Lost Is The Night

by Greg James

  They went on in silence for a time.

  Murtagh broke it, “Khale, you speak of the Thoughtless Dark as if it were a place.”

  “It is, in a way.”

  “You have been there?”

  “Once, yes.”

  “Is it as the legends say?”

  “It is an abyss,” Khale replied, “into which all things slowly sink when they pass away from time and space. Cadaver moons and the macabre remnants of entire worlds float there, for a brief time, before they are consumed utterly by what dwells in its depths.”

  “The Gods in Shadow,” Murtagh whispered.

  “Aye. And though this world is rotten to the core, if it falls tonight then it will fall before its true time.”

  “Then we must find a way to stop it.”

  “Ha! Indeed? Leste learnt it all from you, didn’t she?”

  “What say you?” Murtagh asked.

  “About being a hero. Did you never think to tell her they were lies you spoke? Do you think that by paying homage to them now, that you will redeem yourself for Colm’s fate, for her fate?”

  Murtagh’s face was still, and his eyes unsteady.

  “Tonight we will seek out Barneth,” Khale went on, “and stop his conjurations, but not for grand and noble reasons, Murtagh. We will do it because we both want to go on living and breathing in this world. That is all.”

  Murtagh followed Khale, the silence between them became a heavy, bitter thing.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Khale burned your home?” Cacea looked the dead man over.

  Anhedon nodded. “Aye, he did, in his days as a pirate. He led a fleet to sack Ain’Soph for its wealth. Though our true wealth was our books, the repositories of the knowledge and learning gleaned by past generations, so he was little satisfied with what he found. It is ironic in a way; the Small Kingdoms and their Over-Kings always feared us, but their own struggles stopped them from invading. All it took for my home to fall was a fleet of cutthroats with no higher calling than to rape and pillage. We remembered the white fire. We watched its ashes cool and the people of your lands crawl out of their caves to build once more. Our libraries preserved knowledge from the time that came before; all of this was lost for want of coin and jewels, as was my family.”

  “Your family?”

  “My wife and daughter. My beloved Yare and precious Le’yare, taken, raped, and murdered by Khale and his dogs. Pain is his life and Death is his one true companion. I feel it is only fitting that I rid the world of him when next we face one another.”

  “You do not fear him?” Cacea asked.

  The stiff skin around Anhedon’s mouth crinkled. “I am dead, Cacea Selwen, and the dead have nothing left to fear.”

  *

  Anhedon led Cacea out of the dark caverns.

  The words he spoke to her felt strange on his tongue after nearly a millennia alone. Stranded in the nameless remains of this world for so long, he had never thought to see another soul, other than the monstrosities that inhabited this planetary fragment.

  The girl was afraid, but at least she was not alone, not as he had been when he first came to this rock in the Thoughtless Dark. Though armed with Baro Vane, his enchanted sword, fear had mixed with Anhedon’s blood for many years as he fought to survive. If he had been a living man, who required water and food to survive, he would have been dead a long time ago. Nothing in this world could be consumed by a mortal without a terrible end coming to them.

  They both clambered over the final lengths of the path to the light of the surface. Three suns hung in the sky, turning the air a peculiar twilight shade that made Cacea ask many questions. Anhedon explained that when a world falls into the Thoughtless Dark, it stays trapped in its last moments—the suns were ghosts of time, they had not moved for aeons gone.

  The sand beneath their feet was not like the sand of the world in which they had been born. It was whitish-grey, much like ashes, but if cleared away, other colours were revealed. Anhedon watched Cacea dig through to layers of vermillion, dark emerald, and rich crimson.

  “Another world,” she whispered, her face and voice reflecting her amazement. “And I thought I would only ever journey as far as the southern coast.”

  Anhedon laughed dryly at that. “There is much more out there, Cacea, than the southern coast.”

  “And it is home to the swine-thing and others like it?”

  “No more than you or I,” Anhedon replied. “You know what happens when a corpse is left to rot in the open, I take it.”

  “Maggots and vermin come to feast on it.”

  “Just so. They are no more native to this world than we are.”

  “Are any of its people left?”

  Anhedon shook his head. “No, when I first came here, it was as barren as you see it now. My only company through the years has been my thoughts and memories of times past.”

  “You have done well not to lose your mind.”

  “Yes,” said Anhedon. “Yes, I have.”

  “Where to, then?”

  “A rude shelter not so far from here. Come.”

  As they crossed the plains, Anhedon watched Cacea’s reactions to their surroundings.

  Everything that grew here—and this was not much—was fulvous in hue and rotting away. Meagre plant life threw out withered, disease-pale tendrils that writhed like boneless fingers in the dirt, attempting to survive in the weary climate, and the air around them tasted of stale vegetation. Occasional patches of lichen and moss clung to the rocks, their colouring and texture always put Anhedon in mind of cancerous flesh and spoilt fruits. Eventually, they came to a hollow at the base of some cliffs that had served as his dwelling place for too long.

  Yes, dwelling place, it could not be called home.

  “You are welcome, though I have not much to offer,” he said.

  Cacea nodded her thanks. She did not speak, and he could see in her face how much the short journey had distressed her. This world, its nature, and its state, were outside of her experience, and she was already paling from exposure to it.

  Anhedon sighed. He had no liquor to offer her that might help ease the shock. “Please sit,” he said.

  She did, but with her knees pressed tightly against her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She looked like a lost, terrified animal.

  Anhedon understood, but he could not say so. Words were not going to be a means of reaching her. He put out a hand. She did not recoil from his dry touch. He could feel how rigid were her muscles and her bones. She was shaking with the effort of sitting still rather than leaping up and fleeing across the plains outside.

  Her eyes were glazed in their sockets; eyes as blue as his own.

  She wanted to get away—from him, from this, from everything around her—but some dormant instinct knew that to flee across the plains alone would be to hurtle into Murtuva’s hands. Inside her, the desire to survive and to flee were at war.

  I must do something, he thought, lest she be lost to me.

  He knew a way to reach her.

  She was becoming buried deep inside herself now, and he had to lead her out, just as he had led her out of the catacombs below. Anhedon gently placed his palms on either side of Cacea’s face, closed his eyes, and called out her name.

  Cacea ... Cacea ...

  There was no response.

  I must go deeper.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Khale and Murtagh made their way deeper into Castle Barneth, towards the dungeons.

  “Something ill is at work in this place,” Murtagh whispered. “I knew the way afore, but I fear the path itself has changed.”

  Khale was only half listening. He did not know what Barneth could want with Cacea. There had to be something he was missing. The Crone would not tell him, so there would have been no worth in asking. He wondered if he would ever come to know.

  So, he thought on the task at hand instead.

  Could Cacea be mere bait for him?

  It was an unhappy t
hought. A ruse so that he might be drawn into the Thoughtless Dark. Was she a sacrifice the Crone and her Sisters meant to make in order to banish him from the world?

  It could be so.

  Khale would live to see them rue the day, if that was the truth.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a whispering from up ahead.

  “What is that?” Murtagh asked.

  “I hear it,” Khale said, “and I know not.”

  Before they could say another word, light fell away from the world and a wave of vile sensation swept over them. Khale heard Murtagh screaming and shouting as he once more beheld shifting, unnatural phantasmagoria from the Thoughtless Dark. The passing of it all curdled his own stomach, but he had seen sights far worse and infinitely more abysmal during his long life.

  Yes, he was hardened against the nightmares of this world and all others. Khale the Wanderer could weather this onslaught as he had done with many before. But when he saw her coming towards him, out of the dark, his resolve became less sure.

  He was uncertain as the shade of Milanda halted a mere hand’s span away.

  Her beauty was made luminous by death and her eyes shone like lost stars. Some being from the grave-realm had dressed her in soiled cerements, but they did not mar the guileless lustre of her looks and nature.

  It was only now, seeing her thus, that Khale understood what he had seen that made him fight for her. As a man who raped, pillaged and warred his way across the centuries, there had been nothing noble left in his heart that could be appealed to, or so he had thought.

  In her mien, it lingered still, and he named it.

  Innocence – a light in the dark.

  One that is too often put out by the world.

  Alosse had preserved it in her more perfectly by accident, than another man could have done by design. And then, the light had been put out.

  Khale felt the same rage that brought Neprokhodymh to dust kindling in his veins as he looked on her. He wanted to reach out to her, but he dared not. This spectre was abyss-born and would pass away soon.

  He must not touch it, nor let it touch him.

  Milanda’s ghost raised a fair hand to his face. He backed away from it, though the step he took was faltering.

  Was there a change coming over her? Were the eyes less bright? Was the hair less lustrous? And was the shapely form beneath the burial gown fast becoming more common and worn?

  Her face lost its softness and the lines of her brow became hard. Her eyes grew crude and old, cut from black ice, and a grim despondency gnawed at her lips.

  Slowly, she faded into greyness and then was lost, again.

  Light returned and Khale looked to Murtagh. He had seen something, or someone also, and his eyes were haunted by it. The Wanderer looked away before the old Captain could see he was troubled.

  Innocence once lost is lost for good, he thought, and any man is a fool to think some trace of it might survive in death.

  “I am a fool,” he whispered to himself.

  *

  “We are near the dungeons, I believe,” Murtagh said.

  They had crossed into the catacombs of Castle Barneth. At which point they had done so, Khale was not sure. The architecture of the place was rearranging itself into a labyrinth that made the senses ache with its twists and many turns. He was certain they had passed doors which led to nowhere. He had seen halls where archways were set into the ceiling, stairs ended in unbroken walls, and windows opened onto darkness below.

  The fleshy residue left by the Thoughtless Dark clung in spores and patches to the ancient stonework. In some ways, it was like walking deeper into the bowels of a living thing. This made him uneasy. Khale had known many a leviathan, but this was the first time he had stalked through the guts of one.

  “What do you think lies ahead, Khale?”

  “What do you think, old man?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “You guess well.”

  In the dim light, Khale saw what appeared to be the corpse of a swine-daemon upon the ground. He gestured to Murtagh. The Captain waited as he approached the pale, crumpled heap. It rustled like dry, dead leaves even though there was no wind to stir it. The rustling became a crackling. The crackling accompanied by a thin hiss and slowly, ever so slowly, the shape arose.

  It was a skin with naught inside; no skeleton, no muscles, no organs or teeth, no tongue, no eyes. The lolling orifices in its fluttering face looked like holes torn in old paper and the lips of its mouth made damp sucking sounds as it came towards Khale.

  Its cured texture scraped over stone as Khale looked into the wet pits of its eyeholes. They were quivering and twitching, aching with the desire to reach inside him and draw out the red, dripping meat.

  “Come to us ... O flesh ... be our flesh ... O flesh ... be our flesh ...”

  “Not tonight, daemon,” he said.

  Khale said a word and grasped at the skin’s hollow head. As he touched it, the skin ignited. Flames coursed along its length, licking high, licking low. He let it go. It thrashed away from him, trailing greasy tongues of smoke.

  The roasting of the skin did not take long. It was soon still.

  Khale let out a light sigh.

  “There was little contest there, eh?”

  Murtagh probed at the smouldering leftovers on the ground with the toe of his boot, “I fear I may have had enough for one night.”

  There came a great rustling and crackling from nearby. Suddenly, a horde of skins swarmed out from the nowhere-doors and void-facing windows around them. Fleshless fingers dragged them towards Khale and Murtagh. They were everywhere, or so it seemed. Empty faces hung down from the dark air, fluttering like the wings of giant bats. Ravaged lips and eyeholes whispered, moth-like, wherever the two companions looked.

  “Can you set them all ablaze?” Murtagh asked, backing away from the creeping, flayed sea.

  “Not all and see us both come out alive, no,” he said, “but I can clear a path.”

  Khale stroked the blade of his sword, taking care not to cut himself on its keen edge, and felt the tempered steel hum in response to his touch. Cursed and enchanted swords were untrustworthy things, as were their bearers. Common steel might be common but it was a good enough means for occasionally earthing his magic.

  “Khale, they come close!”

  “Aye, I thought they might.”

  He cut at the closest skin and it burst into flame. As the horror shrieked and fell back, those behind it ignited in kind. The others howled and scattered away from the bright inferno.

  “Murtagh, with me!” shouted Khale.

  Murtagh did not need to be told a second time.

  They ran for their lives from the spawn of the Dark.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Anhedon opened his eyes and found himself in woodland; the first natural growth he had known in a long time. He stopped momentarily to breathe in the sweet scent of the grass, to brush his fingers over the bark of trees, and to listen to the sounds of birds and animals disturbing the undergrowth.

  His lifeless tear ducts ached to weep. But he could not tarry here long. Cacea was in need of him. He crossed through the woods until he sighted a cottage, and he saw she was there—wrestling with her brother in the dirt. He smiled when their laughter and cries reached his ears.

  It had been so long since he had known such sounds, or even felt pleasure.

  She had retreated from the nightmare of his world to this place, to a haven of happy memories.

  Only then did Anhedon realise something was amiss. Looking down, he saw a change had come over him. His skin was young and fresh again. He raised his smooth hands before his barely believing eyes. He touched the skin of his face and felt his hair, no longer dry as a witch’s sticks but as it had once been.

  It is only dream, he thought, a mere illusion. But one that I will happily endure.

  His bones felt hard and his muscles supple, as opposed to the hollow flutes wrapped in frayed muscle and flesh like wrapp
ings of rotted cloth.

  If only Yare could see me now.

  But she would not: he knew that much was true.

  Death was death. There was no coming back.

  He had lost sight of her.

  Anhedon went through the brush, searching again for Cacea until he espied her on the other side of a clearing. She was crouched in the bushes, watching and waiting.

  Out of the trees came a boar, snuffling and snorting its way along, stamping its feet and seeming to ready itself. Her brother, clad in the garb of a peasant-hunter, followed it out of the brush. He held a spear of home-flint bound to roughly skinned wood by knots of hide. He circled the boar, and the boar circled him. He closed with it. The animal stamped and raked at the earth with its forelegs, readying its compact body to charge.

  Cacea leapt up out of the brush and cried, “Kill it, Aarthe. It’s yours!”

  The young man’s head turned at her cry.

  His spear lowered.

  His eyes were off his prey.

  The boar charged. Its tusks tore into the young man’s abdomen. Bloodied skin and flesh fell to earth. Innards hung from the ugly, gaping wound as the boar rutted and gnawed at the young man, who struggled against it with bloodied hands.

  His spear had fallen too far from his grasp.

  The spear was lifted, raised high, and driven down hard.

  The boar uttered a thick, surprised grunt and then collapsed.

  Cacea stood over the fallen beast. She let the gored spear fall from her hands. She went to her brother and cradled his head in her arms. With her other hand, she covered the wound made by the boar. There was no healing to be done there. Nothing to be saved, except a little dignity for the dying.

  Anhedon inclined his head so as to hear her words.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry. I shouldn’t have followed you. I thought I could set things aright. I thought that if this happened again, I could make it not happen, and then everything after would come aright as well. It would all be better. You’d be alive, and I wouldn’t have left.”

  “You did not do this to me, sister.”