by Dylan Doose
“I suffer from illness. My line of work is physical—”
“I was not condemning you, doctor. But the fact remains that your addictions killed you, stopped your heart dead. Conveniently for you, and for my goals, I possess certain… abilities.”
“Abilities?” Gaige asked, already suspecting the answer, one he was quite certain he would not like. Of course, dead was worse than displeased, so he made no complaint.
“Abilities of a magical nature. I’ve dabbled in necromancy. Not much, I do admit, and that is why we don’t have much time.”
Horror rained down on the doctor then. He was… the reanimated dead. Not a ghoul that might be cured from its cursed state. No, he was a transient ghost that would soon fade. When the spell wore off, he would return to a decomposing corpse.
“If you possess such power, why send me to that graveyard this night? Why not attend to the task yourself? And why make me this… this…”
“Walking corpse?”
Gaige glared at him.
The lord regent glanced back over his shoulder and laughed. “As I said, doctor, I only dabble in necromancy. You don’t have long, not in this world. I made you this way because I need you still. You are of no use to me dead. As to your other questions, the answers will do you no good now.”
Briefly did Gaige consider sitting back down, refusing to follow, refusing to play the lord regent’s game. But he had no wish to be a dead man, or rather, a more dead man. And he had every wish to discover this beyond the lord regent had promised him as his prize.
He said so, and the lord regent replied, “Then by all means, follow me.”
Follow Gaige did, and he noticed that for a dead man he was particularly spry.
They walked some distance until they reached a vast room, twice the size of the dining room, with a high-domed ceiling. The room was dominated by pillars of differing heights, and on each was displayed an artifact such as Gaige had never even imagined. So much knowledge, all in one place. Ancient stones and pieces of magnificent armor, and blades marked with symbols of some unknown time.
“From the catacombs beneath Coldcreek,” the lord regent offered. “The catacombs of lost knowledge.”
Gaige felt a stirring within himself, an uncontrollable urge to reach out and touch one. He spun a full circle, wanting to touch them all, each one giving off a unique sensation of temptation. And so he did: he touched the closest artifact, the hilt of a curved black sword crafted of a substance not unlike obsidian.
When his fingertips rested on the pommel, his vision blackened for an instant, and when it returned he was with the lord regent no longer.
In his hand was the obsidian sword, and he was standing in a stone hallway, statues of eyeless, naked swordsmen every twenty feet. Behind him stood men in black armor. To his right, men in black armor, and more to his left. A sound came from down the hall, a hall so deep that the end could not be seen. There was only blackness. From the blackness emerged silver-furred shapes, torches in clawed bestial hands, fangs and red eyes burning in the darkness.
The men behind Gaige roared cries of battle in an ancient tongue, and Gaige raised the black sword. In the same tongue as the warriors at his back, Gaige roared, “Slaughter the beasts.”
With a cry, Gaige stumbled against the pillar and dropped the sword with a clatter. The stone hallway was gone. No silver-furred beasts charged. No warriors stood at his back.
“Careful, doctor,” the lord regent warned. “That is not where I’m trying to send you.”
Gaige stared incredulously at the lord regent, then back at the sword. This had to be a dream, all this. It all defied logic, defied reason. But what he had just seen had been real; he could still feel the heat, the fear, the fury of the men behind him. He could hear the sound of the beasts as they came forth.
“Explain. Explain everything. My one purpose is to gain knowledge. To understand. And right now, I understand nothing.”
“Why must you understand?” the lord regent asked.
“My life. My suffering. Everyone’s suffering,” Gaige snarled. “I need answers to fix it. Don’t you see? Our world, our broken world… I need the answers.”
“Scientific answers.”
“There are no other kind.”
“And yet here you stand,” the lord regent said. “A dead man walking. A dead man rapidly running out of time. So I ask, doctor, what will it be? Answers, or a quest undertaken on faith?”
Gaige stared at him, everything he believed, everything he knew screaming for answers. And yet… “The quest,” he said.
The lord regent nodded. “Take off your mask,” he said. “I see you, Gaige. You have no need to hide anymore.”
Gaige stared at him through the eyeholes, as he had stared at the world from behind this wall for so many years now. And then he reached up and undid the clasp.
“Hello,” said the lord regent with a smile. And then, “Stay close.” For the rest of the way through the massive hall, Gaige kept his eyes focused on the lord regent’s coat, forcing himself to ignore the siren’s song of the artifacts.
They reached a bookshelf that was two stories high, and as long as a house. The lord regent removed a volume—The Indisputable Science of Goodness by Darcy Weaver—replaced it with another tome, and then took out three volumes to the right of Weaver’s book, and moved them to different locations on the shelf. It slid open, revealing a doorway and a steep staircase heading down.
“Steel yourself, doctor, and open your mind. Things are only going to get stranger from here.” The lord regent cast a flame into his palm. Gaige had seen sorcery firsthand before, but he had seen it done with a catalyst and not with such incredible ease.
“Do you have a hidden catalyst? What spell did you invoke? Or is it a trick? Do you have manganese or phosphorous hidden in your sleeve?”
“So many questions, doctor. What happened to the quest on faith?” The lord regent stared hard at him.
Gaige lifted a hand to adjust his mask, only to find his face bare. There was nowhere to hide.
“My flame feeds from the science of sorcery,” the lord regent said and laughed.
And Gaige laughed with him. He decided that, dream or reality, he would find out was going on soon enough. So he followed the red coat with its embroidered wolves and ravens deeper into the ground. They reached a lift made of wood and iron supports. The lord regent gestured Gaige inside and followed, then pulled a lever and the lift began its descent.
When they reached the bottom, Gaige recognized the design of the hall immediately. The stones and the statues: it was the place he had just seen when he touched the pommel of that sword. The place where he had stood at the head of an army and roared for them to go into battle. No dream. He had stood here. And that could have no explanation or answer.
“These are the Catacombs of Time, doctor. In these tunnels lived the ones before. They stretch miles in all directions. I have been here for forty years, researching, exploring, and still I have seen only a small part of the whole.”
Gaige thought the lord regent looked no more than thirty, so he supposed some of those forty years had been spent perfecting his sorcery.
“Still I have not found all their secrets, likely not even a tenth.” The lord regent extended his arms up, and the torches on the walls illuminated. The walls were marked, scrawled with chalk markings, stark white on black. Mathematical equations, alchemical recipes, Brynthian and Fracian scrawlings. Some of the words were even Romarian; more still were alphabets unrecognizable to Gaige.
“In these halls lived an ancient race,” said the lord regent. “A race that could cast themselves through time. Sorcery, or science?”
“A bit of both.” Gaige smiled a little. The tiny part of him that wanted to argue, to insist that no one could travel through time, was squelched by the part of him that believed, that knew.
They continued walking, and the lord regent gave brief explanations of the symbols on the walls, all his work. Gaige couldn�
��t stop his questions, and some the lord regent even answered. They walked for some time until they reached a crossroads, a tall atrium with a pentagram in the center of the floor. Each triangle of the star was filled with an equation, and in the center of the symbol rested an iron helmet—old, but not anywhere as close to ancient as the artifacts in the hallway with the pillars. The helm had two spiked horns that sprouted horizontally from each side. The eyeholes were circular, similar to those of Gaige’s mask.
In front of the helmet was a purple gemstone attached to a necklace. Gaige leaned in and stared at the stone. A maelstrom churned in the center, dark, foreboding, contained by the gem’s shell. It called to him, pulled at him not unlike the obsidian sword, but he felt it even deeper in his unbeating heart, as if he knew it, had once owned it, though he knew for certain he had never seen it before. He reached for it.
The lord regent jerked him back.
Gaige took a deep breath. “What am I doing here?” he asked, his voice low, his gaze locked on the stone. He didn’t expect the lord regent to answer with truth, and was startled when he did.
“I am far more and far less than the man you see before you. There are powers beyond me, beyond the seekers, beyond the majesty of Brynth.” He called up balls of flame in his hands, and the flames spread and grew, licking at his forearms, leaving untouched skin behind. “This is how I began,” he said, and the flames snuffed. He gestured at the pentagram. “And this is how you begin, my friend.”
“We are friends?” Gaige asked.
“We will be.” The lord regent paused. “And we were.”
Gaige glanced at the pentagram again, a sliver of premonition weaving through him. “Any other friends I have that I don’t know about yet?”
“The girl… the Lycan you saved. And two men, Theron Ward and Kendrick Solomon Kelmoor, also called Kendrick the Cold, though he is far from that.”
“Kendrick the Cold? Named after the infamous butcher of Kallibar from three hundred years ago? What parent would saddle their child with such a moniker?”
“You are not looking for someone named after him. You are looking for him. Kendrick. And Theron. And me. My younger self.”
Gaige waited for the surprise, the shock, the denial that should come at such an assertion. There was none. There was only acknowledgment of the truth. It defied logic. It defied science. It even defied sorcery. And yet he did not doubt the lord regent’s words.
“You don’t look surprised.”
“Why should I be surprised? You’re sending a dead man you reanimated at your dining room table to find two men who died three centuries ago and a third man who never died and stands before me now. What could make more sense?”
The lord regent threw back his head and laughed.
“Why do you not go to do this yourself?” Gaige asked.
“There are many reasons, but I will explain the ones your mind will allow you to understand. I cannot risk encountering my younger self. And more than that, if I carry myself three centuries into the past, to a time where I was young and green, my current level of power will be recognized by our enemies. They will be alerted. They will move too quickly.”
“Our enemies?”
“Leviathan,” said the lord regent. “A name you will come to know.”
Gaige nodded. “If I find them… these friends I do not know—”
“When you find them,” the lord regent corrected.
“When I find them,” Gaige said, “how do I convince them that what I say is true? How do I convince them that I know you?”
“Tell Theron that I killed my first rat in the dungeons beneath Norburg and followed behind him as he dragged Ken on a sledge toward Wardbrook. Tell Ken that his whole life he meant good, and that does count. It counts. Love matters. Tell them both that my first and only love had hair of spun gold and enough skill and muscle to land any soldier on his back. Tell them that. They will believe you.”
The lord regent held his arm out toward the pentagram in invitation, and from his belt he drew a long knife of gleaming gold and steel, the hilt engraved with intricate runes.
A preternatural calm settled over him as Gaige stepped into the pentagram, one foot on either side of the helmet that sat on the ground. As he moved, he felt no pain, and he could not say he missed his ruined, twisted limb. Perhaps being dead was not so bad after all.
“Pick up the necklace,” the lord regent said, gesturing with the tip of the dagger. “It will be your only way back to the here and now in the catacombs of time.”
Gaige did as he instructed, again feeling the pull of the gem. He slid the thick chain over his neck, the gem hanging at his sternum. The storm within the amethyst depths swirled and roiled.
The lord regent held out his arm and made a shallow cut across his palm, then turned his hand as he pumped his fist so his blood fell drop by drop onto the helmet. He spoke in tongues. Gaige thought that if he still possessed a heart that could beat, it would be slamming against his ribs right now. A purple mist began to rise from the chalk lines of the pentagram. The lord regent dropped to kneel and slammed his bleeding palm to the ground directly before the helmet. The purple mist converged above him and a black orb hovered in the air above, shiny and sleek.
Turning. Turning.
Images began to take form in the center of the orb. A forest in late spring. A waterfall. An unkindness of ravens in a stark, dead tree.
The orb expanded and Gaige could not look away. There was fear, yes. But what was fear to a dead man? Excitement surged. Here was what he had searched for his entire life. Here were the answers of the beyond.
Noise accosted him, the rushing water cascading over rock, tumbling to the river below so loud he could hear nothing else.
The image of the lord regent was fading.
“Repeat their names.” The lord regent’s voice was faint and far away.
“Theron Ward,” Gaige yelled. “Kendrick Solomon Kelmoor.” Then: “Your name? I need your name.”
The roar was so loud now that Gaige thought his ears bled.
He heard nothing, and then, so faint he thought the voice came from a million miles away: “I am Aldous Weaver.”
But somehow, he already knew that, before he heard the words.
THE END
The Pyres
Prologue
The Ascent
Dammar’s fingertips bled as he pulled himself from one jagged rock to the next. Each gasping breath forced his cracked ribs to expand and collapse, accompanied by a thousand thin nails knocking into his sides.
Rage lit fire beneath his naked heels, pushing him to climb higher, pushing him to reach the top of the Banished Mountain, to reach his destiny, the seed of his vengeance.
What they did to you, sweet Selkirk…
He stretched one hand up after the next until he reached the summit.
He had no flag to plant; he took not a moment to rejoice in the accomplishment. Dammar only lay on his back, the icy wind howling around him, the purple sky close enough to touch. He forced himself to his knees and then to his feet and he walked toward the home of an old god, the Black Cathedral.
Thirteen spear-like towers stabbed the sky, built of stones the gray-black of broken souls. The buttresses extended outward like the legs of a colossal stone arachnid.
The wind howled through the buttresses with the sorrowful moan of the endless dead. It swooned inward and gathered before the doors. Dust and the smallest of stones whirled on the ground, and as the gust blew into Dammar, it said, “Welcome, child…come forth,” as it passed.
And so he did, and with every step forward, the rage grew and he thought of the pyres.
When he stood before the door—two slabs of slate framed by jagged, shimmering black stones carved like teeth so that the portcullis looked like a nightmarish maw—he placed a trembling, bloody hand upon it and…
Nothing.
He pushed.
Nothing.
He lost track of time as he pushed and
beat at the door.
He was going to die up there. For nothing. He would die with the image of the pyres, the flames…the image of blood running, boiling.
Dammar shivered and pressed his back into the doors as he slid down to the ground, and through eyes blurred with tears he looked back at the Basilica, the place he had fled.
A straight two-day run through dark forest lay between him and that grand white structure, but he could see it from this height, a construct as large as the Black Cathedral, but made instead of white stone.
Dammar blinked, and warm tears ran down his cheeks.
He had sworn to never cry again, so he hit himself hard in the face, closed fist and all. Then he screamed at the top of his lungs and the pain from his cracked ribs reached its pinnacle, becoming so intense Dammar’s vision blurred. He hit himself again and then once more, until warm blood mingled with warm tears and dripped off his chin.
He had sworn to never cry again and he had sworn to see that golden dome atop the Basilica’s white tower shatter, and the white city and walls surrounding it crumble to dust.
It was his mother’s stories that had sent him to the top of this mountain. Her face was long forgotten, but he remembered her words and her voice. She had been dead for more than half Dammar’s short life. Even still, he missed her horribly, her and her stories of the old god, the one who loved his people before the followers of the Luminescent hacked him down and locked him away, the god he sought.
All around him were the maddening whispers of the Black Cathedral’s doors. Welcome child…welcome…child…chilllld…come inside…welcome…come into the dark.
“I am here!” he cried out, leaping to his feet and hammering a fist against the slate. And still the doors did not open. “I am here! I am Dammar, your namesake, named by my mother in your honor, in your memory. I come to you because I have no one else. I am yours.”
He pressed both bloody hands to the slate and slid to his knees, leaving two hand-sized streaks of blood as he went.
