God of Night

by Tom Lloyd

  ‘Why?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I wanted a little time to think.’

  ‘I, ah … ya could’ve just asked.’

  ‘Aha, but we in the Sons of the Wind are a little mad, you know this.’

  Lynx winced. ‘I’m starting to realise it.’

  ‘So – now killing is not possible, you are hungry?’

  ‘Ah fuck!’ exclaimed a voice somewhere behind Lynx. ‘He’s always hungry – the fat bastard’ll sell us out for a loaf of bread.’

  Kalozhin raised an eyebrow. ‘Is this true? I confess, this would save us a lot of time and inconvenience.’

  ‘No. Well, mebbe Deern, but not the other two.’

  The man gave a solemn nod. ‘A shame. Could we persuade you another way? Anzhin says he thinks you are handsome and not so fat.’

  ‘Eh? Oh, um … well tell her I’m flattered, but I’m spoken for by one who don’t like to share.’

  Kalozhin roared with laughter. ‘Anzhin, not Elsiarl! But Elsiarl, she also prefers you to your talkative friend. That one, she is moments from cutting the balls off.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Guess I’m still spoken for though.’

  ‘It is a guess? Anzhin will be delighted.’ Kalozhin reported his findings in their native tongue to much laughter from the others. Lynx just lay there feeling stupid. ‘I have other food,’ Kalozhin went on after a while. ‘May I offer you stew?’

  Lynx shook his head as best he could. ‘I’m not selling my friends out for food. Deern neither.’

  ‘It is very good stew.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Is that cured pork I can smell?’

  ‘It is!’ The Sendan brightened. ‘Sweet spices and smoked. Come, you will try it and then we can talk.’

  Lynx allowed himself to be lifted upright, in so much as someone trussed like a turkey had a say in the matter. Once the stars had receded from his eyes, he saw the camp had a relaxed air about it. Most of the soldiers were eating and there was a strong smell of fried fat hanging over the camp which made Lynx’s mouth water.

  ‘First we will give you food,’ Kalozhin announced. ‘Then we must interrogate you, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lynx mumbled, mostly thinking about the food. ‘Only polite.’

  He looked over to where Deern sat. The small man had another black eye, his cheek swollen and red. His hands were still bound in front of him, but he did have an end of bread clutched in them. An ageing long-haired soldier shuffled over to Lynx, untied him and handed him a bowl of stew. Kalozhin plucked a thin sausage of cured pork from nearby and cut a length for Lynx.

  It was tough, made to last on the road, but once his teeth started to soften the meat Lynx found it was extraordinarily good. Either that or he was hungry and a sucker for spiced pork.

  ‘So – why the interrogation?’ Lynx asked between mouthfuls.

  ‘A regrettable duty,’ Kalozhin said, almost apologetic. ‘What we saw was remarkable and I have questions. My superiors will expect answers.’

  ‘You reckon we came here to lie to you?’ Lynx asked. ‘Atieno doesn’t show that bloody trick to everyone he meets.’

  ‘The trick was impressive,’ Kalozhin admitted before raising a finger in correction. ‘Amazing, remarkable – but, a mystery remains.’

  ‘So you’re asking the ones without any magic?’

  ‘I ask you first. We have a saying in my homeland – ask the monkey before you shout at a mage.’

  Lynx paused. ‘That’s a saying?’

  ‘It is better in my language.’

  ‘How big are your monkeys?’

  ‘Big – noisy too. They bite your face if you shout at them.’

  ‘Now I see why Deern’s tied up,’ Lynx said. ‘I still reckon Atieno’s the only one who’ll understand what you’re on about.’

  ‘This is possible, but I ask while he sleeps. He will be down a little longer. I hope we are all friends again by the time he wakes and there is no need to shout.’

  Lynx shrugged and took another mouthful of food. There were worse ways to be interrogated. He’d experienced a few so was happy to at least hear the questions before asking for a beating.

  ‘What do you want to know, then?’

  ‘The magic – it is still here,’ Kalozhin said. ‘All around us, I feel it as a mage.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, this I did not expect.’

  ‘Why?’

  The Sendan cocked his head at Lynx. ‘I do not think you know how an interrogation works, my friend.’

  Lynx laughed at that, trying not to choke on a piece of potato he had in his mouth at the time. ‘Was going to say the same about you!’ he coughed. ‘You’ve not asked me anything yet.’

  ‘In the Sons of the Wind,’ Kalozhin said gravely, nodding at Lynx’s words, ‘we know some things about magic. Some is our creed and I do not share our secrets easily. So, let me say this, I did not expect the magic to stay here. I thought it would go instead, be drawn away.’

  ‘Any direction you had in mind?’

  ‘South-west.’

  Lynx nodded. Jarrazir was indeed to the south-west, where the Labyrinth concealed some sort of great store of magic. ‘Reckon I can guess what you’re on about. How’s it you know so much about these things?’

  ‘It is our purpose to know. My Order is considered mad, this you know. But this is not the whole truth.’

  ‘And that is?’

  Kalozhin smiled. ‘Men are not truly mad for the things they do, but for the things they wish to do.’

  ‘And that’s an explanation?’

  There was a low rumble, deep in the ground beneath their feet. Lynx looked around in alarm, but saw everyone else seemed unmoved by the strange sensation.

  ‘It has been going on a while,’ Kalozhin explained. ‘Because of the magic.’

  ‘Fucking elementals!’ Deern called, his voice muffled from the swelling. ‘Cos that always goes well fer us.’

  Without meaning to, Lynx jumped to his feet. He looked around, ignoring the soldiers watching in amusement. With eyes as good as his it wasn’t long before he caught sight of two angular black shapes, sharp lines and almost glittering edges.

  ‘You’ve got some friends with you,’ Lynx breathed. ‘Shadowshards!’

  ‘Where?’ Deern said immediately, looking round as best he could while still bound. ‘Ah shattered gods, that ain’t good.’

  ‘You can see them,’ Kaloshin said, surprised.

  ‘My eyes are better’n most.’ A slight prickle started on the back of Lynx’s neck. In his muzzy state it took him a little while to translate the sense of panic into reason but, when he did, Lynx gave a gasp. ‘We should move.’

  ‘Move? My friend, you are too superstitious. There is no danger – not from the shadowshards or whatever that was we felt beneath our feet.’

  ‘Not from them, maybe,’ Lynx breathed. As he spoke there was another rumble in the earth and Lynx saw the ground shift and rise slightly as though some creature stirred beneath an enormous blanket. ‘We should move now!’ he repeated, louder this time.

  As he spoke, Deern added his voice to the alarm, demanding that his bonds be cut and his guns returned.

  ‘Get your guns!’ Lynx ordered the soldiers around him, not caring if they understood or were willing to take his orders. As it was, his tone was enough. For all the puzzled looks he received, hands reached for the neatly stacked mage-guns.

  ‘Calm, my friend, we are in no danger,’ Kalozhin insisted. ‘It would be foolish to anger a leviathan with gunfire.’

  ‘It’s not the fucking elementals I’m worried about! You never seen a flock of birds feeding on fish?’

  He received a helpless look from the Sendan and Lynx remembered there were few inland seas in the north. Likely the image meant nothing to the man.

  ‘We need our guns, everyone does,’ he insisted. ‘Load earthers and sparkers – something that’ll hit hard.’ He raised a hand to stop the colonel replying. ‘Birds come to feed on sh
oals of fish, out on the sea, just like these elementals are. You watch that for long enough and the big predators appear for the birds – they’ll take ’em right out of the air!’

  ‘Predators?’

  Lynx didn’t get the chance to explain further. Before he could speak, the ground just outside the hollow exploded.

  Chapter 12

  Lynx didn’t wait to watch what happened next. There were shouts and yells, all overlaid by the roar of something big. In the darkness there was a blur of movement. Hoping he wasn’t going to be shot for it, Lynx grabbed a discarded eating knife and ran to cut Deern’s bonds.

  ‘You get Kas,’ he yelled at the man, ‘I’ll grab Atieno!’

  The other two Cards lay nearby, tied up but propped with bedrolls as pillows. Deern didn’t argue as mage-guns appeared all around them. Whooping war cries rang out as the Sons readied themselves for a fight. Not waiting to cut her bonds, Deern hauled Kas up and worked his head underneath one arm. That done he started to drag her out of the hollow while Lynx heaved the dead weight of Atieno up onto his shoulder.

  Before they could get more than a few yards the ground beyond them burst open. They fell back as several Sons were thrown flying. Another fired into the crazed mass of earth and confusion, but the icer seemed to be an irrelevance to what was going on there.

  Lynx fell back, half-pinned by Atieno, but still found himself gaping at what he saw in the grey gloom of his mage-sight. There was a huge shape protruding from the ground, a lumpen mass of soil and stones that he could discern no detail of. Finally, he realised there was nothing to see. It was a leviathan, an earth elemental, that had no true form of its own but inhabited the soil it passed through like a ghost possessing someone.

  He doubted they could even see all of it, but what was visible had to be a good eight yards long and two high. There were no limbs, nothing like the vast arms of the stone elemental they’d once seen near Shadows Deep, but at the same time it was far from an even hump of earth even before it began to writhe.

  As it did so, Lynx started to make out what was happening and, when he did, it hurt his eyes to see. Behind him, Kalozhin cried out in pain. Lynx chanced a look behind and saw the officer was unharmed but reeling, hands up as though to shade his eyes. There was something uncomfortable in even looking at the things surrounding the leviathan, something affecting them both. Through watering eyes, Lynx persisted and made out low, angular shapes that moved with sharp, darting movements.

  There were three at least, then a fourth ripped a path up from the ground. Lynx glimpsed crab-like pincers slam right into the earth ‘body’ of the leviathan. The earth elemental reeled under the attacks but seemed unable to respond properly to them. As a headache started to build, Lynx saw the leviathan twist and arch up. A flat shape rose, but instead of crashing down on its attackers the appendage raised five yards or more before slamming harmlessly back to the ground.

  Lynx shoved Atieno off him. Near his feet was one of the soldiers who’d been upended. As icers slammed harmlessly past, mostly into the great mass of the earth elemental, he crawled over the unconscious soldier and fumbled at his cartridge case. Years of fighting taught him to search the cartridges by feel and in seconds he had an earther out.

  He loaded the fallen soldier’s gun. Still wincing when he had to look at the magic-hunters, Lynx took aim and fired. The fat stream of earth-magic tore a dark furrow through the night and slammed squarely into one of the creatures. It shuddered under the impact, knocked hard against the leviathan itself. He could see the shot hadn’t killed it, despite the incredible force of earthers, but it did something else that was just as valuable.

  For a moment the pain-inducing haze around the creature wavered then fell away. To Lynx it felt like cool water washing over his face. Suddenly he could see the creatures clearly, all of them. Whatever the haze was, they were doing it in concert and Lynx had disrupted that. The ground heaved once more and a tower of earth rose twenty yards into the sky, tossing trees aside like twigs. The four hunters, many-limbed and low-slung like scorpions, hesitated – some turned to flee. None got far as the rough column of earth split into four coils that each crashed savagely down on the attackers.

  Against the thunderous sound, Lynx heard a sharp crackle of breaking bodies and then nothing. The rolling boom faded and silence flooded in. Lynx found himself holding his breath, frozen with shock until his mind caught up with events. After that he still didn’t want to breathe or move until the earth elemental had moved on – ignoring the humans perched above it as no threat.

  The ground sank, a strangely smooth and quiet movement after the frantic burst of activity they’d just witnessed. Lynx exhaled noisily as relief flooded through his body.

  ‘What in Banesh’s name was that?’ croaked Kalozhin from behind him.

  The Sons officer staggered forward, mage-pistol wavering. Realising the man still couldn’t see well, Lynx cautiously moved aside and lifted the man’s arm when he came in range. Kalozhin flinched but luckily didn’t fire, nor did he resist when Lynx eased the pistol from his hand.

  ‘Hunters,’ Lynx said once the danger was past. All around them soldiers milled in confusion, some looking for threats and others seeing to the injured. None seemed to care much that he’d taken their commander’s gun away. ‘Creatures that feed on magic and elementals.’

  ‘Magic?’ Kalozhin blinked at Lynx and finally seem to focus on his face. ‘Me?’ He shook his head. ‘No, predators you said – hunting.’

  ‘That’s my guess. We’ve seen it before – not those things, but magic-hunters.’

  ‘Did it hurt to look at the others too?’

  Lynx shook his head. ‘Those ones flew, chased down a light elemental then went after our mages.’

  He took a step towards the half-buried remains of whatever had been trying to kill the leviathan then thought better of it. Someone else can go investigate.

  ‘These monsters, I dunno. Mebbe Toil’s heard of something like this – my guess is not, though. They were using magic, maybe, something to confuse the senses of the elemental so they could take it down. So they don’t only feed off magic, they can use it like a mage does.’

  ‘Toil?’

  Lynx hesitated. ‘Relic hunter, part of our company.’

  ‘The Red Scarves, yes.’

  ‘Yeah – we’re half-independent, mostly cos of her tendency to charge off into the deepest black of whatever miserable city-ruin she comes across.’

  Kalozhin nodded. ‘Like Jarrazir.’ He glanced behind him at his soldiers then down at the still-unconscious form of Atieno. ‘Tell me,’ he said quietly. ‘Are the seals broken?’

  ‘The what now?’

  The officer fixed him with a stern look. ‘Do not play games. The seals, in the Labyrinth of Jarrazir.’

  ‘How do you know about that?’ Lynx asked, half-panicked and half-relieved that maybe this mission might not turn out to be a fool’s errand.

  ‘The Sons of the Wind are dedicated to the being that killed your gods,’ Kalozhin said. ‘Do you not ask why? The Sons of the Wind have always had another purpose and I think now you are part of it, my friend.’

  ‘I’m part of too much already,’ Lynx said in a gruff tone. ‘You keep your dogma to yourselves. We’re here to see if you’ll help us out on a mission, nothing more.’

  ‘But we are not mercenaries,’ Kalzhin said. ‘We are a Militant Order. To win our help, you must appeal to higher ideals than money.’ He put a hand on Lynx’s shoulder and smiled when Lynx flinched and shook it off. ‘So – we start again, no? You came to talk, no?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’

  ‘Let us talk, then.’ Kalozhin grinned. ‘Let us talk like mercenaries, over a bottle of something that would kill lesser men.’

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ Lynx said with feeling.

  ‘Good. I am party to my Order’s mysteries, I can answer some of your questions.’ Kalozhin took Lynx by the arm and ushered him away from the camp. ‘My men
will bring your friends, we should all get away from this magic, but we will talk now.’

  Lynx nodded dully. His head sagged with fatigue and he allowed himself to be escorted away from Atieno as two Sons soldiers lifted the mage up. It was an effort to drag his limbs, but Lynx fought his way on and once they were out in the light of the skyriver, he began to talk.

  Chapter 13

  Is this the rest o’ my life now? Gamekeeper and sacrificial lamb combined – keeping these fucks alive while … ah shit.

  Sotorian Bade hissed at the woman ahead of him. She flinched before glancing back to realise she’d moved ahead of the group. Alarm flourished on her face as she scuttled back to perceived safety. Hardened soldiers every one of them, but some just weren’t cut out for this life. So far as Bade could tell he was the only civilian on these patrols, mages aside, but he was also the only relic hunter. That meant he gave the orders and every Charneler in the valley jumped to obey.

  They do now anyway. The ones that ignored me didn’t last long.

  He’d received a letter two days back from some pencil-pusher at the not-a-Palace of the Exalted. It had announced he’d been promoted within the Pentaketh regiment. He now held rank equivalent to a colonel, which was funny given there hadn’t been ranks in the Pentaketh up until now. Added to that, no bloody officer of significant rank had come near this place in a fortnight. Bade had read the letter, laughed and tossed it aside. He hadn’t bothered to tell anyone. What would be the point? They were all too tired to care anyway, Bade included.

  ‘What’s that?’ the dragoon on his right whispered.

  The group stopped, mage-guns pointing outward. They were in a bad bit of the broken holy mountain, a canyon almost half a mile long below the northern face. A long way from help. All around them jagged slabs of rock reached up towards the evening sky. Bade could see a sliver of the skyriver up there against the fading light, but on the ground there was only gloom.

  The hollowed-out warren of the holy mountain contained miles of ground – three separate complexes that had once been mirrors of each other. This northern one was the most degraded if you discounted the fact a fourth had been blown apart by Banesh’s great betrayal. Parts of the magic strengthening the rock had failed, opening up fissures and allowing points of ingress for some creatures that would risk the surface world for a time. It was worse further underground, they all knew that, but increasingly that line was blurring.