by D. P. Prior
“Terribly sorry to interrupt,” Albert said around a mouthful of cheese, “but perhaps it is we who should be worried. Hagalle may give the orders, but we’re the ones who give them a good poking, aren’t we Master Rabalath?”
If looks could kill, Albert would have been holding handfuls of his own guts the way Frayn was glaring at him. Rabalath gave a girlish laugh, but it was hard to tell whether it was from nerves or some hidden shame.
“Good point, Albert,” Paldane said with a fawning chuckle, obviously trying to keep in with the poisoner—and who could blame him? “Didn’t you once secrete thorns dipped in scorpion venom in their robes? I heard you even mixed their incense with toxic resin, and wiped out the Nousian community at Delta’s Bluff with a donation of mushroom soup.”
The journeymen burst into laughter and Albert nodded appreciatively, dabbing his lips with a silk handkerchief.
“From what I see,” Shadrak said, “Zara Gen don’t exactly share Hagalle’s penchant for whacking Nousians.”
“The Templum of the Knot?” Paldane rubbed at his eye then examined his finger.
“Nauseating shoggers,” Grayling said, looking up as if he expected applause.
“Yes, how come they’re off limits?” Frayn turned to Rabalath, who simply shrugged and gave a superior flick of his head, as if Frayn were an annoying fly or a splatter of seagull shit.
“The reason I wanted this meeting,”—Shadrak cut through the crap—“was because I ran into mawgs under the city.”
“How many?” Grayling asked, doing his best to look like he wasn’t bricking it.
“Three. All dead now.”
“But how—”
“The Maze is big, Master Grayling, bigger’n the city. No telling how many ways in and out there are. My problem is that if I alert the council they’ll either commandeer it or try to destroy it.”
“Small loss.” Frayn put his feet on the table. “If you hog all the entry codes, it’s no use to the rest of us.”
The idiots had tried for weeks to work out the panels. Problem was they’d grown frustrated tapping out random numbers. None of ’em had the brains for it. Not like Shadrak. When he’d first stumbled upon the Maze and got locked in, he’d worked through all the combinations in sequence till he found the right one. He later spent weeks doing the same with the other panels and wasn’t about to share the knowledge with his rivals, no matter how much they claimed to be colleagues. He’d shown Albert how to access the outer hatches when they’d started working together, but even he didn’t need to know more than that.
“Nevertheless…” Rabalath drummed his fingers on the table. “…the less the council knows, the better. Let’s see if we can’t deal with the mawgs on the quiet. You never know, Governor Gen might even thank us one day.”
“Mawgs ain’t stupid, Master Rabalath,” Shadrak said. “If there’s more down there, they’ll be wary now.”
“And you can’t deal with them by yourself?” Frayn was loving it, a big smirk crossing his weasely face.
Rabalath closed his eyes and steepled his fingers. “We can’t let the city fall, otherwise who’d pay us?” Some of the brown-nosers amongst the journeymen laughed. “You will take a group of Sicarii, find out where the mawgs are coming from, and seal the tunnel.”
Shadrak nodded. He didn’t like it, but it had to be done. Otherwise Kadee would never let him hear the end of it.
As he left the room with five assassins in tow, he shot Albert a frantic look. He could have done with Albert’s expertise, but instead, he’d been granted a right motley crew who might prove more of a hindrance than a help.
The poisoner shrugged as if it was no big deal. That was the trouble with having assassins for partners: when you needed them most they were just as likely to wrap a cheese-wire around your throat.
A BROTHER IN ARMS
The light from a guttering candle danced across Rhiannon’s flesh, her face flicking between paleness and shadow like a ghost on the threshold of the Void. Her grip on Shader’s wrists was tight, but not painful, her thighs hot and slick with sweat. Shader strained towards her lips, but she resisted, tongue brushing her teeth. His hands slid down her back, pulling her closer. She bent down, crushing her breasts against his chest, nuzzling her face into his neck, licking, sucking, biting. Shader sighed, one hand cupping a breast, the other squeezing her buttock in time to their thrusting.
Sweet pain ripped through his throat, warm blood oozing down the skin. Rhiannon lapped at it like a dog, gulping it down and hissing with satisfaction. Her nails raked at his chest, tearing out clumps of hair and flesh. She pressed down harder with her hips, silenced his protests with salty wet lips. Her tongue coiled around his, knotting, wrenching. He gagged and rolled on top, pushing her shoulders into the bed. Her hands latched onto his buttocks, rooting him in her. Her tongue grew more insistent, pulling his face toward her wide open maw, fangs dripping with saliva. He arched away, striking out with the flat of his hand. She gurgled and sighed, humping her hips against his. He hit her again, this time with a fist, battering her head from side to side until the tongue let go.
“Ain’s teeth!” Shader rolled from the bed and snatched up the gladius. “Get back to the Abyss, demon!”
She held her breasts, offering them to him, eyes wide and innocent, black hair tumbling about her shoulders.
“Back succubus! Get out or taste cold steel!”
She purred and crawled towards him, tongue running around her lips.
Shader screamed, the gladius punching through her face and exiting the back of her head.
***
“Frater?” Tap, tap, tap. “Frater, are you all right?”
Shader sat up, staring straight at the gilt Monas on the wall of his cell. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tried to get his bearings.
Tap, tap, tap. “Frater Deacon?”
“I’m fine. A bad dream, that’s all.”
He waited until the footsteps retreated down the corridor before standing. Reaching beneath the bed, he pulled out his swords, strapping them to his waist and frowning at the Monas before heading to the refectory.
Frater Elphus paused in his reading, but failed to meet Shader’s eyes as he entered. All the brothers noted, each in their own way, his carrying of weapons. The Gray Abbot simply played with his porridge.
“Investigator Shin sends his greetings.” Shader leaned across the lectern until his face almost touched Elphus’s. “Said he found you a great help.”
Elphus coughed and fussed with the pages, eyes darting from Shader to the Gray Abbot.
“Leaving so soon?” Frater Alfred asked, liver-spotted head bobbing above his bowl. Alfred’s counsel had all been for nothing: a litany of his own failings as a novice and the suggestion that if he could pull through then so could Shader.
“I am what Ain made me, Frater. Thankfully, you’re made of sterner stuff.”
Frater Trellian, beard like fly-struck fleece, spread his hands. “Given time, you’d settle.”
“Maybe, Frater, but I don’t think so. I find no stillness in prayer. My dreams are all too human, and the only time I feel complete is with this.” He half drew the gladius.
The brothers muttered amongst themselves, heads shaking, spoons clattering against bowls.
“I’m a reluctant swordsman and a restless monk: neither one thing nor the other. May Ain have mercy.”
Frater Elphus coughed. Alfred and Trellian raised their hands in apology. Shader glared.
As Elphus pointedly resumed the reading, Shader slopped porridge into a bowl, sprinkled some salt, and then joined the monks at table. Thirty-two brothers sat down to breakfast; thirty-three if Elphus were to be counted. He would eat later, having taken his turn as lector for the meal. Ten years ago the numbers had been almost double that.
“Hagalle is suspicious of us,” the Gray Abbot said, apparently reading his mind. “Sahul is not kind to Nousians.” The other monks mumbled their agreement. “Sarum is the only city with
a Nousian templum, and Pardes remains the sole house for religious.”
“Unless you count Gladelvi,” said Frater Gardol, the librarian, black skin betraying his Dreamer blood.
The Gray Abbot frowned. “Frater Jarmin takes great risks there. Let’s pray it turns out well.”
Elphus coughed again.
“Sahul was the Old Faith’s last refuge before the Reckoning,” Frater Darian said, a glob of porridge clinging to his bony chin. “The only land that would accept the foundation of Pardes.”
“Hagalle’s issue is with Aeterna,” Gardol said. “He sees it as the seat of power in the world, the repository of knowledge that was elsewhere destroyed by Huntsman’s magic.”
At the mention of the Dreamer shaman, many of the monks touched their foreheads. The Gray Abbot pushed his bowl away.
“Hagalle’s eye may be on Aeterna, but he’s not ready for war,” Shader said, recalling the galleons he’d seen under construction at Port Sarum. “He has enough problems at home, I’d say.”
“Really?” Gardol squinted at him with jaundiced eyes. “What would the Keeper of the Archon’s sword advise him to do?”
“Hagalle has a very tenuous grip on his empire. Jorakum is too far removed to be an effective capital, and the western sea routes are clogged with mawgs. Hagalle knows he must raise a large enough fleet to deal with them before he can reassert himself in the East. Aeterna has nothing to fear from Sahul. She dominates the oceans and her legions control the continents.”
“Except for Verusia,” the Gray Abbot said. “And Quilonia.”
“True, but if I were Hagalle I’d be looking to strengthen my position in Sahul before going after Aeterna. Drive the mawgs from our shores and then invade the Anglesh Isles. With control of the seas, he could swiftly bring the Eastern Lords back into line and re-take New Ithaka. Next, I’d turn on Ashanta and use her wealth to re-arm.”
Gardol gave a slow handclap. “Very good. Thank Ain you’re one of us.”
“May I continue, Pater Abbot?” Elphus asked, looking up from the lectern and rolling his eyes.
The Gray Abbot chastised him with a barely perceptible flick of his index finger before returning it to the stroking of his upper lip.
The other monks continued with their breakfasts, clanking spoons against bowls and, it seemed to Shader, slurping their porridge with intentional noisiness.
Elphus resumed the reading through clenched teeth, as looks of mirth passed between the brothers.
***
Yesterday’s rain had left a bright sheen on the trees and the grassy tufts poking through the sea of red sand around the abbey. As was the norm for Western Sahul, the weather had reverted swiftly to clear blue skies and a blazing sun. From the parapet, Shader could just about make out the tallest spires of Sarum in the distance, the ground in between flat and featureless, save for the odd gum tree. The woods smudging the hills about Sarum were sparse compared with the forests of Britannia or the mighty Schwarzwald of Trajinot, where he’d led the Seventh Horse on their desperate charge, crushing the ranks of undead and driving them back to the diseased heart of Verusia.
Shader’s thoughts fled to Friston Forest on Britannia’s South Downs, where he’d had a sheltered childhood up until his departure for Aeterna. Friston had been enveloping without being oppressive. Even on gray days, a hint of sunlight bounced off its canopy generating feelings of warmth and belonging.
Had it not been for the mawgs, he probably would have left Pardes anyway and gone home to Britannia. Back then his disillusionment with monastic life had rendered him purposeless, an insidious condition that had gnawed away at his confidence, and more devastatingly, his faith. Funny how such vile creatures could serve as his redeemers. Equally funny, he thought more soberly, how beauty could be the source of his second fall from grace.
Had it all been mapped out for him in advance? And if it had, why would Ain play thus with his soul, offering tantalizing glimpses of certainty and purpose, only to strip them away along with any sense of belief? Other than a stubborn attachment to the teaching of the mystics he had studied in Aeterna: that Ain works through darkness; that faith itself is dark?
Shader’s gaze settled once more on the great monoliths of Sarum protruding from the arid bushland like the death-stiffened fingers of a giant buried by the centuries.
It seemed that, even here, with its mighty towers rendered so small by the distance, Sarum still cast a heavy shadow. Shader recalled how, during his time in the city, the sun had always been at least partially obscured by the buildings, no matter where it stood in the sky. From the abbey, the shadow was of a different kind. He felt it more as a pull, like that of a rusted magnet drawing all manner of decayed and discarded matter towards it.
The cackling-warble of a kookaburra roused him from his reflection. Scanning the woodland to the east of Pardes, he was met with the spectacle of a host of brightly feathered lorikeets launching from the tree tops as a murder of crows descended.
The sun hid itself behind a bank of cloud that surreptitiously crept in from the west, and Shader’s ill humor immediately returned. He went back inside through a trapdoor in the roof and made his way down the spiraling stairs. Darkness followed him, a black cloud settling over the abbey. Hurrying to a window, he glanced outside and was astounded to see that night had fallen, where only moments ago he’d stood in the brightness that follows dawn.
The temperature plummeted. A chill wind whistled from nowhere, rattling doors and disturbing the portraits of deceased brothers. Instinctively, reassuringly, Shader’s left hand closed around the hilt of his shortsword, and then he heard a sickening scream from the refectory.
The Gray Abbot!
***
As Frater Elphus continued to drone on, the Gray Abbot noticed a pooling of the newly descended darkness upon the refectory table. A small vortex of misty black thread formed from the cloud smothering the abbey. His eyes fixed upon the burgeoning center as it sucked in the fog and, like a potter’s wheel, gave it form.
The figure that coalesced from the shadow grew tall and sprouted skeletal limbs. A mildewed skull twisted into place, the jaws opening to unleash a rancid rush of air in the face of the Gray Abbot. He tried to rise, clutching at the amber-eyed Monas that had for so long been his power. As he brought the symbol up, the figure took on more clarity: a surcoat of faded white; a rusty mail hauberk, and a time-blackened helm formed around the skull. Ember eyes smoldered through narrow eye-slits; searching eyes, somehow familiar. The Gray Abbot froze as he recognized the apparition.
“Callixus!”
The wraith snatched the Monas from his hand, snapping the chain and hissing in triumph.
“Ain preserve us! Callixus!”
Callixus leaned towards him, lifted his visor, and roared.
The Gray Abbot screamed and turned to his confreres for help, despairing when he saw them cowering on the floor, hands over their ears.
Callixus thrust the Monas into his belt, raised his arms and screeched like a banshee. The windows exploded, the stench of decay filling the room. Rotting limbs fumbled at the window frames, and corpses riddled with shards of glass began to clamber into the refectory.
The Gray Abbot gasped at the sight of Frater Elphus clinging to his lectern with rigid fingers, black veins webbing his face as a cadaver sucked at his mouth. Something crashed behind him, and he turned to see Deacon Shader burst into the room, longsword in one hand, gladius in the other.
“By all that’s holy!” Shader pointed the gladius at Callixus. “Everyone out!”
The monks crawled towards the doorway crying out as cold and cyanosed hands tried to pull them back.
Shader leapt at the wraith. His longsword slashed out at its neck, but simply passed through as if it struck air. In the same fluid motion the gladius stabbed forward, skewering its belly. Callixus emitted a shrill cry as masses of insects and larvae spilled forth from his wound. The vortex whipped up around him, and in an instant he dissolved back into fo
g and shadow, which melted from the room.
The monks scrambled behind Shader, but the Gray Abbot remained rooted to the spot, mind blank, heart racing. The corpse-creatures continued to lumber towards them, white eyes vacant, flayed limbs groping the air. Shader threw himself among them, his longsword arcing viciously to left and right, the gladius thrusting and impaling. Putrid carcasses fell before him, hacked and decapitated, and yet still they came, piling in upon the lone knight and forcing him back through sheer weight of numbers.
***
The press of corpses was so great that Shader could no longer see the Gray Abbot. He continued to hack and thrust, arms weakening, breath burning in his lungs as he tried to break through. The creatures came on inexorably until, with a great surge, they slammed him against the wall, sending his swords clattering to the floor. A mouth rank with decay clamped over his own, fetid breath making him retch. Cold hands held him like iron, the corpse shuddering as it began to suck. Shader’s fists hammered pulpy flesh, splattering pus and gore. Ice crept through his veins, mist fell over his eyes, but just as despair took him the cadaver pulled back, flame erupting from its flesh. It thrashed about in a macabre parody of a dance before collapsing in a pile of smoking ash.
Shader scrabbled about for his swords, fingers stiff and numb. The undead were swaying to a gentle chant that came from somewhere behind them. A corridor opened through their ranks and the Gray Abbot walked towards Shader incanting Aeternam words of prayer.
“…sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris...”
Flame licked dead flesh, flared to the ceiling and left nothing but dust in its wake.
“Et ne nos inducas in tentationem…” The Gray Abbot stopped before Shader, placed a hand on his shoulder and sighed. “Thank you, Frater.”
He had aged alarmingly.
Shader rose to his feet; gripped his arm. He met the Gray Abbot’s gaze and recoiled. The face that had always been a well of peace and wisdom was now a haunted mask that told of nothing but loss and despair.