by Sam Sykes
And, for a reason even he didn’t understand, all he could do was laugh.
Too perfect, isn’t it? he asked himself. The Venarium will be after you now. You’ve killed so many. Everything’s gone to shit in a single day. It can’t just be coincidence, can it? He looked up to the ceiling. A skylight beamed in the outside world, still blue and bright. Maybe you’d better start believing in gods, old man.
That was not the right reaction, he knew. He should be planning his next move, or his escape, or, barring either of those, running around in circles and screaming.
But there was nothing left in him for schemes and panic. All that remained inside him was in his feet, forcing him to trudge wearily out of the room, down the stairs, and out the door of Mejina’s household.
A ringing in his ears grew louder.
But he was used to it by now.
He was greeted by a red sky and the scent of rot. The people lay in rivers of flesh and bone, of blood and vomit, their bodies intertwined in knots of limbs and their eyes bulging from their sockets and staring glassily at the sky overhead. Buzzards and seagulls and birds of all kinds, shrieking with delight at the abundance, feasted on their carcasses, glaring up at Dreadaeleon with indignation, as though he were intruding on their meal.
Puddles of red-tinged vomit squished beneath his shoes.
His head swam on the aroma of death.
The dead reached out in final spasms before the meat was wrenched from their bones by beaks.
And Dreadaeleon, for his part, simply kept walking.
TWENTY-TWO
AN EMPTY SKY, SPRAWLING WIDE
Like many adventurers, Lenk worshipped Khetashe, the Wanderer.
Known derisively to some faiths as the God without Altars, Khetashe was popular primarily with vagabonds, vagrants, and other misplaced. Khetashean doctrine, sparse as it was, suggested that the god had abandoned his place in heaven to go searching for something greater on earth. Because of this, he was a deity understandably scorned by the followers of more rooted faiths.
How, they asked, could a god who had removed himself from heaven possibly look over his flock? How, they asked, could any sane individual follow a deity who wasn’t looking out for them?
Reasonable questions.
But there were aspects of the faith that Lenk found soothing. The idea of a god who had his own agenda was one he found more digestible than most faiths. Other gods had lengthy diatribes justifying their authority. Khetashe got right to the point.
And so, when other gods sent their omens in vague, easily misinterpreted gestures, Khetashe more or less smacked his followers right upside their fucking heads.
And that, Lenk knew, was why he was staring at an empty patch of sand where Kataria had once lain.
“Not much more to say beyond that, is there?”
Mocca, apparently, agreed with Khetashe’s omen.
The man in white stood beside Lenk, his figure hazy and insubstantial like the smoke from the dying campfire in the morning light. His hands were folded behind his back as he stared down at that same spot of earth.
“The appeal of mortality has long been perception,” Mocca sighed. “Those possessed of ages infinite speak haughtily of seeing the greater scheme in these things. But there is something beautiful in the primitive, animal whimsy of a mortal’s desires, don’t you think?”
He looked to Lenk, who did not look back.
“For what it’s worth, though, I am sorry.”
Lenk said nothing. Not that there weren’t things he wanted to say. He wanted to curse, to scream, to ask why, to call her a vile name just on the off chance it might make him feel a little bit better. But at that moment, breath seemed a precious thing he could not waste.
Kataria was gone.
And he was alone.
The dawn felt cold. And he needed to move. He spun on his heels, stalked toward the pile in which he had left his sword and what meager supplies he had scavenged, and began to shove the latter into a dirty satchel.
“You’ve not even had breakfast,” Mocca said, following. “Are we leaving so soon?”
“We are,” Lenk replied. He counted his rations: just a few stale chunks of bread and a couple of strips of dried meat that had survived in a crate. It’d have to last.
“I suppose I can understand the desire to get as far away from this spot as possible,” Mocca said. “But take care. The Forbidden East lies before you and the way forward is—”
“Not going to the Forbidden East.”
“What?” A note of irritation, singular and iron, crept into Mocca’s voice.
“Nothing left for me out here,” Lenk replied. He plucked up the satchel, secured it to his belt. “Mission failure. Quest abandoned. Whatever the fuck you want to call it. Time to get out.”
He started stalking off, following westward the ridge overlooking the Gullet. The river wended back to civilization. He could follow it. Food would be more plentiful around water, he reasoned.
Mocca suddenly appeared at the corner of his right eye. “Do you not owe a service to the fasha who aided you?”
“You yourself said he was crazy.” Lenk swatted at Mocca, as though he were another puff of smoke he could brush away.
The man in white merely appeared at Lenk’s left, quicker than he could blink. “I never questioned his source, merely his interpretation. There are answers that lie in the Forbidden East.”
“Why do you care?” Lenk demanded, glaring at him. “You know why I was sent here, right?”
“To find the Library of the Learned,” Mocca said.
“To destroy you,” Lenk shot back. “To find something to kill you. The fact that you’re pushing me toward it regardless suggests to me that either you think there’s nothing out there that can kill you or that something there can help you. Either way, going would be a fucking waste of time.”
“Sheffu, dramatic as he was, sent you here for answers,” Mocca replied. “And in the Library of the Learned, there are answers to questions that I need answered, as well.”
“Answers to questions I never asked,” Lenk said, shrugging him off. “Answers that don’t concern me.”
He continued stalking on and, in the moments when he heard nothing but sand crunching beneath his feet, he expected that Mocca had abandoned him. That impression lasted only another three paces.
When he looked up, the man in white stood before him, the haziness of his figure banished and replaced by something that looked all too real. Mocca’s eyes burned, alive with something terribly old that had seen things not intended for eyes mortal or otherwise. And when he spoke, the man’s voice was a pit that swallowed the sound of wind and earth.
“Understand that, while my affections for mortal shortsightedness were genuine, I remain unconvinced of the depth of their wisdom.” His hands fell at his sides. “There is more at stake here than you realize, Lenk, and the thread of your life crosses those of others in ways that would make your head hurt to know.”
Lenk met Mocca’s glare with one of his own, yet even in his skull it felt impotent and weak in comparison. The man was spewing cryptic gibberish, he told himself, in a bid to stall him.
He’s a vision, he told himself. A ghost. Nothing more. Just walk through him.
His body did not seem to believe him. His legs felt numb, his blood ran cold beneath Mocca’s gaze.
The man in white opened his mouth and breathed out darkness. The world around Lenk grew dark and large. Shadows stretched from every corner of the earth to consume the sun and wind. Even the smallest scrub bush seemed to loom over him. The empty desert became a yawning void, a blackness that stretched for eternity and left no room in the world for anything but him, a frail mortal, and the God-King looming before him.
“You cling to life with such ferocity as to strangle it, marveling with dread at the rotting corpses of your fathers for fear that it will one day be you. You cannot see beyond the blood painting your own hands, even as you bleed out upon the cold ground.�
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Mocca’s voice grew. Into something old. Into something deep. A stale wind coursing through the deeps of a cavern long quiet, with only dust and bone to bear witness.
“You have not seen what I have seen, the dreams that haunt me in the dark place I am shackled in, the torments of a world that could be if I could but raise a single finger.”
He spread his arms out wide, as if to embrace all of creation. And beneath him the earth rumbled as if it would rise so he could do just that.
“Let me show you, Lenk.”
The earth erupted as a great spire burst from the sand, an obelisk carved of pure obsidian thrusting high into a sunless sky. Lenk fell to the ground as the earth split and cracked and more rose. Buildings of obsidian and marble, homes carved from perfect faces of stone, aqueducts running a spider’s web over a skyline, domed libraries with banners flowing and torches lit, temples crowned with the statues of learned men and women.
In the span of an ancient breath, a city of white and black, of day and night, had grown around him.
Where there had been only coarse sand beneath his feet, a polished street now loomed. He leaned down, stared into the stone, and saw his reflection. But before he could even state breathlessly his astonishment, he saw another reflection, and another, and another.
He looked up and saw them. Tulwar and humans, shicts and couthi, some races he had never even seen before, all walking alongside each other. Some shoulder to shoulder, some hand in hand, some haggling, some embracing, some laughing and some arguing. People. Everywhere. This was their city.
This was their home.
“What is this?” he whispered. “A vision?”
A woman passed him by, toting a burden of baskets filled with vegetables. She stumbled upon a ledge, dropped her load. Instinctively he moved to help her pick it up, but found his hands passed through it entirely.
“A dream,” a voice replied. Mocca stood at the center of the road, eyes again bright, voice again clear. “Or a memory. Old as I am, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.”
“A memory of what?”
“What I beheld, what I wrought,” Mocca said. He reached out, touched a passing tulwar on the shoulder. The tulwar acknowledged his touch, met it with a smile. “What is known as the Forbidden East today, Rhuul Khaas on the lips of the fearful and ignorant, was once my home. And I shared it willingly.”
“These people, they all lived here?”
“Lived, worked, died. All under my eyes.”
Lenk looked to the man in white, who stood stark and pristine even among the shadows of this memory. “For your glory?”
Mocca met his stare evenly. “For their safety. They required my guidance, my knowledge, my wisdom. What they asked for, I gave. What they needed, I had.”
“For what? What did you gain?”
“Do you not believe that I would do it simply because it was the right thing to do?”
“I believe you are in hell for a reason.”
Mocca frowned at this before looking back over the city—his city. “It was the edict of the gods that we Aeons, their servants and messengers, be cast into that dark place for our hubris in daring to assert control over the mortal realms. And it was mortals who struck us down. Perhaps rightly so. We craved to control them.”
“To know their fear.”
“To know their love.” Mocca sighed, turned back to Lenk. “We, the Aeons, were always cursed to live between heaven and earth. Too godly to live alongside mortality, yet forever wishing we could be as they and share our own fears, our own loves. To a mortal the two are so very close. And the Aeons could not tell the difference, either.
“Perhaps the other Aeons saw it differently—Avictus, Ulbecetonth, Oerboros—but to me, worship was as close as I would ever get to that need. There is a… a certain hollowness that is made full from being needed, wanted. To be the only one who could offer comfort, solace, judgment, was a sensation I craved. Perhaps to the point where I simply could not bear to let it go.”
Mocca’s sigh was immense, a wind that spread through the city and carried the people with it. They vanished into dust, their smiles and tears turned to tiny motes that disappeared into the endless shadow. Lenk watched them disappear, heard his own voice echo through the streets.
“And why do you tell me this?” Lenk asked. “For pity?”
“Would that be so bad?” Mocca asked, offering a weak smile. “Would you yourself turn down a bit of pity right now, empty and alone as we both are?” He waved a hand. “I merely mean to remind you, Lenk, of what is at stake. Not a girl, no matter how much you love her, but the future.
“Sheffu spoke rightly. I was called God-King, Shaper of Flesh, all those titles. I ruled an empire vast as the sun could stretch. But empire itself is a force of creation and it was my creation that brought people together. Tulwar and shicts, humans and couthi, all mortal races together.”
“And you expect me to help you?”
“I expect you to do what you will regardless,” Mocca said. “But you will see so much in the Library of the Learned. And so much of it, I want you to see. You are the one who hears me, Lenk. You are the one I speak to. You are the one I wish to see enter my world.
“I implore you to think beyond your heartache and your agony. Think of the city you left behind, the streets soaked in blood as men kneel in gore and praise gods above for giving them this hell.” He looked intently at Lenk. “And think of what good I could do.”
Lenk met his gaze for a long time and slowly let out a breath. And with it, the city vanished. Its bricks became dust, its spires became shadows, its streets became sand. The sun emerged and chased the phantoms of civilization away like a bad dream.
But it had not been a dream.
Despite the sweat dripping down his temples, he could feel the chill of the sunless world. Despite the roar of the Lyre River from the canyon beyond, he could hear the laughter of the people. Despite there being nothing but scrubgrass and sand for miles around, he could remember temples and towers. It had not been a dream. It had not been a memory.
Just as Mocca said.
The man in white, too, was gone. Left behind was nothing more than an empty patch of sand and a few words that had never been spoken, left scrawled on Lenk’s memory.
“All you need to do,” they whispered, “is stand aside.”
Lenk stood for a moment, staring at that empty patch of sand, letting those words echo through his mind. Before he drew in a long, slow breath and started walking.
East.
A man wiser than he could have said why. Perhaps he realized, in that vision, that it would be impossible to head back downriver given how far they had come. Perhaps he felt the need to keep going, to no longer look over his shoulder for a place where comforts like Kataria were.
But in some part of him, somewhere dark and deep, he could still feel the phantom city around him. He could feel the streets, the spires, the people and their laughter and their lives.
And perhaps he just wanted to feel that. One more time.
When they had first set out, Lenk had wondered why this part of the Vhehanna region was termed “the Forbidden East.”
Four hours of walking into it, the closest he had come to figuring that out was that it sounded better than “the Distinctly Humid and Slightly Inexplicable but Otherwise Just Like Any Other Forest East.”
The rise of the Gullet had marked the beginning of a sloping incline in the landscape. The desert of the Vhehanna lay in the valley below, scrubgrass and trees sprouting up upon the slopes and finally giving way to a verdant forest once it plateaued.
It was even greener and more alive here than it had been in the Gullet. The trees grew vast and twisted with age, coated in vines and wearing crowns of colorful flowers. The underbrush’s leaves bristled, reaching out for him as he walked past. In his ears the songs of life: birdsong, insect buzzing, the distant call of other beasts he couldn’t identify.
Yet even the smother of tr
ees and the symphony of the forest couldn’t hope to drown out the roar of the Lyre River. Here the smooth walls of the Gullet had given way to a wider chasm, the current broken by innumerable waterfalls and rapids. He had ventured away from the ridge ages ago, yet the sound of the river never seemed to change, no matter how near or close he got.
It would have been crazy to suggest that it seemed as if the river were following him. Or perhaps not nearly crazy enough, given that he frequently spoke to a hallucination.
Mocca had been absent for much of this journey, though. Since his persuasive case back at the scrubland, the man in white hadn’t spoken another word. Lenk occasionally thought he saw him in a flash: standing at the ridge overlooking the Lyre, admiring a flower formation hanging from a particular tree. But once Lenk looked in his direction, the man in white vanished before he could utter a word.
Well, he thought. Why the fuck do I keep a hallucinatory spirit guide around if he’s never here when I want to talk to him?
Lenk’s thoughts were full to bursting with the images he had been shown. The memory of the city and its sprawl never seemed to fade. If anything, he began recalling details he had missed before: the smooth steps leading up to a library, the clean burnt-incense smell of a healer’s house, the smile on a tulwar’s apelike face as he waved to a passing shict.
Could it have all been real?
Careful, he cautioned himself with a voice that seemed to be growing dimmer each time the thought came back. He’s not Mocca, he’s Khoth-Kapira. God-King. Cast into hell as a demon after oppressing mortalkind. No one would fault you for suspecting a demon of deceit.
That was all true, of course.
And yet, if his intent was to deceive, wouldn’t Khoth-Kapira deny his wrongdoing instead of owning up to it? Could a demon not feel remorse, even after centuries in hell? Could a demon not reflect, given eternity to do so?
Could a demon not find a new life?
As Lenk so desperately wanted to do?
Doubtless there was more at work here than Mocca was letting on. And yet, all the same, there was no way back. Wherever this road ended, it lay east.
