by Jon Kiln
Suriyen opened and closed her mouth, then looked at her feet, before looking back at Aldameda. “Are you suggesting that Ikrit, this creature that has possessed the Sin Eater, is going to try and sneak into paradise and kill the gods there?”
The Mother nodded. “All of this…” She gestured around them to the water tunnel, and the distant thuds and reverberations of war far above. “This is all a distraction. Keep the gods and the humans busy and their attention elsewhere, while Ikrit performs the worst, vilest, evilest crime in all of history. That is exactly what I fear. What other reason does a devil have for seeking out heaven?”
31
Vekal spent a long time not-existing. All around him was blue and silver and black—an eternity of floating or flying, without body nor form, nor weight or hindrance.
He wondered if, finally, he had died. He wondered if this was all that awaited him after his time in the mortal and earthly Garden. It was strangely peaceful, in a nothing sort of way.
‘Perhaps that is what heaven really is,’ the non-Vekal thought to no one. ‘Not wanting anything. Not having to do anything. Just existing.’
All of his life, Vekal had been taught that he was one of the Unliving, that his wants and desires, his hurts, fears, prides and jealousies were all just passing passions. They were the stuff of the mortal world and designed to get in the way between his soul and the paradise of the gods. If he could just learn how to leave all of them behind, how to not yearn after success and how to not fear failure, then his soul would finally understand this world for what it was—an illusion, a fragment of the whole.
That he belonged outside, and beyond it all…
‘But why do the gods punish and praise us then, if we are never meant to want anything?’ Vekal mused in his dream, green-blue-silver like state. He felt as light as a cloud, and as insubstantial as one as well. He felt that the fiercest thought might be enough to blow him apart, send pieces of the being that had been Vekal to the far corners of—wherever he was.
Still, there was something that didn’t make sense to him. All of those years studying how to be removed and remote from the world, how to be pure, and Vekal found that his heart didn’t want to be removed.
‘I don’t want to not exist!’ he thought to himself, and in that moment there came back to him the sudden rush of memories of his time in the Garden. Of all of the rich sights and smells of the city of Fuldoon, of the taste of fresh fish and spices, of the sight of a gold and cerulean sky low over the desert horizon, of the first fresh winds of autumn when it arrived in the city of gods, bringing with it a promise of fresher weather and calmer temperatures.
And the look of fear in the eyes of the people of Tir when the Menaali had attacked. A fly feasting on the blood of one of the dead. The look of gratitude when Dal Grehb’s diseases and marred daughter was miraculously healed.
And the look of wonder on the boy Talon’s face when he saw that he was going to be saved from sacrifice, and the look of grim determination on Suriyen’s when he saw that she was going to get them to safety. All of those intensely human, worldly passions and experiences—some terrible, some worse than he could stomach, but some better than he had a right to experience.
‘Still, I don’t want to not exist…’ Vekal could no more weigh the pros and cons than he could make any rational decision about what was to happen to him next. He just felt his heart lurch, and start to pull towards a direction that was neither up nor down, but away from the place of calm that he had been before.
“He has made his choice…” A voice like the fall of the first silver of rain on the scrubland.
“What choice?” said another, as hard and as uncaring as the cries of the albino desert crows. “He is who he is. We all are what we are. There is no choosing.”
“But where can he go? Where does one such as he go?” the silvered-voice like moonlight and tears said once again.
The voices formed a kaleidoscope around the little not-form of not-Vekal. They weren’t the voices of people nearby to him, but rather the passing of seasons, of vast storms of color that moved nearby him. They mingled with the voices and memories from long ago and far away.
“There is nowhere else we can go,” his mother was saying sadly, after little Vekal had implored her to leave their stepfather.
“You made your choice!” The angry words of his stepfather as he slapped the dream-Vekal once more for being late bringing in the goats.
“I had no choice..” The words of a thousand tormented souls, before they confessed to some paltry sin or misdemeanor.
No, Vekal thought, what he always wanted to say to the sinners when they confessed to him, but never could. You always have a choice. His not-hands started to solidify into fists, and his not-body started to congeal around him. It was less like a dream now, and more like the freezing cold waters of a deep, endless sea.
Vekal felt a spark within him, a spark of warmth and a tiny ember of life as his heart continued to beat. The devil had been stilled for a while within, as even its prodigious powers could only keep a drowned body alive for so long. The entire might of the evil spirit, a thousand years of knowledge and power had been thrown and wrapped around Vekal’s weakly beating heart and lungs forcing him to stay alive despite however many hours he had spent drifting ever downwards into the deep blue, greens, and silver of the Inner Sea. The devil inside of him was spent, and was dying—along with his body.
But Vekal made his heart beat with that tiny flame of anger. He was angry at what life had done to him. He was angry at what his stepfather had done to his mother. He was angry at the Menaali for destroying the most ancient city of the world, his beloved home, all for one man. He was angry at letting his friends Suriyen and Talon down, at mistrusting them and of not telling them what he bore within him.
It was this spark of anger that he added to the dying embers of the devil’s own willpower. Ikrit was too weak now to talk, and Vekal knew that he didn’t have long. The Sin Eater reached upwards, away from the depths between the worlds and between the living and the dead, and he reached towards life…
32
“Here, what by the name is that?” said the young man to his companion. The young man was thin and sallow-faced, with slightly odd looking bulging eyes, which was one of the reasons why the old fisherman had taken him on. There wasn’t much work left on the Shattering Coasts, and a lad like this one, for all of his skill with the fiddly bits of rope and twine, was just too strange looking for most folk to have around.
But he was good on a boat, and even if he didn’t have the finer knowledge of how to read the times of day, or any other language other than the one he was born with, he knew his way around a fishing trip.
“What have you got now?” the old fisherman said, turning from where he had been trying to light his pipe amidst the drizzle of rain, and finally giving up at his companions’ exclamation.
“Something caught up in the deep pots,” the fish-eyed boy declared. “Give me a hand hauling it, will ya?” He scowled at the older man as he leaned back, pulling with all of his might on the line that disappeared into the choppy waters.
“Cut the line and we’ll write it off as lost in the storm,” the old man instructed him. “That storm was strong enough to tear a whole new shelf off the cliffs. You’ve probably caught some of that fat-bellied trader’s boat that went down in it.” The fisherman tutted and shook his head. It was all such a sad business. War threatening half the south, the far off city of Fuldoon ready to fall any day now, or so they say, and of all the escaping boats packed to the yardarms with refugees. Word had it that one was fool enough to sail due north-east, right up the Shattering Coasts and into the worst storm this side of last winter.
The younger paused for a second, considering whether or not to agree. “But what if it is some of that boat, you ol’ codger,” he said eagerly. “A pot of gold. Silks from the desert. Some rich man’s stash of treasure!”
“You idiot, boy. If it is gold or treasure
, you won’t be able to pull it up, and if it’s silk, it’ll be ruined by now. That ship went down a couple days ago.” The fisherman laughed, but he still grabbed one end of the rope and leaned his weight to it.
A shape started to rise out of the dark waters by the rocks, near where they had moored. It should have been one of the large crab pots that they had laid out across the sea floor, baited with fish heads and each as big as a barrel.
The old fisherman gasped when he saw what it was. “By the gods’ sweet names.”
Barely fitting into the pot, half in and half out, came the body of a drowned and pale man, with dark skin turned white by the heavy crisscrossing of scars over seemingly every inch of him. His clothes were little more than rags, and seaweed had already lodged into his tunic, but his flesh hadn’t turned soft yet, just ashen grey.
“Poor fella.” The old fisherman made the sign to avert the evil eye, passing his skinner’s knife to the younger. “Come on, cut him loose and let the sea take him. It doesn’t look like he had an easy life of it anyway.”
“No wait, he’s still got a pouch. I bet there’ll be a knife or some money in it…” The youth pulled on the line, drawing the drowned body of Vekal to the edge of the boat.
“Leave the dead be. You’ll bring something ill down on us, for sure.” The man tried to pull the younger back from his macabre task, but the younger man was stubbornly insistent, reaching out so that his hands just grazed Vekal’s purse strings.
“Almost… Wait a minute…” The younger man grabbed Vekal under the arms and hauled him onto the edge of the boat, but as he did so, his hands had to clasp the dead to him as close and firm as a lover does to another. The younger man’s hands brushed the cold and clammy skin of the Sin Eater, and a charge like an electric shock passed between them.
“I always admire a bit of greed,” were the next words that came out of the young man’s mouth. But the old fisherman knew the sound of his friend’s voice, and this wasn’t it. This sounded like the buzzing of a thousand, hellish insects occupying his friend’s body, as underneath him the drowned body of Vekal suddenly coughed a gout of sea water, and screamed.
About The Author
Jon Kiln writes heroic fantasy.
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Keep an eye out for the next book in this series.
Books by Jon Kiln
Blood and Sand Series
Crimson Spear
Veiled Dagger Series
Assassin’s Quest
Assassin’s Shadow
Assassin’s Winter
Assassin’s Remorse
Swordsman’s Gift Series
The Wandering Knight
Champion of the Gods Series
Gladiator
Blade Asunder Series
Mercenary
Guardian
Warden
Champion
Sentinel
Honor Bound Series
Forsaken
Betrayal
Dominion
