‘Icarium’s stupid gambit in Letheras. It’s why I never found her soul. No, she carried my eye straight to him, the rotting bitch. And now he’s spat out fledgling warrens, and made of my eye a Finnest for an Azath. He remains the single force of true unpredictability in this scheme.’
‘Calm assures us otherwise.’
‘I don’t trust her.’
Finally, friend, you begin to think clearly again. ‘Just so,’ he said.
Errastas glanced over at Kilmandaros. ‘Can we not feed her or something? Hasten this healing?’
‘No. The wards Rake and the others set were profound. Tearing them down damaged her deeply, in ways no sorcerous healing can reach. Leave her in peace.’
Errastas hissed.
‘Besides,’ Sechul Lath continued, ‘they’re not all in place yet. You know that.’
‘I have waited so long for this. I want us to be ready when the time comes.’
‘And so we shall, Errastas.’
The Errant’s single eye fixed on Sechul Lath. ‘Calm is not the only one I do not trust.’
‘There will be ashes and death, but survivors will emerge. They always do. They will understand the necessity of blood. We shall be unchallenged, Errastas.’
‘Yet you sought to betray me. You and Kilmandaros.’
‘Betray? No.’ We dismissed you.
‘That is how I see it. How can I not?’
‘What you fail to understand, old friend,’ said Sechul Lath, ‘is that I don’t care about being unchallenged. I don’t care about a new world rising from the wreckage of this one. I am happy enough to wander the ruins. To mock those mortals who would try again.’ He gestured. ‘Leave the world to its wild ignorance – at least life was simple then. I turned my back on worshippers because I was done with them. Disgusted with them. I don’t want what we had, Errastas.’
‘But I do, Setch.’
‘And you are welcome to it.’
‘What of your children?’
‘What of them?’
‘Where do you see Oponn in the world to come?’
‘I don’t see them anywhere,’ Sechul Lath said.
Errastas drew a sharp breath. ‘You will kill them?’
‘What I made I can unmake.’
‘Your words please me, Knuckles. Indeed, I am relieved.’
It wasn’t much of a life, my children, was it? I doubt you will object overmuch. Prod and pull, yes, but in the end – after thousands and thousands of years of that pathetic game – what is achieved? Learned? By anyone?
Chance is a miserable bitch, a hard bastard. It shows a smile, but it is a wolf’s smile. What is learned? Only that every ambition must kneel to that which cannot be anticipated. And you can duck and dodge for only so long. It’ll take you down in the end.
A man slips the noose. A civilization steps from the path of its own hubris. Once. Twice. Thrice even. But what of the twentieth time? The fiftieth? Triumph falters. It always does. There was never a balance.
After all, common sense will tell you, it’s far easier to push than it is to pull.
‘How does Kilmandaros feel,’ Errastas asked, ‘about killing her own children?’
Sechul Lath glanced over at his mother, and then back at his companion. ‘Don’t you understand anything, Errastas? She doesn’t feel anything.’
After a moment, the lone eye shied away.
Now I think you understand.
What does the child want, that you did not have first? What do you own that the child does not want? Badalle had awoken this morning with these questions echoing in her head. The voice was a woman’s, and then a man’s. Both delivered in the same abject tones of despair.
She sat in the sun’s light as it bled in from the window, banishing the chill in her bones as would a lizard or a serpent, and struggled to understand the night’s visions, the dark, disturbing voices of strangers saying such terrible things.
It is what is passed on, I suppose. I think I see that.
She glanced over to where Saddic sat on the floor, his collection of useless objects arrayed around him, a lost look on his oddly wrinkled face. Like an old man with his life’s treasure. Only he’s forgotten how to count.
But what they owned, what they had, was not necessarily a good thing, a thing of virtue. Sometimes, what they had was poison, and the child’s hunger knew no different. How could it? And so the crimes passed on, from one generation to the next. Until they destroy us. Yes, I see that now. My dreams are wise, wiser than me. My dreams sing the songs of the Quitters, clever in argument, subtle in persuasion.
My dreams are warning me.
She turned away from the sun’s light and faced the chamber. ‘Is everyone ready?’
Saddic looked up guiltily, and then nodded.
Badalle twisted back and leaned out on the window ledge, craning round in order to see the western end of the plaza. Rutt was there, with Held in his arms. Others waited in the shadows of the surrounding buildings, as if figures on friezes had stepped out from their stone worlds.
It was just as well. They’d eaten all the fruit on the city’s trees.
And the crystal was stealing our souls.
‘Then it is time. Leave those things behind, Saddic.’
Instead, he began gathering them up.
A flash of anger hissed through Badalle, followed by fear. She didn’t understand either. Sighing, she dropped down from the ledge. ‘There will be Shards. Diamonds, Rubies and Opals. We will begin dying again.’
The boy looked at her with knowing eyes.
She sighed a second time. ‘There are fathers among us now. We must watch them carefully, Saddic, in case they find father thoughts.’
To that he shook his head, as if to deny her words. ‘No, Badalle,’ he said in his broken voice. ‘They just care for the young ones.’
So few words from you, Saddic. I’d thought you mute. What other things awaken in you, behind those old man’s eyes, that old man’s face?
She left the room. Saddic followed, his bag of useless things in his arms like a newborn babe. Down the sharp-edged steps, through the cool air of the hidden corridors, and then outside, into the blinding heat. Badalle walked without hesitation to where stood Rutt, who now watched her approach with hooded eyes. As she drew closer, the other children edged into the sunlight, clumped in their makeshift families. Hands were held, rag-ends clutched, legs embraced. She paused in her journey. She had forgotten how many still lived.
Forcing herself on, she walked until she stood before Rutt, and then she spun round and raised her arms out to the sides.
‘The city spits us out
We are sour and we are bitter
To taste.
The blind feeders-on-us turn away
As they gorge
As they devour all that was meant for us
All we thought to inherit
Because we wanted what they had
Because we thought it belonged to us
Just as it did to them
They looked away as they ate our future
And now the city’s walls
Steal our wants
And spit out what remains
It’s not much
Just something sour, something bitter
To taste.
And this is what you taste
In your mouths.
Something sour, something bitter.’
Rutt stared at her for a long moment, and then he nodded, and set out along the wide central avenue. Westward, into the Glass Desert. Behind him, the Snake uncoiled itself from its months-long slumber.
This was something the Snake understood, and Badalle could see it. In the steady, unhurried strides of the children trooping past, in their set faces, bleakness settling with familiarity in thin, wan features. We know this. We have learned to love this.
To walk. To slither beneath the fists of the world.
We are the Snake reborn.
In time, they reached the city’s edge, and
looked out on the flat glittering wastes.
Suffering’s comfort. Like a dead mother’s embrace.
Chapter Six
‘Dominant among the ancient races we can observe four: the Imass, the Jaghut, the K’Chain Che’Malle, and the Forkrul Assail. While others were present in the eldritch times, either their numbers were scant or their legacies have all but vanished from the world.
As for us humans, we were the rats in the walls and crawlspaces, those few of us that existed.
But is not domination our birthright? Are we not the likenesses of carved idols and prophets? Do these idols not serve us? Do these prophets not prophesy our dominion over all other creatures?
Perhaps you might note, with a sly wink, that the hands that carved the idols were our own; and that those blessed prophets so bold in their claims of righteous glory, each emerged from the common human press. You might note, then, that our fierce assertions cannot help but be blatantly self-serving, indeed, self-justifying.
And if you did, well, you are no friend of ours. And for you we have this dagger, this pyre, this iron tongue of torture. Retract your claims to our unexceptional selves, our gross banality of the profane.
As a species, we are displeased by notions of a mundane disconnect from destiny, and we shall hold to our deadly displeasure until we humans have crumbled to ash and dust.
For, as the Elder Races would tell you, were they around to do so, the world has its own dagger, its own iron tongue, its own pyre. And from its flames, there is nowhere to hide.’
Fragment purportedly from a translator’s note to a lost
edition of Gothos’ Folly, Genabaris, 835 Burn’s Sleep
THREE DAYS AND TWO NIGHTS THEY HAD STOOD AMONG THE DEAD bodies. The blood and gore dried on their tattered furs, their weapons. Their only motion came from the wind plucking at strands of hair and rawhide strips.
The carrion birds, lizards and capemoths that descended upon the field of slaughter fed undisturbed, leisurely in their feasting on rotting flesh. The figures standing motionless in their midst were too desiccated for their attentions; they might as well as have been the stumps of long-dead trees, wind-torn and lifeless.
The small creatures were entirely unaware of the silent howls erupting from the souls of the slayers, the unending waves of grief that battered at these withered apparitions, the horror churning beneath layers of blackened, dried blood. They could not feel the storm raging behind skin-stretched faces, in the caverns of skulls, in the shrunken pits of eye sockets.
With the sun fleeing beneath the horizon on the third night, First Sword Onos T’oolan faced southeast and, with heavy but even strides, set out, the sword in his hand dragging a path through the knotted grasses.
The others followed, an army of destitute, bereft T’lan Imass, their souls utterly destroyed.
Slayers of the innocent. Murderers of children. The stone weapons lifted and the stone weapons fell. Faces wrote knotted tales of horror. Small skulls cracked open like ostrich eggs. Spirits fled like tiny birds.
When the others left, two remained behind. Kalt Urmanal of the Orshayn T’lan Imass ignored the command of his clan, the pressure of its will. Trembling, he held himself against the sweep of that dread tide pulling so insistently into the First Sword’s shadow.
He would not bow to Onos T’oolan. And much as he yearned to fall to insensate dust, releasing for ever his tortured spirit, instead he held his place, surrounded by half-devoured corpses – eye sockets plucked clean, soft lips and cheeks stripped away by eager beaks – and grasped in both hands the crumbling madness of all that life – and death – had delivered to him.
But he knew with desolation as abject as anything he had felt before that there would be no gift of peace, not for him nor for any of the others, and that even dissolution might prove unequal to the task of cleansing his soul.
The flint sword in his hand was heavy, as if caked in mud. If only it was. His bones, hardened to stone, wrapped round him like a cage of vast, crushing weight.
As dawn rose on the fourth day, as the screams in his skull broke like sand before the wind, he lifted his head and looked across to the one other who had not yielded to the First Sword’s ineffable summons.
A Bonecaster of the Brold clan. Of the Second Ritual, the Failed Ritual. And if only it had failed. Knife Drip, such a sweet name, such a prophetic name. ‘This,’ said Kalt Urmanal, ‘is the Ritual you sought, Nom Kala. This is the escape you desired.’ He gestured with his free hand. ‘Your escape from these…children. Who would, in years to come – years they no longer have awaiting them – who would, then, have hunted down your kin. Your mate, your children. They would have killed you all without a moment’s thought. In their eyes, you were beasts. You were less than they were, and so you deserved less.’
‘The beast,’ she said, ‘that dies at the hand of a human remains innocent.’
‘While that human cannot make the same claim.’
‘Can they not?’
Kalt Urmanal tilted his head, studied the white-fur-clad woman. ‘The hunter finds justification.’
‘Need suffices.’
‘And the murderer?’
‘Need suffices.’
‘Then we are all cursed to commit endless crimes, and this is our eternal fate. And it is our gift to justify all that we do.’ But this is no gift. ‘Tell me, Nom Kala, do you feel innocent?’
‘I feel nothing.’
‘I do not believe you.’
‘I feel nothing because there is nothing left.’
‘Very well. Now I believe you, Nom Kala.’ He scanned the field of slaughter. ‘It was my thought to stand here until their very bones vanished beneath the thin soil, hid inside brush and grasses. Until nothing remained of what has happened here.’ He paused, and then said again, ‘It was my thought.’
‘You will find no penance, Kalt Urmanal.’
‘Ah. Yes, that was the word I sought. I had forgotten it.’
‘As you would.’
‘As I would.’
Neither spoke again until the sun had once more vanished, yielding the sky to the Jade Strangers and the broken moon that was rising fitfully in the northeast. Then Kalt Urmanal hefted his weapon. ‘I smell blood.’
Nom Kala stirred. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Immortal blood, not yet spilled, but…soon.’
‘Yes.’
‘In moments of murder,’ said Kalt Urmanal, ‘the world laughs.’
‘Your thoughts are harsh,’ replied Nom Kala, settling her hair-matted mace in its sling draped across her back. She collected her harpoons.
‘Are they? Nom Kala, have you ever known a world at peace? I know the answer. I have existed far longer than you, and in that time there was no peace. Ever.’
‘I have known moments of peace,’ she said, facing him. ‘It is foolish to expect more than that, Kalt Urmanal.’
‘Do you seek such a moment now?’
She hesitated and then said, ‘Perhaps.’
‘Then I shall accompany you. We shall journey to find it. That single, most precious moment.’
‘Do not cling to hope.’
‘No, I shall cling to you, Nom Kala.’
She flinched. ‘Do not do that,’ she whispered.
‘I can see you were beautiful once. And now, for the yearning in your empty heart, you are beautiful again.’
‘Will you so torment me? If so, do not journey with me, I beg you.’
‘I shall be silent at your side, unless you choose otherwise, Nom Kala. Look at us, we two remain. Deathless, and so well suited to this search for a moment of peace. Shall we begin?’
Saying nothing, she began walking.
As did he.
Do you remember, how those flowers danced in the wind? Three women knelt in soft clays beside the stream, taking cupped handfuls of clear water to sprinkle upon the softened pran’ag hides before binding them. The migrations were under way, velvet upon the antlers, and the insects spun in iridescent c
louds, flitting like delicious thoughts.
The sun was warm that day. Do you remember?
Greasy stones were lifted from the sacks, rolled in hands around the circle of laughing youths, while the cooked meat was drawn forth and everyone gathered to feast. It was, with these gentle scenes, a day like any other.
The call from the edge of camp was not unduly alarming. Three strangers approaching from the south.
One of the other clans, familiar faces, smiles to greet kin.
The second shout froze everyone.
I went out with the others. I held my finest spear in my hand, and with my warriors all about me I felt sure and bold. Those who drew near were not kin. True strangers. If necessary, we would drive them off.
There was this moment – please, you must remember with me. We stood in a row, as they came to within six paces of us, and we looked into their faces.
We saw ourselves, yet not. Subtle the alterations. They were taller, thinner-boned. Strewn with fetishes and shells and beads of amber. Their faces did not possess the rounded comfort of Imass faces. Features had sharpened, narrowed. The bones of their jaw beneath the mouth jutted under dark beards. We saw their weapons and they confused us. We saw the fineness of their skins and furs and leggings, and we felt diminished.
Their eyes were arrogant, the colour of earth, not sky.
With gestures, these three sought to drive us away. This was their land to hunt now. We were the intruders. Do you remember how that felt? I looked into their faces, into their eyes, and I saw the truth.
To these tall strangers, we were ranag, we were bhederin, we were pran’ag.
Killing them made no difference, and the blood on our weapons weakened us with horror. Please, I am begging you, remember this. It was the day the world began to die. Our world.
Tell me what you remember, you who stood facing these roughened savages with their blunt faces, their squat selves, their hair of red and blond. Tell me what you felt, your indignation when we did not cower, your outrage when we cut you down.
You knew you would come again, in numbers beyond imagining. And you would hunt us, chase us down, drive us into cold valleys and cliff caves above crashing seas. Until we were all gone. And then, of course, you would turn on each other.
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