by D. P. Prior
Least he was consistent in that, he supposed, as he strapped on his sword belt and slipped his father’s longsword half out of the scabbard. It was nicked in a dozen places and badly in need of sharpening, but there hardly seemed much point. One more fight, and it could go back into retirement, same as it had the first time he went to Sahul, when he’d finally left the Seventh Horse and betrayed his vows to the Elect. He slammed it back in its scabbard.
He’d always known what this was about really. Prove to himself he could win the Archon’s sword. Prove he was the best of the best, and then give it all up for Nous. That is, if the monks at Pardes would have him back. He’d have plenty of time to think about that on the return voyage to Sahul. Plenty of time to lick his wounds if he lost, or to temper his pride if he won.
Somewhere outside, a dog barked, and Nub’s ugly face drifted up behind his eyes. Poor old Nub. He’d pretty much forgotten about the dog until the dreams had started, and maybe that was a good thing. Mom had praised him for the Nousian way he’d handled what had happened, but even now, when he thought about it, he still had that burning rage towards Brent. Chances are, if he saw the boy—man, now—he’d cut him down before he could stop himself. He gave a wry smile at that. It would make for one hell of a confession. Still, if he’d read the looks right between Mom and Father all those years ago, someone had paid for Nub’s death. Jarl Shader wouldn’t have been able to help himself. It was all about justice, in his book. He would never have gone after the boy, but Brent’s father would have been fair game.
He poured himself a glass of tepid water from the pitcher on the nightstand and plonked himself down on the bed to drink it. Every sip soothed his throat and cleared the cobwebs from his mind. He caught himself staring at the Monas on the far wall. It was a symbol he’d seen every day of his life—hell, it was even on his surcoat, embroidered in red—and yet he still wondered how it came to represent the son of Ain the Unknowable. It was vaguely man-shaped: a cross for a torso with stick arms and wavy legs. The head was a circle with a single eye at its center, and the whole was topped with a crown in the shape of a crescent moon. He knew the meaning of each aspect inside out, but something about the Monas had always nagged at him. He couldn’t say what it was, only that it felt … wrong.
He scoffed at that. There was nothing wrong with the Monas. Nothing wrong with Nous and his holy Templum. The problem was with him. Always had been. Jarl Shader had got it right all those years ago when he’d refused the faith, knowing he could never give up what he was. Shader shook his head and finished off the water. He’d given it his best shot, fought the holy wars in the black forests of Verusia, sent hundreds of Nous’s enemies back to the Abyss that spawned them, and yet he’d never once felt like he was doing Nous’s will.
A knock at the door saved him from wallowing deeper in a past he’d sooner have forgotten. He set down the glass and pulled his hair back into a ponytail as he stood.
“Come,” he called as he took his greatcoat from its hook and shrugged it on.
The door opened a crack, and then, as if gaining confidence, a few inches; and then a hand appeared on the jamb, followed by a broad-browed face with ears an elephant would have been envious of.
“Magister!” Shader said. “I wondered if you’d come.”
“No need for you to call me that any longer,” Adeptus Ludo said, rounding the edge of the door. “It’s been more years than I care to remember since you had to endure my classes.” He straightened his black and purple cassock and beamed.
Shader had forgotten just how huge the man was; even with his stooped stance, the result of sixty plus years of study, his old theology master towered above him, and Shader was a tall man by any measure.
Ludo raised his bushy brows high above his spectacles. “Widow’s peak. I knew it! You hide it well under that hat of yours, old friend.”
Shader smiled and took the hat from its peg, tugging the brim low. “Keeps the sun out of my eyes, Adeptus. Every little advantage…”
Ludo came all the way in and shut the door behind him. “You’ll need all the help you can get against my man Galen.”
Shader had watched Galen coming up through the rounds. He had some skill, it’s true, but his main asset was brawn; that and a self-belief bordering on arrogance. “Galen’s yours?”
“My warden, and I must say I’m glad of it. Oh, it’s a new thing they brought in since you left. Dangerous times to be a priest, my friend. The hand of Sahul reaches further with every passing year.”
“You don’t believe that,” Shader said. “The Templum’s always needed an enemy outside of Nousia. Keeps the masses from focusing too closely on the politics at home.”
Ludo’s eyes sparkled through his lenses, and he gave his characteristic finger wag. “Haven’t changed, I see. Still don’t trust authority. I had wondered if the campaign in Verusia might have fixed that.”
Shader puffed out his cheeks, hoping to find a different topic. Verusia had changed a hell of a lot for him, but if anything, it had made his mistrust of authority even stronger. Too many men had died needlessly. And how they had died at the hands of the Liche Lord’s minions.
Ludo must have sensed his unease. He clapped a shovel-like hand on Shader’s shoulder and looked him in the eye.
“Good luck with the final, old friend, and I really mean that. I’ll be rooting for Galen—it’s a loyalty thing, I suppose—but you will always be my favorite pupil. You were the only one in Nous knows how many years to challenge Berdini’s paradox.” Ludo’s eyes strayed to the sword at Shader’s hip. “And yet here you are, still caught up in it yourself. Oh, that reminds me. How are things in Sahul? How is the famed Gray Abbot? I can’t imagine he’s thrilled you’re here and fighting once more.”
“He encouraged it,” Shader said, leading Ludo to the door and opening it for him.
“Really?”
“I’m sure he has his reasons,” Shader said. The Gray Abbot always knew what he was about, and in this case Shader had a worrying feeling he knew what it was. The ancient Abbot of Pardes had seen right to his core, he was sure of it. Maybe he was secretly hoping Shader would win the Sword of the Archon and get back his taste for action. Maybe he was hoping Shader simply wouldn’t come back.
VISITS IN THE NIGHT
City of Sarum, Sahul
Ernst Cadman flipped open his pocket watch and squinted at the digital display. It took a moment for his sleep-dulled mind to register that he wasn’t wearing his pince-nez. His bedroom was blacker than he’d known it. He couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. Couldn’t see the pocket watch now either—which seemed a little odd. He reached out and patted the hard wood of his bedside table with tremulous fingers. Precisely four reassuring dull taps, not the sharp raps he’d feared. Not that it was a reasonable fear, he told himself. He’d worn the illusion of fatness for so long now it had the familiarity of an old coat, the comfort some children glean from a favorite blanket. He brushed against the frames of his pince-nez, felt them skid away from him, but managed to snag them before they could fall.
He fumbled and squeezed the pince-nez into place on the bridge of his nose and saw clearly that the time was 3:33 a.m. and 55 seconds exactly. He gulped—more out of habit than necessity. The two number fives danced around his mind, taunting, warning, predicting. Just my rotten luck, Cadman grimaced, his mind already permutating to make them into anything but what they really were. 5+5=10, the ritual began. And 1+0=1, which is 4 less than 5, but added to 5 makes 9. That was where he needed to stop, he reminded himself. 9 was a good number—it was 3x3 after all. But if you added it to the original 5… He groaned. That made 14, and 1+4…
How the deuce can I see the watch when I can’t even see my own sausages? Cadman wiggled his fingers in front of his eyes. It struck him as odd, too, that the pince-nez had made a difference. It was a matter of illumination, not of focus, and he’d never really needed them for that. Like so much about him, they were merely for show, and not a littl
e comfort.
Gosh it’s cold. Not that that was anything new. Even Sahul’s scorching summers had done nothing for the chills. But it was a darned sight colder than normal. Freezing even. He expected to see his breath misting before him—well more of a death-rattle than actual breath—but couldn’t see anything in the pitch blackness. It was becoming rather worrisome, not being able to see. He tugged at the end of his mustache as if it could ward off evil. The evil of the Void. Cadman began to run the numbers through his mind, adding, subtracting, dividing, as the panic began to rise. If only he could get to the curtains without tripping over and breaking his neck. He tugged aside the blankets and rolled his great bulk to the edge of the bed.
“Cadman.”
A voice like the rustling of paper. He froze, black heart thumping against his ribs and threatening to shatter the illusion of flesh. Someone’s in the room. Someone’s in the room. Someone’s—
“Cadman.”
The blackness darkened at the foot of the bed. It was all Cadman could do to turn his head, his hands clenching around the covers ready to tug them back over. A sliver of shadow curled towards him as if it were going to stroke his cheek. Cadman drew back, pulled the blankets up to his nose. Tentacles sprouted from the heavy dark, bobbing and undulating, poking and retracting. A series of pustules erupted from the central mass, lumps of twisting blackness that could have been heads, lolling, nodding, shaking. It was still too dark to see any more than the outline of black on black, and Cadman was grateful for that.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. Both hands were on his mustache and the number seven raced around his mind. Damn those fives. Curse them. Now look what they’ve done.
“I come in answer to your call.” A Cheyne-Stoking rasp.
“I bring what you seek.” A malign susurrus.
Call? Seek? “I called no one. Please go away.” Unless…
“You read books of knowledge.” The first voice rippled and crunched.
Blightey’s grimoire? Indecipherable poppycock. All sigils and wards, pious sounding words and a bunch of warnings meant to frighten the ignorant. He shouldn’t have read it again—nor any of the other works of his one-time master; but when you’d lived as long as Cadman, you had to refresh your memory by rote—every last bit of it. Systematically. Some might even say slavishly. It didn’t pay to forget.
“I came to Otto Blightey as I now come to you. I offer knowledge of things that can ease your suffering.”
“What do you know of my suffering?” The fear was turning to anger now, as he’d hoped it would. Seven was great for that. A strong number. Very resolute.
“Every time you feed your needs I feel it.” A voice thick with pity, as if it considered him less than the smokers of narcotics whose every waking moment was consumed with the desire for more.Which is not so far from the truth. Perhaps, if there were another way. It was all very well clinging onto existence, but there had to be more dignified ways of doing it. Ways that didn’t involve guzzling down the gory remains of others. All these centuries he’d been nothing more than a parasite, but what other choice did he have? It was either that or… He squeezed his eyes shut. He never liked to think about oblivion.
“What are you? What can you offer me?” Almost immediately, Cadman wished he hadn’t asked. He’d learnt all he could stomach of the dark paths from Blightey back in Verusia. There was a limit to how far he was willing to go. He knew Blightey had taken things much further—he’d seen the fruits of it in the mutilated victims, the impaled corpses outside the castle walls: white and rigid, the stench of feces and putrescence. Some of them had continued to gurgle and gasp around the stakes protruding from their gaping mouths for hours. Days even. If that’s what knowledge of the Abyss did to a man, Cadman wanted none of it. It’s why he’d fled. Why he’d come to this accursed backwater on the other side of the world.
Another head plopped from the black mass and swayed towards him on a sinuous neck. “You know of Eingana?”
One of the Aeonic Triad who fell from the Void with the Archon and the Demiurgos, if the myth’s to be believed. “The serpent goddess of the Dreamers?”
The black mass gurgled and hissed, its appendages lashing the floor, dark heads rolling. “The mother of life, they say.” There was a note of irony in the voice this time. “Keeps the creatures of Aethir in being by the slenderest of threads.”
“Ah, the funiculus umbilicalis. I’m not entirely ignorant of Sahulian mythology.” Always paid to study the native culture. Might make all the difference in a tight spot. You could never be too careful. “Cords of her own flesh invisibly sustaining all life in the world of the Dreaming. Once severed, so the Dreamers believe, the creature ceases to be.” Cadman shuddered. Such a graphic description of the precariousness of existence. Every moment a tightrope walk over the Void. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t she also the bringer of death?”
The creature roiled towards him, tentacles rearing and coiling like vipers in heat. “All things have two natures,” one of the heads hissed. “You of all people should know that.”
Cadman felt it could see through him, through his corpulent disguise and right down to the bone. He backed up against the headboard, dragging the covers with him.
“I know what you fear.” Another head spoke now, its voice soft and empathetic. “I, too, have endured on the threshold of existence, a dweller of the space between dreams and the Abyss. I, who have seen so much, felt so much. I can help you.”
“Why?” What’s in it for you? Nothing good ever came free.
“Because we are fellow sufferers. Because what I have I would share with you.”
That didn’t sound at all appealing, judging by the look of the thing. “You would have me become like you?”
All the heads laughed in unison, a loathsome cacophony that rattled the windows. “There can be no others like me. My creation was … unique. What I offer is the knowledge to endure, the fullness of the life of Eingana.”
“And that’s yours to give?”
The tentacles settled to the floor, the heads turning as one to glare at him with eyes blacker than the darkness.
“It is yours to take.”
That would involve action, and action never came without risks. “I’ve survived this long without your help, thank you very much. If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to keep things just as they are.”Lurking like a spider at the heart of its web, with an unsuspecting city my larder. Oh, joy! An eternity of feasting on the corpses of peasants.
The creature surged towards him, limbs flailing and agitated. “You cannot refuse,” hissed one of the heads. “It is in your nature. You will not refuse.”
Cadman pressed his back into the headboard, wishing he could pass right through it, through the wall and out into the street beyond. The creature squelched over the foot of the bed, its tentacles bashing against the floor.
“You will not refuse.” Thud, crash, bang. “You cannot refuse.” Thud, crash, bang…
***
Thud, crash, bang.
Cadman sat bolt upright in bed, patting his face to make sure it was still there. Cheeks and jowls, bushy mustache, great mop of hair. All present and correct.
“Hold on,” he called out to whoever was knocking at the door. What time is it? He snatched up his pocket watch from the bedside table and flipped open the lid. 3:34 and 16 seconds precisely. Who the hell’s bashing at my door at this infernal hour?
Dirty light from the street lanterns spilled through a gap in the curtains. He rolled out of bed, eyes adjusting to the gloom, and found his pince-nez atop the book he’d been reading himself to sleep with: Otto Blightey’s Voices from the Abyss. He shoved it onto the floor. Damned nonsense had fired his imagination a bit too much for comfort.
The knocking from downstairs grew louder and more urgent.
“All right, I’m coming. Give me a chance, would you.”
He lumbered across the room and threw on his dressing gown. Shufflin
g out onto the landing, he turned up the gas lamp he always left burning at night. A dangerous business, but better than the darkness. Someone was still hammering at the door as if all the creatures of the Abyss were coming for them. Cadman skipped nimbly down the stairs, feet clattering on the tiles by the door.
Oh dear.
He took a peek at his reflection in the entrance hall mirror. More of a skull than a head—just the merest strips of parchment thin flesh clinging to mottled bone. His hands were rotten, black with mildew. Skeletal fingers cracked and groaned, joints barely articulated by decaying ligaments. He frowned at his bony toes, tapping them on the floor.
Careless, Cadman. Very careless. Caution, caution, and caution again. He watched the fleshiness re-form in the mirror—great rolls of fat dripping from his jaw, waistline ballooning beneath the dressing gown, fingers swelling until they resembled bloated slugs.
Another flurry of thumps and the door rattled like the lid of a restless sinner’s coffin.
“One moment!” Uncouth bloody Sahulians. No manners. Absolutely none whatsoever. Cadman stroked his rapidly returning mustache. Better. Now then, let’s see what this racket’s all about.
He pulled back the three heavy bolts, twisted the key in the uppermost lock, fumbled in his dressing gown pocket for the big key for the deadlock and then inched open the door until it caught on the chain. A small pallid hand flopped through the gap, blood staining the fingers. Oh, my giddy aunt! Cadman took a step back and threw up his hands.
“Open up,” a voice wheezed from the other side. “I’m a Sicarii.”
An assassin. Another one of Master Frayn’s paid killers. This is getting beyond a joke. The fifth in as many weeks. Cadman entertained the idea of slamming the door on the hand and crushing it until it either fell off or withdrew. Not really an option, despite the appeal. It didn’t pay to mess with the Sicarii.
“Name?” he demanded through the gap in the door.
“Shadrak.” Pain in the voice. Breathing labored.