by Sam Sykes
Mocca inclined his head low. “You are no fanatic, Lenk. But you are no believer, either. You trust only what you can see, what you can touch.”
He turned and looked long over the desert. Across the sands to the south, cliffs rose up in the distance.
“And that’s what I intend to give you.”
The moon was already peering over the cliffs when Lenk arrived. The roar of the hot afternoon wind had become a frigid moan. It felt refreshing for all of a moment before the chill made his sweat-ridden clothes all but freeze to his skin.
The journey had taken an entire day and two waterskins to trek from the caravan to the cliffs. His skin, burned a bright pink, tingled as he pulled his sweat-drenched shirt away from his body.
“Fucking outstanding,” Lenk muttered, peering down his shirt. “Half my body is sweated away and the other half is cooked.” He inhaled deeply. “I smell bacon. Do you smell bacon?”
He looked around. Mocca stood several feet away, his back turned to Lenk, silent as a grave. As he had been for the entirety of the trip.
Their journey had begun pleasantly enough—Lenk had been pleased to be away from the Chosen and their empty, grinning faces.
But as they trekked farther into the desert and the wind and sun took their toll, the two of them had fallen quiet. Lenk because he had been presently sweating his balls off, but Mocca’s reasons were … less apparent.
As a demon, he had no need to eat, to drink, to adhere to the mortal limitations that bound Lenk’s weary muscles. But every step farther away from his Chosen, his words had come more sparsely and his face had grown darker. After a few hours in the desert, Mocca’s eyes were locked on their destination and unblinking, as dark and empty as the Chosen he had left behind.
“Not that you’re not riveting company,” Lenk said, approaching the man in white. “But if you’ve hauled me through a day of baking sun just to show me a bunch of rocks, I’m going to jam this somewhere soft.” He patted the hilt of his sword.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t complain,” Mocca replied. His tone was flat and soft.
“That wasn’t a complaint,” Lenk replied. “That was a threat. Very different.”
Mocca said nothing for a moment. “You would, wouldn’t you?”
Lenk flinched. He wasn’t used to words like that.
Words like that—soft words, dying words—they belonged in the mouths of grandmothers and weeping women. The last time Lenk had heard words like that, they had come from lips he had known the taste of beneath green eyes rimmed with tears.
To hear them coming from a demon, to think the God-King could sound so vulnerable as … as …
As she did, Lenk thought, involuntarily.
The thought made him shiver in a way the wind could not.
“It’s not your fault,” Mocca whispered. “Just one more tragedy of this world.” He raised a finger and pointed toward the cliff face. “A very long, very old one.”
Lenk peered into the darkness. The moon had climbed over the peaks into a cloudless sky, painting the cliffs indigo. And through the jagged shadows cast by the crags, Lenk could just barely see a rock he would call most peculiar.
After all, he had rarely met a rock that had stared back at him.
He pushed past Mocca and hurried across the sand to the cliff face. As he drew nearer, he saw more and more: a head, an arm, a torso. And, at the level of his face, a singular stone eye, wide open and staring directly at him.
From the neck down, the statue looked like a robed man. Carved from the rock, as though it were reaching out from the cliff face itself, a single hand extended with the palm raised. But instead of a face, it had just one massive eye. And though it was stone, it seemed to peer directly at Lenk.
Like it knew him.
“I’ve seen this before …” The words escaped his lips without him realizing. “Somewhere …”
A past adventure. Or maybe just in a dark dream he had once buried long ago.
“What do you suppose was the first face you saw?”
Mocca appeared beside him, looking gravely at the stone statue.
“Like when I was born? How would I know?” Lenk shrugged. “I don’t know. My father? My mother? The village midwife, I guess.”
“That would be accurate for most children,” Mocca said. He reached out, fingered a lock of Lenk’s silver hair. “But then, most children were not as unusual as you. They are all dead, yes?”
Lenk flinched away. “What?”
“Your mother? Father? The midwife?”
“Yeah.” Lenk’s voice turned dark. “All dead.” His hands clenched into fists at his side. “By my hand.”
It had been Shuro who told him. The woman with hair like his, eyes the same cold blue as his. The woman who, too, carried a sword she could not put down and left corpses in her wake … starting with her family. Whatever had made them this way, it began with that: the murder of their families by their own hands.
“You had a reason for bringing that up, I assume,” Lenk said. “But if you dragged me all the way out here just to be an asshole, I’m not going to stop at chopping off your head.”
“The first face you saw when you were born”—Mocca gestured to the statue—“was this.”
“So you brought me all the way out here to be cryptic? That’s … better?”
“I brought you here”—Mocca raised a hand and pressed it against the statue’s—“because I need you to see for yourself.”
His fingers interwove with the statue’s stone digits. And suddenly the statue returned the grasp. Dust fell from its fingers as it clasped Mocca’s hand and held it tightly.
“Magic,” Lenk gasped.
“Not the kind you know,” Mocca replied. “The power of this place is older than any wizard’s.”
As if in agreement, a low and distant rumble shook through the cliff’s face. The statue released Mocca’s hand and, with the grinding of stone, began to slide backward, disappearing into the rock. In its place, a lightless gap in the stone stood.
Mocca glanced at Lenk, offering the barest of smiles as he gestured to the new doorway. “It’s quite safe, I assure you.”
“I have only a few rules I abide by in life,” Lenk said, glancing at the gap. “And if I don’t have one about going into a dark hole in the middle of a desert, I can make one up real quick.”
Mocca shrugged and walked into the gap. “I suppose I can’t blame you.” While it was small, it easily accommodated his size. “Were I you, I wouldn’t want to know what lay inside here, either.”
“What? Some kind of monster? Demons?” Lenk called after him as he disappeared into darkness. “I’ve killed plenty of those.”
“Oh, no.” Mocca’s chuckle came back as an echo from inside. “A demon could merely kill you. This is much worse.”
There probably also should be a rule about never following demons who said shit like that, either, Lenk thought.
And, as he followed Mocca into the darkness, he knew that the demon spoke true. Whatever was down here, he would regret. His life, of late, left little room for anything but regrets: for freeing Khoth-Kapira, for betraying Shuro, for every corpse and bloodstain he had left in his wake.
All for her.
He felt his way through the darkness, found the walls of the tunnel no more than an arm’s length to either side. The ceiling hung low, only a foot above his head.
The passage was choked with dust, his feet the first to have seen it in ages. But as he pressed on, a pinprick of light appeared. It grew brighter, silver moonlight pouring into the tunnel, illuminating walls that had been carved smooth, torch sconces that now hung empty. People had once been here.
But that was a long time ago. And the only thing that greeted him as he stepped out of the tunnel was wind and shadow.
His feet crunched on sand-covered stone as he stepped into a courtyard. The moon hung high overhead, casting a singular great shadow from a singular great shape presiding over all.
&nbs
p; A statue. Just like the one he had seen in the cliff’s face, except much bigger.
Tremendous, towering, it rose over the courtyard like a god. But unlike any other god, its hands were not extended in benediction. It raised a single hand outstretched in warning. In lieu of a face, it bore a single, unblinking eye. And though its stare was stone, Lenk couldn’t help but feel like it was looking at him with the cold familiarity with which one regards an unwelcome relative.
It knew him.
“They called him Darior, back when he was worshipped.”
Mocca appeared at Lenk’s side, staring up at the statue. Upon the demon’s face, despair tugged at the corners of his lips, and scorn burned in his eyes.
“That was the closest thing he had to a name, at least,” Mocca continued. “He had more than a few, most of them scornful. Some called him the Judge. A precious few called him the God of Gods, long ago.”
“Long ago …” Lenk whispered.
“One can’t ever say if a god truly dies,” Mocca said. “But when no one speaks their name, when their statues no longer stand, when no one thinks to cry out in the night for them … well, that’s the closest thing to a true death they might ever know.”
“What was he the god of?”
A moment’s hesitation before he answered. “Justice.”
“I’ve seen the inside of a few courthouses. They always invoke their own realm’s gods.”
“Not your concept of justice.” Mocca waved a hand. “Yours is merely a fancy word for revenge. Darior saw something … grander.”
He held out both of his hands, palms up.
“Mortals view justice as a scale. They stack virtue on one plate and weigh it against corpses stacked on the other.” He mimed the motion of a scale balancing before flitting his hands, casting both corpses and virtues aside. “Darior saw it not as a balance to be kept but an inevitability. All actions demanded responses; all responses demanded more actions. Justice, true justice, was not a question of sin answered with atonement. It is a conversation that continues forever with many unpleasant words.”
Lenk looked thoughtfully at the statue looming over them before he casually spit on the sand.
“Sounds like a cock.”
Mocca said nothing. He extended a hand to the western wall of the courtyard. He closed his eyes and, one by one, braziers that had had been hidden by shadow burst to life. Without wood to fuel them, they burned an eerie green flame that cast the courtyard into an unnatural light.
And Lenk would have thought that odd, had he not seen what they illuminated.
A mural, its paint dry and flaked away in places, and all of it covered in dust. It stretched across the entirety of the wall, depicting a scene of darkness. Humans, women all, their heads bowed and backs turned, knelt in rows in the blackness. And at the center of it, a painting of Darior, his unblinking eye turned upon them all, seemed to leer out and stare at Lenk.
“It was our sins that made Darior take notice,” Mocca spoke from behind. “We were still called Aeons, then, though only barely. Our desires to guide mortality had turned to a need to herd them, to control them. The mortal armies marched against us, but to no avail. Our powers were greater back then, our sight endless. Darior alone could see that mortality required a new weapon.
“And he made them. His forges were the wombs of the desperate and sorrowful mothers who were too merciful to bring life into this dark earth. His metals were their tears and their agonies. Their service was compulsory …”
The green fires sputtered to brighter life, illuminating more of the mural. The mothers lay hacked and bloodied, empty eyes and sad frowns looking up at the children that had been born from them: naked babes with heads of silver hair and clenching blades in their hands.
“And brief,” Mocca said.
Lenk’s mouth fell open. Unconsciously, he mouthed the words. “Family, home, faith …”
“All three must be lost before they can realize their potential,” Mocca said. “Darior instilled the barest of his essence into these children, these weapons, and in doing so commanded them to fulfill their purpose.”
“A god?” Lenk whirled on Mocca, eyes incredulous. “I have … a god in me?”
“No.” Mocca smiled. “The fraction of a power that you can contain couldn’t even qualify as part of a god. Yet Darior’s strength was such that even that fraction was enough.”
“Enough for what?” Lenk demanded.
Mocca closed his eyes. The flames died away. Yet just as swiftly, he pointed to the eastern wall and more braziers sprang to life.
“For their duty to be done.”
Another mural sprawled across the wall. But where the former had been black, this one was red. And silver. It showed the children with the silver hair, now grown and marching upon hordes of twisted creatures. Demons, Lenk knew; some he recognized, some he did not.
Their faces were alive with fear, their bodies hewn and hacked and bursting with bright red. Their corpses lay in sheaves upon the mural. And the people with the silver hair showed no emotion. Their eyes, each one the same cold shade of blue, betrayed nothing as they waded into the horde and slaughtered with impunity.
“And this, they did,” Mocca said, sighing. “When we fell from Aeon to demon, we lusted for the things that mortals would grant us: devotion, fear, hope. These creatures for which we had no name, they gave us nothing but steel. And slowly, we fell beneath their blades. Darior’s will drove them, Darior’s power fueled them, and they drove us to the edge of the shadow.”
Mocca’s voice grew soft. His eyes grew distant.
“I remember them,” he whispered. “In the darker days of the war, when the mortal armies marched upon Rhuul Khaas, I heard my Disciples scream as these nameless ones tore them open. Yet they themselves said not a word. Even when I was cast below and their victory was won, they never so much as smiled.”
Lenk stared at them for a long time, their empty faces and cold eyes. After a while, the question leapt to his mouth without him knowing.
“Are there songs?” he asked.
“What?”
“Songs.” Lenk turned and looked to the demon. “There are always songs about war. That’s how you remember them. The heroes, the villains, the massacres … if it’s worth remembering, there’s a song about them.”
“Lenk,” Mocca replied, “this is history lost to every mortal race—”
“But not to you,” Lenk said. His voice cracked slightly. “You were there. You saw everything. Did they sing about them? Did anyone tell stories about them?” He felt his voice choke inside his throat. “Were they people?”
Mocca stared back at him for a moment. His face grew long and brimmed with sorrow.
“There is only one story of them.” He turned to the northern wall and closed his eyes. “And you are reading it.”
More braziers lit. One more mural was illuminated. And it was bright white.
Humans, these ones with eyes wide with fear and mouths alive with screams, gathered at one edge of the mural. They flew banners of bright colors, sigils of gods that Lenk knew well: Talanas, Galatrine, Daeon …
An army, he recognized, but only by their colors. To look upon them, he could see little difference between them and the demons. Their weapons were bloodied and their faces were bright with terror as they swarmed toward one edge of the mural, where the brightness gave way to an endless dark.
And there, he saw them. The nameless warriors, their hair the color of their steel, their faces empty and their eyes unflinching.
Even as the humans pushed them into darkness.
Like hail, they fell into the gloom, fading the lower they went. And at the bottom of that great black pit, a single eye stared up, so dim it was barely there.
“Darior,” Lenk whispered. “What happened to him?”
“Gone,” Mocca said. “As gone as a god can be, at least. His essence was spent forging his living weapons. And when they had fulfilled their function, the remaining gods and
their mortal vessels feared what he might do next. Darior represented inevitability, all that rises and all that falls. And as he cast down the Aeons, heaven feared that they would be the next to fall.
“And so they were hunted. They were executed. They were slaughtered. They faded from the world, the last of Darior’s name. And as their memory of him disappeared, so, too, did he.”
A hand fell upon Lenk’s shoulder. He looked up into Mocca’s smile, a warm light amid the cold flames of the courtyard.
“But he was still a god. His essence was not so easily extinguished. And though they appear but rarely, his children still are born into this world.”
Lenk looked around him, at the murals, at the history of these people …
His people.
“No,” he whispered to himself. “Not people.”
“Pardon?”
“Not people. Not children. Not born.” He tore away from Mocca’s grasp and stalked to the mural. “Forged. Made. Wrought. I wasn’t born. I was made. Like them.” He gestured wildly to their empty faces. “I slaughtered my own family. I’ve left nothing in my wake but bodies since the day I left home. I wasn’t born. I’m not a person.”
When he whirled back to Mocca, only then was he aware of the tears streaming down his face.
“I’m a weapon.”
Mocca’s face was as stone: as silent, as cold. He stared at Lenk, his expression betraying nothing.
“Aren’t I?” Lenk asked. He stormed toward Mocca. “Aren’t I just like them? Aren’t I just a weapon that can’t stop killing because what else does a weapon do?” He seized the man in white by his robes and shook him. “Aren’t I?”
And yet, even grabbing him roughly as Lenk did, Mocca felt too solid to be moved. Lenk felt as though he gripped a statue. Mocca would not move. Mocca would not even blink as he looked upon Lenk and whispered.
“I cannot answer that,” he said. “But I came here to find out.”
“No,” Lenk all but screamed. “No more cryptic bullshit, no more games, no more of this.” He tried to shove Mocca away but succeeded only in pushing himself off the man in white. “I want to know.”
