The Brass God

by K. M. McKinley

  Only last week, Katriona had protested that Demion keep the lid on the bowl, she so loathed the food. He admitted that, as perfect as she was, she could be quite ferocious in the morning.

  He looked at her in concern. “Are you well my dear?”

  She waved her fork over the paper while she finished her mouthful. “Never better!” she exclaimed. She flicked over the page, and stopped speaking for a long while. Demion went back to his reading.

  “I don’t believe it!” she said quietly, setting down her fork with a click.

  Demion, who was thoroughly absorbed in the other particulars—to whit the racing times and participants at the next Royal Karsan dracon steeplechase—looked up distractedly. “Hmm?”

  “Oh do pay attention my dear! Have you not read the business pages?”

  Demion looked askance. He never did read the business pages. “Well, not quite yet.”

  Katriona slid the paper across the top of the racing gazette and stabbed at an advertisement.

  He leaned in obligingly.

  “‘For sale’,” he read, “‘by public auction to be held upon 31st Seventh at the offices of Gerwin, Fael and Runcor, the Lemio Clothing and Shoddy Factory, in whole or in part lots.’” He scanned through the rest of the details: public viewing dates, highlighted items, and an address to which one could apply for a full catalogue of particulars of the sale.

  “A sale of a business? I don’t—”

  She interrupted him again. “It is the mill, the mill! That scoundrel Grostiman is selling his bloody business!”

  “My dear,” admonished Demion. “Please, at breakfast.”

  Her anger vanished. “Are you going to raise your eyebrows at me for swearing, husband?” she challenged him playfully.

  He smiled at her. He rather liked it when she swore. “Not at all.”

  “Good,” she reread the advertisement, and her annoyance returned. “Oh, I don’t know! He’s sly. I will admit. I... Do we have cheese? I suddenly have a yearning for cheese.”

  Demion pointed his knife at the end of the sideboard where cold food was arrayed.

  “One cannot intimidate these people easily, my love,” said Demion haltingly. Katriona was heaping slices of cheese onto her plate. She stopped, then picked up a brace of bread rolls.

  “They do not always get their power handed to them with their father’s inheritances. Those that fight for their position are not to be underestimated. Grostiman is of good, old blood, but he won what he has himself. His father left him nothing, he was quite poor. You have picked a fight, challenging him.” He looked back at the broadsheet. “I say. There is a note here for an article on page twelve. Perhaps that will set the matter to rest in your mind.”

  Katriona came back to the table and plucked up the paper again. She seemed more short-tempered than usual. Demion Morthrock loved her anyway. Let her rant, let her rage. Her fury was as sweet as her smile to him.

  “What? Where?” She crammed in a piece of cheese and rushed to the marked page. “There’s a story here,” she paused to read. “What? He has issued a statement to say that the conditions of the children at his family’s factory were unknown to him! The dog! He reported and closed down his own mill. Well, I am sure his cousin has probably been arrested. How could he? Has he no loyalty? Or perhaps some other has been made out as the guilty one.”

  Demion went back to the food, where he speared a sausage, then, as an afterthought, took his own serving of cheese; Katriona’s had enticed him. “He is a clever one. I’d be wary of him, if I were you.”

  “Rot and more rot!” said Katriona. She slapped the broadsheet onto the table. “I’ll not let him get away with this. What the hells has he done with the orphans in his charge?” She scanned quickly. “It does not say! Here, he’s quoted!” She rapped article with her knife. “‘Generous benefactors’, ‘properly cared for.’ I’d wager he’s turfed them out onto the damned streets!” she shouted.

  Demion set his fork down carefully. Regrettably, the racing pages would have to wait. “My dear, please. Be careful with Grostiman.”

  “It’s him that’s going to have to be careful.” Her eyes narrowed in a calculating way. “I’ve got an idea that will greatly displease him. I’ll—”

  She stopped dead, her eyes wide with surprise.

  “My dear, are sure you are well?” Demion’s concern grew at his wife’s suddenly pale features.

  “I am terribly sorry,” she said breathily. “I have come over quite nauseous. It must be the kidneys.”

  She stood hurriedly. Her eyes rolled back into her head, her legs folded under her and she span around, knocking her breakfast plate to the floor as she fell. At the clatter Laisa rushed in and stopped uselessly in the doorway, her hands over her mouth. Demion thrust himself to his feet, knocking his chair over.

  “Damn it girl!” he shouted at the maid. “The goodlady is taken ill! Do something! Get some smelling vapours, get some water!”

  The maid stared back in shock; Demion Morthrock never shouted at anyone.

  “Quickly!” he roared.

  Laisa ran from the room. Demion mopped his brow shakily. He rang for his butler and knelt by his wife. Her hand felt clammy in his.

  “My dear, my dearest dear!” He patted her face. “Oh, confound these female garments!” he said, struggling to loosen her corset.

  When his man eventually arrived, Demion had her corset off. She was breathing more easily, but still Katriona had not come around.

  “About time!” he snapped at his butler. “Send for the physic. My wife is sick.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In the Company of Giants

  THAT WIND SPEAKS is not commonly known in civilised lands. Where brick and stone hold sway, the wind is mute. To hear its voice one must travel far from multitudinous humanity. The wilder the country, the better, for it is in the most isolate landscapes that the wind speaks loudest.

  At the heart of the Black Sands the winds howls in pain. Its voice is wordless, but its anguish clear. Why it cried so, Rel Kressind did not know, but its misery battered at him as hard as the cargo of sand it carried.

  Rel leaned over the neck of his dracon, his face turned from the wind. Scarfs wrapped tightly about his head protected him from the worst of the sandstorm. It was a lifetime since Zhalak Zhinsky had laughed at Rel’s ineptitude with nomad’s robes. Since then they had become as a second skin to him, donned without conscious effort. Suffering is a good school. Sore eyes, sunburned skin, and sand in every crevice of his body had been his tutors. Rel had learned a great deal about surviving the wilderness.

  The biggest lesson, he reflected, was not to go into the damn desert in the first place. Propelled from a comfortable life in the Isles of Karsa by a chain of events he could scarcely credit any more, Rel found himself travelling in the company of giants, the modalmen of legend, in pursuit of a rail gang enslaved by others of the giants’ kind.

  Rel’s companions were by far the least of his worries. They were dangerous, but they sheltered him. If he strayed from the march or fell from his mount, one of them would patiently fetch him back, like he was an errant toddler, and save him from the hungry ghosts, uncanny beasts, and other terrible things that infested the Black Sands.

  The desert was full of glimmer, the crystallised stuff of raw magic. All manner of curious phenomenon were conjured by it. Time ran in strange loops. Windows to other worlds opened in the night. Out in the rolling black dunes, following a light in the night could kill you as surely as thirst. Phantoms came from the darkness, and wicked things lurked in the deep, stony, waterless places where nothing ought to live.

  Though the Black Sands exceeded the wildest tales, the modalmen proved to be far from the monsters of fable. They were as huge and as terrifying as expected, but though possessed of four arms and covered in glowing patterns, in spirit they did not seem so different to other men.

  There were three with Rel: Drauthek, Ger, and their leader Shkarauthir. Drauthek rode behind Re
l on his massive garau, a great beast, charcoal skinned and patterned with light like its rider. Ger and Shkarauthir rode ahead, their huge shapes ships in the driving sand.

  Since Rel’s rescue, he had spent a great deal of unwelcome time trekking north, following the trail of the kidnapped rail gang. For all his efforts to learn the ways of the desert, the modalmen regarded him as an amusing, if ill-informed, novelty.

  The stories told in the Kingdoms suggested the modalmen would eat him. This was not untrue, for there were modalmen that would have devoured Rel; Shkarauthir made that clear to him at the start. Maybe the greatest lesson he had learned was that all men were individuals no matter their type, and nations were rarely as homogenous in thought as they looked from the outside. The modalmen were as divided in motive and temperament as other people. The group that had attacked the rail gang were of the Giev En, a man-eater clan. Shkarauthir’s group were of the Gulu Thek, and they did not eat human flesh. The Gulu Thek were the enemies of the Giev En, and their philosophies were opposed, principally on the matter of whether or not Rel was acceptable as food. Division was the lot of every human group, no matter appearances to the contrary.

  The older Rel got, the more certainties seemed anything but certain. Simple concepts of good and evil failed to capture truth’s nuances. Archetypes were often stereotypes, and stereotypes could be based on the flimsiest information. He supposed this was the first flowering of wisdom in his callow brain. He hoped he lived long enough to employ it.

  He had a lot of time to think, most of it while bent double over his dracon’s neck with the sand blasting at his head. Not that any of the profundities he dwelled on made his journey easier.

  Shkarauthir’s group rode a day behind the caravan the Giev En had joined, so their dust trails would not give them away, though they had no need to worry about that in the middle of the sandstorm.

  “Brauctha’s scouts are not so good as those of the Gulu Thek,” Shkarauthir had told Rel in his musical, if flat, Maceriyan on a day when the weather permitted conversation, “but they are adequate in skill enough to see us.”

  Now they were on the way to the Fallen Citadel of the Brass God, and Shkarauthir’s men followed.

  Whoever the hells the Brass God is, thought Rel. Shkarauthir was being predictably evasive about that, or why the Giev En had raided the camp in the first place, after so long a time of peace. The modalmen were intensely frustrating beings. They refused to explain, and expected Rel to know things he clearly could not know.

  Rel’s own plan had been to find the modalmen who had taken the workers, and guide in a rescue party. He had been staggeringly naïve.

  Instead I find myself at the arse end of the world, going to tea with monsters who would likely murder me for supper, in the company of other monsters who can’t give a straight answer to a question.

  “Wonder of wonders, my life never fails to get worse,” muttered Rel to himself, and was rewarded with a mouthful of sand. He had little choice but to go with them. Death was everywhere in the sands. Only the modalmen knew its every face.

  The bass blast of Ger’s horn halted the line of riders. The huge shapes of the modalmen on their six-legged beasts turned to the left. The line became a huddle. Rel rode into the middle, grateful for the shelter the giants provided.

  They passed through humps in the sand that grew in number and regularity, and the wind’s assault was curtailed a little more. After a few moments, they emerged onto a wide space, flat as a city square.

  Rel sat up in Aramaz’s saddle. More modalmen appeared from the storm’s shroud. Gathered in the centre of the space were dozens of them, their garau herded together, and campfires already established. Through the dusty air, the colour of this new group’s marks was obscured.

  “Hey!” Rel shouted. The modalmen saw excellently in the dark, but their daylight vision was not as good as a Kingdoms man’s. Bright light dazzled them, haze like this was impenetrable to their eyes, though surely they should be able to see this other group. They did not react as if they had. “Hey!”

  Shkarauthir’s modalmen circled about and stopped, Rel in the middle. Shkarauthir leapt down from the back of his mount. In one of his four hands he held a spear as long as a human’s pike.

  A warrior came sauntering out from a guttering campfire while the rest of the encamped modalmen got to their feet and set up a fearsome hooting. Whether of challenge or of greeting Rel had no clue. He tensed. Drauthek and Ger sat placidly as their leader alone faced the crowd of bellowing giants. Rel slipped his carbine off his back and undid the fastenings on its oilcloth cover.

  Drauthek look over at him and made a small hand gesture for him to desist. Rel ignored him and slipped the rifle free.

  The hooting continued as Shkarauthir and the modalman stared at each other.

  The display went on too long. By the time the modalmen leaders performed a complex handshake involving all their arms, Rel had a bullet in his gun and his heart in his mouth. He wished he had one of the modern repeater carbines. One bullet would not be enough.

  He breathed out shakily as the two modalmen embraced. The hooting calls got louder.

  Shkarauthir returned to his companions, where he had words in his own tongue with Ger and Drauthek before speaking with Rel. Dismounted, Shkarauthir was still taller than Rel was upon the back of his dracon. His face was swaddled in a headdress much like Rel’s, but his chest was naked. In the grooves in his bare skin, red light shifted to blue and back again.

  “We camp here tonight, small one,” said Shkarauthir.

  “Do you know these... people?” said Rel. “Are they dangerous?” To me, he added to himself.

  Shkarauthir looked at Rel in that way he often did, which is to say, like Rel was mentally impaired. “They are my people. They are of the Gulu Thek.”

  “Did you know they would be here?”

  “I did not know but I expected.” Again he gave that look, though it was changing to one of amusement.

  “What are they doing here?” said Rel. He had given up on politeness weeks ago. It did not bother the modalmen if he shouted or asked his questions with meek circumspection. They needed prompting on every point. Allowing himself to be irritable helped decrease Rel’s frustration with their obtuseness. The modalmen did not care for Kingdoms manners.

  “There is to be a moot,” said Shkarauthir.

  Rel prepared to ask the inevitable follow up question, but Shkarauthir had evidently learned something of non-modalmen during their association, and offered an explanation.

  “My people have been looking for us. A summons came to our god-talkers not long after Ger, Drauthek and I committed ourselves to the hunt.” He nodded to himself. “The news clarifies matters for me. It is not unusual for the man-eaters to take small people to the Brass God as gifts, but why in this number and why before the summons were given, I do not know. We will learn at the moot.”

  “Did you know this already?” asked Rel.

  “No, not know. Suspected,” said Shkarauthir.

  “How did they know to find you here in all this desert?”

  Shkarauthir shrugged his upper shoulders. “That is the will of the One. Here is an important place. Much magic is here. It draws us together, maybe. Maybe it is chance. Maybe more of my kind will come. Maybe they will not. The One will decide. Many Gulu Thek wait for us at the mooting ground. All is the One’s will. We pursue no longer, we go to talk.”

  He left it at that and wandered away.

  “Hey!” shouted Rel after the modalman. He tugged his scarfs away from his eyes and mouth so he could shout louder. “Hey!”

  Shkarauthir turned back patiently. “Yes, small person?”

  “Where the hells is here?”

  Shkarauthir held up his four arms to encompass the flat area and its surrounding mounds. “These are the barracks of our ancestors, in the once-city of Losirna.”

  With this explanation, the nature of the mounds emerged suddenly, like an image from a trick picture.


  Rel was surrounded by ruins.

  THE WIND DROPPED, its dying dumping curling waves of sand upon the desert. The moons came up before the sun set. The red emerged before the white, rushing up so quickly that the pair of them were together in the sky for only the briefest time. Between the lunar siblings the looming Twin glowered down at the Earth, pale blue in the evening, rapidly turning black as night drew in. Sparks of light flickered in clusters around its equator. Rel watched awhile. The storms of sparks were something new, something forbidding, and growing more numerous every night.

  Little mesas of broken stone surrounded their campsite. Sand banked up against the rubble in line with the prevailing wind, elongating them into shapes like sleeping dracons. Rel inspected the remains as the modalmen threw up their simple camp. He didn’t help. The giants were so much stronger than he that he was a hindrance to their efforts. After the fourth time of nearly being trodden on, he had given up. That had been some time ago.

  He was also wary of the newcomers. Despite belonging to Shkarauthir’s clan, they looked at him strangely. Busying himself elsewhere seemed prudent.

  Away from the bustle of the camp, Rel knelt on the ground and brushed black sand away from a door stoop sized for modalmen. Low walls persisted either side. Years of exposure to the pitiless wind had scoured the polished stone rough. Though the seamlessness of the masonry concealed its artificial origins, in many places the eroded details of nooks, carvings and windows could be made out. If it had not been for these surviving outlines of figures and other decorative embellishments, Rel would have taken the mounds for natural outcrops. There were no individual blocks in the wall, and no lines of mortar.

  He fished a chunk of rubble from the sand. Although it too was worn, in crevices it retained a little of the glasslike qualities found in many Morfaan remains. He let it thump down to the sand, wondering what could have broken the walls so comprehensively. Very little in the arsenal of the Hundred could so much as scratch Morfaan building glass. On the opposite side of the Gates of the World to the Glass Fort was a ruinous fortification, the twin of the Glass Fort. The manner of its destruction was a fearful mystery. Here was a whole city broken down to dust.