessing two hearts. Wiglic. Have you heard of him? Of course not.’
Obviously he had survived the sorcerous rat...
‘The days were fearsome, and the Holca tottered on the very scarp. Wiglic saved them. So mighty was his strength that the wombs of all their wives and daughters were yoked to his pole, indentured to his seed.’
‘Oh... that Wiglic.’
‘You jest, and yet still you gawk like a girl in flower!’
But had the rat survived him?
‘He has two hearts?’
‘So they say...’
And what was wrong with his blasted limbs?
‘If I put my ear to his chest?’
&n
bsp; ‘Perhaps you might hear.’
How had he found himself in the care of these women?
‘But is it... is it safe?’
‘Now it is. But later, who could say?’
Even his tongue and lips were denied him!
‘What do you mean?’ the younger asked, her voice wincing in horror.
‘The Sarcal simply robs him of motion,’ the old woman replied, her voice growing distant. She had left the chamber... or whatever housed him.
Thurror Eryelk wrenched at his musculature with a savage effort of will. Nothing. What had once been an effortless extension of his being was now as smooth and insensate as glass.
‘You mean he can... can hear us?’
The old woman laughed from some socket in the unseen structure.
‘If he has awakened.’
‘So... so... there’s a chance he might c-come back after?’
A barking laugh signalled the old woman’s return. ‘Eh, Holca?’ she called from a floating point above his face. ‘When you return to wreak your vengeance, ask for Isil’alma–‘
‘What are you doing?’ the girl cried.
The old woman’s laughter was husky and rueful, canny and matriarchal. Eryelk knew her kind. She had learned the secret that escapes so many of those who live into the white of old age, the understanding that mischief is what keeps the soul hale and vital. And since all mischief risks injury, she could not but indulge some small, carping yen for cruelty in its expression.
‘Such a simple girl!’ she chortled, her voice still hot above his face.
The woman would have made a good Holca grandmother...
Were she not a rat witch.
‘Were you kicked by a mule as a child? Did your father cane your head?’
An injured huff.
‘No-no-no, my child...’ she said, floating back into the near void to inspect him. ‘You need not fear this beautiful monster...’ A breath filled with longing and spite, onion and cheese.
‘What one gives to the Scarlet Magi never comes back.’
Earth and muck.
Perhaps he had not survived after all.
§
A crew of mail-armoured men had arrived hard on the old woman’s revelation. They treated him roughly, cursed his bulk with marvelling apprehension. He heard wheedling female voices, the kind of how-dare haggling to which the helpless are prone, the laying out of conditions on an unconditional transaction. Huffing and muttering in unison, they tossed him into the back of a muck-wain. Naked, he could chart the continents and archipelagos of shit scabbed across the bottom with precision. He could feel well enough, but he could not in the least move.
He shook and bounced like a corpse once the wain began kicking over ruts and debris. His eyelids relented, at least, revealed crescent-moon glimpses of his nocturnal transit, parades of ancient brick facades against starry black, all crammed into wending canyons. A particularly nasty slap of the planks sent him onto his side, and he found himself staring down his cheeks at the image of the crimson-canopied palanquin that followed them. The carriage sat upon black-lacquered yokes long enough for some twenty or more bearers, but possessing only twelve, slaves that in no way resembled slaves, armed and armoured as they were. Sorcery riddled the whole of the conveyance, an intimation of disgust that the Holca could sense through scissoring black. Even concealed by silken drapes, the sedan’s occupant smouldered with nauseous clarity–and the horrific truth of Eryelk’s circumstances as well.
The Scarlet Spires had him.
The most violent Son of Wiglic was no stranger to doom. Ever had danger been a matter of curiosity to him, be it infested forests, piracy on the Seas, or mercenary wars. One could not be born with gifts such as his and not come to a bloody end. Even now, paralysed by sarcal, a captive of the most cruel and powerful of the Schools, he did not fret so much as wonder. Only ignorance had caused him any real fear in his life–a fact that Stitti, his mentor and surrogate father, had found endlessly amusing. To know was to fear, the old pick would say (making no secret of his own cowardice). To be ignorant, on the other hand, was to be immovable, to possess the inexhaustible courage of the oblivious. One cannot fear what one does not know. This was why so many grew besotted before battle. This was why the learned were so craven, the civilized so servile...
No man craved both wisdom and peril as he did. His was an upside-down soul, the Sranc slaver insisted, one that, combined with a Holca frame, made him as rare as nimil. “If only you had will, boy, discipline, the whole Three Seas would tremble!”
If only.
The barbarian could smell the river. Carythusal had to be mucked like any other stall crammed with beasts, and the River Sayut, for all its sluggish immensity, could not but become a sewer. “Why else would the Scarlet Magi built their towers so high?” the wags in the street said. The wheels hissed and smacked across mudded ground. With the yokes extending so far past the bearers, the palanquin resembled some immense beetle scuttling in the gloom, chitinous and raw. Warehouses, windowless and ancient, loomed over its passage.
The air grew hard with moisture. The palanquin stopped with the muck-wain. The armoured bearers bent at the knees and stepped from the yokes–and yet the conveyance hung as before. The slaves were mere ornaments, Eryelk realized–likely a means to avoid outraging the pious masses. Ekyannus XIV, had been baying for the destruction of the Schools for years now, ever since becoming Shriah of the Thousand Temples.
Water slurped about unseen pilings. The barbarian sensed more than saw the armoured Bearers close about the wain. The gilded litter, meanwhile, sank to a point less than a cubit above the ground. The occupant batted aside an embroidered flap, unfolded like an ancient crane stepping clear of the sedan. He strode directly to Eryelk, his manner brisk despite his stooping age. The Nail of Heaven burnished his hairless scalp, etched the ragged lines of his mien.
Thick lips parted about a lozenge of white incandescence. Lanterns flashed from his eyes.
‘Scir-hirammal topta ez...’
And in the heartbeat that remained to him, Thurror Eryelk realized that Stitti had been wrong. Some Men did share his lust for knowledge and peril.
Sorcerers.
§
Air lathed his body.
His Clay-father, the one who had struck him from his mother’s hips, had died when he was but four years old. Moiar, his name was. Eryelk remembered nothing of him, though his uncles never ceased commenting on his uncanny resemblance to him.
The waters lay beneath, snakes twining under black-silk sheets.
His Breath-father had been the Master of the Kumrûm, the only slaver entrepot above the Sixth Cataract, high enough on the River Wernma to border the traditional tribal lands of the Holca. Stitti, his name was, Heramari Stitramoses. For all the local prestige he enjoyed, he was an outcast among his own, forever barred from his native Carythusal, where he had been nothing less than the Royal Scribe, a master of thousands, not to mention the way history would frame his sovereign. Barons, even Palatines, had come to him grovelling for favour–that is, until the circulation of several tracts (written in his distinctive hand) had sorely offended the Ainoni King.
Scaled towers loomed naked from veils of haze.
Moiar had been Stitti’s most prolific supplier. The Sranc Pits were well named, for they were nothing if not bottomless gluttons, devouring hundreds of the raving creatures every week–more during holy festivals. It behove any slaver to court the favour of his suppliers, especially where Sranc were involved. Thus did Stitti and Moiar become fast friends. And thus did the young Eryelk, by dint of some scandalous arrangement no one would explain, become Stitti’s ward upon his father’s death.
The famed crimson gleamed black in the light of the Nail, horns soaring into the void.
And so a Holca boy on the savage rim of civilization learned everything there was to learn about the great, diseased city of Carythusal–and its most notorious and fearsome denizens.
They swelled into scale
d immensities, blotted all vision...
The Spires!
§
They had practiced until their welts bled. They crossed their training swords in observance of jnan, then, their limbs humming, meditated upon the hearth fire.
There was a carelessness to the way Stitti spoke, a deceptive air of thoughtless rummaging, as if he searched for something precious belonging to someone he did not like. ‘Of the cancers that pock the City, the Scarlet Spires are by far the most wicked, the most deadly. The Collegians say they have begun plumbing the Hundred Hells, communing with unclean spirits. Pray that you never have call to deal with them.’
‘And if I should be so unlucky?’
‘Humour them, boy. Humour them so far as your life is worth.’
‘And if my Heart does not allow it?’
He was always chewing gow-gow seeds, always holding thoughts between his teeth, pondering...
‘Then your flesh shall be your pyre.’
§
Somewhere... Yes. He was somewhere.
‘All who know of Carythusal,’ a voice crooned, ‘know at least two things...’
Somewhere dark.
‘The Sranc Pits...’
He hung suspended, ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist, so that he resembled a nude diver.
‘And the Scarlet Spires.’
Iron often communicates its strength through mere touch. Eryelk needed only become aware of the chains and manacles to know they could not be broken.
Even still, something about the voice antagonized.
‘The Pit and the Spire. Which is more wicked I wonder?’
And so the most violent Son of Wiglic wrenched, hissing for effort. Great sheets of muscle twisted and flexed, all of it braced against the fulcrum of his monstrous will. Veins mapped the swales and striations of his musculature. It seemed the ceilings should come crashing down from the gloom, such was the huffing violence of his exertion.
His chains did not so much creak.
The voice continued as before, unaffected by his display.
Grimdark Magazine Issue #2 Page 7
