Nannath felt a breath of hot presence on his right. He turned just in time to see a huge brown steed, its shiny coat lathered with foam, slam into him. The impact knocked the breath out of his lungs. He managed a weak groan as he lost balance, tripped, and fell. The god tried to rise, but his body disobeyed. He gasped for air, felt terrible pressure in his chest. He crawled forward, nails digging deep into the lush earth, scraping, clawing, trying to get away. His muscles trembled with pain and rage.
After several moments, he managed to breathe again. Fresh energy suffused him. Nannath staggered up like a drunken man, weak, disoriented, his field of vision shrunken to a blinding red circle. Blood pounded in his neck and temples.
He looked toward the forest. He would never make it.
They would not even let him hope. Something crashed into him from behind. He flew like a puppet, rolling, limbs entangled. He landed facedown, tall grass slicing his face. The tender shoots did not feel so pristine now.
“Enough,” someone called. Nannath knew that voice. He had never forgotten that voice. A voice he had not heard in thousands of years.
Nannath blinked the dirt and blood away, trying to focus. An old man, friendly and innocent looking, was approaching in a slow pace that grew faster and more erratic as he came nearer. But then, the god saw the eyes.
“Damian,” he whispered in an ancient tongue not heard in the realms for countless generations.
Damian stopped two paces away, staring at the sprawled form of his former kin. “Nannath. You silly fool. You should have run, you should have run far, far away. You had your chance. But now, it’s over.”
Nannath tried to grin. He only managed a crooked grimace. His lips were torn, hanging like dead slugs, coated in blood and crumbs of earth.
“We will destroy you,” he tried, a last act of defiance. There was no fear. Only utter, crushing disappointment. He had been the living dead for so long, and now that he had found passion in life again, it was going to be taken away from him.
The avatar wearing the friendly face lost composure. Damian drew a short sword he wore at his hip. He swung. The sharp tip sliced through Nannath’s left wrist. The hand detached, fell away like a wilted flower. A starburst of cold pain exploded in Nannath’s head. He opened his mouth, but no sound came. The icy shock of the amputation froze him.
His eyes rolled down, staring at the stump. It looked like a sausage. Strangely, no blood squirted. His vision blurred. He sagged.
“Keep him awake!” Damian shouted in Continental.
One of the horsemen dismounted and knelt by the wounded god. He pulled a cloth from a small leather pouch and tightly bound the severed arm. Then, he propped Nannath on his lap and slapped him lightly so he would not lose consciousness.
The man’s thick, harsh face was whiskered, coarse and alien, so changed from the spotless, graceful features of the early man. Strange, the fallen deity wondered, how the mind paid attention to such useless, unimportant details. Probably as a distraction and defense against the black tide of pain that was smothering him.
“You won’t die so easily, you traitor,” Damian rasped, quivering with wrath. “You have betrayed me, all of you fools. But I will hunt you down. I will find you all and kill you all. This world belongs to me. You are a sad joke. A forgotten fable. You belong in the past.”
Nannath could barely hear him. After the initial calm, a torrent of numbing agony was rushing through him. He rode a growling thunder of boiling anguish, unable to pull away. He had lost control of his body, of his senses. There was only the severed limb, on fire, a beacon of torture that would not go away.
“Keep that traitor awake!” Damian snarled. He kicked Nannath. The sprawled god opened his eyes. They rolled in their sockets, seeking focus, finding none. They closed again, eyelids fluttering wildly.
Damian shoved the kneeling horseman away and took his place. He grabbed Nannath by his hair, lifting him up. That seemed to work. Nannath lurched into consciousness, gasping, wailing thinly. His eyes were wet with tears and blood, but they locked on Damian’s.
“I have waited for so long,” Damian whispered. “So long, you stupid, ignorant fools.”
“You will not succeed,” Nannath groaned.
“You have all betrayed me, you, Simon, Elia, everyone. And why? Over pride? Over foolish pride? Because you could not let me be myself? Because I was so different than you and your wooden ideas? Because I had dreams and passion? Because you were afraid to live? Stupid fools.”
“You will not succeed,” the wounded deity repeated. He seemed to draw strength from that one weak, futile sentence.
“Ah, enough!” Damian slammed the god’s head against the soft ground. He let go of the hair and brought both his arms around Nannath’s throat. He squeezed with a millennium-old passion of hatred. Nannath struggled feebly.
Damian kept his grip tightly locked long after the other creature stopped fighting back. Finally, he pried his fingers free, staring at his hands as if in shock.
He had not expected it to end this way. He had thought Nannath would beg to be saved. He had thought he would not lose his composure. He had wanted to be majestic in his victory, aloof and condescending, in control of every little detail. Instead, black rage had swathed him. It was so different than what he had expected. He did not know whether to feel disappointed or exultant.
Damian stood up. He wiped the blood on his shirt. Four armed men stood some distance away, watching him, waiting for their orders. They had known this assignment would be different from all the other missions they had ever done. They said nothing. It was not their job to talk.
Damian breathed deeply, trying to calm his racing heart. He had just Unmade a god, sent his soul to the Abyss for all eternity. His first kill, with his bare hands. A rush of ancient feelings stirred in his belly, seeping into his blood. The sensation of lethal intimacy was nothing like any human emotion. Forget Special Children. This was the true meaning of being alive. His hands shivered uncontrollably.
His Special Children had betrayed him. They had failed his expectations, his ambitions. But no matter. Human years were meaningless. He would help Calemore get what he wanted. Soon, Damian would be free. Then, he would have all the time in the world to plan his son’s death.
And Elia…he would find her and tell her that he was sorry. That he loved her still, after all she had done to him. And they would be together and they would rule the world, like they had been supposed to, so long ago.
He shook his head, emptying his mind of thoughts. He looked down at the broken corpse of another fool. Another traitor. He spat.
“Burn this thing,” Damian ordered.
The four men stirred into motion. One of them brought a skin and poured oil onto the death body. Another struck flint and managed to light a small piece of wood. Within minutes, the mutilated cadaver was burning, turning into a dark, shriveled cinder.
Damian did not stay to watch. His party rode on. They had more gods to kill. Behind them, in the abandoned field, a thin column of gray smoke rose. The crackle of burning grass was the only sound.
CHAPTER 8
The earth spat Ewan out. He surfaced on the lifeless volcanic rock disoriented, his mind swimming with vivid dreams. It took him a long time to realize he was aware and alive and no longer in the Abyss.
His skin felt no cold, no heat. The real world was gray and dull. Ewan remembered. He was a Special Child. The world around him happened to other people.
He sat up, dusting himself off. He was wearing an old, dirty tunic that smelled of ships and rotten fish. His mind roiled. Some time ago, he had been just a silly boy, trying to make a living in an Eybalen port and earn coin to make his instincts go quiet. And they did.
On this island, he had found his destiny. But now, once again, there was an unpleasant pull in his soul. It felt like urgency. It felt like the abdominal pain before diarrhea. He almost believed the next spasm would not be as bad as the last one. But his discomfort floated in his veins, felt like spoiled fish
oil.
He tried to think, tried to banish the surreal existence of the Abyss. He had no idea how long he had spent in the timeless void between life and death. It could have been hours. It could have been days. Maybe a whole age. The passage of time in the outside world eluded him. The land around him was as dead and lifeless as it had been when he had arrived here with Investigator Armin.
Ewan stood up. Using his corporeal body felt funny and awkward. After several dozen paces, the familiar sensation came back to him. He flexed his hands and stretched. He hopped twice. He picked a shard of volcanic glass and hurled it away.
The earth around him was solid, intact. There was no Abyss anywhere. The dark hole was gone. Ewan knew he had done that somehow. He did not fully understand what he had done, but his sacrifice had mended the terrible rent in reality and fouled Damian’s plans. His father…
His existence in the Abyss felt like a dream. Perhaps it had been a dream, a collective dream of thousands of lost souls who lived and shared their anguish with everyone else, all at the same time. And maybe because he was still alive, his fate had been different, that of an observer, someone who dreamed, but did not live the illusion.
Most of the souls he had sensed were unaware of their ethereal torture. But some were. Gods and goddesses and humans, trapped in a void of eternal unrest, forever doomed to live with questions and doubts and fears and futile existence. Ewan had hardly understood their madness, but he had known genuine anguish when he had seen it.
He wanted to eat, but then he remembered he had no need for food. It was a human habit. Maybe he could eat and pretend that he enjoyed it. Maybe it would give him a semblance of his former life back. But then he realized it was not just hunger for simple edibles. It was instinct, trying to alert him to something his mind could not interpret. That necessity again, the compelling urge to go somewhere. West. It was west this time. He had to leave Ichebor.
Ewan cued his senses toward the shore and began walking. The lip of the old volcano snarled down at him, sharp and jagged. No matter. He dug his fingers into the cold, ashen ground and scrambled. Rocks shattered in his grip. Normal people would never have managed even one step up the treacherous cliff, but he had no such problems. He crawled over razor-sharp boulders, ignoring their lethal tug.
After a few minutes, he scrambled to the top, rolled over, and looked at the island. It was an empty, deserted expanse, leaden in color and devoid of any soul, animal or human. His was the only living presence. He started pacing back toward the shore. Perhaps Armin was still there, waiting for him. Perhaps he would meet another human soul. He opened his mouth and spoke aloud. Words poured out. Ewan laughed.
As he walked, oblivious of the jagged, vicious rocks crunching underneath and the icy wind whipping at his skin, he kept thinking about the dream of his existence in the Abyss, trying to reason it out. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Small details crystallized, became clear and logical. He remembered talking to undead gods, remembered helping them regain awareness of their condition. He remembered their tales of a life in another age, before hatred and jealousy even existed. He remembered the flood of deities entering the Abyss. The strangest thing of all, Damian was there too, a filthy backdrop to the scenery, cackling madly one moment, weeping uncontrollably another. He never spoke to the other gods, never tried to amend the deep rift between them. He existed on his rage only. And he cursed Ewan and all the other Special Children. But inside the Abyss, his passion was just an echo of misery, as unsubstantial as everything else. He had been defeated.
Ewan wondered how that could be. After all, the god had somewhat escaped the Abyss. At least a part of his foul essence had, enough to embed itself in the real world. But there was something that still held a trace of his soul back there. Maybe gods had multiple souls. Maybe they could exist in many places all at once. It made no sense to him, and other gods had not been forthcoming with answers.
For a while, Damian had been a quiet shadow. He avoided everyone. He kept to himself and his hard misery. The banished god radiated sorrow, the kind of sorrow a living thing felt. Ewan almost felt sorry for him. He was not like the evil thing portrayed in the history books. He sounded defeated, broken, and lonely.
Then, an unknown time later, another god entered the Abyss. At the same time, Damian woke from his stupor. The wails of despair became solid, enthusiastic fury. He was a dark, annoying presence once again, harmless and impotent in his reach but disturbing nonetheless. Some new energy possessed him. His mood swung from anger to madness to anguish, but he seemed resolved, determined. A change had gripped him. Something in the outside world had made Damian break free from the meaningless gloom and made him furious and alive again. Something had given him a new hope.
The newly arrived god would not share his ordeal. He kept apart, silent, dejected, ashamed. But whatever it was that had Unmade him, it wasn’t just simple oblivion. It wasn’t fading away into nothingness. A horrible thing had befallen him. His life force had been snuffed away. The other deities felt it, and they panicked. The Abyss boiled with fear.
It was as if some kind of balance was shattered. One moment, Ewan was floating in the void, sharing this mad dream with others; the next moment, it collapsed like a bubble of tar. He found himself in the real world, his mind plagued with worry, and a need. Whatever it was, it made Ewan feel uneasy and restless. Something tugged at his soul. Maybe those were the gods, crying for help. Maybe it was something bigger than the gods. He had to find out.
He reached the shore. No ship waited for him. He shrugged. Well, there was little else he could do. He plunged and swam, one stroke at a time. There was no cold, no fatigue. Only purpose.
Many days later, he reached Eybalen. From some distance away, the city looked unchanged. Up close, it was still no different. Ewan sat on an old, abandoned pier, letting his clothes dry, listening to the din of chaos and trade behind him. So many people, so many sounds. So simple and real. It would take some time getting used to.
Not far away, an old man was bleeding horseshoe crabs into a large bowl. They sold that blue blood as medicine, he knew, although he wouldn’t trust it to be healthy coming from those ugly armored things. Finished with one of the crabs, he tossed it away, then picked up another. A child would then pick up the discarded monsters and pierce their soft bellies with a hook. Ewan remembered. The fishermen used them as bait.
Taking a deep breath and ignoring the methodical crab carnage, Ewan rose and walked into the cauldron of smelly humanity. He avoided contact with people, keeping his eyes low, following a random pattern in the crowd. No one talked to him. No one confronted him. Cutpurses saw nothing of value about him and let him be.
After a while, Ewan got his first chance to see himself in a beaten plate of copper, resting against a pile of crates, waiting to be loaded onto a ship. The reflection that stared back at him was not perfect, but it was his old self. He had not aged even a day. He still looked like a somber child.
Perhaps no time had elapsed.
Encouraged, he started asking after familiar names. But the dockworkers just frowned at him. No one had heard of Captain Horace or the Tenacious. No one knew who the egg-headed Sirtai might be. With each question, panic grew deeper inside him, constricting him. He was soon gasping for air, his voice thin and barely audible.
He fled the docks and hid behind a butcher’s shop, watching half-mangled, blackened entrails rot in a gutter, assailed by rats and flies. The smell was pervasive, but it did not make him sick. He was glad he could smell the world. It made him feel more real. He stood thinking, but there was no escaping the one thought that formed in his mind. He would have to ask someone about the date. Ewan sought a likely victim, a content-looking sailor who would be willing to answer an innocent question and not try to clout him or ask for sex in return. Luckily, the harbor front provided ample game. He found his mark soon, a small, stocky guy from one of the Far South car-racks. The man answered him, all right. He told him what year it was.
The boy looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. Every sight looked new and alien. Eighteen years. Eighteen long years had elapsed. It was not the same world he had left. No one he knew back then would remember him. He would probably not even recognize them himself. Some might even be dead. He should have been a grown man by now.
He tried to remember his friends. Ayrton. Was Ayrton still alive? Where was he? What had happened in the war? How did it all end? What happened to Sarith? What happened to Vicky? A pang of pain lanced through his heart when he thought about the girl he had thought he once loved.
Did she still work at Wicked Filly? What a fool he was, he realized a moment later. How could she? Almost twenty years had elapsed since. No one employed old whores. They were bad money. Ewan wondered what had become of her. Had she married someone? Did she have children? Would she remember him if he showed up at her doorstep?
If she were alive, he thought. An inner sense of wisdom he had not known he possessed answered all of the questions for him. Perhaps he had aged in the Abyss, only on the inside. Perhaps he had learned truths in a way no living human could. But he knew, with an agonizing conviction of a man all alone in the world, that his former life was gone. Ayrton, Vicky, Sarith, Armin, they were all gone forever.
There was only the pain in his belly, beckoning him. West.
He found employment in the docks easily enough. He was young and strong and did not tire easily. For the sake of the people around him, he shared their meals and breaks and pretended to hurt as much as they did. The pay was meager, but he saved all of it, since he needed no food or lodging after work.
He knew he could get by with very little, but he did not want to travel like a beggar, scavenging on the road. He wanted to look decent and respectable at least, even if he could not feel that way about himself. But financial freedom loomed far away, beyond his reach. Hauling goods back and forth around the harbor broke your back. It did not make you rich.
The Broken (The Lost Words: Volume 2) Page 8
