The Dead Gods
Page 44
The gull surfaced, throwing the fish down its throat. Soon the other birds turned to mob the new arrival, screeching at it with hostile intent, in an effort to drive it off. The gull needed to feed again, but the will inside it forced it once more into the air, leaving the others to continue their watch of the hunting whales.
Reading the pattern of the waves and the presence of seabirds, the will forced the gull’s body onward, as the sun sank towards the sea in the west. To the south, before it, the landmass gradually emerged. The gull swung to the eastern edge, seeing a huge city, a work of men, stretched between two headlands jutting out into the sea. The sight of it coaxed a memory.
He had been heading south to Acaross, a shadowed empire of men, fleeing from the fire priest in the marsh. He had been a beast there, lurking in the swamps, but before that had he not been a man?
The city below was enormous, but he did not recognise it. From the headlands breakwaters reached out, forming a huge port. Issuing from its haven were hundreds of vessels, ships of wood and ships of steel, ships of war, all heading south. And then he remembered, he had been Lord Sheerak, blessed by the Messiah of Shadows, but he had been bested in combat and his butchered frame given to salamander. He had remade himself and found himself abandoned by his master. The house of the Corpse Lord, where his soul had been yielded to his god, was now destroyed and desolate.
Here then was the hated Taleel, on the large island Cyria, metropolis of the upstart empire which Acaross would crush like a beetle. They were embarking for war, once more setting out for the coasts of his homeland, where ten years previously they had been defeated. Maybe he could find a host on one of those ships, let Taleel itself take him home? He chuckled at the thought, but his evil joy was brief. All those warriors going to their doom would be fit and strong, he would have to search long to find a suitable host amongst them, but he did not have the luxury of time.
The fish had given some nourishment to his host’s frame, but it had been driven beyond its normal physicality. The wing muscles ached, the small body yearning to die. Sheerak knew he had to find a new host soon, before his hijacked body gave out. The evil will forced the body on, but in desperation now it scanned here and there. Without a host, his dark consciousness would surely dissolve with the dawn’s hateful sun, becoming nothing but a powerless, spiteful memory doomed to suffer in this world of light and life for eternity, voiceless, lost and forgotten. The fire priest would be victorious. But in the city, there would be evil and corruption. All cities were rife with it: envy, betrayal, lust and darkness in men’s hearts.
He flew over the city as the western sea drowned the sun. The fools were celebrating their imminent defeat as fireworks erupted over the harbour. Over the tightly packed quarters, with their dark underbellies of cutthroats, there he could find a shadowed heart to take his dark consciousness but then, unbidden, he sensed something greater.
There was one fully open for his psyche, in the very lair of his lord’s enemies, in the Fire God’s seminary itself. The body was old and the vessel’s soul lost in a maze of hallucinatory insanity; but the man, oh the irony of whom he was! The gull gave a final, feeble croak as Sheerak sucked its last vestiges of existence from its frail body. It was now or never.
The spent body tumbled from the sky as the psyche of Sheerak shot from it, towards the man’s chambers in the seminary. Truly the Corpse Lord was the god of this world; had he planned this? There was no such thing as coincidence, of that he was sure; he was piece in a puzzle, a pawn in a great game played over the centuries, but it mattered not. Here then was a vessel, prepared and anointed for him by his god’s machinations. Here he would do his lord’s bidding, hidden in plain sight of his enemies.
A dark shade stalked the shadowed corridors of the seminary that night, as it sought and found the High Mage’s chambers. There was a moment of nothingness as Sheerak took possession of his host.
Sheerak opened his newfound eyes. He felt the age in this body, the aches and stiffness of the accumulated mortal years. He looked at his hands; they were wrinkled and yet … this body had power within it. He looked about the room, shelves of potions, powders and tools of alchemy. In the centre a brazier burned fiercely, the flames bright and twisting, as if in outrage at his presence in this place. On his tongue he found a hidden lexicon. He uttered words and waved his hand and the flames died down to the reddish glow of embers, under the command of the Grand Mage of the Alchemists Guild.
Sheerak laughed as the shadows enveloped him.
~ END ~