by Ari Marmell
“Because I didn’t think he’d come see me.”
“Ooh, I wish the Council had killed you!”
“Stick around. Anything might happen.”
Death reined Despair to a halt in a mixed cloud of dust and rolling green mists, before a gaping hollow in the rock. This far from the platform where the Council held court, the hellish realm had taken on a slightly more civilized aspect. It was still a pit of blasted badlands, flaming crevices, lava flows, and jagged crags half mountain, half stalagmite. But here, portions of the stone had been worked by the hands and tools of living creatures. Great humanoid figures, their specific features long since worn away by the harsh environs, half emerged from the sides of columns and hills; ancient sentinels, their vigils long ended, left to slowly return to the rock whence they came.
The cave where Death had halted was flanked by two of these vague figures. The floor here was worn smooth by the passage of many feet—or, more accurately, a few feet at a time over the course of centuries. The opening itself gave some sign of having been worked, for it was just a bit too symmetrical, a bit too smooth.
The light gleaming from deep within, a steady yellow-white glow rather than the reddish flicker of fire, might have provided something of a clue, as well.
“So, why are we here?” Panoptos asked again.
“I’m here to speak with the Keeper. Alone.”
“Oh, Death, Death … Haven’t we already had this conversation? I’m supposed to escort you while you’re here—”
“And provide me whatever resources I require, as I recall it.”
Something in the creature’s face suggested a smile, despite the lack of anything even resembling lips. “I fear ‘privacy’ doesn’t qualify as a resource.”
“No, but information does.” Death slid from the saddle, landing with a soft whump. “Just because Belisatra has never come to the Council’s attention doesn’t mean one of their agents hasn’t run across her a time or two. It just means the context wasn’t vital enough to report. Flutter on down to visit the archivists, will you? See if you can dig up anything on her, then find me and report back.”
“I … you … We passed the archive on the way here! Why didn’t you say something then?”
“Oh, did we?” The death’s-head mask did absolutely nothing to conceal his broad grin. “I must have forgotten. So sorry to inconvenience you. Haven’t you left yet?”
Spitting curses nearly venomous enough to imprint themselves into the nearby rock, Panoptos shot away into the distance. The petulant snapping of his wings was, Death assumed, the closest he could come in this environment to slamming a door. Snickering, the Horseman entered the passageway, leaving Despair behind. Dust soared in beside him and settled once more atop Harvester’s blade.
“You’re going to cut yourself one of these days.”
A derisive caw was his only answer.
“All right, then. Don’t come squawking to me when you’re desperately hunting for your missing tailfeathers.”
The corridor took on an ever-more-artificial aspect as Death progressed. The floor grew smoother, the walls more symmetrical. When the stone abruptly ended and the steel began, it wasn’t jarring at all; it just felt like a natural stage of progression. The steady illumination Death had seen from outside had no clear origin, but seemed to emanate from points upon that steel, as though it were reflecting a light source otherwise invisible.
At random intervals, small sigils had been etched into the otherwise seamless metal. The Horseman ignored them. They weren’t keyed to trigger in his presence—and besides, they were mostly focused to prevent creatures leaving, rather than entering.
The barred gate ahead, formed of that same steel, was also so intended. Opening it from this side was a simple matter of pulling a winch recessed into the wall. From the other side? An intricate combination of levers had to be positioned just so before the many latches would slide from their sockets.
In this particular instance, however, Death needed to do neither. The gate hung open, as some creature or other of the Charred Council’s was currently coming the other way. And the eldest Horseman, who believed he had seen just about everything Creation had to show him, was struck practically dumb in shock. Even Dust spread his wings and hissed through opened beak.
“Panoptos? What are you …? How did …?”
Except it wasn’t Panoptos, though it took Death several long instants to realize it.
It looked almost exactly like him: the same freakishly long arms and fingers, the same dark and glossy skin, the same twitching wings. It even trailed off into rags and mists where its legs should be.
In one respect, and one only, did it differ. Only six eyes, rather than Panoptos’s nine, gleamed emerald from the otherwise featureless face. These, rather than shifting and swirling, were fixed in twin columns of three.
Death was just raising Harvester before him, half convinced he’d discovered some attempted impersonation and infiltration, when a second creature, identical to the first, appeared from beyond the gate.
The two creatures giggled and snickered, and the voices certainly held Panoptos’s accustomed derision. They placed their hands together and bowed in unison. “Hello, Horseman,” said the first.
“So pleased to meet you,” said the second. They both snickered once more.
“You don’t know about us!” the first realized. Their laughter grew louder.
“No,” Death said coldly. “But I’m betting your corpses would be a lot less aggravating to talk to.”
That, at least, put a stop to the laughing.
“We’re not enemies,” said the first.
“We could hardly be coming from the Keeper’s sanctum if we were,” said the second.
“We’re servants.”
“We’re messengers.”
“And we’ve delivered our message.”
“So we’ll be going.”
“Unless you plan to kill us.”
“But the Council might take that amiss.”
They swooped past him, one to each side, and Death—for lack of any better option—let them go. Bemused, he continued on his way, bypassing several side corridors until he reached a massive door of black iron.
If the corridors had boasted walls with the occasional rune, this door was essentially a mass of runes with iron ridges between them. He could feel the magic radiating from it, a physical atmosphere through which he had to push, and he knew that this was nothing to what lay beyond. He hammered at it four or five times with the heel of his left fist.
He heard nothing. The portal seemed to absorb the impact without the slightest sound. Yet someone was aware of his presence, for he heard the bar sliding aside. The door drifted open on massive hinges, still utterly silent.
“I welcome you, Horseman.”
The figure in the open doorway, his face downcast in a gesture of nervous respect, was that of a young Maker. His hair and beard were gold—not blond, but quite literally golden—and his eyes just as purely silver. He wore vest and trousers of thick brown leather, which clashed rather fiercely with his ruddy, almost rusty complexion. That leather was scored with all manner of small slits and burns, suggesting that the apprentice had been hard at work.
“Hello, Berrarris. Is your master in?”
“Oh, most certainly—though he might wish otherwise. It’s been quite the day for visitors.”
“I just met two of them. Since when does Panoptos have siblings?”
“I’m told they are called Watchers, Sir Horseman. I know only that they serve the Charred Council, much as Panoptos himself does. You’d have to ask the master for details. Oh!” Berrarris flushed—though it was barely visible, given his natural coloring—and stepped aside. “Please, enter.”
Death stepped past him with a muttered “Thank you,” choosing to ignore the fact that the young man was trembling.
I’m not that frightening, am I?
Well, maybe …
“I’d like to sp
eak to him,” Death continued.
“Of course. I believe he’s with yet another guest at the moment, but I’ve no doubt that he’ll make time for you. If you’d follow …?” He led the way, still unwilling to look up and risk meeting the Horseman’s gaze.
The rooms through which they now passed displayed shelves and podiums of wonders. Weapons, armor, peculiar mechanical devices with functions that Death couldn’t begin to guess … But all were, in some way or another, crude. Just a little imperfect in shape, or a tad awkward in construction.
These, Death knew, were Berrarris’s creations—the many projects on which he worked as he studied his art beneath his master’s tutelage. Of his master’s own works, however, there was no sign.
Not until the final chamber.
“Would you permit me just one moment, Sir Horseman?” the apprentice asked before scurrying on ahead. Death heard a few muffled voices—including one he failed to recognize—and then Berrarris returned. “He’ll see you. Please call if you require anything.”
He hurried off in one direction as Death headed the other. Just as he moved to enter the chamber, he felt a faint surge of eldritch forces and caught the faintest foul odor.
“Well. My home appears to be a popular place today.” The voice was deceptively soft, humble, even gentle.
The man to whom it belonged was not.
He was clad in similar leathers—trousers, boots, and vest—to those worn by his apprentice. Where Berrarris boasted the muscular stature of a worker at forge and anvil, however, this figure, though tall and broad of shoulder, was gaunt to the point of emaciation. Paler than Death, he truly appeared to be one missed meal away from the grave.
Yet there was nothing of decrepitude or weakness in his movements, his stance, or his presence. He gave, in fact, the impression of boundless strength, held in reserve until the precise moment it might be needed.
It could not have come from his expression, such an impression—because he, like Death, was never seen by living eyes without a mask. His own, however, was an angular slab of iron, featureless save for the narrow eye slits, and for the trails of corrosion that ran down from those hollows to create an image of eternal weeping.
The Horseman nodded his greetings to perhaps the only servant of the Charred Council who was feared as widely as he himself. If Death was the highest enforcer of the Council’s will in their defense of Balance, then this was their magistrate, their jailor, their executioner. This was the creature who held the worst of all possible fates in his hand.
The Keeper of Oblivion.
“I encountered some of your guests,” Death told him. “Watchers, Berrarris called them?”
“Ah, yes. The Council’s latest errand-runners. Designed and bred to serve. Seems our dear friend Panoptos was something of a prototype, Death. A template. Now that he’s proven both his efficacy and his loyalty …”
“A slave race, then?” The distaste so thick, it practically stained the surface of Death’s own mask.
“Can you ever imagine the Council trusting—truly trusting—anything else?”
Death almost replied with Other than us? Ultimately, however, he couldn’t even pretend to fool himself that much.
Instead, he grunted and wandered across the chamber. The walls sported the ubiquitous glyphs, as well as several doors, but the room was otherwise bare of adornment save for a single bench of stone …
And the portal.
Broad and tall enough to have admitted all four Horsemen, while mounted, it was a circle of glass contained within a ring of intertwined iron- and gold-forged serpents. It might almost have appeared to be a giant mirror, save that the glass reflected absolutely nothing. Neither was it remotely transparent. It was just … there.
Few beyond the Keeper himself—perhaps none—knew the proper rites to open that portal; a fact for which most in Creation had reason to be grateful. Beyond that thin dimensional membrane lay nothing. Nothing at all.
Oblivion.
Some scholars theorized that this was the void beyond Creation, an emptiness outside the Trees of Life and Death. Others that it stood as a pocket of the Abyss, well below even those metaphysical pits whose fearsome gravities slowly drew reality’s dead and dying realms into the depths.
Ultimately, the truth of its location—if concepts such as location even applied at all—was unimportant, compared with what it was.
Nonexistence, not as an absence but a presence. An emptiness that exerted its own nature. Anti-light, not darkness; anti-sound, not silence.
Anti-life.
For beings that were so very nearly immortal—for creatures who knew as fact that, after death, the soul returned to the source of being, so that some manner of existence continued—it was, bar none, the most dreadful of fates. Consignment to Oblivion made even the most fearless entities tremble, formed the basis of horror tales told throughout Creation.
It was the most fearsome sentence the Charred Council could levy, reserved for only the vilest of enemies and the greatest threats to the Balance. And, quite possibly, Death’s own fate should the Council ever decide that his defiance had crossed the line; it was a thought even he could not face without apprehension.
And it was all in the hands of the Keeper. Death wondered, not for the first time, what sort of mind and soul lay beneath that iron mask, and how it possibly kept itself from going utterly mad.
“And your other guest?” Death asked, staring into the portal just as intently as if there had been something to see. “Consorting with demons now, are you?”
“What makes you think—?”
“Come on, Keeper. I felt the teleportation just before I entered, and there’s still a touch of brimstone in the air.”
A chuckle echoed, distorted, from behind the iron. “I deal with all sorts in my position, you know that. Unpleasant, but occasionally necessary. And yes, the Council is aware.”
“Of course they are.”
Silence, then, interrupted only by the faintest reverberations of a few particularly deafening eruptions from outside.
“Come, my friend,” the Keeper said a moment later. “This is your third visit since your return to the Council’s embrace. I’m flattered, but I doubt very much that you came to discuss my taste in houseguests.”
Death turned to find his host now seated upon the bench, leaning back against the wall in an attitude of repose quite at odds with his normal energies.
“You, more than anyone besides my brothers,” the Horseman said, “know much about the atrocities I have committed in my time. A few of those I told you, even the other Riders don’t know. But I’ve not told you all of them.”
“Nor would I expect you to. Just as I’m sure you know that, in all our talks, you’ve barely dipped beneath the surface of my deeds. We do what we must, when we—”
“Spare me the platitudes!” Death interrupted. “For all our talks of responsibility, even of guilt, have you ever once known me to question my actions?”
The Keeper raised a calming hand. “My apologies. It sounded to me as though—”
Again the Rider cut him off, though this time with little heat in his voice. “No, I can’t blame you for misinterpreting. I’m still working out precisely why I wanted to speak to you. I’ve long thought that only you hold a position that would allow you to understand my own past, but now …”
Death turned his head for a moment to meet Dust’s eyes, perhaps struggling to read in them what he could not yet extract from his own thoughts.
“As I just said,” he continued thoughtfully, “for all I’ve done, all the terror and carnage I’ve wreaked, I’ve never once questioned or doubted my choices. All of it, every last action, was necessary in the greater cause. I’ve regretted the necessity of my duties on several occasions, but never the performance of them.”
“Then what’s disturbing you now?” the Keeper asked him.
“Have you ever learned, after condemning someone to Oblivion, that the Council was wrong? That the c
onvicted wasn’t deserving of that fate?”
“Never. Of course, I don’t investigate such things, either. I have to trust the Charred Council’s judgment, Death. I have to. It’s the only way I can perform my duties without losing whatever remains of my sanity.”
Death nodded. “As I’ve always trusted that the cause I serve justifies any action I take in its name. But,” he admitted, “the ‘greater cause’ I’ve served has changed over the millennia. Some of my earlier sins—my actions when I rode at the forefront of the Nephilim horde, before my brothers and I realized the extent of our transgressions and broke away—were committed in the name of beliefs and agendas to which I no longer subscribe.”
“In other words, there were atrocities that you can’t justify to yourself any longer. Something you don’t merely regret, but actually feel guilt over.”
The Horseman nodded. “It’s not a feeling I’m accustomed to. And it’s more than a little unpleasant.”
“And this comes up now because …?”
“My current assignment. Not even the other Horsemen, or the Charred Council, know the full story. Nobody living does, except me. I was hoping it would stay that way. Now … Now, for the first time in a very long life, I’m faced with the repercussions of my ‘unjustifiable crimes.’ I can readily accept the consequences of any act that I still approve of, that I would commit again, but …”
“Are you seeking advice?” the Keeper asked.
“Not especially.” Death abruptly straightened, and whatever doubt had crept into his voice vanished. “That is, I’ll happily tell you what’s happened …” Well, most of it. “… and consider any council you care to offer. But that wasn’t my primary purpose. I think, before I do what I must to make things right, I just wanted to unburden myself to someone who might understand.”
“Fair enough. I appreciate your trust, Death.”
“Who said anything about trust? You’re just the only person I know who’s potentially as vile as I am.”
The Keeper offered a soft laugh, though it may have been out of courtesy rather than genuine amusement. “So what lies ahead?”