The Brass God

by K. M. McKinley

  The present was visible behind the vision. Paved terraces were displayed over the slumped mounds that covered them. Towers rose from stumps like ghostly markers for their own graves. The inhabitants waded through sand without hindrance. They walked in a different time. They did not see what the future held for them, and as Rel watched, the vision grew in veracity, crowding out the sad truths of the present. Ruins shivered and faded away like a mirage caught. The warding pouch Aarin had given him warmed at his side. He placed a hand on it, but paid no attention to its warning.

  The vision spread. Light engulfed the foot of the wall he stood upon. Pitted stone became shining marble and Morfaan glass. Gaping, wind-blasted hollows shimmered and turned into fine windows glazed with coloured panes and alcoves furnished with golden statues.

  Magic lapped over the top of the wall. His feet tingled as the light washed them, taking him from present night to long-ago day. His back was still in the cold of night, but his front was warmed by a gentle sun. As its rays touched his face, the noises of the city went from muted to immediate, and his nostrils filled with the scents of warmed stone, spices, and reptilian, alien bodies. The day was hot, but pleasantly so, not the baking heat of the desert. The climate reminded him of Irrica or one of the other northern kingdoms, so different to dreary, rainy Karsa.

  The city invited him in. The warmth reached the back of his head. The Morfaan saw him and stopped. Children pointed. Adults smiled and beckoned, asking him to join them.

  Rel dropped his gun. He unhitched his sword. Both struck the wall with the thump of metal on sand. The pouch at his belt vibrated frantically, collecting weight to itself that dragged at his side, pulling back toward the night, but it did not possess the power to stop him.

  He took a step forward.

  A huge hand grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back into the dark.

  “I told you, I am thinking, that you ought to remain by the fire,” said Shkarauthir.

  The vision retreated like coloured silk pulled off objects on a table, revealing what was hidden beneath. The city day receded until only the very centre remained, tantalising him with its warmth. The bell chimed, and then it was gone. Rel blinked after-images from his eyes. He shivered in the sudden cold.

  Shkarauthir peered down at him with his characteristic unreadable expression. His tribal markings shifted from red to blue in the darkness.

  “Or am I recollecting incorrectly?” he said.

  Rel could not decide if the giant were mocking him or asking a genuine question.

  “I... The city,” he said. “It was real.”

  “It was,” agreed Shkarauthir. “You saw it as it was, a long, long time ago; a time before we true men, perhaps. You are blessed to receive such a vision, and see it as I knew it, though it nearly cost you your life.”

  Rel’s quizzical face prompted the modalman to crouch low. He pointed his massive finger in line with Rel’s eyes, so that he could follow.

  “Look, by that tower. There is the thing that lured you.”

  At first, Rel saw nothing, then something moved, and he discerned a shape lurking in the lee of a tower’s stump. It was almost invisible, a piece of blackness solid as coal. A sense of evil clung to it. Red eyes and steel teeth flashed as it turned and slunk away.

  Rel let out his breath.

  “What by the hells was that?” he said.

  “What else? One of the lesser Y Dvar: a godling, trapped here. It uses the memory of the land to tempt fools in, small one.”

  “For what purpose?” Rel gathered up his gun and sword, eyes fixed on the shadows where the Y Dvar had been. “You’re going to say, ‘So it could eat you’, aren’t you?’

  Shkarauthir nodded sagely. “So it could eat you. Body and soul.”

  “I am never going to get used to this bloody desert.”

  “It has got used to you, small one. You are honoured. You must be strong in will to coax the Y Dvar out. They only devour those rich in magic.” Shkarauthir looked at him strangely.

  “I’m not. And it doesn’t feel like an honour,” said Rel. “Drauthek wants to eat me, that wants to eat me, you say the other modalmen want to eat me. Is there nothing out here that does not wish to eat me?”

  Shkarauthir made the grumbling hiccupping that served him for a laugh.

  “Not very many. The Black Sands can be dangerous to the weak.”

  “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not weak.”

  “The way I look is the way I look, as you are the size you are.”

  “As in, small and weak?” said Rel.

  Shkarauthir laid a friendly hand on his shoulder, a gesture that nearly floored Rel. “Come. Sleep. Tomorrow your peril only grows. You will need all your strength, such as it is. We have a hard ride across deadly country. The secret ways open, for a time. We will travel quickly, but it may kill you.”

  “You know,” said Rel, “you are lousy company.”

  “I am very good company,” said Shkarauthir amiably. “You would be dead without me. Company that keeps you alive is company of the best kind.”

  Shkarauthir set off back to their camp. As always when walking with the modalmen, Rel was forced to run to keep up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Prisoner of Monsters

  RAFOZO AWOKE TUVACS from a troubled sleep, bringing him to full alertness with a jolt. The hooting, laughing calls of their captors boomed through the dark, along with the screams of men.

  “Wake up! Wake up!” whispered Rafozo. “They’re coming.”

  “A choosing?” asked Tuvacs.

  Rafozo nodded. His eyes glinted in the dark. His skin shone with sweat.

  “Don’t look at them. Show no fear.”

  Tuvacs’ heart hammered, urging him to fight or flee, but the modalmen could not be fought against by mortal men, and there was no escaping the cages.

  In other circumstances the desert would have appeared beautiful. The moons had set and the stars were more numerous than children’s wishes, filling the heavens so deeply across the God’s Road that it was a glorious, milky white. Subtle shades of violet and blue were visible at the edges, the sort of light that the faintest illumination would destroy. Only the black circle of the approaching Twin detracted from the vista of stars. Tuvacs had never seen such skies as these anywhere else. They went unappreciated, a backdrop for his horror.

  The day was a long ordeal of boredom under which squirmed constant terror. Every man in the cage dealt with their situation as best they could. Tuvacs’ wits yet remained his own, though he fully expected the madness to descend upon him. Maybe tomorrow, maybe tonight. His eyes darted around the cage, all the energy his body poured into him had nowhere to go, so his mind spent it obsessively calculating who would be next. To think he had survived his wounds and his fever to die like this. Most of the men stared fixedly at the rough wooden boards of the cage floor, their manacled hands crossed over bony knees. At the time of choosing, no one could look at the empty chains dangling from the crude iron bars.

  There was an older man, the Marovesi named Fulx. Rafozo said he had begun the journey a big man, well-muscled and tough, a survivor of the inter-clan warfare so beloved of the southern kingdoms. At the beginning Fulx had made light of their predicament, but his good humour was as doomed as his body. The stress had eaten away at his mind as surely as starvation had stripped his body of flesh. When Tuvacs knew him he was skeletal, his strong shoulders were hunched. His eyes were enormous above sunken cheeks. He shook with terror, chewing at his cracked lips like an animal caught in a trap.

  “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” he said. The others glanced at him. Sometimes, if everyone in a cage was quiet, the modalmen would pass them by. The men shifted uneasily, their manacles rattling.

  Dunets was the unofficial cage leader, partly by his utter ruthlessness in taking food and comfort from others, partly because he sometimes shared what he stole. He was the only one that spoke.

  “Keep him quiet!” he growled.
“Keep him quiet or we’re all dead.”

  “Oh please, please!” whimpered Fulx.

  “Hey, hey!” said Rafozo soothingly. “Shh, hey, Fulx. Fulx!”

  The other man stared ahead, the whites of his eyes as big as saucers.

  “Remember the stories you told me, about the fighting in the south, the winters, the ice dragon? Hey, remember that ice dragon you killed? You must have been really brave.”

  The modalmen were opening the cages, working their way down the line to Tuvacs’ prison. Men in the others pleaded, screamed and sobbed as they were brutally removed from their restraints.

  Tuvacs ignored them, focussing on Rafozo calming Fulx down. The young man touched the dagger-length tooth Fulx wore around his neck. Fulx glanced down at it and moaned.

  Tuvacs shifted, coming as far across the cage width as his manacles would allow. “Yeah, he really liked that story,” he said. “I’ve never heard it, can you tell it again?”

  Rafozo gave Tuvacs a grateful look.

  Fulx stared at them with uncomprehending eyes.

  “That’s right. It was a great story. How did it go?” said Rafozo.

  Dunets grunted. “Strangle him. Stop your jabber. Your nursemaiding won’t do shit.”

  “Screw you, Dunets,” Rafozo said. “You found the creature with your dogs after it slaughtered your goats?” Rafozo said to Fulx.

  “Yeah,” said Tuvacs. “How big was it?”

  The modalmen were at the cage ahead of theirs. In their corral, their draught beasts lowed at the disturbance, their markings flickering. The men in the cage shouted. One of prisoners kicked at the hands of the monster reaching in to pull out his friend. The modalman slapped him so hard Tuvacs heard the bone snap in his leg and he screamed. The modalman grasped the man he had chosen, and deftly unsnapped his chains from the cage bars. The modalman’s fellows laughed at the shrieks of terror the wretch gave. When the man did not stop, his captor reached up and snapped his neck as easily as if he were a barnyard fowl.

  “You must have been very brave, be brave now,” whispered Tuvacs urgently to Fulx.

  Their cage’s turn came. Golden Rings was coming, so named for the hoops that pierced his lower lip. At the sight of him damp warmth leaked out of Fulx, wetting the cage boards. The door screeched open on dry hinges. Huge charcoal coloured hands reached in. Only one modalman at a time could fit into the opening of the cage’s rear, but they were experienced livestock handlers. It used its upper arms to sort through the men, poking at them, grabbing limbs or heads and turning them this way and that in rough inspection as they shouted and tried to get out of the way. Pandemonium reigned over the caravan. The shouts and cries of terrified men shattering the peace of the night. The hands passed over Fulx, and he screamed loud enough to scare the ghost out of a man.

  “No, no, no, no!” he jabbered.

  The modalmen grabbed Fulx around the waist with its upper hands. An insane strength possessed the Marovesi, and he bucked and thrashed, foiling the modalman’s attempts to undo his chains. Tuvacs was trapped, the modalman’s heavy arms crushing him against the bars while the legs of the Marovesi battered into him. A wild kick caught Golden Rings square in the eye, eliciting a grunt of annoyance and bellows of monstrous laughter from its comrades. The modalman swatted Fulx across the face, stunning him. Rather than taking the opportunity to undo the chain, the modalmen stepped back, and pulled.

  Fulx screamed at the pain. Tuvacs had never heard such agony given voice. The manacles bit deep into the flesh of his wrists at the modalman’s tugging. His shoulders popped out of their sockets audibly. The modalmen twisted and wrenched, furious at being kicked in the eye, and Fulx shrieked horribly, until, with a final tug, the manacles skinned the unfortunate man’s hands. Lubricated by his own blood, Fulx slipped free, and was carried out from the cage, leaving the gloves of his skin lying limp upon the cage floor.

  Tuvacs blinked Fulx’s blood from his eyes. He could not control his breathing. His heart hammered in his chest so hard he thought he would die. Creeping faintness blotted his vision. So fixated was he on the ripped flesh of Fulx he did not notice that the modalmen were not done with their cage, until he was grabbed, and his chains removed from the bars.

  He was lifted up like a child and dragged into the night. Golden Rings had him. He held Tuvacs up appraisingly, lifting his arms and sniffing at him, grinning evilly. Satisfied with his selection, he walked away from the cage, bearing Tuvacs from his shouting comrades. He cuffed Tuvacs about the face in idle cruelty, leaving his head spinning. The wounds in his back shifted painfully, threatening to tear. Pain and terror crowded out all other sensations. He was still weak from his fever, and unconsciousness beckoned.

  Another modalman stepped into the path of his would-be devourer, halting Golden Rings. Tuvacs, who thought he could not possibly be more scared, knew the full depths of terror.

  Before him was Brauctha, their captors’ leader. In a tribe of giants he was the biggest of all, standing head and shoulders over the others. Upon his back was an enormous sword, long as a logger’s saw. It was an impossible weapon, so huge it could be wielded by no one but the giant modalmen, and then only one so large and strong as Brauctha. He lacked his right eye. A long battle scar crossed over his brow, grey and thick as a rope at the top, running over the empty socket, then forking to mar his cheek with a pinkish lightning bolt. Whatever weapon had caused the wound had split his eyelids right through. These been stitched back together badly, and healed into a puckered mess of scar tissue.

  Brauctha’s head was studded with a crown of silver rivets. Gold rings and silver bars pierced his flesh around the deep grooves of his markings.

  Golden Rings paused. Brauctha ruled more by fear and violence than agreement. His clan lights pulsed strong colours in challenge. The glow of Tuvacs’ captor dimmed in response.

  Brauctha barked at Golden Rings in their tongue. Tuvacs had a natural facility for languages, even ones so foreign as the modalmen’s, and he had begun to tease out a few words from the stream of nonsense sounds. “Not” and “kill” were two of them.

  Tuvacs’ captor looked at his prize. Golden Rings was only slightly smaller than Brauctha. He argued back, holding Tuvacs up, prodding hard at Tuvacs’ wounds and protesting.

  The chief repeated his demand again. Reluctantly, Golden Rings offered Tuvacs up with his head submissively bowed.

  Brauctha took Tuvacs in two gigantic hands. He was as helpless as a ham passed from butcher to goodwife. Brauctha held him with one hand clamped around his neck, the other around his thigh, which Brauctha’s fingers encircled completely. He lifted Tuvacs up to his good eye, peering at him closely. The modalmen had a strange, musky odour. Given the constituency of their diets, he expected their breath to be foul with rotten meat, but contrarily it was sweet, a spiced smell almost. Out of the two of them, it was Tuvacs who stank. Brauctha’s apish nose twitched, and he smiled, his wide mouth splitting so wide it seemed to Tuvacs he could swallow him whole.

  “Not you,” he said in gruff Maceriyan, its vowels smoothed and words punctuated by strange clicks. “You are good meat. Good spirit. You will be with me.” He sniffed again. “You stink of piss. Fresh. But it is not yours. Not your stink. You are strong. Good warrior. No coward. You will live. I say before, you will live. He will not listen. Soon we reach the moot and he will see, but he want to kill you now.”

  Brauctha shoved Tuvacs at Golden Rings, and shouted at him. Golden Rings backed away, until he was stood with his back to the cage.

  Brauctha’s voice rose in volume. Golden Rings nodded, and mumbled, but as he grabbed Tuvacs’ bicep in his upper right arm to take him back to his prison, his face became savage, and he reached behind himself with his lower right arm, using Tuvacs’ body to shield his grasping of a long, bone handled danger worn flat across his back.

  Tuvacs shouted a warning. It was not needed.

  Golden Rings drew his knife halfway before he died. Brauctha’s markings flared brilliant g
old. With his two upper hands, he drew his sword from the scabbard on his back, swung it over his head and down onto the other modalman. The blade was more than seven feet long, and wickedly sharp. Its edge caught the light of Brauctha’s fury as it descended and cleaved off both the second Modalman’s right arms. Tuvacs fell. The weight of the creature’s severed limb still clamped about his arm dragged him to his knees. Hot blood sprayed all over him. The injured modalman roared and fell back against the wagon. Brauctha finished him with a thrust so powerful it punched right through his back and out the other side. The blade squealed on the iron bars and gutted a man in the cage.

  Brauctha yanked out his weapon, pulling out ropes of offal on the blade’s deep serrations. The dead modalman fell first face onto the ground, the light of his clan markings extinguished. Brauctha spat on the corpse. Two other modalmen hurried up to take it away while another stuffed Tuvacs back into the cage and locked his manacles to the cage bars. Woozily, Tuvacs realised his injuries had split a little, spreading their hot, throbbing pain across his back.

  The modalmen withdrew, heading back to their fires and the cooking pots where they butchered their screaming human victims and the slaughtered Golden Rings.

  Tuvacs slumped down into the blood and piss slicking the wooden planks, too weak to move. The horrors of the night were replaced by thankfully dreamless black.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Riding North

  WITH BELLOWING CALLS Shkarauthir’s modalmen greeted the dawn. Rel poked his head from under his blanket. His arm was dead from him lying upon it. Huddling into as small a bundle as possible was the key to staying warm in the desert nights, but warmth had a price, and his limbs cracked like an old man’s when he stood up.

  The modalmen packed their few possessions quickly, binding the bundles to the saddle horns of the garau. Rel bent stiffly to roll up his blanket. The events of the night before were like a dream, hard to believe they were real. Only his line of footprints leading away from the camp and back told the truth of it. They were quickly scuffed away by the massive boots of his hosts as they loaded their beasts.