Yllithian was surprised to discover that he could still hear sounds. At first he thought the sense of hearing the distant, thunderous shocks as they occurred was an illusion created by his vitrifying body. Perhaps, he’d thought, a sympathetic resonance of some kind was generated as even unliving matter recoiled from the distant violence being done to its fellow matter. His chuckle came out as a staccato hiss and he knew then that he could still hear. He wondered if this was to be his perverse fate, to be frozen into immobility and able only to hear the world dying around him.
Yllithian’s growing self-pity was interrupted by awareness of a small, regular sound approaching him. Slow, shuffling footsteps that came closer with agonising deliberation, as if belonging to someone badly hurt or heavily burdened. Yllithian tried to twist around to see from his one, dimmed eye but he could not turn his neck. He tried to speak but only a whistle of air escaped from his rigid lips. Suddenly a dark, spider-like shape crouched before him, metal glimmering on its stick-thin limbs. Yllithian could only watch helplessly as it darted some sort of stinging barb into his prone body three or four times, each penetration felt as a dull, distant impact.
More time passed. The enigmatic figure remained squatting over Yllithian’s recumbent form and more details emerged about it little by little. The face was a pallid blur, the body wasp-waisted and narrow shouldered, with finger-thick metal pins protruding from its limbs and spine. Long white hands searched over his body assuredly, stopping here and there to brush away flakes of black glass. Tingling spread gradually through Yllithian’s limbs and face. Recognition dawned suddenly and he tried to speak again.
‘B-B-hronss,’ Yllithian managed.
‘Ah very good, my archon, mobility returns,’ the spindle-limbed figure replied. ‘It is indeed I, loyal Bellathonis, come to your succour in your hour of need – a fact that I would ask you to recall later when we achieve happier circumstances.’
‘K-K-K–’ Yllithian struggled to get anything out of his frozen lips. The indignity of his situation was coming close to driving him insane but he persevered doggedly. Bellathonis watched him with ill-concealed amusement. ‘K-Ku-Kurd?’ Yllithian said at last.
‘Ah. Not entirely, for now the plague has been placed into temporary remission by the antigens I was fortuitously carrying about my person. We must seek a more permanent solution at my laboratory, or whatever is left of it. In the meantime there will be considerable discomfort, I’m afraid, as the irreversibly transformed tissue sloughs away.’
‘Y-yu-yuh-you…’ the word came out as a satisfactorily low, threatening growl. Yllithian revelled in his tiny triumph. Bellathonis seemed to be less impressed.
‘Oh come now, Yllithian, don’t be disagreeable. If you really blamed all this on me you’d scarcely be warning me about it now, would you? Most certainly not at the moment when I hold your life literally in my hands. You and I both know you’re cleverer than that. Please accord me the same courtesy.’
Yllithian’s next attempts at framing words became incomprehensible as the glass plague loosened its grip enough to enable him to scream. One thought kept his sanity intact through the molten crucible of pain. No matter how clever, how courteous Bellathonis thought himself, he would receive this agony a thousand times over when Yllithian finally took his revenge.
Aez’ashya sprinted along the narrow silver path with Sybris’ braid still fluttering, forgotten, in one of her fists. The path bucked and jinked treacherously beneath her flying feet as tremors ran through the fortress walls. Shrill, unearthly cries could be heard coming from above, and an awful tearing sound that seemed to stretch endlessly like the turning of a great wheel. She did not look up.
The poisonous light of the Ilmaea was brightening unbearably, turning the silver path to a molten strip of white light. Aez’ashya narrowed her eyes and powered forward, bounding metres at a time as she left the zone of heightened gravity behind. She was still not moving fast enough to reach safety before the first real impact hit. The very air flared into luminosity with a thunderclap suddenness that heralded a shockwave of devastating intensity. Aez’ashya was pitched screaming into the abyss as the path shattered beneath her, falling amid a storm of bright shards.
In sheer desperation she kept moving, running, leaping, swarming through the air from one tumbling shard to the next. It was a show of preternatural agility that would have put her trainers to shame but it was still not enough. The termination of her fall into the monofilament nets was only seconds away.
Something shot upward past Aez’ashya, a winged, flying figure followed by another and another. A pack of scourges were beating upwards on their powerful wings, flying desperately to escape the debris tumbling down from above. Aez’ashya hurled herself outward without hesitation, kicking off from the falling ruin of the path to arc down onto the last scourge in the pack with arms outstretched and the hook-like blades of her hydra gauntlets fully extended.
The scourge caught a glimpse of her form plummeting towards him at the last moment and tried to twist aside to no avail. Aez’ashya caught the scourge in her bladed embrace and pulled him to her like a long-lost lover. Wings beat furiously, buffeting Aez’ashya as the scourge fluttered helplessly in her grip. The scourge was dying, streamers of arterial blood flying from its body as it struggled, but its instinctive efforts to stay aloft were enough to slow Aez’ashya’s fall. She rode the winged warrior unmercifully, using her weight to pull the falling, fluttering pair of them towards the fortress’s inner wall. Instinct kept the scourge’s wings beating right up to the moment that Aez’ashya released him to crash into the wall as she leapt free.
She landed on a sloping expanse of fluted metal and dug her hydra gauntlets into its surface as the scourge flopped and rolled past before disappearing from sight over the edge. Shortly afterwards several of the crystalline blades on the hydra gauntlets snapped clean away and sent her slithering several metres down the slope after him. Aez’ashya punched down desperately and managed to bring the movement to a scraping, screeching halt, but her hold still felt horribly precarious. She paused for a moment to gather her senses. Her heart was still pounding and limbs shaking from the adrenaline coursing through her system. There was no sense of fear, she was pleased to find, only tremulous excitement.
She glanced about her, trying to make sense of where she had landed. Above her the sky was a circle of white fire pressing down above the glowering walls of the fortress. Falling debris roared as it plunged past her en route to the bottom. Rumbles and shocks ran through the metal beneath her hands and feet. The air seemed full of tumbling detritus and the tiny, flying figures of scourges, hellions, reavers and others trying to escape the mayhem. A score of metres up the sloping surface she was on became a vertical wall with a row of narrow windows looking out. Aez’ashya tried to crawl towards them but only succeeded in almost losing her grip and fractionally sliding backwards. With their frangible crystal blades the hydra gauntlets were ill-suited to this kind of work, and Aez’ashya fervently wished she had her ordinary knives to use instead.
She noticed with amusement that Sybris’s braid was still fluttering around her fist, caught on the crystal hooks there. A thought struck her as she looked at the braid and she cautiously disengaged one gauntlet from the slope in order to grasp the dangling tip. The blade was still attached, a hand-long, serrated fang of monomolecular-edged steel. Aez’ashya grinned and plunged the blade into the metal beneath her, the molecule-fine tip shearing through it just as readily as if it were soft flesh. With a firm handhold to work with she began to work her way slowly upwards to safety.
Bezieth could tell immediately that she was close to death. She could feel the warmth and life readily draining out of her through the self-inflicted gash in her thigh and leaving a terrible, paralyzing weakness in their wake. Somewhere in the distance she could sense malignant forces gathering. They seemed to be watching her slow demise with hungry eyes as they waited impatiently for
her soul to slip from her body. The djin-blade still lay nearby on the cracked stones, vibrating gently. No one seemed willing to pick it up after what they had seen it do to Bezieth.
Archon Naxipael hovered anxiously at the edge of her dimming vision, unwilling to stoop to helping her himself but also unwilling to entirely abandon one of his doubtless few surviving allies. The snake-archon’s narrow eyes suddenly locked onto a member of the small band of survivors surrounding them.
‘You there!’ Naxipael snapped. ‘Yes you wearing the wrack mask. I hope for your own sake that you’re the real thing. Tend to her wound immediately, I want her able to fight! The rest of you – we’ll be moving out in five minutes. Search the fallen for anything useful.’
Part of Bezieth’s mind was nodding with approval even while another was planning how to survive what came next. Naxipael was taking charge, giving the survivors something to do so that they wouldn’t start to think about what was happening, but Bezieth understood that there was a new kabal forming here and now, with Archon Naxipael at its head. Naxipael was going to look for other survivors to assimilate them into his ever-strengthening group. They would likely be glad to join him, for the most part, to enhance their continuing chances of survival. Anyone intractable enough to refuse would become another victim of the catastrophe. Depending on how the fates fell Archon Naxipael might come out of the whole disaster immensely stronger than he was before. He might even push his way up into High Commorragh in the chaos.
A darkly robed figure was obediently shuffling across to squat down next to Bezieth. She fixed her gaze on the wrack’s grilled mask as he bent to start examining her injury. Naxipael saw her as an asset still but that wouldn’t last. Soon he would start wondering why he should risk keeping her around…
‘What’s your name?’ she demanded imperiously. She didn’t feel imperious. She felt as if she were trapped at the bottom of a well with the wrack’s mask hovering above her, blotting out the sky.
‘Xagor. This one’s name is Xagor, Archon Bezieth,’ the wrack said meekly. Well, that was something at least. An uncomfortable heat was rising in her wounded thigh as the wrack worked, but she doggedly showed no sign of discomfort. She found that it helped to have something to focus on, a tiny measure of control to exert.
‘Who is your master?’ she asked more reasonably.
‘Master… Bellathonis,’ the wrack replied a little hesitantly, an odd detail that Bezieth filed away for later.
‘Who else do you know here?’
‘No one, Xagor only came to witness the procession,’ the wrack murmured, intent on whatever he was doing to the wound now. Bezieth looked at him shrewdly.
‘Why would you do that? Bellathonis hasn’t served anyone in the lower courts for years, he thinks he’s too good for us no-oww!’ Fire unexpectedly lanced through the wound and set Bezieth’s teeth on edge. For an instant it felt as if it was being opened up anew.
‘All finished,’ the wrack said hurriedly as he stood up and backed away.
Bezieth cursed him ferociously and levered herself up onto her feet. The wound subsided to a dull throb but her whole leg felt stiff and wooden. She tested her weight on it a few times with an angry grimace before bending down to scoop up the untouched djin-blade. The febrile energy Axhyrian’s spirit had demonstrated before seemed gone for now, the sword nothing more than inanimate object. Naxipael glanced over and nodded approvingly. Yes, she thought as she turned the blade warily in her hand, still an asset.
She looked around the canal bank, now a wasteland of fallen masonry and shattered slabs tilting drunkenly at all angles. A handful of heavily armed survivors were in view picking over the remnants of the procession. Naxipael was in the process of haranguing them to find a functional palanquin, but everything of that ilk looked to be mangled or half-melted into useless scrap. In the distance the multi-hued star still shimmered over the canal like the eye of a baleful god. It was time to get to work.
‘Forget all that, we have to get moving,’ she said as she walked over to him, striving not to limp. She jabbed an accusing finger towards the broken gate. ‘We can’t stay near that thing a moment longer.’ Naxipael’s face showed a momentary irritation that was quickly smoothed over.
‘Are you sure you’re fit enough to walk?’ Naxipael asked solicitously. ‘I had thought to find some means to carry you.’ An unlikely story, Bezieth thought, more likely Naxipael was seeking a quick means to enhance his prestige.
‘I can walk, and I can fight too. We must go. Now.’ Bezieth realised it wasn’t just bravado that was making her push Naxipael to leave. She really did have a sense of mounting dread, she could see it in the nervous faces around her too. Something about the light itself was disquieting. It was as if it cast an invisible, profane heat against both mind and soul. It was a sensation that made Bezieth want to run away and hide somewhere deep and dark.
Naxipael had the common sense to detect the prevailing mood and soon led his small group into the ruins, clambering across splintered stonework and twisted metal. The fascia of the palaces was a hollow-eyed mockery of its former grandeur, yet most of the damage was superficial. Decorative colonnades and balconies had fallen by the thousand but the underlying structures were built of more solid stuff. Darkened corridors and tilted steps led inside. A scattered detritus of cups, vials and crystals crunched beneath their feet as they advanced. Periodic bursts of screams and howls echoed from deeper within, accompanied by weird, plaintive strains of music that drifted in and out of perception. The survivors clutched their weapons and advanced warily.
Towards the back of the loose column Kharbyr walked cautiously alongside Xagor. The haemonculus’s pentagonal talisman of metal was hidden away inside his bodysuit, as cold and lifeless as it had been when he first took it from the wrack. When the Dysjunction struck Kharbyr had hoped the thing was meant to protect him somehow and had clutched at it desperately but to no visible benefit. Instead he’d had to fight for his life alongside Xagor, and only their shared experiences in Shaa-Dom enabled them to survive the tidal wave of extra-dimensional filth that came washing through the warding. Then Bezieth and Naxipael had showed up cutting their way through the mess. Sticking with them had been an easy, and wise, decision at the time. Less so once Bezieth turned on him and tried to cut him down on the spot with that insane sword of hers.
‘We should strike out on our own, go and look for Bellathonis,’ Kharbyr whispered to Xagor.
‘The master will find us when we are needed,’ Xagor replied with an irritating degree of confidence.
‘And in the meantime we tramp around in the guts of lower Metzuh helping Naxipael and Bezieth build an army?’
‘Xagor wishes to know the alternatives.’
‘Strike out on our own and hide out somewhere.’
‘There is safety in numbers.’
Insane laughter came rattling down the broken corridor from somewhere ahead of them. Firelight, or something very like it, was painting dancing shadows on the ceiling and walls. As they got closer to its source it became clear that the corridor opened out into a larger hall. Figures could sometimes be briefly glimpsed cavorting inside.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Kharbyr said grimly.
CHAPTER 5
A TALE OF ORIGINS
On the hundredth day after the calamity on the maiden world of Lileathanir the survivors of the bright lakes clan finally came within sight of the Lil’esh Eldan Ay’Morai – the ‘Holy Mountain of dawn’s light first gleaming’. The survivor’s journey across the riven face of the maiden world of Lileathanir had been a hard one. What little food had been saved from the initial raid had been lost in the calamity that followed it and so privation had tormented them every step of the way. The clan’s ablest leaders and warriors had fallen in the great sky battle against the dark kin. Those brave warriors had given their lives to drive away the slaver-takers even as catastrophe struck t
he land, and by so doing they had left their people leaderless in the dreadful aftermath. So it was that the pilgrimage north to seek the World Shrine began as a straggling crowd of mostly the young and the old, the infirm and the cowardly.
They had looked to Sardon Tir Laniel for guidance at the beginning. She was tall and unbowed by her many winters, her hair still the colour of ripe corn. Her service as a protector and a worldsinger a half-century before had been much admired among her clan so it was natural that they sought her leadership at a moment of crisis. The only thing Sardon could think to do was to journey to the World Shrine and seek help. At first she had intended to travel alone but the other survivors would hear none of it; the ghost paths were too dangerous to enter, they said, and the land was in turmoil. The great pterosaurs refused to fly and the pack beasts quickly sickened in the ash-choked air. A journey to the World Shrine on foot would take months. The frightened survivors raised all these objections and more, but no one argued against making the journey only about who should go. In the end the whole clan, all that was left of it, simply picked up their meagre possessions and joined her in walking north.
The great forests of Lileathanir had burned like torches in its oxygen-rich air. Far off on the horizon to the south and east the sullen glow of distant fires continued to light the sky. The fires remained visible throughout the survivors’ march, but the regions they passed through were already dead and cooling. In many places the cloud-scraping trunks of mighty trees still stood upright like cities of blackened towers, at other spots violent earth shocks had uprooted hundreds of the forest giants and created impenetrable mazes of charred timber. Thick drifts of grey ash lay across everything that muffled all sound and kicked up choking clouds with each step. Periodically they had to divert around shuddering clefts in the earth or sluggish flows of lava from the host of young volcanoes rising across the land.
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