Blood and Sand Trilogy Box Set

by Jon Kiln

  ‘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.

  Desert Forged

  1

  Vekal Morson screamed. He had once been told, many years ago as a child in the Tower of Records, that drowning was painless, a slow departure into the sleepy abyss—and then of course, to the judgement of the gods. Coming from a world of sand and grit and omnipresent dust—the Sand Seas of the deep south—the priest Vekal had thought that all of the gifts that water brought would be merciful.

  But that was a lot of crap, the Sin Eater now knew. Drowning was in fact excruciatingly painful. His chest felt like it had been scooped out by hot pokers and knives, and even his limbs shivered with lines of fire. And water was no friend of man. He had been aboard the tugboat The Emerald just a scant few days ago when they were struck by a storm so ferocious that maybe it was the gods casting their judgement down on him for harboring such evil inside his own body and soul.

  An evil that now had a new home.

  “Dear gods! By fish spit and fish-eye!” The older man in the boat beside the drowned Vekal was gasping, looking at the only other occupant, his apprentice fisher, the younger boy named Gant.

  “What, father, am I not good looking enough for you?” said Gant, not in the thick and slurry accent of his birth, in a small scrape of a fishing port along the Shattering Coasts. Instead, Gant spoke with the sound of a thousand buzzing insects, and the cracking of bones being ground under millstones.

  Gant was not Gant, and the older fishermen knew that. For one, Gant was a thin, sallow-faced boy whom no one wanted to have working about the town thanks to his odd looks and somewhat snide nature. He was a boy who hunched and scurried, and now the thing that was not Gant sat upright as if he owned the boat, cradling the not-dead man that they had recently fished out of the deep blue. And, the older fishermen of course knew—Gant was not, would not, and never had been his son.

  “Wh-what? What have you done with the boy?” the older demanded fearfully, scrabbling to the back of the boat.

  “Aaargh!” screamed Vekal between them, his voice becoming hoarse as he shrieked at the pain that was shooting through his body. It wasn’t just the drowning that was causing this wailing in the man though, it was also the nub of scar tissue from an old arrow wound near the center of his back, that had caused a part of his spine to heal wrong. Had it not been for the priest’s recent possession by the spirit that was now inside Gant, then Vekal would either have died or been a cripple months ago.

  “What have I done with him?” said the thing that was not Gant, causing the boy’s face to break into a sickening, leering smile. “Oh, he’s still in here alright. They are all in here, all of the ones I take. All just one big, happy, family…” The devil started to laugh, relishing the fact that it had a body that was young and healthy, instead of crippled and drowning.

  “Come to me, father, join the empire of Ikrit!” The devil reached for the old man, who shrieked in fear and backed away as far as he could go—which was nowhere. He was pressed up against the gunwale of the fishing boat, cowering and shivering in terror. Behind them rose the dark walls of rock like blades and scales spearing out into the sea. The Shattering Coasts were well named, and from it the older fishermen took brief inspiration.

  “You can’t get back! You won’t make it to land without me guiding,” he said, just as the thing that was Ikrit-Gant was almost on top of him.

  “Ah. I see.” The Gant that was not Gant paused, his eyes becoming dimmer somehow as he searched through the boys’ own memories, rifling through the younger mind like a thief might do through a stolen purse. “Drat it. By the Unholy Names of the Festering Ones!” The devil swore as it realized that what the older fisherman was saying was true. The boy that he now inhabited didn’t, indeed, have the necessary knowledge and skill to navigate through the broken cliffs, towers, stacks and scales of rock of these coasts—let along drive their boat to his chosen destination.

  “Well, you’re clearly the cleverer one,” Gant’s buzzing voice mused, before looking around at the boat around him. “Say, can you pilot this boat with just one person?” He turned back to the older fishermen once more, his face lighting up in hellish greed.

  There was sudden movement as the screaming Sin Eater turned into a wailing one, swinging one of the boat’s oars to connect solidly with the side of the boy’s head, sending Gant to fall to the rails of the boat as unconscious as a rock.

  “Dear gods and all that’s holy, save us…” the older fisherman was wailing and crying. “Is it gone? Is it still in him? Gant! Gant-boy, come back to us!” The man scrabbled forward on hands and knees towards the suspiciously lifeless body of his apprentice.

  “Don’t touch him!” snarled Vekal from where he was slumped on the side of the boat, his legs splayed out in odd angles in front of him. He still held one end of the long six-foot oar in hands that were shaking with exhaustion. The pain in his back was worse than excruciating. The priest felt sick and woozy, like some deep part of him had torn in the sudden effort.

  “You are the dead. The Unliving. You do not belong to the world but to those that live beyond it,” Vekal hissed the litany of the Morshanti, the accursed Sin Eaters of the city of Tir’an’fal. Usually it brought him peace and a clearer mind, and he hissed each word as if to force it into truth. “You are made of this world but are not owned by it…”

  “Bleeding hell,” said the older man, looking at the panting, wheezing man whose skin would be as dark as night but turned white with the criss-cross of countless thousands and thousands of thin scars. Even without his current traumatic back injury, Vekal knew that he would be a sight worthy of the stuff of nightmares.

  “You’re one of them, ain’t you? One of the dead priests of the deserts.” The fisherman started to mumble his own prayers to whatever watery spirits he believed in.

  “Tir’an’fal, the City of the Gods,” Vekal corrected, before a wave of pain threatened to drag him down again. “I will cast no shadow, for the dead have nothing to hide… argh!”

  “You were dead, you were drowned! I saw your body hauled out of the deeps. No man could have survived down there without air.” The fisherman was wailing.

  No, the priest thought through the agony. No man could, unless they had a devil inside of them, keeping them alive through its evil and tainted magics. He should be dead, he knew, and many times over—and he could feel his death coming for him even now, rising from the wound in the center of his back and the burning ache in his lungs.

  Perhaps this is how it should be. Vekal gritted his teeth, looking at the unconscious body of Gant. I will die and return to the gods, my Lord Annwn and my Lady Iliya. But a sudden fear clutched at his heart—would the gods of history, of records and of time and of mercy look kindly upon him or will they send him down to the darkest pits of hell, or back to earth to repeat his life as some new human? As one of the Morsh
aanti of the City he might have been assured entry into the heavens, finally light enough to float up through the rivers of time to the halls of the gods.

  But Gant will wake up, as will the devil inside of him. He could see the boy’s chest still rising and falling. He was unconscious, and the blow to his head was strong, but he would live. Consequences like the games of counting blocks that the old men used to play in the cobbled streets of the city fell into place before him. Ikrit the devil would take the old man, as one who could pilot the boat. Even in the boy’s form, Ikrit would be able to overpower and eventually possess the older, before discarding the boy somewhere.

  And then Ikrit would sail to the Isle of Gaunt, there to unlock the Lockless Gates, the backdoor that led straight to heaven. Vekal had actually agreed to help the devil in this feat: to seek a direct pardon from the gods themselves, as no devil had ever done before, but would the gods hear him? Would they ever forgive a fiend that had thrown lives away so casually, and what would they think of the priest that had carried it there?

  He was doomed, he knew. Either die now and be damned, or… Vekal hissed, biting his lips together to stop the wave of pain that threatened to make all talk superfluous.

  The body of the boy-devil murmured slightly as he began to regain consciousness.

  Vekal shifted over onto his hip, reaching closer to the form of Gant. Every movement was like someone driving a sword through the middle of his back. “My feet will leave no tracks in the sand, for there is no way back,” he whispered through the pain, jaws clenching and releasing, eyes focused on the every few inches that he could drag himself nearer to the waking boy.

  “What are you doing?” The fisherman looked up in alarm. “You gonna kill him? Kill my Gant?” he asked in horror.

  “Your Gant and my demon,” Vekal growled, pulling himself closer. He was only a feet or two away now. “Almost. Just move me closer, please!”