Copyright © 2016 by Michaelbrent Collings
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cover and interior art elements © Michaelbrent Collings breakermaximus,
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cover design by Michaelbrent Collings
PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF
MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS
"Epic fantasy meets superheroes, with lots of action and great characters…. Collings is a great storyteller." - Larry Correia, New York Times bestselling author of Monster Hunter International and Son of the Black Sword
"... intense... one slice of action after another... a great book and what looks to be an interesting start of a series that could be amazing." - Game Industry News
"Collings is so proficient at what he does, he crooks his finger to get you inside his world and before you know it, you are along for the ride. You don't even see it coming; he is that good." – Only Five Star Book Reviews
"What a ride.... This is one you will not be able to put down and one you will remember for a long time to come. Very highly recommended." – Midwest Book Review
"I would be remiss if I didn’t say he’s done it again. Twists and turns, and an out-come that will leave one saying, 'I so did not see that coming.'" – Audiobook Reviewer
"His prose is brilliant, his writing is visceral and violent, dark and enthralling." – InD'Tale Magazine
"I literally found my heart racing as I zoomed through each chapter to get to the next page." – Media Mikes
Dedication
To...
those who struggle to make the world a better place,
not through fighting
(though that sometimes has its place),
not through anger,
but through kindness,
and understanding,
and appreciation for those who share
this strange, wonderful world…
and to Laura, FTAAE.
PROLOGUE: gods
"Some say: From whence come we? To this I answer: We are of the gods. We come from them, and some day to them we shall return. For as the Gods once were, so now are we; and as the Gods now are, so may we someday become. The house of the Gods is ours to claim, our birthright and our destined future."
- Emperor Eka, First Rules and
Commandments of the Ascension
The Guardian held a body in his arms.
Darkness covered him, and that was right. That which a Guardian does in the Place Above must be done under cover of darkness. That was ingrained in the Guardian's body, in every particle of his being.
The Guardian walked forward in the pure darkness, and as he did he thought.
This, he knew, was something that should not be. Guardians did not think. Not beyond the limited needs of their tasks.
His task was to take this body and place it atop the spike. To impale it and leave it.
The darkness would cover him, and that the spires would always be there when he or his brothers came to do their hidden work. The People Above had tried several times to destroy those spires. To pull them down or dig them up. But the spears that stood in a ring around the castle were of a substance too strong to be destroyed by means magical or mundane. And they ran too deep to be dug out – to the very foundations of the mountain itself.
The spires would stand forever. And the darkness would come when they saw use.
That darkness was thick, and had physical presence. No torch could cut it, no magic light could part the curtain it spread over all. It was so real a thing that the Guardian could actually feel it.
Feeling.
Another thing he knew set him apart. None of his brother-Guardians felt. None of the others seemed to understand anything at all. They had jobs, those jobs were done: the end and sum of their existence.
But not him. Not this Guardian.
And yet was he really any better? Any more? Even as he pondered his own reality, he realized he was climbing the spike. Which spike would hold the body had been decided through a complex mathematical process that would yield the closest thing to a random choice that was humanly possible.
Humanly.
The Guardian almost laughed. Didn't. Silence was part of the task.
He reached the top of the spike, holding himself up easily with one hand, the other arm all that was needed to hoist the body atop the spire.
He was very, very strong. But he took no pride in that fact. It simply was – like everything else about him. Like he himself.
He pushed the body atop the spire, the sharp point pushing at the corpse's back. When he let go of it, the weight of the body was enough to drive the spike deeply into it. The Guardian then grabbed one of the dead man's –
(It is a man, isn't it? Like me? Am I a man?)
– legs, and one of his arms. He released his legs' grip on the pole, and added his weight to the body's own. The spire punched the rest of the way through the body, and the body then slid down the shaft. One foot. Two. Three.
Enough.
The Guardian let go and dropped to the ground far below. He landed silently. Looked up. He could not see through the mist of darkness that accompanied him to this place, but he knew what was there. The man who had dared travel Below was ready. He would be found in the light. Then….
Then what?
The Guardian did not know. He did not know so much.
He walked away, something inside guiding him as he passed over feet and yards and miles. The darkness receded as he walked, so slowly that even he – he who had done this task a thousand times, and would do so a thousand more – barely noticed it.
He did notice the woman, though. Not all at first, and yet very quickly. She crept into his notice, through a back door in his mind, so that when he finally became aware of her it seemed that she was all that existed. She was all he saw… and she was all he wanted to see.
He brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. He had never done that before. It was not impeding his vision, so why?
I must look terrible.
Another first. He had never worried about his appearance – had never wondered if his hair, which was bright red, with a streak of gray down one side, would be pleasing or ugly to another's sight.
He knew that he was supposed to be of a type that none would remember, that would pass in and out of others' attention with the same impact as a light wind: real, but invisible. Real, but beneath notice.
That was the way of the Guardians.
That was his way.
"Why do you stare?"
The Guardian didn't realize the woman was speaking to him until she repeated the question.
He pushed his hair back again, and felt his spine straighten.
Why? Why am I changing who I am?
(Please her.)
He walked towar
d the woman. A strange sensation came over him. A shift in the bones and muscles of his face.
He was smiling.
He knew what a smile was, of course. He had seen it in others during his work. Even some of the Guardians could smile – the ones tasked with finer, more sophisticated elements of the Work.
But he had never done it before. And yet it seemed the only thing to do.
"I… am sorry."
The Guardian's tongue stumbled. He rarely spoke. It was not a part of his job. He hung the bodies. He left the warnings.
The woman laughed. It was a bright, merry sound. It made something inside the Guardian ache. Made him recognize a void he had carried with him for the entirety of his existence, but had never recognized until now, until this moment when something finally filled it. The laughter completed him – or nearly so – and the Guardian wondered, for the first time in all his years, if he had a soul.
She laughed again, and he knew he did.
"Don't be sorry," she said. She was drawing water from a small stream that ran through the middle of the town, and sudden worry crinkled her eyes. She dipped a small cup into water, and offered it to him. "Would you like to drink?"
The Guardian knew he should not. The part inside him that told him what to do, where to go, was screaming. He had deviated from his course. He must return. Perhaps be… repaired.
But he did not return to his place. He stepped toward the woman. Every step closer to her took him farther away from his designs. Every step closer to her made the voice telling him he was changing what must not change become quieter.
He reached for the cup.
She put it in his palm.
Their hands touched.
The woman smiled. "You don't say much," she said.
He smiled back. "No."
"That's all right. I like you anyway."
At that moment, a boy came around the corner of a building. That he was this woman's child could not be doubted. Not that he looked anything like her. He was only six or seven, but there was none of the coltish figure, the exuberance the Guardian had seen in other children. This boy was hunched over, his back swollen to the point it looked almost as though he carried a sack beneath his tunic. He stood at a lopsided angle, one of his legs visibly shorter than the other, and his face was a mismatched, asymmetrical mask: the nose pushed to the side, the eyes not quite level with each other.
But those eyes were the same color, the same shape, as those of the woman at the water's edge.
And the way she smiled at him told the Guardian the tale, even before she said the words. "My son," said the woman. "Vrisha."
The child held something in his gnarled hands. A yellow stone of some kind. As the Guardian watched, the stone glowed slightly. The boy seemed to realize what had happened, and quickly stuffed the stone into his pocket. But he didn't leave.
He smiled, too. And even though the smile came through lopsided lips, it was still somehow just like his mother's.
The Guardian's grin stretched so wide it hurt. He looked at the boy for a long time. "Vrisha. Vrisha the Jeweler," he said, tasting the sounds. They felt good. Right.
No Guardian had ever made a joke before, he suspected.
But does that mean I am broken? Or healed?
He suspected the former. And did not care.
The boy smiled slowly. Embarrassed, but clearly enjoying the title.
The Guardian looked back at the woman, and spoke words he thought had never been spoken by his kind before.
"May I sit here awhile? May I… stay?"
ONE: ends begun
"And the crown rested upon me, and I held the scepter of power, and I said: of a truth, this is my world, and this is my glory. And I shall hold all in the palm of my hand, and shall protect it, for were it not so, all would fall, and great would be the devastation thereof."
- Emperor Eka, First Rules and
Commandments of the Ascension
1
It is said that dead men spin no tales. But though true that may be, also true is this: they scream, and they howl, and they claw at the thick barriers that surround Halaw, better known as the Netherworld, and known best of all as the Walled City of Fear.
One of the men actually managed to get his fingers on the top of the wall, here on a place where it was low, where it sagged a bit on the inside.
Barnas smashed his club down on the man's hand. He heard the familiar sound of snapping bones. The man had already been screaming: first the scream of so many in the city, the scream of hunger and rage and fear all bound in a tight knot; then the scream of triumph as he felt freedom in his grasp; then the scream of agony as his hand collapsed under the weight of the iron band that circled the thick wood of Barnas' club.
The sound made Barnas wince, though he heard it at least three times a week since he'd been here.
And how long have I been here?
Barely any time at all. But far too long. Forever.
Another hand reached up. This time the club that swung down belonged to Ikaia, the second guard stationed on this section of the wall.
Crack.
The crackle of individual bones could not be heard under the power of Ikaia's blow. Just the dull thud of the huge man's even huger club half-burying itself in the stone of the wall.
The prisoner shrieked and fell away, leaving the mass of flesh that had once been a hand behind, still pinned beneath Ikaia's club.
"They are bold today," said Ikaia. He wrenched his club away from the stone with a grunt, then cleaned off the meat and blood by scraping it along the wall. The wall was already coated with a thick layer of ash – the Netherworlds was located on the mountain of Fear, which wasn't a mountain at all, but a volcano. And ash was always spewing from some wound in the earth or another. The land wept poisonous tears that made it impossible to stay clean, that spread disease, that killed nearly half of the children born in this place.
Fear indeed.
"Bold. Yes," Barnas said. Though with the loss of the man's hand, the unkempt group that had attacked – or the few who had made it through the bowfire the tower archers had rained down on them – seemed to lose their nerve. They slunk into the shadows and disappeared.
Most of them. One more lost himself to the bowmen as a single arrow arced down from the tower that loomed over all this part of the wall. It took the convict in the back of the head. He fell without a sound.
Barnas was silent for a moment. He stared at the prisoner.
What am I doing here?
Ikaia seemed to sense Barnas' mood going down. He clapped his big hand on Barnas' shoulder. "Remember that all is well."
"How can you say that?"
"Because you are on the wall, and not within it, my friend."
Ikaia laughed. Like most of the people who claimed Fear as their ancestral home, he was large and dark of skin, with eyes that flashed as though he had somehow contrived to capture some of the fire from below the mountain and lash it to his very soul.
He laughed much, did Ikaia. And that was a rarity here, in this place where men came to die – either because they were judged worthy of a slow death in an entire city of convicts, or because they were judged worthy of an even slower death as the ones tasked to keep those men in their place.
"Stop!"
Barnas jerked at the word – though it was one he heard at least a dozen times a day as prisoners tested the walls, and tested the guards.
Ikaia clapped his hand down again, and Barnas figured he would probably have bruises all over that shoulder when he took his armor off tonight. "You are jumpy today, my friend."
"I'm jumpy every day, Ikaia."
He looked up to the source of the sound in time to hear it repeated: "Stop, or be fired upon!"
The voice came from the tower, and Barnas could see an arrowhead edging through the slit cut in the tower wall. He jumped again when he saw where it was pointing: not inside, but outside the walls.
One thing they never had to worry about: peo
ple trying to get into the Walled City. The people in the city were all either thought to be dead, or thought of as better off that way. And who in their right mind would want to join them?
And yet here were three people, approaching the wall. This wasn't the gate, so there was no road. They were just picking their way over and around the black volcanic rock that served as the ground here. A bit of a marvel in and of itself, considering that one of them wasn't even walking.
"Halt! Now! This is your last warning!" The arrowhead moved slightly, and another one appeared in the arrow slit directly beside it. Then a third beside that one.
The three newcomers stopped. No one spoke. Easy to see why the guards in the tower didn't say anything: what could you say to three people wandering about in a barren land, approaching a city of madmen and murderers?
"Get down on your knees!"
Ikaia laughed. "Really, Na?"
Barnas almost laughed, too. It was only the strangeness of the moment that stilled his voice.
"All of us?"
One of the newcomers spoke – the reason for Ikaia's laughter. It was he who had come to the wall without walking – and, indeed, it was clear he couldn't walk, for his legs were small and withered. Instead of walking, he sat on a strange contraption unlike anything Barnas had seen. It was a chair, but it had two large wheels attached at two its sides, with two smaller wheels behind them, and another two smaller wheels before. When the man moved a lever, the chair moved forward of its own accord – it must have been enchanted by a Push.
The man himself was old. No, ancient. So wrinkled it was hard to tell what he looked like, any more than one could tell the form of a grape by looking at a raisin. A few strands of white hair clung to his otherwise bald head, and a thin curl of a beard spun like a spider's web down to the rumpled remains of thick leather clothing that looked as though it had been burned repeatedly. Not by a great fire, but by the falling of hundreds of small sparks: round, dark patches in the leather, singed and blackened.
Child of Sorrows Page 1