“I’m sorry?” said Aarin.
“Come,” the prior said. “There is no time like the present. With a little luck, soon all our questions will be answered.”
Not knowing what else to do, Aarin allowed Seutreneause to lead them out of his chambers and into the vault. Three monks waited there, two already carrying Mother Moude’s chest. The group walked toward the dark end of the hall, under the scaffolding. The scent of decay intensified there. The workers tapping mechanically away were not men, but animates, dead whose ghosts had been trapped within their corpses. All of them wore the black habits of the monks.
“This work was done in ancient times,” said Seutreneause. “The names are the names of all the dead of Karsa, each carved with precisely four hundred and forty four strikes of the chisel.”
“It is a form of binding?” said Aarin.
Seutreneause nodded. “You are very astute. With so many ghosts failing to manifest for their departure we cannot be sure of their fate. Old doctrine tells us they make their own way to the other side. But there are so few now, there are among us those who fear they dissipate, and find no rest.”
“That’s... terrible!” said Pasquanty.
“And must remain secret,” said Seutreneause with a stern look. “The nature of the afterlife has always been shrouded to all but the most powerful mages and Guiders, and accounts of journeys there are garbled. Some suggest it to be a terrible place, but it is a place. Imagine then if the populace suspected there was nothing after death. Soldiers would refuse to fight. No man would take any risk. Others might throw off the shackles of civilised society in their despair, and let run their animal urges in a riot of indulgence. These things cannot become common knowledge.”
“I swear, prior, I shall never speak of it!” said Pasquanty in terror.
“You are preserving their souls,” said Aarin.
“By binding them in a small way to the mortal realm, we might give them time to persist, until the crisis is passed and the gates of the dead open again.”
Aarin looked up at the dead men working the walls.
“And you keep your own safe in their shells.”
“We have done so for one hundred and fifty years.”
“It has been going on that long?” said Aarin, shocked.
“Longer, since the time of the Driving,” said the prior. “You are far from the first to notice. Since Res Iapetus’s time, over four million men and women of Karsa have passed on. The population increases, our work becomes a heavier burden.”
“Why only Karsa?” said Aarin. “You are of Macer Lesser. What of your own people?”
“We cannot save them all,” said the prior. “This place was founded by a Karsan, it is funded by the Ministry of Death.”
“They know?” said Aarin.
“Naturally,” said the prior. “You are percipient to have noticed what few have, but I did say you were not the first.”
“Who built this place?” asked Aarin.
“Ah, here we are,” said the prior, evading his question. They reached the far end of the vault, well out of the light illuminating the scaffolds. A yett was set into the wall. The prior took out a key of bone on a bright red cord. It squeaked loudly in the lock. His hand came away red with flakes of rust.
“Down we go,” said the prior.
Aarin paused upon the threshold. The air was noisome.
“Do you wish to find the answers you sought, or are you going to abandon your quest at this late hour?” asked the prior.
Aarin looked behind him. The monks crowded he and Pasquanty, blocking the way back. Pasquanty pleaded with his eyes that they leave. Aarin shook his head slightly, and looked back into the pit.
“Lead on,” said Aarin.
The prior went first, taking one of many lanterns hanging from greened bronze hooks and striking it alight with a flint and steel wrapped in oil cloth on a shelf beneath. Aarin bade Pasquanty do the same, so the deacon took up a second lantern. He himself kept his hands free. The lead of the three monks took a lantern to light the way for those carrying Mother Moude. Together they went down a short tunnel cut into the stone of a place far from the world.
The tunnel opened out in the face of a cliff comprised of white rock columns shot through with gleaming veins of glimmer. The far side—if there were one—was invisible. Stairs unguarded by rail or line cut down across the rock formations at a steep angle. Either the work was poor, or the rock was rotten, for the steps were uneven. Each was a crumbling invitation to trip, while overhead the upper part of the sheared columns were poised like pistons ready to thump down. They kept to the wall. Aarin put out his hand. The rock was chill and slick as butcher’s fat and his fingers came away greasy.
“Careful here,” said the prior unnecessarily. Pasquanty whimpered.
The stairway angled downward in a straight line, taking them far out from where the island would have stopped. The stone was like nothing Aarin had seen on the surface. He could not believe the sea to be above them. The prior had not lied, the caverns were buried in no earthly soil. The void ate up the sounds of their descent, the clink of chains on Mother Moude’s chest, their breath, the slap and gritty slide of sandals on the steps. Though the rock was running with moisture, there was no drip of water, nor any sound of wind from the unvarying, foul-smelling drafts blowing upwards. The presence of the monks was an imposition on the void’s unnatural stillness. A building sense of anger emanated from the dark.
The stairs eventually ended, as all things must. A broad platform of pitted paving slabs held up by iron girders jutted into the void from a small room scraped back into the cliff. The stairs stopped a little way beyond, odd marks still in the stone, as if whoever had made the stairway had intended to go further, but had turned back.
Three slender piers of stone extended further into the dark from the platform’s edge. Rusted iron rings were sunk into the very ends. To these, the prior pointed.
“Set Mother Moude on the central pier. Deacon, you must go to the left, Guider, to the right.”
“No. This is not right. We will go back,” said Aarin, wary of the prior’s intentions.
“Oh thank you!” whispered Pasquanty.
“You must,” said the prior.
Aarin backed away. A dagger tip in the small of his back halted him. A gentle prod informed him of its deadly sharpness, the point pushed through his clothes and pricked at his skin. Pasquanty looked on, the little lantern bathing his aghast face in yellow light. He looked so like a character from a badly acted melodrama, Aarin would have laughed in other circumstances. The two men carrying Mother Moude had their free hands inside their habits, ready to draw their own daggers. Had Pasquanty been a different man, Aarin supposed, he might have smashed one in the face with his lantern, while he could step round quickly and disarm his captor, and so might they have effected escape. While Aarin considered his course of action, Pasquanty froze. If Aarin acted alone, he would die.
“To the piers, please,” said the prior. “If you do as we ask, you will survive this, Aarin. Triesko had every faith in you.”
“I trusted him,” said Aarin, rocked by betrayal.
“You were right to. He did not send you here to die. You are our hope, Aarin, not a sacrificial lamb. Now give us the keys to Mother Moude’s chest.”
Aarin took out the necklace from his robes and held them up. The monks set Mother Moude down. One came forward and yanked the chain from his neck.
Another prod in the back inched Aarin forward. Pasquanty was shepherded onto the leftmost pier by nothing sharper than a hard look. He trembled so much he was in danger of falling, his eyes closed against the endless drop. Aarin stared ahead, and took his place calmly. The pair of monks stayed behind them on the platform, daggers drawn.
The last of the prior’s servants placed Mother Moude’s chest onto the middle pier and shoved it out. The rasp of metal and wood on stone broke the silence, and the sense of intrusion grew heavier. The monk balanced the chest
carefully, unlocked it, and opened it wide, exposing Mother Moude’s bones and her chain inside. He looked to the prior, who nodded to him. The monk opened his robe and unhooked a heavy steel hatchet from a belt inside.
Pasquanty looked at Aarin helplessly.
“Call her forth,” said the prior. “The Dead God requires a sacrifice. You shall not pass without one. A dead soul for the Dead God.”
Aarin looked at the sorry collection of brown bones. He had always meant to find a way to free Mother Moude. Her enslavement was unjust, punishment meted out in a less enlightened age. He had always held back for fear of what havoc she might cause. He wished he had been braver.
“Do it!” said the prior. “If you do not, you are of no use to us and you must perish for what you know.”
“Please Guider,” whimpered Pasquanty. As much as the deacon irritated him, in that moment Aarin felt sorry for not being kinder to him too.
“Mother Moude,” he said quietly.
She did not stir.
“Louder!” hissed the prior.
“Mother Moude!” Aarin shouted.
At the second call the witch’s ghost shot out of the chest. She wore her youthful form, naked and voluptuous. The hook on the end of the chain pierced ethereal flesh that bled smoking blood. Before she reached its fullest extent, the monk swung his bronze hatchet, smashing the chain, and Mother Moudee soared high. She shrieked in joy, looping around and around, the chain snapping after her like the tail of a kite.
“Free! Free!” she shouted. “I am free!” She came to a halt a short way out from the stone piers. “No chains, Guider Aarin? No chains?” She stared down at him triumphantly.
“I set you free, as you have asked me to do so many times,” he said quietly.
“And you will regret it. Do you think I shall go gratefully to the far lands? Do you think I shall grovellingly accept your mercy and lift the veil, ducking under and away with nary a whimper? You are wrong, wrong! You shall face my anger!” she shouted. “Four hundred years have I languished in that box, imprisoned, used, my life and afterlife taken from me. Such torment will I visit on you, the last of my captors! I will haunt you to the end of your days. All you love shall perish by my hand!”
“I am sorry,” said Aarin. Tears welled from his good eye and ran down his cheek.
“Oh Tallimastus!” intoned the prior. “Accept this gift of the dead. Open the way for the living!”
The wind from below blew stronger. Mother Moude dropped a foot. Alarmed, she looked about her. “What is this place?”
“I am sorry,” said Aarin again.
A groan resounded from the void. A voice moaned upon the wind. “The first lock is open.”
Aarin had seen terror on the face of the dead before. It was his duty to ease it, to help them from this world to the next. The Guiders of his day might hide the holiness of their calling and name it a moral duty, but it was and always would be a sacred one. There was nothing he could do for Moude. She reached out her arms.
“Please!” she said. “Please!”
With a piercing scream, she was yanked away from sight. A phosphor trail danced in the black and was swept away. The wind blasted strongly, rocking Aarin back on his heels.
“Now the second gate,” said the prior.
The monk guarding Pasquanty’s pier strode up behind him and cut his throat with a swift, clean movement. Pasquanty’s hands shot up to his neck, arterial spray jetting between his clutching fingers.
“Pasquanty!” shouted Aarin.
Aarin’s cry was cut short. A noose of red rope was placed around his neck and drawn tight. He grabbed at it but it would not shift. He turned around. A monk held grimly onto the knot. He reached for the monk holding the noose, grappling with his arms, but the man had been chosen for his strength and reach and would not release the rope.
As Aarin choked, Pasquanty gurgled horribly, eyes wide with fear. He reached out for Aarin with one hand, blood bubbling between the fingers of the other. The monk who cut him put his foot on Pasquanty’s backside and shoved him off into the dark.
“Oh Tallimastus!” shouted the prior. “Accept this gift of the living, open the way for the dead!”
The wind roared again, reeking of corpse gas. The other two monks joined their comrade and took up the end of the rope around Aarin’s neck.
“The second lock is open. The gate is wide. You may pass,” said the voice.
“To meet with the god of death, one must die,” said the prior. “You have one unliving eye,” the prior said to Aarin. “Look through that, and come back to us.”
They pushed him from the edge then. Feared that his neck would snap he grabbed for the rope above the slipknot, but they kept the rope short. He fell only a foot, banging his shins on the stone. He lifted his legs, his feet scrabbled at the pier but were kicked away, and they lowered him down until all he could see was the abyss stretching infinitely down. His muscles burned with the effort of holding the rope slack. Tears blurred the sight of his good eye.
For five minutes he hung on to the rope, keeping his own weight from his neck. He tried to cry out, to beg to be lifted back, but all that emerged was a strangled gasp. His feet kicked. He found no purchase.
“Hurry him along!” commanded the prior.
“Yes master.”
Something hard and cold whipped into Aarin’s fingers, and he could not hold on any more. The rope jerked him, the knot slid tight, crushing his throat closed and shutting his veins. Black spots whirled, his vision flickered, and Aarin was gone from the lands of the living.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Dead God
AARIN FELL AWAY from himself and into the void and the wind. Above him his body kicked on its line of red rope. The immensity of the wall overcame the small scene, until it was lost in an unending gloom, and it seemed to lose all relevance to him.
Aarin had glimpsed the lands of the dead. Some of what he had seen had unsettled him, some cheered him, the disparity between the two extremes had hardened his resolve to perform his duties better. He would leave no soul to wander lonely, or be sucked up into the dark vortices that troubled the marches of the world between the realms of death and life. It pained his heart to know he had failed two such souls in a matter of minutes.
This was not the realm of death. The forbidding immensity of the void became claustrophobic from his current point of view. A definite idea of centre was inherent to it, even if the edges appeared infinitely far away. He rushed on, reaching untold velocities, until he flew at the same speed as the wind, and a false calm descended. A thread, red as the rope that strangled him, unspooled from his heart, linking his spirit to his corporeal form. As long as that held, he might return whence he came.
Time became erratic. An eternity beckoned, bottled by the dark. There was none of the rushing light and sound he had seen as he guided other souls onto the next phase of their existence. He skated along the curves of time’s cage, neither truly living nor truly dead.
A light winked brightly ahead, and receded to a point bright as any star. Perspective shifted, the light exerted an attractive force upon him. He accelerated. The light burst, becoming a confusing display of dazzling, interlocking circles.
Light died. Motion ceased. He had arrived.
Aarin stood upon a smooth plain of silver, whose rounded horizons suggested a globe. Upon the plain was a throne. Upon the throne was a mighty figure divided medially in two. One half of the figure was as familiar to him as his own face; a long head, a dark beard, blind eye, a supply muscled body pierced at wrists and ankle by nail marks. Tallimastus, god of death and creation, glared the doleful glare Aarin had seen upon a thousand representations.
At the midline of his body, the smooth bronze skin gave way to desiccated corpse flesh, sunken onto angular bones. The face that side was a death’s head, shrouded in shrunken skin, the eye hollow and clotted with dark matter. The crucifixion wounds were hard black slits, little different to the god’s eye on that sid
e.
“So another comes into my prison,” said the god. The living side of Tallimastus’s body remained motionless as every statue Aarin had ever seen of him. It was the dead half which spoke, words hissing through locked teeth. “Welcome, Guider Kressind.”
A dusty cough served it as a laugh.
Aarin fell to his knees, and pressed his head against the silver. “I come to beg your indulgence,” he said.
“As they all have come,” rumbled the god. Ennui strangled his words of life. “Speak.”
Remembering the prior’s command, Aarin looked up with his good eye shut, and squinted through his bad. He expected to see nothing, he had been blind in his left eye since he was six years old, but through it he saw clearly. Through his dead eye the stylised representation of Tallimastus’s right half and cadaverous left were replaced by a careworn man, still titanic, but human somehow. His face was lined with worry, both eyes milk white, his beard long and full. A red line across his forehead marked the crown stolen from him by his son. In all regards, size excepted, he appeared as a deposed monarch, a blind king in exile. The wounds in his limbs wept slow blood.
Around him were crowded a depleted court. Mother Moude was at his right hand, Pasquanty, his face full of accusation, at the left. Behind were nine others Aarin did not know. Three of them were Guiders like himself.
Tallimastus turned in his throne. “You see them?”
“Yes, my lord,” he said.
“Then you are mighty in your art. The others did not.” He pointed out the Guiders. “They gained the knowledge they came for, then they remained, as shall you. Amuse me before your vitality flees and you become a dumb ghost. Ask your questions, the answers will do you no good. There is no escape from this place.”
With difficulty Aarin kept his good eye closed. He had not attempted to do so since he was a child, when he spent hours every night hating his brother and willing his sight to return, and he found the action hard. The muscles twitched with unaccustomed effort.
“How did you come to be here?” Aarin asked.
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