by Various
The echoes are everywhere on Davin. It takes skill and faith and sacrifice to hear them, to draw their scattered force into knots of prophecy and revelation. They touch even those who cannot hear. The truths of the gods are not limited by distance. To parse the truths, though – to sift through and truly understand them – that is a gift. It is the province of the few. And the closer one comes to the source of their propagation, the greater the density of the echoes.
Is it clarity that Tsi Rekh hopes to find? Revelation, certainly, but that is not the same as clarity. Revelation can strip the flesh from the soul. Mysteries can step out from the night. They can descend from on high with fury. To witness them is to be laid bare before something far more terrible and powerful than simple clarity.
He is so close now, so very close. So close to the source. So close to the Lodge of Echoes.
Close enough that the voices are so numerous, they must weave and tangle and entwine. Fragments and laughter, secrets and cries, the screams of torn vision and worse truths are gathered together. From their midst, they select a single thread for Tsi Rekh alone. It is gossamer venom. It will not speak its revelation, but this echo will speak to him. He closes his eyes. He opens himself to its touch.
He does not presume to take the thread. He lets it circle around his skull. Thin beyond vision, coiling, sharp as darkness, it reaches into his ears.
This is his echo. This is his truth.
A mouth that he must never gaze upon begins his word. A single sound.
Mmmmmmmmmm…
That is the gift. That is the echo that has come for him.
Mmmmmmmm…
Beneath sound, beneath bone, as great as a continent’s stone.
Mmmmmmmmm…
The promise of more, if he proves worthy, if he passes the test.
And he will. This is his vow. He will hear the full expression of the echo that is his destiny.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm…
…Memory.
His tent, the flaps parting to admit Akshub. She is alone, this high priestess of the Serpent Lodge. The old woman is half Tsi Rekh’s size and many times his age. Thin. Bones in her hair, older bones beneath her flesh. Age is everywhere upon her. His tribe, stronger in weapons and armour and body than the vermin who live in her camp, could slaughter all her kin. He could kill Akshub with a single blow.
The half-formed thought is terrifying. Why? Because he would be dead as soon as he raised his hand. Because he would anger the gods.
Banishing the idea before it takes hold. Listening to Akshub open the doorway to destiny.
‘On this day, the Lodge of the Hound has the favour of the gods,’ she says. ‘To the Serpent Lodge fell the honour of turning the Warmaster. His change is the work of my lodge. It is our serpent that whispers in his heart. He walks from us to bring the fire to the stars.’ She grins. Insects crawl over her teeth. ‘But you, priest, have a great claim too. You will hear the sacred from the source. You will touch it. You will be it. It is time to proclaim your right.’
‘My right to what?’
He knows. He understands the meaning of the word source. He must hear her say it, though. Akshub’s voice will make it law.
‘The Lodge of Echoes.’
Sighing. Glory, a burning coal in his chest. ‘We have tried before.’ As have all the lodges.
Older memories, transmitted memories, the lore of Davin: the Lodge of the Serpent, of the Bear, of the Hound, of the Hawk, of the Crow, all – all, all – have sought to own the Lodge of Echoes, the first lodge, the lodge that precedes and surpasses all animals.
All – all, all – have failed.
Has any worshipper ever even crossed the plain? No answer. Not one has returned. The mountain, always a distant and forbidden marker of power.
But Akshub’s voice comes, cracked and insistent. ‘Go, priest. Cross the plain. Climb the mountain. Open the doors.’
‘The gods will permit it?’
‘The gods command it. Go and meet destiny.’ She stretches out a hand and jabs a hooked fingernail against Tsi Rekh’s chest. ‘Open the doors,’ she says again.
‘And why does the Serpent give this honour to the Hound?’
Insects and smiles. ‘I give nothing. I am the messenger. I am the opener of ways, but it is not for me to travel them.’
And Tsi Rekh to the dark mountain has come.
He opens his eyes. The memory burns off like mist before the magnificence of the present. The shadow of the mountain has almost reached the bluff. The details of the plain have vanished. There is only the dark. The loam of whispers.
The last of the light is fading, its lie stabbed to death. This is how it has always been on Davin. There is no rebirth at dawn – there is only the primal sacrifice of nightfall. With every sunset, the gods reassert their rule with sacred murder. The shadow draws closer yet, then closer: a shadow with mass, strength and will. It reaches the base of the bluff. Minute by minute, it climbs higher. The tide of dark reaches for Tsi Rekh. He watches. He will not blaspheme by looking away. He will see the very second that marks his fall toward apotheosis.
The shadow reaches him. It touches him.
It is more than cold. It is a freezing agony, as though his limbs were being severed one by one. He welcomes the shadow and its will. And so much more than cold, more than pain. This is a test.
Then, through the act of his welcome, it becomes a claim. It is ownership. It is a grasping. In the echoes, he hears nods. He has been found worthy.
‘Now!’ he cries.
‘Now!’ he calls.
‘Now!’ he thunders.
His voice is picked up by the echoes. It too has been welcomed by them. They carry it before him, across the plain, bringing his ferocious joy of worship to the mountain. They carry it also behind him, to his followers, and beyond. Because he is blessed, because he is chosen by the Lodge of Echoes, his voice has joined the dark chorus that rings the planet. On the other side of the globe, sorcerers of the lesser lodges will hear his voice amidst the fragments that come to them, and they will wonder at the summons.
Does he feel power now?
Yes. Yes.
Wait, say the echoes.
More, say the echoes.
Mmmmmmmmmm… says his fate, growing louder, stronger, on the verge of transformation.
He waits, motionless, arms outstretched, staring into the rich darkness. His followers arrive from the camp. They number thirty-one. With him, their party is thirty-two, a sacred grouping: the eightfold path of Chaos multiplied by the will of the four gods. They are rabble and they are faithful, sacrifices to be used without thought and martyrs to be praised for their willingness to die. Like him, they bear weapons and armour. They are powerful amongst their fellows. They come from the Lodge of the Hound and that is enough, whether they are alive or dead, to make them supreme over all other Davinites.
Tsi Rekh walks into the shadow. They follow. They descend the slope. The ground of the plains is uneven, jagged. Some of the pilgrims are barefoot, and before they have gone many steps they leave a trail of blood behind them. They do not light torches. They march into the very origin of night. They cannot see where they walk. Tsi Rekh strides with certainty, guided by the pull of destiny. The others do not have an echo of their own to sustain them. They stagger. They trip. They fall. They do not cry out but Tsi Rekh knows that there is pain and the ruin of flesh. Beneath his feet, he can feel the squirm and crunch of insects. They scrabble out from the cracks. They are thirsty for the wounds of the faithful.
All is as it should be. His chest swells. He could swim through the dark to the mountain. But he will walk with his acolytes and bring them to whatever role it is that awaits them. They are elevated, because the Lodge of the Hound has been, but they are not chosen.
Unlike him.
Always chosen.
The
wait of years.
A stirring in the depths of his mind. Thin as hair, jointed, with a scorpion’s sting. What is it? He cannot grasp it. It grows stronger, more insistent as they walk through the night. In the hour before dawn, when at last they reach the foot of the mountain and begin to climb, the thing blossoms. The moment he touches the sacred rock, the coiled irritant strikes.
Memory again. Different. Older yet new. The event forgotten, erased from his consciousness. Born-reborn-exulting only now, answering a moment in time.
Tsi Rekh is a child. He is very young, a few years old. Can he speak yet? Barely. Can he understand? Yes. That is important.
Inside a tent. Whose? He can’t tell, because that is not important. Akshub is there, the witch seeming old even then.
She has always been old.
Two other adults are there. His parents, speaking with Akshub. Why her and not an elder of their own lodge? Her presence is its own answer. She is that powerful, often transcending the lines between lodges.
His parents’ attention goes back and forth between the witch and their son. He stands in the centre of the tent. Circles drawn in salt surround him. There are designs between the circles. The child does not know what they mean but they frighten him. The adult Tsi Rekh tries to read them in this new-old memory. They defy him. They keep shifting. They twist, they slither. They are serpents, and they are language. They are envenomed meaning.
‘Hail,’ Akshub is saying. ‘You are blessed among our people. You have found favour with the gods.’ She looks at Tsi Rekh. ‘He will be the passage. He will be the way.’
His parents laugh with pride. Their pride sounds like the squealing of rats.
‘Stand over him,’ Akshub instructs.
They take their places inside the circles. Facing each other with Tsi Rekh in between. He looks up at these giants, his mother and father. This is the first time the adult priest sees their faces. Two more of the faithful, bearing the scars and damage of worship.
Strangers. They mean nothing.
Yet they mean everything, because they are the instruments necessary to achieve his glory.
Looking down at him, still laughing.
Still squealing.
Akshub’s movements are a blur – graceful in their perfect brutality. His parents still stand but their throats are slashed wide by the old woman’s knife. Blood falls in torrents onto his upturned face. A cataract, a flood, a rising sea. He is drowning. There is no tent, no ground, no air, only the blood.
The blood and the circles.
And the old woman’s voice. ‘Listen,’ she hisses. ‘Lissssssten!’
The drowning child obeys. The echo speaks to him for the first time then. Into his ears comes a whisper. It is a name. The memory loses definition there. He cannot be told the name yet. But now he knows the nature of the revelation, and the name with the great hum.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm…
And then.
Now. Outside the memory. Climbing the mountain. The echo, the word, the name, so vast and terrible that minds cannot hold it, begins to take shape. After the hum that is the thunder of earth comes the choir of dead stars.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…
‘Light the torches,’ Tsi Rekh says.
It is done, and the torches are strapped to leather harnesses on the acolytes’ backs, to burn high above their heads. The worshippers can climb with both hands. So there is light now. Smoke, too, and a stench. The heads of the torches are wrapped in cloth dipped in human tallow.
As the climb beings, Ske Vris, the most promising of Tsi Rekh’s acolytes, stops, her hands frozen where they first touch the mountain.
‘I cannot,’ she says. She struggles, but a greater will holds her. ‘I am forbidden.’
Tsi Rekh nods and leaves her. It occurs to him that she is being spared. Sacrifice, then, is ahead. He has no fear that it will be his – the end of his path is still as distant as it is grand.
So he leads the climb up the steep face. There are many handholds. There are also many shadows. They cannot always be distinguished from one another. The mountain’s jaggedness exacts its tribute of pain. With every injury, the victims scream their gratitude to the gods. That there would be a price was a given. It would be blasphemous to wish things otherwise. Victory without sacrifice is meaningless.
The closer they come to the peak, the greater the agony. The handholds are the edges of blades. Blood is the key to elevation, and Tsi Rekh is bleeding too. Hands, arms, legs, all robed in crimson. He feels the honour of the pain. It spurs him to greater speed, to hurry to his appointment.
Almost at the end of the climb now. There is a wide ledge coming up and perhaps a route into the complexity of the peak, which appears to twist like a nautilus shell.
Beschak climbs to Tsi Rekh’s right, one respectful handhold behind. He has been Tsi Rekh’s chief acolyte for years. Akshub presented him to Tsi Rekh when the follower was a child.
‘The boy is important to you,’ she had said. ‘Prepare him. Make him ready for the moment.’
‘How will I know when it comes?’ Tsi Rekh asked.
‘He will know.’
Beschak grabs a spur of rock with his left hand. He hauls himself up. His feet lose their purchase. He slips. Clutches the spur hard. A blood-slicked palm slips.
Tsi Rekh stops to watch.
Beschak’s eyes shine in the light of his torch. He looks at Tsi Rekh. ‘Now?’ he asks.
Tsi Rekh says nothing. He waits to see.
The spur crumbles to dust, as if it had been nothing more than crusted sand. Beschak laughs and falls.
In Tsi Rekh’s ear, in his mind, in his soul, he hears the echo’s ecstatic Aaaaaaaaaaa…
And new echoes. Granted to him alone? He would think so. Ancient ones, so forgotten that they can no longer reach much beyond the mountain’s peak. Given strength at the moment of Beschak’s shattering.
Tsi Rekh pauses. These echoes are startling. He did not expect this.
Images. They must be of another place. This cannot be Davin.
No, no, there is certainty. This is Davin. Of another time, buried beneath millennia of savagery and blood.
Images of cities, of soaring structures, of proud light.
Tsi Rekh’s lips curl in hatred. He wants those towers brought low. So does someone else, the being to whom these memories and this hatred belong.
The echoes fade. That which is dead is less important than that which will die. There is work to be done.
A name to be spoken.
Tsi Rekh climbs again. He reaches the ledge. It is a path, sloping up and curving into the rock. It will lead him into the nautilus. He waits for his acolytes to gather behind him and then starts forward.
The path itself is a coil. The sides of the rock fissure are barely wide enough to permit passage. The light from the torches feels weak, as if the rock absorbs the shine. The pilgrims walk into the spiral of midnight. Then there is a sharp turn, and they are out. They stand in the interior of the peak. Perhaps the mountain was once a volcano. This might be a crater. If it is, then the volcano has been extinct for a very long time.
‘Put out the torches,’ Tsi Rekh says, obeying not an instinct but a command. He hears it in his head, and the voice belongs to Akshub. Another memory. She gave him the command forty years ago, then buried it.
The acolytes do as he says. The fires die but the light does not. There is a wash over this space. Grey of mould, green of rot and white of hate. It roils and shifts, it turns, it–
It looks. The light sees.
And it is bladed. A beam glances over the ground, sweeps over the pilgrims. One, Hath Khri, reaches up with her arms in ecstasy and the light cuts through them. She falls, blood spouting from stumps below the elbow. She gasps her praise to the gods.
Movement must be earned, Tsi Rekh thinks. It must be unders
tood as a gift. It must be presented as a form of worship.
Hath Khri turns toward him. She smiles before she dies, bleeding out onto the cold rock.
Like Beschak, this was her moment. All in the service of the path Tsi Rekh must walk.
Mmmmmmmmm…
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…
There are ruins everywhere. They are low, broken, vague. Impossible to tell what they had once been. Tsi Rekh sees the trace of walls, the gaps of doorways. Nothing else. Simply the ghosts of history, a phantasm of a time when the Davinites built something more substantial than yurts.
There are other echoes of this time, of course – the lodges themselves. And in the centre of the hollow peak rises the Lodge of Echoes, the greatest of them all. It is the source of the light. This light, Tsi Rekh realizes, is another manifestation of the echoes. If he had the skills, perhaps he would see more than the glow of thought’s decay. He is humbled by the revelation of how far he has yet to go.
The Lodge of Echoes is suspended above the ground by eight huge pillars. They are squat, wider than they are high, though they are five times taller than Tsi Rekh. The structure they support is vast, monolithic. Its side walls are vertical, smooth as glass, regular as iron, but they are stone. The four corners are turrets but the towers bend in at sharp angles to point towards the centre of the roof like clutching talons.
The front of the lodge is different. This wall is not smooth. It is a complex of whorls, depressions and protuberances. The glow dances over the shapes, revealing and concealing details, creating shadows and meanings that shift, slippery, into something new before they can be understood. The wall is disease. It is song. It is the echoes given shape in stone, and it is their medium. It is the agent of their transmission to the whole of Davin.
And inside? Inside is the origin of the echoes. Inside is Tsi Rekh’s quest. Inside lies his destiny.
Inside is what he must accomplish.
