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

by Frances Mason

  Down the middle of the avenue flows a deep conduit of water from a fountain at the far end, from whose waters rise Seltathra’s human upper torso and man’s head, with bull’s horn’s, one broken, gills on his neck, fin on his back and fish’s tail from the waist. From his nostrils steam sometimes rushes, like the breath of the Geysers of Thedra, south of the city’s caldera. In the spring virgins throw flower petals in the always fresh stream, and at the summer solstice children drag toward the fountain, by threads of woollen yarn, little boats carved with prayers to the god of the great river, on which all Thedrans’ lives depend, to whom all pious Thedrans daily give thanks.

  Across from the alley where a small figure now hid in shadows, were two temples, that of Urysthra, terrible god of war and vengeance, bringer of chaos and, beside his giant statue gorging on men, the shapely beauty of Finusthi, goddess of love and caprice and whores, her legs entwined with those of her many lovers, male and female, her eyes looking to her husband with an expression of mockery mingled with affection. She was the goddess Rose herself looked to for support when the world seemed most cruel. A goddess who did not despise her as so many lustful husbands and respectable wives did.

  She looked back up the alley from which she had come, then both ways along the Avenue of the Gods. It was dark except for the torches along the avenue and the braziers outside the temples. On those temple steps opposite her young brides and grooms of the cult of Finusthi would offer themselves as temple prostitutes the day before their wedding, hoping that the goddess’s blessings would fall on their marriage. The priestesses of Naathi, and most especially the puritan sect, frowned on the practice. Why did people hate prostitutes so much? She had never hurt anyone.

  She heard a cough behind her and looked over her shoulder. Despite the shadows the man saw the terror on her face and stopped short. How had he come up on her like that? Her heart beat so hard she could not hear anything beyond the thrumming in her ears. The night was balmy and she had been walking quickly, but until now she had not noticed how much she was sweating. She wondered if he would respond to begging. But she knew it was no use. Even if she offered herself as payment for mercy he would simply use her then kill her, or worse. He turned toward a door and hammered with his fist on the wood. What accomplices waited within? The door was opened and light spilled into the alley. He stepped into the light and the door closed behind him, leaving her in darkness. Rose sighed her relief.

  There had been thieves guild manglers outside The Temple, sitting on the stairs, leaning against the doors, as if they had read her mind. She had thought if she had gone there they would not think anything of it. Inside The Temple was sanctuary and they would not touch her there. She could talk to one of the priestesses at the shrine of Finusthi there and dedicate herself to the goddess as a nun. Then she would be safe. But there they were. Had someone spied on her and Alex that night in the stable? The groom perhaps. They had never discussed sanctuary before that, only the Convent of Love. So she had made as if she was shopping in the market, browsing through the stalls, bartering loudly for a piece of fake jewellery. Had her hysterical tones sounded like bargaining shrillness or terror? She had thought of simply returning to the brothel, but she had come too far emotionally to turn back. Her determination had hardened with her fear. They would not own her anymore. She would never work for them again. They would have to kill her. She had wandered through the stalls with theatrical casualness; if prostitution had taught her one thing well it was the thespian arts. And then as night had fallen she had slipped into a side street and wended her way laboriously across town to the temple district.

  She quickly looked both ways along the avenue and ran for the temple. Suddenly men spilled into the avenue from alleys she had forgotten existed. They were all converging on her. The temple seemed further and further away with every step, as though she were in a bad dream. But she knew the bad dream to well. It was her life. Her legs burned as she ran. Then she caught the rim of Seltathra’s conduit with her toe, staggered, caught a cobblestone at an odd angle and fell, striking her forearms and head on the cobblestones. She lifted her head and looked from side to side. The men were rushing toward her, closing in like darkness to the wick as a candlelight is snuffed. Why had she listened to Alex? How could she have been so stupid? She had been sold as a child to settle her mother’s debts, and had lived her life as a slave, only enjoying luxuries the other girls did not because her beauty brought so much gold to the House of Delight. She should have known there was no escape. She tried to lift herself, but her ankle gave way and she fell again. Her vision blurred. The temple steps were impossibly distant, columns shaped like coupling men and women. They seemed to alternately cover themselves with shadows and display themselves in the flickering light of the braziers. If she had not been chased she could have crawled all the way to the sanctuary.

  She sighed, and abandoning all hope freed her. She did not feel fear anymore. Instead, she experienced a sudden clarity. She would not give them the satisfaction of her tears, or of her murder. The contents of her bag were spilled across the cobblestones. Fearful lest she give away her intentions, she had brought no spare clothes, only what she thought most essential. Her boxes containing simples, the herbs with which she concocted medicines, the phials of elixirs for soothing syphilitic pains, and there, among the rest, one tiny phial, in red glass that looked black in this light. She crawled toward it. She closed her fingers around it as the manglers closed in on her. She rolled over, sat up and faced them defiantly. They would get no more pleasure from her. This pleasure would be all hers. She had concocted the potion with a combination of quick acting poisons and narcotics so that it would be both swift and painless. She unstoppered the phial. They stopped, only feet from her, murder in their eyes.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder. Too late! In desperation she lifted the phial to her lips, but another hand knocked the poison to the cobblestones, and another gripped her other arm. Now she had lost even the hope of despair’s solution.

  She could no longer restrain herself. She wept. Her whole body shook with the tears of many years, tears she had not shed since she had been a little girl. After the first wealthy brute had used her she had cried, a child’s tears beneath a man to whom they had only given more pleasure. In time she had lost count of customers, and the pain had turned to numbness. Eventually the numbness had become bitter resignation. But she had not lost all feeling, and understanding that subconsciously, she had carefully protected what little remained beneath an impervious armour of cynicism and good humour. Now, at the end of her life, the tears poured out, in a flood beyond her control.

  She was being lifted, and half carried, half dragged. Where they would take her she did not know, but she hoped it would be a quick clean death. She knew that was not their way though. More likely they would torture and rape her. Only when they had violated and humiliated her beyond her strength to bear would they murder her. Perhaps they would gang rape her with such violence that the violation itself would kill her. Her fate would be advertised among the whores of the House of Delights. It would serve as a warning to other whores who sought to escape. Why hadn’t she thrown herself from the bridge? It would have been so easy, between the shops and the guilds there were so many places. Why hadn’t she poisoned herself in her own room, and drifted away from this cruel world in a haze of drug induced pleasure?

  They were climbing stairs, her injured ankle following rather than carrying her. She blinked the tears away. She was being carried into the temple. A priestess was under each of her arms. She looked back and the guild manglers glared from the avenue. But none would interfere with a priestess of Finusthi, and none would dare desecrate Her temple. Alex had been right. Here she would be safe.

  Chapter 19: Augustyn: Thedra

  The masked man approached the looming temple, passing by the adjoining abbey. Both were built of blackest obsidian, along the irregular surface of which torchlight occasionally ran, like a soul fleeing from life to the
underworld. The Temple of the Harvest was located east of South Gate, just beyond the affluent area that surrounded the northern tower, on which the ducal palace had been built in elegantly carved marble, sparkling now with golden veins from hundreds of blazing torches and braziers. But here the many lights on that façade, towering high above and behind the masked man, seemed not to reach, the atmosphere oppressive, the shadows almost substantial. He had long since passed an unmarked boundary, not so much between wealth and poverty as between sanity and madness, beyond which death was the rule and “law” only a word chuckled by grinning murderers to their pleading victims. As lawless as the area was, though, no ruffians would try to murder the priests of this temple or steal their treasures, for who can flee Death when he comes? And who dares invite the knives of his devotees, the Dark Monks, that most infamous of all monastic orders? While to some men murder is casual, and to others even pleasurable; to the devotees of Nethra, god of death, it is worship, and it is said that those who have been sent to his halls by his own assassins, there have lavished upon them uniquely horrifying tortures unknown to other shades. The only eyes to observe the masked man were those of startled rats – glowing like tiny coals defying the encroaching darkness and cold in a dwindling fire – before they scuttled across the cobblestones into deeper darkness. Perhaps they too sensed the horror of this place.

  As he climbed the steps, the tortured dead writhed as if in agony in the flickering light of guttering torches to either side of the porch, positioned to show the scenes but allow as little light as possible to pass beyond the door into the temple. At the peak of the door arch the tympanum displayed in relief the torments of those who had followed Death unwillingly to his realm: stretched on a rack or drawn by horses to extract the admission of mortality’s guilt; burnt at the stake or quartered like traitors; cut into dainty pieces to feed their own mouths; flayed before their flesh was stripped to the bone, only to be sewn back together again, and suffer once more the same fate; women giving birth to sharp spined monsters; men castrated by the sharpened teeth of beautiful women. Lining the curving layers of embrasures were carvings of the Dark Lord’s willing servants, supplicants to his inescapable harvest, and their victims, only willing in their screams: butchers decapitating bakers with their knives, bakers cooking butchers in their ovens, women poisoning devoted husbands, children murdering infant siblings, smiling soldiers holding grimacing heads high on pikes, rape with hot iron or sharp sword, a forced feast rushing from a ruptured gut to be fed on by the next to eat.

  The masked man ignored the disturbing scenes as much as he could and entered the Temple of the Harvest. As he stepped inside he removed his mask. But he did not reveal his face; inside, the temple was wrapped in suffocating darkness. Even if it had been a sun blessed day outside it would have been dark within. Unlike most temples this one had no stained glass windows to colour its nave with bright images, and as the sun rose in the east the great oaken doors, facing south, braced with sturdy iron, would be closed against the light and the prying eyes of the living; though few were foolish enough to seek clear knowledge of the Dark Priests and their hidden ways.

  Within the shadows of the side aisles inside the temple deeper shadows moved. At first they seemed as insubstantial as the dark, but as his eyes adjusted he could see what he already knew. The shadows were the silhouettes of the black cassocked priests of Death. A smell of decay permeated the viscid air, which seemed to cling to him, moaning in a low tone like a vast, insubstantial monster. But the moaning was the priests also. They murmured again and again, in recapitulation as endless as the armies of the dead, a prayer of thanks to their Lord for their final end, and the hope that their lifetime of service would please Him. At least so the man had been told. He could not understand the language, though he sensed power in it. Within his ears it seemed to multiply into a thousand discordant whispers, pleading, seductive, terrifying. The only light was at the altar, a single candle, obscured as each priest passed before it, casting a shadow as far as the feeble light of the flame reached. The light, as if strangled by the air and falling to the floor, did not reach far. From near its furthest reach it bled out in contorted veins, sickly and unnatural, as if it too sought the dark maw of Death.

  The man did not approach the altar directly. Instead, following the ancient ritual, he stepped into the eastern side aisle and followed the murmuring priests in their shuffling walk. He shuffled with them and echoed, as well as he could, the strange syllables they murmured. When he passed in front of the altar behind which stood a surpliced priest, he snuffed out the candle, as all mortal life is in the end snuffed out by Nethra. In the total darkness, he took from his side a purse heavy with gold, placing it quietly on the altar. Though he could not see in the darkness and heard no sound but the murmuring of priests he knew the surpliced priest had taken it, as quietly as Death takes an old man in the night.

  After the votive offering had been made, most supplicants would complete a formulaic prayer, asking that Nethra take a person into his loving care. If the person was a commoner a priest would then convey the prayer to the adjoining abbey, and a contract was tacitly established between the votary and the Dark Brotherhood. The brotherhood would not rest until one of its number had assassinated the victim. For the assassination of powerful men the prayer would be conveyed to a conclave of Dark Suvarks, princes of the cult. For the assassination of a king only the Dark Arkon could give consent. As dangerous as the Dark Brotherhood were, even to soldiers, a poorly calculated political assassination could result in heavily armoured and armed soldiers marching into temple and abbey and butchering all they could find, and the most visible in the hierarchy of the cult would die first, the Dark Suvarks, the Dark Arkon, and the Dark Abbot. It had happened in the past, on what to history was known as the Day of the Sublime Sanctification. Though all priests and monks of Death invited his blessing in the end, the temple hierarchy would not willingly deprive him of his most able servants in this world. They would not invite such a slaughter again.

  The size of the votive offering was remarkable, but the man was no ordinary votary. And he did not merely pray for a death. Before he spoke the priest knew him and his wish.

  “Only Nethra’s most devoted servant may understand the subtlety of His ways,” he intoned.

  “And the worship of Him must be as he wishes,” the priest replied, referring to both Nethra and the Dark Arkon.

  His eyes having adjusted sufficiently to the total darkness, the man fell back into the line of murmuring priests, following them up the west side aisle and leaving the temple, replacing his mask. As he crossed the threshold the candle on the altar was relit, awaiting the next offering.

  Chapter 20: Augustyn: Thedra

  Augustyn read the reports from his spies in Vrongwe.

  His face was grim. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the news. His lands were attacked by King Louis, to whom, after many years of prevarication, he had done homage for the Vrongwenese county of Gwendur, hoping thereby to allay the fears of that dithering monarch. The formal vassalage had achieved little, with the king forever manufacturing pretexts for a fight in the succeeding years, and alternately attacking and fleeing Gwendurian troops, depending on his fickle moods or the rise and fall of favourites in his court. A particularly belligerent and avaricious favourite had recently found his way into Louis’ bed, as eager to grasp Gwendur as the king’s flaccid prick, filling his arse with sterile seed and his head with dreams of conquest. So the attack itself had not been a surprise, and his marshal in the county had responded quickly and efficiently to the threat. But this time the Crimson Monks had been involved. That meant Amery, whose family was traditionally aligned with the cult of Urysthra, god of war.

  Absent-mindedly he looked up into the empty room. Only then did he become aware of the cowled figure before him. He started, and a chill went up his spine. No matter how many times he witnessed it the preternatural stealth of the Dark Arkon surprised him. This arkon had been Dark Abbot befo
re becoming the arch priest of his cult. As the Dark Abbot he had been the most accomplished assassin of the Dark Brotherhood. He did not lower his black cowl. Somehow the light of the lantern on the edge of the duke’s table did not penetrate beneath its folds, so that, instead of looking into a face, the duke stared into impenetrable darkness.

  The soft murmur of the sleeping city seemed to speak. But it was the Dark Arkon’s voice. “You wished to speak.” It was not a question.

  It was said by some that the duke commanded the Dark Arkon, and the claim was not entirely false. He had the power to direct any assassination against any person, no matter how highly placed. The suvarks would not sit in council and consider the risks to the priests and monks of Nethra if the duke requested the assassination of a noble. Even if he were to request the assassination of a king he knew the arkon would not refuse him. But however much he could direct the arkon the duke always felt he was actually the servant. Whatever his plans, however willing the arkon to direct the guild of assassins to accomplish them, he felt that the outcome was in truth what the arkon desired. He, The Duke, so feared across Ropeua, was only a minor piece in a cosmic game of Battle Board between gods. And this man knew in advance the outcome of any move. In fact, he seemed to know what move was going to be made before any direction was given.

  “Matters of subtlety not force are my concern,” Augustyn said.

  The arkon seemed to nod. It was a gesture so subtle the duke could not be sure he had not imagined it. The darkness within the cowl seemed to watch him, though he could see no eyes. Was there amusement in that darkness? Mockery? Contempt? Or was there nothing? He shuddered.