Chainworld

by Matt Langley

The ground was almost upon him.

  The girl and the pack would hit the rocks first, the impact exploding their flesh in the silence between the last heartbeat he’d ever feel and the first heartbeat he’d never experience as Shryke was unmade.

  “Shryke?”

  A sliver of ice far colder than the free-fall ran through Shryke’s body in response to hearing his name.

  He opened his eyes.

  He stared at the bloated belly of an armoured gargantuan.

  He looked up, and up and up.

  The armour was stained and rusted with blood and seemed to go on forever.

  He had to retreat a step to see the whole creature.

  “Shryke?” she boomed again, hefting an enormous axe that was easily the size—and weight—of Shryke’s body from mailed fist to mailed fist.

  Shryke knelt at the huge figure’s steel-plated feet, “I come looking for power my Familiar.”

  “Do you now?”

  “I have a spell to cast but lack the energy to shape it.”

  “You are dying?” The double-headed axe, ragged-edged from the eternal battle, still glinted between the stains. Shryke felt the glints against his eyes like physical manifestations of light. He ignored them and nodded.

  “I am moments from death,” he admitted, his mouth parched. Death was close. “I have walked here, across the fields of endless warfare, to offer myself to you. I will use the powers exchanged to save myself and one other.”

  She looked down on him. “You are aware of the risk? Of who will see?”

  “I am.”

  “And still you would make such a powerful casting?”

  “I am not ready to die. Will you feed me?”

  The huge helm bowed in a single nod. She raised the axe high into the blood red sky as Shryke knelt and made his peace with his conscience.

  The axe came down.

  Shryke opened his eyes.

  Rain fell across his face, blurring his vision as all around him the storm continued to rage. High above him, the Riven Bridge was drawn like an eyelash from the lid of the dead god’s eye.

  Shryke sat up, every bone in his body hurting. His right arm was crusted with scabs from the cat-beast’s attack. His chest burned with the slow-healing wound from the Fornian’s axe. But he was alive, and had settled on the rocks at Ravine’s base, as if he’d just laid down there the night before to sleep.

  The girl beside him murmured in her unconsciousness, blissfully ignorant of the miracle that kept her alive. Her hand brushed at the now healed but livid scar on her forehead. To his other side, the pack lay precisely where Shryke would have put it if he’d left it there himself.

  Shryke took one breath and savoured the moment’s stillness as he prepared to meet the screaming death rushing towards him through the Quantum Aether.

  Death came at him then, dressed in Assassin’s blacks, with a face constructed entirely from the determination to prosecute a righteous execution.

  Chapter 4

  Barl awoke in blackness.

  Not the ordinary night-time dark of the Shadewalls as they moved across the Suns burning at the centre of God’s Heart, but blackness as an absolute. Blackness as the absence of light. The cold bit bone-deep. Every breath burned in his lungs. On his hands and knees, Barl reached out desperately, trying to feel anything. He was on some sort of flat, polished-smooth surface that stretched on beyond his reach.

  He didn’t dare move.

  Not at first.

  The darkness was utterly disorientating.

  His heart thumped in his chest, quickening with anxiety as he remembered how his heart had seized in his chest as he fell through the yawning hole that had opened beneath him, and with the recollection came the memory of ice forming across every inch of his skin.

  The memory was tactile.

  What else did he remember?

  Think.

  Think…

  There was something. An image. He tried to focus on it. Bring it back. What had he seen? A hinged section of corn and soil spilling into darkness from the inner silvery skin of God’s Heart, those grains of dirt shimmering in the reflected light of a million pinpricks of light?

  Had he really seen inside God’s Heart?

  The sense of awe at seeing inside God’s Heart for the first time swept through him again in a rush of wonder and fear.

  Barl swallowed. His throat burned raw. He had to swallow again, and when he did, he started a fit of coughing that hawked up saliva and phlegm. An incredible thirst took root. He managed one word:

  “Hello?”

  Barl’s voice was dead in the space. No echo or reverberation, but there was an undeniable sense of vastness that engulfed the word. This place was bigger than any room he’d ever imagined.

  “Where am I?”

  Nothing.

  “What is this place?”

  The blackness itself wasn’t scary. At least not at first. Barl wasn’t afraid of the dark, not like some of the kids in the village who still believed imaginary creatures lived in the dark.

  The sharp thought of his father’s despairing face, at the pain and sadness where there should have been fear, brought tears to Barl’s eyes. He hadn’t called out like a child for his father to save him. He had been strong. But it was hard to stay strong in the darkness.

  Barl rubbed his eyes as much to clear the memory as to wipe away the tears. He wasn’t going to learn anything by sitting in the darkness waiting for something to happen to him.

  He got to his feet.

  Barl clenched his fists. He steadied himself against the heaving thumps of his heartbeat which felt so much more intense than they had before the organ had frozen. He mustered all his strength of will and determination and took a step, then another. Edging forward he reached out like a blind man, feeling for a wall. He needed something to give him an idea about his surroundings.

  But there was nothing.

  He didn’t want to think about what that meant.

  He concentrated on what had become his reality. No walls, no change in the level of the ground as he continued to shuffle in what he hoped was a straight line. Forward, always forward. All he could hear was the beating in his chest and the scuff of his boots against whatever the ground beneath his feet.

  Barl walked on, no sense of time. It could have been hours. It could just as easily have been minutes. One foot in front of the other. His heart calmed eventually. The only sounds he heard, his footfalls.

  He stopped.

  Looked around, trying to divine any kind of detail in the blackness.

  It was a formless void.

  Time stood still here.

  He walked on, now it could have been an hour or a day.

  He couldn’t see any part of his body, and his mind began to whisper that he had ceased to be. This was death. He had left his body. He was a soul wandering in the eternal dark, inventing the sound of footsteps and the beats of his heart as a familiar trick to pretend he was still alive.

  Barl pinched the back of his hand.

  It hurt.

  But did it?

  Was he inventing that feeling too, simply because it was meant to hurt?

  He had no way of knowing. Not for sure.

  He began to feel uncomfortable with the possibility that he was nothing, a cloud of thoughts travelling in a nowhere place, thinking nothing things.

  Barl imagined himself shrinking into a point in the air, maybe just one of a billion points in the deadened atmosphere, like one of those grains of soil he’d seen pinprick bright. And imagined a billion other boys like him who were nothing more than a collection of thoughts in a cloud of other clouds.

  Barl had to stop walking then.

  His imagined heart was threatening to burst out of his made-up chest.

  He might be an idea floating through a blackened dream, but he’d succeeded in terrifying himself to the point of paralysis.

  “Where am I?” he screamed at the void.

  “You can travel,” the d
arkness replied.

  The voice, a female voice, seemed to come from all around him. It was at once distant and right up close, whispering in his ear so intimately, surely he felt her breath on the nape of his neck? Barl clawed at the blackness either side of his head, expecting his fingers to find flesh.

  But there was no one.

  He spun on the spot, reaching out now, fingers clawing, hoping somehow to snag whoever had spoken.

  Nothing.

  No one.

  “Who are you?”

  “You can travel.” That wasn’t an answer. It made no sense.

  “I don’t know what you mean! Please! I just want to go home.”

  “It’s not within my gift to do that, but in time perhaps you will be able to achieve the great distance needed to go home.”

  “Great distance…” the words hit him like hammers. “Please… I… don’t know not what to call you… Please, tell me, how far am I from my home?”

  “As far as it is possible to be.”

  The sobs wracked his thin frame. Barl fell to his knees, the rush of fear enveloping him in a crashing wave. It washed through him. He was flotsam on the tide, curled and drowned. His breath stuck in his throat as if his lungs were filled with water and then…

  Barl really was drowning.

  Suddenly he was beneath water. Still in the blackness, but underwater.

  Barl could swim, he’d been to the nearby coast with his father in God’s Heart many times to catch fish and boil water for salt. He’d enjoyed swimming in the gentle waves and the deep blue waters that ran onto the wide white beaches of the estuary. But this was nothing like that. He was deep beneath any waves; water was thick in his throat and his lungs were bursting.

  He looked up and saw sparkling through a glitter of wavelets a tiny light. It hung in blackness, so it wasn’t a faraway sun… unless this place had no Shadewalls to produce night. The impossible thought came unbidden.

  Barl put his arms to his side and kicked up for all he was worth.

  The light grew brighter fast, and immediately felt nearer, spurring him on.

  The pain in his chest was immense. Crushing. But the light was so near, he kicked on and on and on until…

  He burst through the surface with a roar, taking a shatteringly deep yet wholly restoring breath from the cold air. The light was a round, yellow-lit ball that didn’t seem to shine with its own light, but rather reflected a light from a more distant source.

  Barl’s back bumped into something solid and cold.

  Something floating on the water behind him.

  He twisted around in the dark water to see what he had come up against.

  It was a small black hulled skiff, big enough for perhaps three or four adults. There was a woman, tall and beautiful, in a black robe that was secured at her throat with a silver chain rowing the small boat. She reached an ebony-skinned hand down to him.

  Barl hesitated, but what else could he do but take her hand?

  It was warm.

  The woman smiled.

  “See?” she told him. “You travelled.”

  Chapter 5

  Death came out of the air as if it had burst through a crack in reality.

  It was cowled in true black, masked beneath a black turban blazing the Red Star of a Guild Assassin on the forehead. The Assassin leapt upon Shryke silent as a summer night and deadlier than the poisoned air in a plague crypt. Muscle memory saved his life in that half-second as the Assassin’s blade whispered its deadly course towards his neck. He rocked back on his heels, arching his spine beyond the limit bones were meant to stretch, and still the lethal blade nicked a blood red scratch like a second smile across his throat.

  There was no thought, only action.

  His hand closed around his own war-scarred length of black steel, and in a single fluid motion Shryke whipped it upwards, creating a defensive barrier between him and death. Sparks flew between the two blades as they clashed, the sheer power pent up within the black chainswords so fierce they sizzled brightly in the still falling rain, lighting up the sky.

  He couldn’t think. Thought brought lethargy to the fluid dance. He needed to exist beyond thought if he were to stand a chance. He needed to become the black steel, lighting it up with the fire of his soul. The codespell tore through his mind even as he rolled, and the blade in his hand caught with soulfire, a sheer sizzling gold that burned as bright as his life against the fizzing hole in reality where the Guild Assassin had passed from one location into another. He licked his lips. The assailant was taller than Shryke, but much thinner and lither.

  Its blade cut through the rain.

  Once. Twice. Thrice.

  Each time he met it with a solid parry that sparked with life against the grey air. His opponent was good. Better than him? Possibly? Hungrier to cling to life? Unlikely. Shryke fell back on the rough, rain-slick granite floor of the ravine. He needed to land a blow before the merging of soul and sword failed and he lost his slight advantage, but with nowhere offering solid footing the best he could do was fight to stay alive, rather to kill.

  On and on the Assassin came, the only expression to be found on its cloth wrapped face was in the black marble eyes staring out through the linen mask. There were thoughts of cruel homicides swimming in their endless depths that denied any femininity the Assassin’s body might have suggested.

  The Assassin hacked down at Shryke’s feet on the slippery rock, forcing him to leap without knowing where or on what he would land.

  Shryke came down hard, crunching on the uneven ground; his left foot buckled beneath him. He sprawled, sword raking along the rocks with metallic protest that sheared off the edge of his codespell, dulling the blade’s light even as he rolled onto his back to avoid the Assassin’s black blade as it scythed down in a vicious arc to strike the rock where his head had been less than a heartbeat before.

  Shryke kicked up, blocking the Assassin’s wrist with the heel of his boot.

  There was a sudden intake of breath as the impact shivered along her arm. It was nothing more than a momentary lapse in the attack, and rather than slow her, had the Assassin pull a second weapon—a dagger—from within her cowl, offering her everything she needed to gut him like a fish.

  She stabbed down with it.

  The blade sliced deep into Shryke’s boot, but it miraculously failed to draw blood.

  Luck was with him. But luck couldn’t be trusted. Luck was a bitch. But he was happy to ride it.

  Shryke reached out with his free hand and yanked at the Assassin’s ankle with enough force to upend her on the treacherous rocks. She crashed sideways, flailing as a jagged boulder slammed into her ribs. She didn’t make a sound. There were seconds left until the codespell was executed and the extra power crackling through his blade was spent. It was now or never. Shryke brought his blade up, pushing himself to his knees, and brought the sword down.

  Once. Getting up on one knee as the Assassin barely managed to parry, still on her back.

  Twice. Now up on both feet, Shryke took a single step forward. The Assassin was completely on the defensive now.

  He didn’t recognise this killer from the Guild.

  In the many attempts to kill him as an apostate over the years, he had recognised only one. Whoever had ordered Shryke’s death wasn’t using Assassins from any of the cadres he was familiar with. He flattered himself to think they were running low on volunteers willing to throw their lives away by going up against him. And even the brief exchange of warrior’s pleasantries hadn’t stopped him from killing the one assassin he had recognised—just as nothing would stop him from killing this one.

  He was Shryke.

  He would not die today. Not here. Not like this.

  On and on he came. Varaciously hacking and thrusting, utterly controlled, a deadly spiral of steel the Assassin barely managed to block and parry away, first with the flat of her sword and then when he was inside, with the hilt of her dagger. But still he came at her. Driving forward rel
entlessly, calm, cantered and lethal. He was Shryke. He had already won this fight, even though his enemy still had breath in her lungs. She tried a desperate ploy, looking to lock hilts with Shryke and turn his forward momentum to her advantage with the free dagger. The short, serrated blade hissed through the leather of Shryke’s jerkin just above where the cat-beast’s wound from The Plain was attempting to scab over. The blade lifted the crust and sent a lance of fresh agony up Shryke’s arm. Cursing, he was forced back, and in that misstep, fell. A jagged rock drove point first up into the base of his spine.

  Spurred on by the creases of pain furrowing across Shryke’s face, the Assassin came at him.

  Shryke couldn’t stay still; he twisted and bucked, timing the move to perfection. The steel point of her blade struck rock. It didn’t snap off, but rather opened a slice in the rock. It was a true Magic Forged weapon, the like of which he had not held in his hand for many years.

  That changed things.

  The Assassin pulled the blade from the rockface and swept her leg out in a roundhouse kick, connecting with Shryke just behind the knee. The blow wasn’t hard, but it was strategically clever. His leg buckled, and a lesser man would have sunk to his knees, but Shryke was no ordinary soul. He sprang backwards, impossibly far, improbably fast, but not before her blade sliced the back of his hand, marking him for a third time. The shallow cut opened the tendons to the rain. Shryke rasped out in pain as his grip broke and his own blade skittered away between the rocks. He heard it clatter well out of reach.

  With a sinking in his guts, he knew the fight would be over soon, and not the way he needed it to end. The reversal surprised him. He was better than this. He always had been. But now he was making mistakes like a neophyte. This wasn’t him. He needed to detach himself, give himself to the instincts that had served him so faithfully all these centuries through and across time.

  He felt the codespell end and his essence flood back into his system.

  It was something.

  A change in the balance of the fight, though not enough to unmake all the mistakes he had made thus far. Surely?