Chainworld

by Matt Langley

  Garn had already prepared a trestle and easily lifted the barrel onto it, breaking the wax seal on the tap with his thumb and holding the first flagon beneath the amber stream.

  Barl watched with fascination as the flagon filled with foamy liquid, and a thirsty crew of men and womenfolk lined up behind his father, each with their own leather cup or pewter flagon.

  Garn’s pint drawn, he raised his hand. “Before we drink my fellows, I wish to give first sup to my own son, Barl, who has made a fine job of bringing sustenance to us this day!”

  Among the half-raised tents, and the quarter-constructed stalls, the line of workers raised a cheer as Garn placed his flagon against Barl’s lips.

  Barl had never tasted beer before, but the smell of it was inviting and the foam popped pleasingly against his nose as he dipped forward to drink.

  Unfortunately, that was where the fun stopped.

  The first rush of bitter liquid across his tongue caused him to retch almost immediately. His eyes bulged and his stomach heaved. His flailing hands pushed the flagon away from his mouth and he fell back, retching up not only this morning’s breakfast, but—or so it felt—every breakfast he’d ever eaten, in a long stream of bile and watery food.

  It wasn’t until he’d stopped puking his guts up that Barl was able to look up at his father and realised many of the village workers were chuckling at his predicament. Barl sank down heavily on the crushed stalks and looked up at his father with wounded eyes.

  Garn smiled and reached down for the boy, pulling him up smoothly and settling him on his wide and welcoming shoulder.

  “I am sorry, father. I have shamed you.”

  “Nonsense boy,” Garn boomed with amusement. “You could never shame me. Everyone’s first taste of beer is a rite of passage. It’s an acquired taste and let’s just say that some, like our master brewer, acquire it quicker than others.”

  “Were you sick, father? The first time?”

  Garn shook his head. “No, boy, I was not, but believe me, I feel sick when I see the workings with numbers and words you learn every day with Shaj. I can forgive you a little queasiness, if you can forgive mine!”

  “Of course, father.”

  Garn squeezed the boy’s shoulder, then set him down on the table of one of the half-completed festival stalls. “I trust this will be the only time either of us has to forgive the other.”

  “I do too,” Barl said with all seriousness, and Garn was off again, laughing fit to shake the whole of God’s Heart.

  Festival night began with a torch procession along a narrow pathway that had been cleared through the corn. From inside it looked endless as it curved all the way back to the village.

  Villagers walked arm in arm. Some carried instruments, others dragged more beer kegs through the night. Barl walked with his parents, Shaj and Garn. He grinned sheepishly as Garn promised water was being transported as well as ale. Earnestly, the lad swore he would never drink again, first swallow from a keg or last. He was done with the stuff. That earned an even broader grin from his old man.

  Up ahead, the villagers formed a circle, each holding a torch in one hand, their arms linking through the elbows of the person next to them. The guttering torches transformed the circle into the ceremonial heart of the village, and as Headman it was Garn’s privilege to get the festivities underway. His father loved this time of year more than any other. So many of his duties included sadness, like only last week when he’d been forced to preside over the funeral of one of his oldest friends. Nights like this, where everyone came together in joy, were a delight.

  Barl looked beyond the circle at the stalls set with so many challenges and games just waiting to be played. Barkers were ready at each one, eager to entice the villagers into trying their luck and parting with their coin.

  The canvas tent in the centre of the flattened corn circle was already alive with the grunts of wrestlers psyching themselves up for their bouts. Barl heard the slapping of flesh and the stamping of feet. What happened in that tent was as much a dance as the arm-in-arm twirls and swirls to the music that happened outside the tent.

  A second wide oval had been stamped flat in the field, large enough to allow for the horse and dog races that, as far as Barl was concerned, were the high point of the festival. He’d spent too much of the year begging and pestering his parents to buy him a dog from one of the trainers who travelled through the village, bartering them for lodging, food and beer. The promise was always the same, “Maybe next year, son. When you’re a little older and can look after the mutt yourself.” The thing about next year was it never came.

  Garn stepped into the centre of the circle, raising his own torch high. The light danced shadows across his face. “I am a simple man,” he said, earning a hoot of laugher from someone nearer the back. His grin spread. “I enjoy simple pleasures. The land, the air,” he found a familiar face in the crowd. “Even you, Hojek…” which was greeted by uproarious laughter from everyone apart from Hojek, Garn’s younger brother, who just shook his head and called back, “It would be my honour to beat you in the ring later, old man.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky this year,” Garn chuckled. It was a ritual. Everyone loved the back-and-forth of the brothers. “Believe me, friends, when I promise you this: it is the simple things which are the best things. The Song, The Story and The Game.” There were nods around the ring. “Who doesn’t enjoy the thrill of competition, the honour of the victory when hard won? Who hasn’t drawn on the sadness of defeat to spur them on through the next challenge? I know I have.”

  “You’d think you’d be used to losing by now, old man,” Hojek chimed in, much to the amusement of the others.

  “It is this struggle, this glorious struggle, which sets us apart from the beasts of God’s Heart, brother. It’s these games which make us richer…not in terms of coin, but if anyone wants to wager on my win against Hojek later, I’ll give you ten to one… Make that twenty. I’m feeling good this year.”

  Another cheer went up as Hojek ripped off his shirt with a yell of triumph and cast it at his brother’s feet in challenge. “Get on with it, man, there’s people here who’ll die of age before we get to the fighting at this rate,” Hojek mocked.

  Barl clapped and cheered and hooted along with everyone else, beer sickness completely forgotten. He looked to the dark horizon. The sheer upward curve of God’s Heart arching away and up into the night was an awe-inspiring sight. It was impossible to believe something so fundamental to life could have been imagined never mind constructed by mere mortals. It was proof of divinity if ever there was proof to be found. The Shadewalls were across the suns now, producing the night they were about to enjoy. The Shadewalls were more than regulators to divide day from night, when coupled to their nearness or distance to the endless surface they created and controlled the seasons. Nothing would grow in the fields without them, and likewise no animals would flourish.

  God had thought of everything inside his Heart.

  Barl’s people along with the billion other tribes who lived their lives on the inner surface of this boundless sphere were happy, settled, and above all, safe.

  “Let the games begin!” Garn bellowed, and the villagers responded with their most raucous cheer yet.

  This was the very stuff of life and a life worth living, at that. Barl’s heart swelled with love, for his father, for his clan, for his home, for the arch above them, and the trampled corn beneath them. Such was the joy in his soul he could have climbed the miles of the arch to the keystone and floated safely back down on it. He could only imagine what it must be like to stand in front of the torchbearers, their Headman, leading them with wisdom and love.

  Gran stripped off his shirt and clasped forearms with his smiling brother. Both men lit in torchlight, their eyes alive to the moment and the thrill of the wrestling bout to come.

  Barl was half way across the circle when the first scream came.

  In that first half-second it was easy to mistake it
for a caw, the shriek of savage fighting birds, but Barl recognised the screamer.

  It was Shaj.

  He turned as his mother screamed again.

  This time there was no mistaking the sheer terror driving it.

  Barl ran towards his mother—or tried to. His feet wouldn’t work. He wasn’t moving. A chill rush of wind swarmed all around him. He felt the rapid frost burn across his skin, which made no sense. It was the height of summer. There was barely a breeze.

  But before he could isolate the cause of the sudden cold burn, more people screamed. Once voice rose above them all. Garn yelling, “Nooooooooooooo…”

  Silence sliced through the yell, cutting it dead.

  Barl didn’t understand.

  The world had been robbed of sound.

  All around him there was nothing beyond the emptiness where it should have been. And it was truly deafening.

  He looked down and tried to make sense of what he saw: the ground beneath his feet—the trodden down stalks of corn and scuffed dirt—had hinged away onto a freezing blackness filled with a billion diamond points of light. It was as though he stared into the very core of God’s Heart and the sucking void where the long dead deity had rotted away to nothing.

  Barl fell.

  It was gradual—sickeningly so—a collapse down through the hole in the world, and even as he clawed out desperately trying to find anything to hold onto, he could only fall faster, his mother and father’s faces sick with terror as they silently screamed his name.

  Barl spun and flailed and fell, ice forming on his skin, eyes frozen in their sockets as his ears filled with the desperate drum of his last heartbeat as it froze solidly in his chest.

  Chapter 3

  The Riven Bridge lurched alarmingly as the Raiders ran across it, several instinctively moving to follow Shryke even as their fifty-crowns fell into the grey rain clouds glutted between the peaks below them.

  Shryke, in free-fall, back first, arms spread-eagled, savoured their rage as he, the pack and the girl, were swallowed by the rain.

  The feeling in his guts, that hollowness, that chill shiver, wasn’t unfamiliar but he would never get used to it, no matter how many times in his endless life he fell.

  The drop from the Riven Bridge was by far the highest drop he had thrown himself from.

  Shryke stole a glance at the girl beside him, falling headfirst, like a rag doll, limp and unconscious as the winds buffeted and bullied her. It was a blessing that he didn’t have to calm her. He needed all his wits to concentrate saving them both.

  The jagged edges of the granite slopes rushed, vague darknesses barely visible through the mist of rain. Below, now less than half a mile down, boulders and broken rock formations waited to crush Shryke and the girl into blood and bone.

  There was barely enough time to perform the incantation before they reached the ground, but that little technicality was the least of his worries. Using the codespell magic would be a terrible drain on his physical powers, but he could live with that. What he didn’t know if he would get to ‘live with’ was what happened when the ripples the codespell sent out into the Quantum Aether reached the Guild Assassins. Every trigger had its own signature, and that would burn brightly across the Aether for anyone with the ability to see, pinpointing him, not just where but when. And that was considerably worse than being shattered on the rocks below.

  Shryke was not ready to die. Not today, at least.

  He closed his eyes. He drew one, two, three calming breaths, slowing his pulse, and stilling the blood in his veins as his heart froze within the icy hand of a deity he had long ceased to believe in. Because there was nothing magic in the world. Nothing.

  Shryke prepared to walk upon The Plain.

  Smoke. Fire. The screams of the damned.

  Shryke stood on a rocky promontory above the battle. The Dreaming Armies of the Plain met once more in the eternal clash of the forever battle. The crucible of war boiled beneath him. The conflict had begun before time, and it would continue long after time ceased to matter. Blood ran thick as a silted river beneath the combatant’s feet. Carcasses rotted. The stench of death, the burning of flesh and the screams of the souls being extinguished battered Shryke’s senses in a brutal barrage of stimuli.

  He stumbled forward a single step, then dropped down on one knee. He needed his hand to steady himself against the heaving ground.

  The red and black of the battle reflected cruelly in his eyes.

  He took a deep, acrid breath from the corrupt air. He had no choice but to descend into the maelstrom of eternal war.

  Shryke drew his sword. He felt nothing. Not the thrill of the blade’s hunger for fresh souls, not the ache of emptiness that the end promised. None of it. He was disconnected. Distanced despite the fact he was wading into the heat of the battle’s rage. All around him things that might once have been human hacked at things that might evolve into humanity if they survived long enough—faces streaked with spit and blood, skin slathered with a black-rain which fell mercilessly from swollen skies all around them. The clash of steel, the soft hiss of metal separating flesh from bone. The rush of bodies plunging recklessly through the blood and mud, and everywhere the dank stink of sweat.

  Battle beasts looming over the throng, huge furies in the air slamming down and ripping a trail of heads from lines of combatants. Dragons wheeled in the grey air overhead, burning and scorching through the dead and dying, their huge black wings flapping slowly through the ragged plumes of smoke.

  Shryke waded into the thick of it, knowing his doom waited in this world, as it had in the last and would in the next if he made it that far. The sickness of the free-fall still clenched in his guts, his body remembering what should have been its death as he plunged from the Riven Bridge. In both worlds, he knew he was rushing willingly to his death. But here, that death would damn him in this world and rescue him in the other. That was the secret nature of this place.

  Black armoured Wraiths, their jaws just slack bones hanging over hollow throats, came at Shryke from all sides, howling. He took the first blow on the flat of the blade and rolled it away from his body with ease. The Wraiths offered no thought behind their assaults; they were mindless. Shryke took seconds to turn the blades of the second and third on their wielders, and seconds more to cleave jawbones and skulls, ending the threat. He moved forward, hacking at bone-legs, disarticulating spines and scything open the bone cages that once upon a time had been living bodies as though nothing could touch him. He moved with ruthless efficiency through the fringes of the battle, pausing momentarily before a blasted mound of bones that climbed steeply up to a bleak, battle swept platform of skulls and ribs that towered over him. The bone mound was surrounded by a moat of blood.

  Shryke waded into the cold, iron-red liquid.

  Clots and coagulations floated around his legs. The stuff of life clung to his armour like leeches. His feet slipped and slid over unknown things beneath the surface—things he did not want to imagine—as he forced himself to wade on deeper into the blood until it was waist deep.

  Through the worst of it, Shryke began to rise, climbing up the lower skirt of the bone mound while the conflagration of battle raged all around. He ignored the screams, the roars and rage, the weapons clashing, and the dying being done. His focus was on the bone hill, and what he knew he would find at the summit.

  A snarling cat-beast, hide tiger-striped and protected by rusting armour, leapt at him from its place of concealment between two immense bone cairns, dislodging a crushed skull that skittered down over tibias and fibulas and other bones. Shryke didn’t flinch. His breathing didn’t so much as quicken. He merely reacted and a heartbeat later a viscous line of blood ran down his forearm, the beast dispatched with a strike through the heart. The cat’s claws lost purchase on the bone slope and the dead beast rolled down the slope into the blood moat, where it sank below the surface.

  Shryke walked on.

  He closed his eyes, savouring a single hear
tbeat’s dislocation, and in that moment, he was still falling from the Riven Bridge, the woman at his side, the pack slipping out of his grasp.

  “Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!” The shriek tore through the moment, bringing him back to the endless battle. A Fornian Warrior of the Seventh Legion leapt upon that heartbeat of dislocation and hacked at Shryke with its wicked double-headed axe. The blade, each wing of the iron butterfly bigger than his head, slammed into Shryke’s breastplate, splitting through treated leather like the carapace of a bug. The axe head dug deep into his sternum with a sudden shock of pain. It blossomed black agonies within Shryke’s chest, blood, muscle and bone tearing apart as if they were his soul rather than his meat.

  Shryke grabbed at the thick leather-wrapped haft of the axe, making it impossible for the Fornian to yank it free from the gaping cavity at his heart, and with his free hand severed the enemy’s throat with one fierce slash of his blade. The creature fell away, axe forgotten as he clawed desperately at his neck, trying to stem the flow of blood with his fingers.

  Shryke cared nothing for the Fornian’s death. He trudged on, pulling the axe from his chest and throwing it aside. He ignored the blood and exposed bone. He would heal. He always did.

  Unless he died on the rocks in that other place.

  Vultures and crows circled in a cloud of slow feathers on lazy wings.

  He followed them, trusting that they would lead him to where he needed to be.

  Shryke crested the bone rise. The whole battle was laid out before him, but now it was so much nearer and more immediate. The tang of blood sprays from vicious and unrelenting hand-to-hand combat turned flesh into the flimsy fabric of war banners, lashing about in the fierce winds. The moans and screams of death became a vibrating symphony of horror and of despair that swarmed his senses.

  Shryke closed his eyes again.