Chainworld

by Matt Langley

  The dirt.

  Drifting from her hands over the bulwark of the airship, Carlow’s look of disgust.

  Her faith in the God’s Safehome lost on the winds of new Gods.

  New Faiths and the loss of her own.

  Was that when she’d let this devil in?

  Was that when she’d lost herself to evil?

  As Summer bent closer, Galdar tried to find something, a reserve of calm in the churning ocean of terror in which she was drowning.

  This was what happened when faith was lost.

  This was punishment.

  Summer’s palm was bigger than Galdar’s whole head. It came down over Galdar’s face and everything went dark.

  “We travel,” was the last thing she heard Summer say before…

  Shryke opened his eyes to the Plain.

  The shock of cold air and freshening wind, gusting hard over the marshy ground, made him shiver.

  He looked down.

  He was no longer pinning Galdar down.

  He knelt.

  The wetness seeped up into his skin. He felt the ache of rheumatism stiffen the joints of his limbs. He got up carefully, gingerly. Summer stood, back in full armour, helm down. She moved immense battle-axe from hand to hand as she looked out to the horizons.

  The boy stood beside her.

  He was nervous.

  The battle-mace hung limp in his grip.

  Shryke still couldn’t bring himself to look at the boy. There was something about him that was just wrong. He couldn’t place the start or endpoint of it. It was just there, as if it were a crack in his emotions. Uncomfortable and unsettling. Wrong.

  He had to look away.

  “Why are we here, Summer?” Shryke heard the boy ask.

  “We must battle the God-Queen on The Plain. She is in the girl. When you and I arrived and she became smoke, she seeped into the girl’s bones as a means of escape. She thought to hide there from us. Her magic is strong, but here we have a chance to send her back to the realm of the Gods.”

  Shryke didn’t like the idea of sending this enemy back anywhere.

  He had a better solution “Why can’t we just kill her?”

  “Because Gods never die,” Summer said, patiently. “We just stop believing in them.”

  Summer stalked off across The Plain. Shryke and the boy followed in silence.

  Galdar didn’t know where she was.

  It was cold as death.

  It was wet.

  She lay in dew-damp grass.

  She sat up and looked around.

  Not a field; a blasted marsh under a swollen sky.

  She could make out the peaks of mountains in the far distance one way and in the opposite direction, almost at the limits of her vision, she saw the endless streams of beetle-like warriors hacking and killing each other. Their armour black with blood or mud or both.

  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

  Inside. A voice. It wasn’t Galdar’s, not the voice of her own thoughts, but it was inside her head.

  She ground the heels of his hands into her temples trying to force it out, but it had taken root. It was in her.

  More words. Words in a language she did not understand. But she sensed the intent.

  A codespell.

  The surge of magic seared against her ribs.

  The words skittered around inside Galdar.

  She felt them, sharp and shivery in her guts. She felt them crawling up into her skull. She felt them echoing through her.

  But the spell did not ignite.

  An anguished cry tore through Galdar’s skull. Something gripped her heart. Bone-cold fingers closed around it. Not bone. Smoke. Smoke encircled the wildly beating organ.

  It was trying to squeeze the life out of her…

  “Stop! Please, stop!” Galdar clawed at her chest, but it wasn’t as though she could reach inside and make a vent for the smoke to disperse.

  The vile choking black smoke of bones squeezed.

  And squeezed.

  She felt the ripples of shock around her heart.

  Images flashed blazing bright through her mind. Was it true, her life would return to her in those last seconds, fever fresh? Last thoughts. Shryke. Yane. Her parents. The desert of the loop. The Moveable Church. Dirt drifting away from her palm. Carlow’s bloodied and broken body, the vile bones clambering out through his impossibly dislocated mouth.

  The grip around her heart released, howling another desperate scream of frustration, and beneath it all, anger.

  The smoke drifted away inside. Galdar felt it curling and curdling in her belly. Like a sickness. An infection.

  It pulsed inside her blood, down into her legs, turning her, making her walk towards the fighting armies. She fought against it with all her strength, but there was nothing she could do against the will of a God.

  Her feet plunged on, into the sucking mud on the marsh land. She sank into the cloying mud up to her knees, and still clawed and fought her way desperately forward, muscles burning in protest, as the thing took her to the battle.

  CARRY ME.

  “No…”

  CARRY ME.

  The voice was so loud inside her surely its demand had to carry all the way across the Plain, louder than the clash of battle she was being drawn toward.

  “What are you?”

  I AM YOUR GOD

  “I have no God,” Galdar said. “I don’t believe in anything…” It sounded pitiful now she said it. It wasn’t some fierce roar of defiance.

  AND THAT IS WHY I AM GOING TO KILL YOU, GIRL. A LOSS OF FAITH MEANS A LOSS OF LIFE.

  “So, kill me. I don’t care anymore. Do it. Or can’t you? Is that it? I can feel you inside me. You are smoke. I felt you try to squeeze the life out of my heart, it’s still beating. You can’t kill me, can you? You’re trapped inside me. Summer did this to you. She trapped you.”

  YES. I AM TRAPPED. BUT I POSSESS ETERNITY. ONCE YOU REACH THE ARMIES OF THE PLAIN I SHALL BE RELEASED.

  Galdar looked to the distant armies locked in wild battle. She saw the arrows streaking across the blood red sky in flocks. She saw the banners fluttering on the tops of spears, the dull glints of black steel blades cleaving and cutting up arterial sprays of blood.

  And still she walked on, inexorably forward, towards her what she realised was her doom.

  Barl struggled to match the punishing pace of Shryke and Summer.

  He knew he could trust his Familiar, but Shryke…he had no idea who this man was, but there was no denying his mere presence made Barl decidedly vulnerable and unsettled. Moreover, he really couldn’t buy the idea he had somehow stepped out over 35,000 years into his future. What did that even mean? He was in the Sun-Machine inside God’s Heart, home, at least, but everyone he had ever known, everyone who had ever cared for him wasn’t just dead they were ash reborn in the land, in trees and grass and everything else?

  He had heard incredible things in recent months, and even grown used to terrible wonders and the sense of dangerous awe that the Assassins inspired, but this? He didn’t dare ask Summer if it was possible for a spell to take him back—if not to where he had departed Pantonyle, but somewhere close, because he was terrified the answer would be no.

  They marched on, striding powerfully through the wet marshy land, eyes fixed on the battle before them.

  On the edges of hearing, Barl could just barely make out the screams and roars of total war, of a million and a million more warriors fighting to the last. Their numbers never diminishing, their dead never outnumbering the living, as if every time one died in battle, another was spawned somewhere else in the throng to give the eternals a never-ending supply of fresh death and destruction.

  Barl hated the infinite nature of it, the pointlessness of it. All that pain and suffering, just to create the charge to power magic in the real world.

  It was both cruel and torturous.

  It spoke of the true evil at the centre of the mind capable of creating such a mechanism.

 
; Barl wanted no part of it.

  The power of becoming a Guild Assassin, however much good it was supposed to bring to the Universe, was corrupted beyond bearing. The thought of being shaped into a surgeon of hope, his blade being used to cut out that cancer of wickedness had been utterly corrupted by this God-Queen…

  He stopped. Dropped the battle-mace in a damp grass.

  The wind slapped his wet hair against his forehead and blew away the tears that welled in the corners of his eyes.

  “Enough,” he said to the fast-receding backs of his companions.

  Shryke and Summer stopped and turned.

  “What is it, Barl?” Summer asked lifting her faceplate so that Barl could see the concern chiselled into her immense features.

  “I don’t want this. I don’t want to fight any more. This isn’t right. This isn’t what it should be.” He held out his empty hands, palms up. “Look at me, Summer. I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost my home, my family anything that was ever important to me. And now you tell me I’ve lost myself in 35,000 years of nothing. I don’t want to be an Assassin. I don’t want to have to kill. Surely you can understand that murder isn’t noble. Killing is vile. It shouldn’t even be a last resort. My father knew a better life. He grew crops, not corpses.”

  Summer knelt in the grass. “I’m sorry, kid. I truly am, but it is the truth, Shryke and I cannot do this alone.”

  “You’ll have to.” Barl grunted, then lashed out with a booted foot, sending the mace rolling away. “I’m not picking it up.”

  “He’s just a child. Leave him.” Shryke bent and picked up the battle-mace. Then dropped it with a sudden howl of pain and stared down at the steam rising from his scorched palm.

  “That’s not you weapon, Shryke. It’s Barl’s,” Summer told him.

  “I just want this to stop.”

  “Look kid,” Shryke said, not unkindly, but trying to speak to the boy the way his Familiar had. “The universe is at war with itself. We didn’t do that. But we can end it. The three of us. If there’s going to be a chance for peace, we need to stand against the God-Queen.” He looked to Summer. “Back me up here.”

  The Familiar smiled sadly. “I may look the strongest, but it is nothing more than a perception filter. An illusion. I am nothing without you. I am your Familiar. Without you at my side, I have no strength, just as you have no power without me. If you won’t stand Barl, then we all fall.”

  Barl looked into Summer’s eyes. There was a warmth and a truth there that moved him.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “Look at me, Barl. I need you to look at my eyes when I tell you this, so you can see I’m not lying.” He did as he was told. “If you don’t fight, you will die. And so will everyone else. The God-Queen will unleash the Failsafe and from that moment everyone and everything is doomed. If the Dreaming Armies awake it is the end of everything.”

  “How can you be sure we’ll defeat her?”

  “Oh, my sweet dear friend, I’m not. I have no idea if we will have the strength to win. But I know that without you, we have no hope.”

  Summer picked up the battle-mace between her thumb and forefinger and placed the heavy weapon back on Barl’s upturned hands.

  “There is still so much for you to find out about yourself. Both of you know so very little of your true natures. But there is no time for revelations now. Now we fight the greatest evil any of us have ever faced. You cannot go home, Barl, but what you can do is give it a future.”

  Barl looked down at the battle-mace.

  It was wet with the water from the marsh; the breeze moved the droplets across the carved surfaces. He saw the patterns weave away beneath the water, in constant motion. It was a face, wasn’t it? His mother? His father?

  Or was this merely another trick?

  “It’s not a trick,” Summer answered his thoughts aloud. “You see what you need to see. You see what will give you the strength to do what has to be done.”

  Barl looked up at Summer.

  Beyond her in the sky, enormous black wings that seemed to stretch from edge to horizon’s edge beat at the air like drums: the dragons returning.

  He looked to the battle.

  The warriors were no longer fighting themselves. All heads turned towards the mythical beasts. All swords raised, black steel glittering and shimmering with bloody glee. All axes brandished, spears forward, bows cocked with arrows.

  Their war cries burst from their blackened, hateful mouths.

  Barl was no longer moving towards battle.

  The battle had come for him.

  Chapter 37

  Three stood against the multitude.

  Summer, impossibly tall, armour slick with blood and gore, swinging her axe through sweeping arcs. Each swing brought more pain and suffering to the onrushing army. She must have decapitated a thousand bodies and more, her face lit with fury and focus. Her axe smoked. Its blade cut the air with a song of defiance.

  Shryke launched volley after volley of arrows, the black steel tip streaking through the sky as they flew at dragons. Arrowheads speared them through their flaming mouths. Arrowheads pierced scales and armoured plates, punching deep into their flesh. Arrowheads embedded in glassy eyes. Arrowheads send beast after beast falling away, wings stilled, onto the warriors below.

  He kicked out his mailed boots at eternal combatants who got too close. He drove his boots into ribcages, breaking bones. He hammered them through legs, snapping bones. He lashed out, tearing jaws from faces. Every kick sent stalagmite spumes of blood into the air.

  They froze for a second, long enough for the fighter behind to be given a sense of the future that awaited them in a grim premonition of their demise.

  Another deadly arrow speared a dragon in the eye.

  Barl ran tiny between the onrushing bodies, swinging the battle-mace, each one crippling a foe who stood staring up at Summer. He battled bones. Broke the hinges of knees. Thrust up and tore out guts. And hated every single death he wrought. But there was nothing he could do but kill.

  How long could they last like this?

  How long before they drowned in this endless tide of war?

  Summer began wading forward. She was taking the fight to the army. A thousand dead, screaming filled the air. She crushed more skulls, using them like writhing cannonballs. She brought slaughter to the battlefield.

  And as death’s energies swept towards them Summer began to grow.

  Taller.

  Wider.

  Wilder.

  The sheer wild magic of death swelled the Familiar. She grew. Huger now. Every footstep she took flattened a dozen warriors beneath her boot, crushing the life of out them.

  The boom of her steps punctuated the screams of death.

  Beside her, Shryke felt the fire in his muscles as they grew. Every tendon was aflame. But the power pent up inside him needed release. He felt his legs grow ever stronger, his accuracy with the arrowheads unerring. Every arrow flew true.

  Where once there had been a black cloud of wings in the sky, lit by dragon fire, now there was a ragged flock, reeling from losses suffered to Shryke’s arrows.

  The twang of this bowstring was constant; there was no gap between firing and reloading. Arrows turned the sky to black steel. The great winged serpents banked and rolled, rose and fell, twisting and squirming in the air as they desperately tried to evade his rain of death, only to crash down in huge gusts of flame, burning soldiers into cinders where they fell.

  Barl moved faster.

  He didn’t have to think, he cut swathes through warriors. His arms were no longer his own. It wasn’t muscle memory or training or instinct. He could relinquish his hold on the battle-mace and it would continue killing without him. No amount of death could sate the weapon. Barl was secondary now, irrelevant. The taste of other bloods filled his mouth. He walked forward, blinking other lives from his eyes.

  Impossibly they were winning.

  The dragons were retreating.

&
nbsp; The armies wary, no longer attacking in waves, wise to the fact that these three were more than they seemed.

  Summer wove a shimmering ring of protection around her huge body, the codespell enclosing Shryke and Barl, too.

  TAKE WHAT REST YOU CAN Summer boomed into their heads. THIS IS NOT OVER YET.

  Shryke didn’t need telling twice. He knelt, and took a series of deep breaths, focussing his thoughts. Centring himself. His hands were bloody from where the bowstring had sliced deep into his fingers. Flaps of skin hung from them.

  Barl watched as Shryke mouthed a spell and his fingers knit together, healing.

  But even healed, they were stiff with scars and crusted with scabs.

  Shryke would be in constant pain as the battle progressed.

  Barl sat down with a thump on the wet grass, not caring that the cold seeped up through him.

  The battle-mace was clean and new made.

  Barl wasn’t. He was drenched head-to-toe in blood and corruption.

  It did not matter how frantically he wiped at his clothes, the stains wouldn’t diminish.

  “Where is Galdar?” Shryke asked.

  WITH THE GOD QUEEN.

  BEHIND THE ARMY.

  DIRECTING IT TO ATTACK US.

  Barl looked up, “What is going on? Why are we here?”

  THE DREAMING ARMY OF THE PLAIN BATTLES HERE UNTIL THE BATTLE IS WON. ONCE THE GOD-QUEEN CAN CONVINCE IT OF ITS VICTORY HERE IT WILL WAKE UP ON THE SUN-MACHINE AND SET FORTH TO DESTROY CREATION. THIS CANNOT HAPPEN.

  Barl’s heart thumped sickeningly in his chest.

  They were surrounded.

  The vengeful, snarling faces of the Dreaming Army, brandishing their weapons, beating their black armour, spitting their anger, their hate, goading but wary, now, not rushing forward to the slaughter.

  Shryke finished the healing of his fingers.

  The magic he used brought the Assassins. One. Ten. A hundred. More. Until a thousand lined up in rows before Summer, weapons at the ready.

  He had known they would come.