by William King
Every inch of the ceiling planks and their supports was covered in mystical carvings. From small protrusions dangled skulls of every size; tiny ones that belonged to babies and monkeys, huge ones that belonged to alligators and things that might have been small dragons.
Balthazar did not doubt that some of those skulls belonged to people that he had once known. Some belonged to colonists that had been abducted and sacrificed. A few Sunlander women slumped roped to pillars. They had the blank, horror-filled eyes of the captured slave.
He sensed the flow of power all around him. The runes channelled it. It was tainted with the raw, roiling angry power that derived from blight. When he breathed in, he seemed to draw energy into himself along with air and the stink of the village. He smelled hallucinogenic incense. It came from orchids picked in the depths of the swamp. It constantly burned in fires set under the eaves of the building.
Red Talon led him to the steps of the hall. Balthazar removed his boots and most of his clothing before he entered.
A squat old man covered in tattoos lounged upon a throne made of human bones, one leg thrown over its side. His face was lined as if from extreme old age. He carried a short staff tipped with a glowing skull. He wielded it like a sceptre. Balthazar knew that the skull had once belonged to his greatest rival. Rumour had it that the man’s spirit was still imprisoned within it and that the chieftain communed with it and drew upon its essence for power.
“Coiled Serpent,” Balthazar said, abasing himself. “I am overjoyed to be once more in your presence.”
Coiled Serpent smiled. It was not a reassuring smile. It revealed his sharpened teeth. He raised himself from the throne and extended a hand to help Balthazar rise. His grip was crushing. There was an apelike power in the old shaman’s chest and long arms. His braided hair might be white, but age had not sapped his strength.
“Be welcome in our hall, blood brother,” said Coiled Serpent. He dropped back into his throne. Balthazar studied him closely. He might be strong, but his joints looked swollen, and his movements spoke of pain. The old shaman was not as healthy as he wanted people to believe.
“It does me good to be back among your people,” said Balthazar loudly in the tribal tongue. He had always been good with languages.
“And it does me good to see you, old friend.” Balthazar could not help but notice the sour note in Coiled Serpent’s voice. They had never been friends. They had simply shared an agenda since they were both young men.
Balthazar had come to the jungle clans seeking ancient knowledge to supplement what he had found in the grimoires. The shaman’s master had possessed it and had recognised in Balthazar one who shared his dreams for the return of Xothak. He had made Balthazar and his apprentice Coiled Serpent swear blood brotherhood. Even then they had been rivals, for the old man’s attention and lore, for power within the cult.
It had been fortunate that Balthazar had returned to colonies to work towards Shadowfall. If he had remained among the tribes, one of them would have killed the other. Given that Coiled Serpent was one of the tribe, Balthazar guessed it would have gone ill for him. He would always be an outsider here no matter what the shaman or his son said.
“I have brought great news from the city of the goldhairs,” Balthazar said. “I succeeded at last in raising the Servant of the Lord of Skulls.”
“I know,” said Coiled Serpent. “Our Lord has spoken to me in my dreams.”
He paused to give that time to sink in. Balthazar realised that Coiled Serpent was speaking more for the benefit of the listening tribesmen than he was to Balthazar. There was a competitive edge to his voice. Balthazar may have raised the Servant of Xothak, a thing no tribal sorcerer had managed to do in centuries, but he was letting his people know that it was to Coiled Serpent the god spoke.
Balthazar pushed down his jealousy. There were many reasons why that could have been. Coiled Serpent dwelled here amid the blight where the Outer Darkness seeped into the world. Balthazar had dwelled in the warded cities of the Sunlanders, surrounded by protective elder signs. Contact with the Outer Dark was difficult under those circumstances.
“The Lord of Skulls also told me that your plan to overthrow the rule of the Sunlander chieftains had come to naught.” A gloating note entered Coiled Serpent’s voice. He was pleased with Balthazar’s failure. And yet there was something else there as well, something hard to place or define.
“There was present a great champion of the Sun. If it were not for him things would have gone differently,” Balthazar said. Even to himself, it sounded too much like he was making excuses. He glanced around at the tribal leaders to see how they were taking things. Their faces were blank and unreadable. Was he being weighed and found wanting? Perhaps the tribesmen no longer saw him as a useful ally. Perhaps the only use they would have for him now would be as a sacrifice.
“So our Lord told me,” said Coiled Serpent. It sounded as if that admission had cost him dearly. He was saying something he would rather not have and yet he had no choice but to do so. Slowly the implications of that settled into Balthazar’s mind. Xothak had spoken to the shaman of Balthazar’s deeds. It had already exonerated Balthazar of any blame for the rising’s failure.
Perhaps, he told himself, or perhaps Coiled Serpent merely wanted him to think that, to lull him into lowering his guard. The old man was cunning.
“I am honoured indeed,” said Balthazar. Some of the chieftains nodded as if they too thought that. Perhaps Coiled Serpent was telling the truth. Or perhaps not. He had always been good at keeping his own counsel until the moment was ripe. Perhaps this was just another example of that. Balthazar felt a crawling sensation between his shoulder blades. He was aware that at any moment, an obsidian spearpoint might be plunged between them.
“I was told you would be arriving this evening. That is why I sent my son to meet you.” Balthazar wondered whether this was true or whether the old man was simply making this up after the fact. On such little things did shamans built their reputation for foresight. “The Lord of Skulls told me you would come. It told me that you would enter its temple and make a sacrifice to it. It told me you would be blessed.”
Balthazar stared at Coiled Serpent. It was all he could do to keep his mouth from flopping open. The shaman was saying that he, Balthazar, had been chosen for some special purpose. The tone in which he spoke made it all too clear how much Coiled Serpent resented being forced to speak, to acknowledge that Balthazar was higher in the favour of their mutual god. Triumph filled his heart. If this were true, then he was on the path to glory.
If it were true . . .
This might just be an invitation for him to set foot within the temple and be offered up for sacrifice. That would be a high destiny and not one word of what Coiled Serpent had said would be a lie.
Balthazar glanced around. The tribesmen looked friendly. Some of them looked as if they were in awe of him. Of course, he had seen them act this way before, right up until the moment they gutted their unsuspecting enemies.
“My son and his Lodge will accompany you into the temple,” said Coiled Serpent. “They have asked for this place of honour, and I have granted it. A sacrifice has already been sanctified. Go now!”
Balthazar bowed and turned away.
Chapter Six
The terrified girl writhed atop the altar. The ropes held her. She scraped her face against the rough stone, and her gag came free.
“Please, please,” she whimpered. “I don’t know what I have done but tell me, and I won’t do it again.”
“Hush,” Balthazar said. “You haven’t done anything wrong. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
His words echoed around the vast chamber deep below the ruined Temple of Xothak. Luminescent fungi lit the place. Legend claimed the mushrooms had come from distant worlds beyond the great Doors. It was cold down here as it always was, no matter how hellishly hot the swamp above became.
The members of the Jaguar Lodge stared at him. They
did not understand what he was saying in the Sunlander tongue, but it was clear they did not like him using any Solari words in this sacred place.
Excitement filled Balthazar. This was not a trap. He was not going to be sacrificed. He was going to speak with his god, visit its realm beyond the world, send his spirit into the Outer Darkness. Tonight he would bask in the presence of the Lord of Skulls and draw upon its power. He licked his lips and smiled.
The girl’s eyes went wide with horror. Balthazar shrugged. He did not care what happened to her. In a way, it was all to the good. Her struggles would help appease Xothak. The Lord of Skulls lived upon terror and horror. They were to it what meat and drink were to lesser beings.
Let her scream! Here in the cool dank catacombs, no one would hear her shouts. No aid would come. Her shouts would only amuse the tribesmen.
He lifted the dagger. It was the same blade he had used to summon the Servant of Xothak at the end of the Masque of Death. Dried blood made it look rusty. Evil runes glittered on the blade. Their power was evident even to the girl. She moaned in horror when she saw them. Or perhaps it was just the sight of the blade that affected her.
Balthazar reached out and stroked her chin. “Hush, girl. Be at peace. It will all soon be over. You will show me the way to the Dark. Yours is an honoured task.”
His voice was rich and aristocratic and reassuring. His touch quietened the girl. He stuffed the gag back in her mouth. The girl’s eyes widened at the betrayal.
He took a deep breath and raised the blade to his lips and kissed it. The tang of the metal and the taste of old blood were indistinguishable. He extended his arms and pointed the blade at the carved skull at the head of the altar.
The girl ceased to writhe as if she sensed the imminence of her demise. He smiled at her and then brought the blade arcing downwards to pierce flesh. He found her heart and twisted.
A portal to somewhere else, invisible to everyone in the room save him and the dying girl opened. Something gigantic looked down at him from a place outside the world. This, he thought, was how an ant must feel when a man walked by.
His flesh tingled, and his hair rose on end. It felt as if his soul were being drawn from his body. Waves of darkness flowed over him. The chamber flickered in his vision.
His legs felt weak. All strength drained from his body. The world receded around him. As his skin grew colder, the ceiling and walls and floor became translucent. He told himself he was not dying. He was not being devoured by Xothak. His spirit was being liberated from its prison of flesh.
He looked down at himself. He saw his tall, lean figure, his jet black hair, his half naked body embracing the dead girl. His view shimmered, and he became aware of a presence near him. It was the spirit of the girl. It glowed a sickly translucent green, visible only to him. It looked terrified, and it turned and fled, unaware that its struggles were merely leading it closer and closer to its doom. He followed it, knowing it was his guide.
She flew down a long tunnel that wound away through cracks in the fabric of reality
The walls of this tunnel appeared lined with skulls. As he flew after her, her image’s skin peeled away to reveal the illusion first of muscle and then of bone. He thought he heard a faint screaming. Ahead of him, the departing soul moved faster and faster.
His spirit flew downwards, into a maze of tunnels that looked as if they extended all the way to the world’s core. He knew they did more than that; they extended outwards into the worlds beyond worlds, an infinite maze that led eventually to all places and none.
The tunnel widened, the aether through which he flew becoming thicker and thicker. He felt as if he was drowning in it, pulled down by currents of magic. Visions danced before his eyes. Vast presences moved all around him, things that would suck him down the way a whale sucked down plankton.
He was trespassing in a realm where his kind was not meant to go. Voices hissed and whispered in his ears, hinting at forbidden secrets, offering to satiate his innermost desires. He felt his mind begin to fragment and fought to keep a grip on his sense of self.
Shadow deepened around him, and he sensed its corrosive, mutating energies. Ahead of him, a massive ziggurat loomed, built entirely of skulls and bones. It seemed to float in a vast empty space all of its own.
The soul he followed was a mere wisp now, a fast fading bubble of light and life. He passed through an arch that was the mouth of a gigantic glowing skull and raced down a corridor whose roof was supported by ribs and whose walls were bricked with skulls.
He entered a throne room where a Power waited. It sat upon a throne of skulls and looked at him with eyes as empty as the depths of space. It opened its jaws and the light of the girl’s departing soul flew in and was swallowed. The Lord of Skulls turned its empty eye-sockets on Balthazar and beckoned for him to come closer with a long bony finger.
Balthazar did so, despite the fear that filled him. He approached the towering figure along a path of bones. He abased himself on a carpet of skulls, all of which seemed to watch him.
Xothak reached out and touched him. Blazing light passed through him. Images filled his mind, threatening to drown out his consciousness. He felt his thoughts and memories inspected by a monstrous intelligence.
He saw his recent conflict with the Guardian Kormak, Xothak’s summoned servant defeated, the plan to infect the city of Maial with animated corpse warriors ended before it could even begin.
He relived his fear and anger and disappointment. The ritual should have made him master of Xothak’s ancient kingdom, a high priest who ruled in the name of his absent god. Instead, it had ended with him bolting from the site of the ritual and taking refuge in the labyrinth of catacombs before he was forced to flee the city.
Xothak flicked the pages of his memories like a man inspecting the leaves of an old and not terribly interesting book.
He saw his life on an insect scale. His sickly childhood among the nobility of Terra Nova, the interest in alchemy that would eventually grant him health and power, his induction into the Shadow Cult in which he would learn sorcery. He saw his travels into the jungle in search of ancient secrets and his second induction, this time into the sacred Lodges of the tribes of the interior. He saw those around him grow old even as his knowledge of alchemy and dark sorcery kept him young.
He sensed growing interest as Xothak saw what he had learned about the sarcophagus of Vorkhul and the Guardian’s mission to find it. If he had had to name the mood of the Lord of Skulls, he would have said excitement.
He felt himself measured and judged. Power flowed into him, so great that he could barely contain it. Somewhere his human body was screaming. He knew what it was like to wield the power of magic, but this was something else. This was his body and his talent being used by something else as a vessel for its power, a vessel to be filled and discarded.
A link was being strengthened between him and this vast, alien entity, turning him into a conduit between the underworlds of Shadow and the mortal realm.
He was afraid, and he was aware that there was nothing he could do about his fear. He had no choices in this matter any more. He was a tool wielded by an entity from beyond his world, being reshaped to its purposes, remade to do its will.
Visions flickered through his mind. He saw the seething jungles of the interior and the tribesmen who dwelled there. He saw the shamans who could still talk with Xothak in their dreams. He saw the towering mountains and, beyond them, the deserts where the sand demons roamed. He saw a beautiful naked woman with features unlike any he had ever encountered and knew that somehow they were connected or would be.
New knowledge filled his mind, the patterns of spells that would summon demons and bind them to his will. Fragments of knowledge of the ancient world. Visions of glowing metallic gods blasting monsters with weapons of light, of demons the size of mountains rising from the sea to swallow entire cities.
A burning compulsion settled on him. He must learn the source of Vorkhul’s sarcophagus
. If there were more like it, he must acquire them and unleash what they contained. When he did so, a new age would begin.
Satisfaction swelled in Balthazar’s heart. He knew then that he was being given a mission that might change the entire history of the world. An Old One like Vorkhul could twist the fate of kingdoms. What would not be possible to a company of beings like him?
The power continued to flow through him, becoming a river that carried him back to his body. It flowed out from him and into the dagger he carried and the amulet he wore. As he regained his senses, lines of fire flickered from them to the amulets of the tribesmen. They had been granted a portion of his power to utilise with their gifts.
His Lodge brothers all knew he was touched now. They bowed low before him, abasing themselves utterly. He smiled at them, a god bestowing a benediction on his worshippers.
“Raise yourselves,” he said. “We have work to do.”
Chapter Seven
As the company marched away from Westerby, Kormak cast a last thoughtful look back at the village then gave his attention to the road ahead. The troops grumbled at the early start, but they would be grateful later when they were resting through the hottest part of the day.
“How much further till Helgard?” he asked Anders.
“At the end of the three days’ march, we’ll hit the fort that controls the entrance of Helgate Pass. After that, the town is a day’s march up into the mountains.”
“You think we’ll have any trouble along the way?” He was thinking about what the Prefect had said about the tribes last night.
“This many men? I doubt it,” Anders said confidently. “Not unless the tribes are going on the warpath anyway.”
“I talked to a man last night who had different ideas.”
“There’s only one way to find out who’s right. If we hear drums, you’ll know he is.”