by Sam Sykes
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For Dad, who thinks this is noble.
ACT ONE
WHERE DEAD MEN TREAD
PROLOGUE
The Seventy-Eighth Year
Rhuul Khaas
Man believes in nothing until he destroys it.
Among my colleagues and those alike in thought and prestige, during the conversation about the flaws of mortality—it is a lengthy conversation and the flaws are many—the subject of their seemingly inherent ingratitude continues to vex.
Show a man a book and teach him to read, he will continue to express himself by painting on the walls with feces. Show a man how to till his soil that he might grow more abundant crops, he will eat dirt to spite you. Show a man the face of heaven, he will pick up a sword and attempt to cut its eyes out.
Coarse, I know, but strive to understand our frustration.
We have danced around this subject in countless conversations across countless hours within countless days. So much that even our own very long lives seem wasted from all the time we’ve spent in deliberation. Yet it continues to plague us precisely because, with all the knowledge we have uncovered in those very long lives, the answer to mortality’s mistrust of us continues to elude.
Until now.
As with so many problems, speech proved inadequate for solving it. Only when I put ink to paper, as I do now, does it become clear. Nothing is truly real until it is written down.
Thus do I realize why it is mortality fears us.
A man—
Pardon. That must sound dreadfully narrow. It could easily be a woman, or a shict, or any of these creatures.
A mortal does not necessarily fear what he does not understand. Rather, a mortal fears that he is understood.
In his primitive mind, a darkness ahead is not an opportunity to learn, beckoning him to enter. When he gazes upon it, he does not see the unknowable. He sees—or thinks he sees—something within, staring out at him, understanding him, learning about him.
This thought, understandably, frightens him.
It is difficult for us to understand—or rather, for the others to understand, at least—for the collection and dispersal of knowledge remains our primary function. To understand and be understood, in our eyes, is the natural way of things. To the mortal, however, it is his greatest vulnerability, his greatest anxiety.
Yet also his greatest ecstasy.
For it is within this unknowing that he feels most comfortable with his gods. They remain so far away that he is insignificant to them and he takes solace in this, knowing that they understand him and, having not killed him yet, must love him. It is the vast gulf between his world and theirs that he creates a meaning to fill. It is in this great silence between them that he finds them comforting.
And there exists no doubt in my mind that, were the gods to open heaven and step down to stand before him, his first act would be to pick up a sword and try to kill them.
And that is why he resents us. We are too close for him to be unknown to us, yet too far to be able to be struck down. We are messengers, and our voices make his ears hurt. We are shepherds, and he has no wish to be herded. We are here and he cannot deny our existence, yet he cannot kill us and thus we are unreal.
Perhaps it sounds mad, but I find a certain strength in that philosophy.
The others, perhaps, view the mortals’ defiance as blasphemy. But I? I confess to a fascination with their logic. And the more I study it, the more I realize the wisdom in it.
In destroying, in hurting, in slaying, he understands. What takes us ages of deliberation to know, he knows in the instant he puts metal to it. He knows if it can be destroyed and what it will take to destroy it. He uses every part of his intellect in figuring out how to destroy it that it might not harm him, and, in doing so, he understands it. All of it.
Whatever it is. Be it construct or living matter, be it written word or speech, be it law or love or truth or… or…
I get ahead of myself. Oerboros and Kyrael often chastise me for this.
In my writing this down, it all seems so clear. Yet I know I could not show the others. They would think it madness, naturally. Or worse, seek to inform higher powers—distant though they may be. Yet someday I hope to refer to these notes and use them as the foundation for something greater. In this I hope to understand the mortal. In this I hope he understands me.
Perhaps it will hurt. But that may very well be the price of this knowledge.
Accept no truth that comes bloodlessly.
Adhere to no law that is not earned.
Trust no creation that you cannot destroy.
From the annals of His Word,
The First and Final Testament of He Who Held the Light,
Khoth-Kapira
ONE
PAPER MEN, FOLDED
When the pale light of dawn finally found Lenk, he was staring into the eyes of a dead man.
It was not a killer that he had studied for the past evening. The angles of the dead man’s brow, chin, and jaw were sharp, but they lacked the tension that belonged to men who killed for any other reason than a very good one. Or what they thought was a very good one.
Rather, in the scars on his face and the coldness of his eyes, Lenk saw a hard man. Not a desperate criminal; here was a man who had drawn steel enough times that he had simply forgotten why he’d started. Or even when he had ever begun.
Granted, it had been days since Lenk had seen a bath—or a stream or a mirror—but he had to admire the detail of the man. It was a rather good likeness of himself, he thought.
The words dead or alive framing his face, however, were new.
The sound of sloshing water caught his ear. He crawled quietly to the slatted window of his room and peered out. Farmers, their Djaalic skin made darker by years of honest labor, were just now emerging from their huts. They rolled up their breeches, picked up their tools, and waded into the murk of their rice paddies.
The Green Belt, as it was known, was home to such people. So named for its position beneath the city, the narrow valley had proven the only place in the region capable of sustaining agriculture. In years past, it had fed Cier’Djaal. Now it made rice to sell. But year in and year out, the farmers had remained the same. Good folk, honest and hard.
How many of them had seen a wanted poster like the one in his hands? How many of them knew his face belonged to the dead man called “the assassin of Cier’Djaal”?
How many of them, he wondered, had relatives back in a city in which he had left behind so many corpses?
Pain shot through his stiff muscles. These weren’t the thoughts of an innocent man, he knew. But even the most devout priest, after six days in a tiny room with no contact from anyone, would start to wonder what he’d done to deserve such isolation.
Lenk felt tempted to go out there, into the mucky fields, and talk to the first farmer he saw. He’d tell them who he was, what he had done, all the people he had killed—or supposedly killed—and simply wait for their response. Whatever happened next would have to be better than the is
olated waiting, the paranoia, the wondering.
He told himself this.
Yet when one of the farmers glanced his way, toward his tiny room, he ducked away from the window and let the slats fall shut, plunging the room back into darkness.
He took a deep breath, rose to his feet. He walked to the single door and stared, for the fiftieth time that morning, at its handle. He hesitated to call his quarters a cell—he could leave anytime he wanted, assuming he was willing to face the consequences alone.
And for a man, even an innocent one, who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, there were many.
True, he had been there when the riot had been touched off. True, he had climbed over the dead bodies to escape the carnage. True, he had fled the city just as riot became war and war became massacre. True, the circumstances under which this had all happened, it could be said, did not make him seem innocent.
But he was.
He told himself this.
And, for the fiftieth time that morning, he laid a hand on the door’s handle.
“I wouldn’t.”
A shudder ran down his spine at the sound of the voice. Lenk expected he should have been used to it by now, considering how often he heard it.
Yet when he turned around and saw Mocca standing there, he forgave himself for his alarm.
He merely resigned himself to the ire he felt at the sudden appearance of the man in white—for it was still less disturbing to think of him as a man.
“Six days,” Lenk said. The sound of his own voice was a rasping, grating thing to his ears. “Six days I’ve watched fires burn over the city walls. Six days I’ve watched people carrying bodies out on the road. Six days of waiting with stale bread and drifting cinders and distant screams. Six days…” His eyes drifted back to the door. “And I have heard nothing from Kataria.”
And there, leaning against the wall as though it had been waiting all this time for him to arrive at this conclusion, was the sword.
“I’m not going to survive a seventh,” he said, reaching for the weapon.
“What, pray, do you expect to do?”
Lenk was so accustomed to Mocca’s voice that he didn’t even need to turn around to know he was wearing that half-delighted, half-arrogant quirked eyebrow. As though he knew something Lenk didn’t and was just waiting for the young man to stumble around long enough to be amusing before telling him. Lenk resolved not to give him the satisfaction.
“There’s a lot you can do with a sword, even without knowing what you’re doing,” Lenk replied. “That’s how I got here.”
“A point,” Mocca replied. “Rather, what do you expect has happened to her?”
At this, Lenk cast a glare over his shoulder. “Maybe she was captured. Killed. Trampled to death, speared, gored, branded, whipped, burned, I don’t fucking know. There’s a war going on not five miles away from here. If I went through every possibility I’d be here all fucking day.”
“Possibilities are easy to live with,” Mocca replied. “They’re distant things, cold breezes on warm days. Certainties are harder.” Beneath shadows cast by his white hood, his smile looked sinister. “Certainties crush people.”
“Look, I know being able to appear wherever and whenever you want permits you a certain degree of crypticism, but if you could kindly get to the point.”
“It’s possible she has been captured. It’s possible she has been killed.” Mocca shrugged. “There are a lot of people out there living with the possibility they might die and the certainty that you”—he pointed a finger at Lenk—“are to blame for it. Thus I can say with certainty that they will flay you alive for the possibility that they might not have to live with that fear.”
If there was anything more aggravating than a bastard who could appear out of thin air, it was a bastard who could appear out of thin air and who insisted on always being right.
And because Mocca was that kind of bastard, Lenk took a moment to draw in a deep breath before letting the blade slide out of his hand and clatter to the floor.
Mocca was right.
That thought settled upon Lenk’s shoulders, bore him to the ground as he pressed his back against the door and slid down to the floor. A shot of pain flared up in his side in protest. His fingers brushed against his tunic; beneath the cloth and the dressing beneath it, the wound felt tender.
Six days.
That number seemed real only when he felt the pain. Because only when he felt the pain could he remember how it had all happened.
Two powers had sat down in Cier’Djaal with the intention of making peace. It didn’t matter that both had brought their armies with them: the black-armored, fanatic legions of the Karnerian Empire and the reckless, beast-riding louts of the Kingdom of Saine. The people of Cier’Djaal naïvely believed that the negotiations would prevent their homes from becoming battlefronts.
And they just might have, had he not been there.
Lenk wanted to say it was just bad luck that had brought him to the window overlooking that meeting. He wanted to say that it was an elaborate series of circumstances that had made it look as if he had shot the bolt that had killed the negotiator and caused the two armies to accuse each other of having him do it. He wanted to rail against the gods who had put him there, bleeding from a wound as the city and his life fell apart around him.
But six days was a long time. Long enough for him to realize that there was no such thing as luck, nor circumstance, nor even gods so petty. There were only moments in which men like him had a choice to put down the blade and walk away or not.
He glanced sidelong at his sword.
Sometimes those moments lasted longer than six days.
“If you’re bored,” Mocca suggested with a tone that might have sounded sympathetic coming from someone less horrifyingly arrogant, “we could always return to our last discussion. I hope you’ve been giving some thought to my proposal.”
“I’m not bored.” Lenk leapt to his feet, ignored the pain, and strode toward Mocca. “I’m impotent.”
Without even looking up, he walked straight into Mocca. And without even blinking, he walked straight through Mocca. The man’s entire body shimmered, his white robes quavering like water that had been struck by a stone. When it resettled and he was whole again, his dark brows knitted in disapproval.
“You know I hate it when you do that,” Mocca said.
“I don’t know anything.” Lenk whirled on him, deliberately walking through him once more. “I don’t know how this all happened. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where Kataria is. I don’t know if she’s coming back.”
He turned to walk back through Mocca, but halted. He regarded the man—even though he knew Mocca was definitely not a man—through narrowed eyes.
“And I don’t know why you’re still here or even what kind of crime against heaven you are.”
Any man would be angry at those words, and Lenk desperately hoped that Mocca would be furious. He searched the man’s face for it: a scowl, a baring of teeth, a curse boiling behind his mouth. Anger would be something human, something understandable.
But it was a calm face that stared back at Lenk, a smile tugging at the corners of slender lips.
Mocca was not angry.
Mocca was never angry.
And Lenk suddenly found himself staring at the door again. But even if he could escape Mocca’s stare, he could not escape his voice. It was calm. It was confident. It was so very cold.
“You know who I am,” Mocca said. “You know my name.”
“Names,” Lenk replied without looking up. “Names. You have so gods-damned many.” He threw his hands up, tossing each one into the air. “God-King, Flesh-Shaper, Heretic, Murderer, Slaver.” He paused before spitting the last one: “Demon.”
He turned to face Mocca. And he saw it. One last ripple across the water, one more twitch of the lip, one final flash of light behind eyes that became all the darker for its absence.
“One more,” Mocc
a said softly.
Lenk opened his mouth. Silence.
“Say it.”
“Khoth-Kapira.”
The name fell from Lenk’s mouth. And in the deafening silence that followed in its wake, Mocca changed. His body was firmer, his phantom flesh was more solid, and his smile was something altogether more sinister.
“Before I was sent to hell,” he whispered, “that name burst from every mortal mouth from where we stand to where the sun rises. God-King, Flesh-Shaper, all those other titles were merely words. My name… was heavy with meaning. My name built cities. My name united people. My name”—his smile grew broader—“was everything.”
Demons, unfathomable though legends portrayed them as being, were not horrifyingly complex. Possessed though they once had been of heavenly grace, they were creatures of straightforwardly mortal ambition. They plotted, true. They schemed, yes. But above all else, they wanted. They craved.
And Mocca’s craving was etched across his face in his smile.
“No,” Lenk said.
“Just listen.”
“No.”
“What have you got to lose?”
“To a demon?” Lenk laughed, a shrieking, breathless sound. “Every—”
“No,” Mocca interjected. “Do not finish that word. Do not finish that thought if you can help it.” He pointed to the slatted window and the world beyond it. “That city, and any life you hoped to find in it, is dead. You stand in this room, alone, pining after a woman who may not even be alive. You have had six days to come to this fact, but out of respect for you, I shall make it perfectly clear.”
Lenk blinked. When he opened his eyes, Mocca stood but a hairbreadth away. And with a breathless voice, he spoke.
“You do not stand to lose everything. You had precious little on this miserable little stain of creation to take and it has all gone. All you are left with is ash and darkness and thousands of people who want you dead if it’ll distract them from the truth.”
“Demons don’t know truth. Demons lie.”
