Horn of the River God: Book I of The Song of Agmar

by Frances Mason

  Unlike the victims on the walls, the woman beneath the blade lived. She was naked, and shackled to an altar like stone on which she was stretched spreadeagle by transparent manacles. Lines of some substance as transparent as water flowed from the tip of the sword to the manacles, which were made of the same substance. The woman’s translucent skin was moist, and her long hair, which cascaded over the edge of the altar stone, all the way to the floor, was almost transparently fair. Alex had grown up surrounded by whores and actresses and was not easily impressed by female beauty, but this woman was more beautiful than any he had ever seen, more beautiful than Rose Redlips of the House of Delights, more beautiful even than the princess Sophie, daughter of queen Rose, whom he had seen on state occasions. This woman’s face was turned toward where he stood in the archway, as if she had waited for him.

  Her eyes were emerald green. She looked right into his eyes, and now he heard the voice more clearly than ever before. The voice he had heard for weeks now. The voice that had haunted his dreaming days and drawn him in the night, through shadows, past shops and too easy to pickpocket fops, toward this terrifying tower, through the darkness, through the despair, past traps, and horror, and illusion, to this place. “Are you the greatest thief in Thedra?” he heard in his head, and the woman’s eyes mocked him. The question provoked him. “Yes,” he thought. “Prove it,” the voice replied. The mockery in her eyes was replaced suddenly with pain as she screamed.

  For the first time Alex noticed the necromancer, and the runes which circled the altar on the flagstones of the floor, pulsing with sick light like the crystal above. The man was dressed in the clothes of an aristocrat. Hose and doublet and tunic and ruff, but a smaller ruff than most nobles he had seen in the city. Given that ruffs seemed to get larger year by year, Alex deduced the necromancer must be either very old or indifferent to fashion, though his age was not clear in his face. The necromancer’s face was lined with a frown of concentration and his body swayed, his arms flying out at strange angles, fingers tied for brief moments in patterns that seemed so impossible that Rubbery Rob would have been amazed. And he muttered, and whispered, and growled, and screamed, and snarled; a language of threat, and cruelty, discordant and harsh, as if a thousand minstrels were being murdered every moment; and each, with no regard for the others, desperately tried to sing one final note. As if in reply to these utterances, in the translucent flesh of the woman a wound opened. Within her seemed to be no blood or organs, but only water, and the water bled, splashing on the altar and flowing down the side, mingling indistinguishably with the transparent hair. And the woman screamed. And she shed a single tear. As the tear formed at the edge of her eye and began to roll down her cheek the necromancer ceased his spells, and quickly moved forward, extracting it with a pipette. He raised the pipette to his eye, and sighed with deep satisfaction. He took it over to a small table, and squeezed the contents into a small glass tube. “Soon we will know, my lord. Soon we will know.”

  Then he collapsed as if exhausted into a large, comfortable looking chair. His head hung down, and his breathing became slow and shallow. Alex waited, watching for any sign of danger. The necromancer did not move for several minutes. Alex crept across the floor toward the altar stone on which the woman was stretched. As he crossed the outmost circle of runes he lost heart. Dread overcame him and he tried to step back, but he could not move. But then he knew he could. He could fall to his knees, so he did. A terrible weight dragged him down. I can’t do this, he thought. A foul taste was in his mouth, as if all the rottenness of Thedra had been condensed into an essence and poured onto his tongue. But you can do it, the voice said.

  He looked up, and into her eyes, and the taste was washed away, as if he had drunk from the sweetest mountain spring. And he knew that he could do what had to be done. And he knew what had to be done. He looked up, to the sword. He dropped to his hands, and focussed his eyes back on hers, and he crawled. He lost all sense of time. How many hours passed as he crossed that terrible space? How many years? How many centuries? How many millennia? But he knew millennia were as nothing. This woman looked no older than him. But her eyes carried the wisdom of ages, of the water that washes patiently at stone, wearing away strong castles, turning great stones to pebbles, pebbles to sand, and sand to nothing, and their gaze washed away his doubts, again, and again, and again. She showed him how short a thousand years could be. In time as she knew it great mountains were worn down to become plains or valleys. To climb those mountains was nothing when they had been washed away by the patient, inexorable aeons, and the gentle caress of flowing water. And he was climbing to his feet, climbing onto the stone, reaching up and over her, reaching up toward….

  “NO!” he heard the scream distantly as his hand closed on the hilt. He almost fell, dragging the sword down. The threads of power that had extended from the crystal to the empty pommel were broken. The transparent threads that extended from the tip of the sword to the manacles evaporated and the manacles splashed away. The woman sat up. She smiled at the now standing necromancer with vindictive sweetness, and from his mouth and nostrils water gushed, first as though he were coughing up a mouthful of water that had gone down the wrong way, then like the gush of a fountain, soon like a waterfall. It seemed impossible that his body could have held so much water or released it so quickly. He had stood up from his chair, but now dropped, to his knees, to his hands, to his belly. The woman climbed off of the altar stone, and walked to the edge of the innermost runic circle and halted. And the water poured out of the necromancer’s mouth and nose. He turned over on his back and desperately tried to inscribe a magical rune on his chest, but the water from his own lungs washed over its fire, erasing the shape before he could complete it. The water flowed across the flagstones, washing the runic circles away, and when it reached the inner circle the woman stepped forward, walking over to where the necromancer choked and squirmed on the floor in front of his seat, water still gushing from his mouth and nose. She looked down at him with mild curiosity as he flipped about on the floor like a fish out of water. Then, with a final twitch he was still.

  The woman went to the table where the necromancer had squirted her tears into a tube. Lifting the tube she went to the first of the hanging victims. She unstoppered the tube and blew gently across the mouth, then she poured a single drop onto what remained of the man. As she did, all the tension and anguish went out of him. The corpse seemed to sigh, then all hint of unnatural un-living life was gone from it. Though Alex did not understand exactly what had happened he knew the man’s soul was at rest. She walked the entire circuit of the room, doing the same with each of the prisoners. Alex now understood what the flask he had discovered earlier was. He took it out of his pack and handed it to her. She took it, unstoppered it, and blew gently over its mouth. Then she stoppered it again and handed it back to him.

  “What is given freely will not pollute,” she reassured him when he hesitated. He looked down at the sword, and offered that to her, guessing that somehow it belonged to her, but she shook her head. “Not yet. The change is soon upon us, and I may not linger.” She smiled again, took his face gently in her hands and tenderly kissed him. He had kissed many girls before, and done many other things besides, but never had it felt like this. His heart lifted, and he did not have a smart word to say or a cynical thought to think. In that one moment all his cares were washed away.

  As she drew back he looked around the room. He had come to rob the place, but there did not seem to be much of value up here. Except perhaps the crystal. It still floated up there above the stone altar despite the necromancer’s death. He was wary of it though. He could feel it as much as see its light, pulsing, as though it were the heart of the tower. The light was no longer threatening, but it felt obscured, like the sun behind clouds. He decided to leave it there, though the thief in him wondered at its value to a fence.

  He looked back to where the woman stood, asking, “What do you mean, not yet?” She was not there though.
He looked around. She was nowhere in the room.

  He shrugged. He had seen so much strange magic this night, illusions and necromantic horror and he could not say what else, that a woman, or whatever she was, disappearing was hardly a surprising event. He wondered for a moment whether she had been real, but when he looked down he saw he still held the large transparent phial, its contents weightless and sparkling with an inner light.

  He went back down the stairwell, entering the furnished room. In one of the chests was a jewelled necklace. Rose would enjoy that for a while, he thought. A smaller chest was full of gold coins. He took as many as he could carry in his pack. He decided he could leave the rest here. No one but him would be foolish enough to break into this place. He could come back when he needed more.

  Descending the stairs he stopped by the door where the angry spirit had earlier forced him out. There was something he knew he had to do. Cautiously he opened the door. Still the skull glared. He steeled himself, took out the flask, and stepped into the room. The spirit raged, and Alex’s hair stood on end, but he knew he had to do this. He felt the air shift, trying to force him out, but he fought against it. He grasped the hilt of the sword, though he was not sure it would do anything to a spirit, and he did not want to harm it anyway. But the moment his fingers wrapped around the hilt he felt a surge of strength. In his head he heard one word, “blood,” like a shriek. Every hair on his body rose, and the strength was also something to fear. But the spirit in the room cowered more than he did at this power, which was as threatening as the raging river, when the summer thaw pours down the mountain ice in flooding torrents to the plain. He quickly crossed to the skull. He had to release the sword to unstopper the flask, and when he did the raging spirit renewed its assault. He lifted the flask. His every movement seemed slowed, as if his arms were gripped, even his wrists, and his fingers. He would not be stopped though. He tipped the flask a little way. One drop slowly formed at the lip; slowly formed, stretched, hung; a thread of connecting moisture stretched, thinned, and snapped. Slowly the drop fell, and all around the air of the room assaulted him, burned his lungs, filled his nostrils with the smell of decay, his mouth with the taste of blood, made his eyes sting and his ears ring. It became too bright to bear, every line too sharply drawn, every colour too clear, and unnaturally alive. The drop fell, and fell, and fell. Still it was falling. He lived many lives and died many deaths as it fell. Then it struck the skull. The glare faded from the sockets, and the twisted skeleton on the bed seemed to sigh. The threat faded from the room. It was done. The spirit was at rest. He stoppered the flask.

  As he left the tower he felt no threat in the garden. Whatever spell had twisted that place was lifted. Its despair was gone, and its shadows were now natural. The sky was greying as the sun rose in the east. There was a small well off the main path to the gate, and a glade beyond, which he had not been able to see in the night, or rather because of the dark magic, since the moon was full. There was a vegetable patch and an orchard, and barrows and spades and hoes and rakes and sickles and scythes in a small shed beside a great oak tree. Who used these? Surely not the necromancer. And no human gardener would willingly come to the necromancer’s tower. Perhaps, Alex thought, he had made the tools work for him with magic. Alex breathed in the air. Rich and natural, soil and fallen fruit and freshly scythed grass. He looked up at the tower. It carried no threat now, but something still had to be done.

  Going back up he searched the necromancer’s corpse and found a ring of keys. With these he unlocked the bodies on the wall and the one in the room below, dragging them all out to the garden, as well as the necromancer. He was not usually one to do honest work, but he dug a deep hole now. First taking a single small bone from each skeleton, or cutting away the smallest bone of the smallest finger of the fleshed corpses, he then rolled what remained into the hole and filled it in with dirt. From the necromancer’s corpse he took nothing, thinking his spirit deserved whatever fate awaited it. The others might not rest in the charnel houses, but it was a pleasant garden with the enchantment lifted. He hoped they would rest easily there. He wrapped the small bones in a cloth and slipped it into his pocket so that he could do one more necessary thing.

  He had seen from the glade that he could easily climb from the oak to the top of the wall, and left that way, only stopping by the gate to collect his rope and grapple.

  Chapter 4: Jared and Javid: Thedra

  Jared looked away from the lens, blinked and rubbed his eyes. He went outside. No one was around. His brother’s stairway to the moon, a ridiculous project in Jared’s estimation, rose into the greying sky. His brother was nowhere to be seen. Probably at work high up in the sky, getting closer to nowhere. The moon was setting in the west, its prismatic illumination replaced by the grey of dawn. Whatever Jared might think of the stairway as a utilitarian object, he had to admire his brother’s skill and determination. If only he could get him to help more with the observatory, the secrets of the moon’s interior would be sooner revealed. Jared walked over to the southern edge of the tower. It took a few minutes, since the tower, like those of all four quartering gates of the city, had a diameter of four hundred yards. He peered over the battlements. Why did they have battlements here? Who would be foolish enough to try to take this city? It would be easy enough to take the inner ring, with its palace buildings close to the water, and access under the outer ring, but the outer ring was so far above the water you would have to extend enormous scaling towers from a ship’s deck. And how would you get a ship up to the caldera? Unless you built it up here. It amazed him how impractical these so called men of the world sometimes were. And they called him a dreamer. He looked southwards across the lake to the great arc of the Labyrinth of Leaves.

  He and his twin brother had both been monks there once, many years ago. Still some nights he dreamed of it, of being lost in its mazes. He would hold up his lantern at each archway to read the runes, but they were incomprehensible. He would open a book and its letters were meaningless scrawls. After a life devoted to learning he knew so little, such a tiny fraction of the sum of all human knowledge. And because of his ignorance he could not find his way in the dark. So he must search further, going forth into the darkness, not to discover something new, but to find a trace of what he had once known. But it was nowhere to be found, and in the Labyrinth of Leaves he knew it was a vanishingly small part of the whole, a part he might spend a lifetime not finding. And yet he must try. And then he would wake, and know his knowledge was not enough, and never could be.

  That the new abbot was, unlike his predecessor, reluctant lending books and scrolls from the labyrinth to the twins, made the search for knowledge more difficult. Whenever they asked he would hum and haw. That volume could not be found. That part of the library had been catalogued but the catalogue had not been catalogued. And on, and on. Jared wondered if he saw resentment in the abbot’s face, envy of these two who had escaped. Yet, for all Jared’s love of practical science, he suspected some of the envy was his own. He could no longer walk freely in the labyrinth. So much had been lost to gain so little. So little knowledge! But, he quickly corrected himself, what lifetime can yield more? Soon enough he would find himself in a darkness deeper than any in the great library, in a place where all turnings led only to oblivion, led away from what little he had known. The old abbot had died. He been a friend, and the old abbess also. But she was the Oracle now, and the one who replaced her in the library, though her heart was kind, had not yet the wisdom not to pass requests through the obfuscating new abbot, who was more politician than philosopher. Nor had she the learning to find a tome herself. He might try to explain in detail how to find what he sought, but he did not want her to realize how well this outsider knew the labyrinth. The Orders of the Leaves guarded their mysteries jealously.

  A rush of air announced the descent of Javid, standing on one of the stone slabs with which he was constructing his stairway. The slab reached the tower and Javid inscribed a rune of dis
pelling in the air, then stepped off and joined Jared at the battlement. Javid breathed in deeply, and said, “The air has cleared.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Jared said, looking into his brother’s face. Since it was like looking into a mirror he saw his own aging there but, perhaps because of the air, which Jared did notice now that it had been mentioned, Javid’s mood was brighter.

  “Lost in your work?”

  “Finding myself in my work.” Jared looked at his brother ironically.

  “I could do with some help,” Javid replied hopefully.

  “So could I.”

  “You know my work is the more important.”

  “What, building a stairway to nowhere?” As soon as he said it he knew he should not have.

  Javid’s face clouded over. “The moon isn’t nowhere.”

  “And yet,” Jared said, pointedly looking to the horizon where the moon was setting while pointing straight up, that’s where your stairway ends.”

  “Star-way. It’s a work in progress.”

  Jared relented. “Like life,” he sighed, and the same doubts that had previously assailed him struck again.

  “Until it ends,” Javid’s sigh echoed Jared’s own.

  “Or all things end. When the lost are found…”

  “…the old age will end. I don’t think the prophecy refers to our mortality.”