He would not disappoint Ariah a second time.
When he rode forward the world around him shifted and, instead of standing on a mountain top or riding across a field of snow, he saw the ocean to his right and Torema proper before him. All around his position people sat in squalor. They looked desperate. They looked hungry. Hunger, he knew, could be a great motivator. It worked on slaves and statesmen alike.
Beron smiled as the people around him looked up at him astride the great war beast he’d been given by Ariah.
He gathered his thoughts only for a moment before he made his statement. “Torema has food and roofs and clean water. Who among you would sleep in a bed tonight and feast, and sup on sweet wines?”
All around the king of the slavers the hungry and the desperate turned and listened.
Interlude: Desmond
Desmond cursed and Bump crawled after him, not wanting to look back, hardly daring to slow down. The water was coming and there was no denying that sort of force. He’d lived through enough floods when he was young to know that water was more powerful than flesh when it set its mind to a task.
They’d scaled high and hard and even as he worried he saw Bump reach the pinnacle of the hill and start over to the western slope. Not that he could go very far without Desmond.
As if reading his mind, the shorter man reached down and grabbed his wrist, pulling.
“I’m coming! Calm down!”
“Not fast enough, you fool!”
Desmond dared a glimpse. The vast wave rushed forward and drove into the mountainside hard enough to make their bodies shake. Desmond fell on his ass and clutched at the closest rock for purchase. The stone did not slide as he feared it might and he stayed where he was as the vibrations continued. The water roared as it drove against the Broken Swords.
Still, for the moment they were safe.
Desmond called for Anna. Both she and Brogan had gone lower into the mountains looking for a passage that might not exist. If they were still low enough, they’d be drowned or swept away. The two of them moved down the slope, falling and rolling with very little control. Stones bruised Desmond’s arm, and leg, and face. He groaned and did his best to stop. Whenever he thought he was making progress it was Bump’s turn to run into him and knock him sprawling. Whenever he thought they might be safe from the impacts he was thrown again and often as not bounced off the shorter man.
Eventually the two of them rolled to a stop.
In the distance they could see the waters cutting through Harlea’s Pass in a titanic wave that was unceasing. The mountain actually rumbled from the roar of that water.
Desmond lay back and counted the number of places he ached. It would have been much faster to count the spots that didn’t hurt.
Desmond spoke mostly to himself.
Bump heard and responded, “What?”
“I said, I’m going to find my wife.”
“Well, I’ll not stop you.”
“Good. I’d just as soon not drag your corpse with me.”
Bump chuckled at that. It was a small jest but they were both alive and that seemed to make everything just a little more enjoyable at the moment.
That was when the mountain cracked to the north of them. Full-on split down the middle, vomiting dust and giving off noises like thunder.
Desmond sat up, his pocked face set in a scowl of worry, and the world tilted.
The mountain surged again and both of them were up and running once more, heading to the south where the mountains had the good sense not to jump up and down.
Behind them the mountains exploded.
Brogan McTyre
Brogan fell backward, his legs powerless, his limbs refusing to listen to his commands.
He wanted to not fall. He concentrated on that idea. It did not work.
If he ever hit the ground he could not say.
His senses exploded before that could happen in any event.
The eyes of a man are limited. The ears can hear a lot but not everything. The skin of a man can feel any number of sensations but those, too, are muted when compared to the senses of a god. Brogan learned that the hard way as his body dropped bonelessly to the ground.
He had no idea what to call what happened to him. His eyes saw more than they should have. He saw through the skin of the mountain to the world beyond. In an instant he understood the devastation that had already taken place and he was horrified. The land he had traveled most of his adult life was gone, broken and blasted and bloodied. The cities he had escorted caravans to were in ruin or overflowing with too many people. Two separate armies rode toward Torema from the north. One sported the colors of Giddenland and the other carried the tattered flags of Saramond. They were large armies, to be sure, but they stank of desperation and hunger.
Saramond was gone. The very land it had once sat on was lost to the ocean’s tides. Giddenland was still there, but Edinrun had been erased from the world. He knew where the vast city was. He saw the people locked within its confines and heard their desperate screams. They could not escape and the darkness that surrounded the city walls seemed filled with other things, best not considered too closely.
The structures of Stennis Brae still stood at the top of the mountains, but they were abandoned. There were no people walking the pathways of his homeland. They had all moved to the west, and most were as confused by that notion as he was.
Somewhere to the south of them Bump and Desmond sat on the ground chained together. Desmond’s mind was only for Anna, and Brogan felt guilt though he had done nothing wrong. His thoughts, he assured himself, were clean enough. His body disagreed.
Further south he sensed Bron McNar and knew his king had done something horrible, but he could not quite see the man. All around where Bron should have been there was a vast city of people and either they were obscuring his new senses or something else was. In any event he knew the king was in danger and that there was nothing he could do for him.
At the southernmost edge of the land was a place that was considered holy by the gods. It was a place of sacrifice and unending potential. He hated it in an instant, knowing it for a mirror of the very spot where the Grakhul had killed his family. If he could have, he’d have wiped the place away like a bad memory, but he did not have that power.
In the wastelands to the south and east, and in several other places, there were pits of darkness that seethed and boiled with furious hatred and desperate hunger. They were not completely a part of the world, but like the area where Bron McNar lurked, they were half-hidden and left a taste across his mind that was unclean.
Still his senses expanded further.
Torema was still there. The Kaer-ru abided. Both the city and the islands were crowded and overflowing. There were so many people and so little left that could support the growing populations.
He knew without trying to understand why, that Harper was there and so were several others with whom he claimed fellowship. He saw them, sensed that they were safe for the moment and knew that he would be seeking them soon enough, because to the east and sliding north, the towns along the ocean’s edge were either torn away or collapsing into the surging waters. So many deaths, all brought about by his actions and those of the gods.
Guilt tried to crush him like a boot crushes an insect, but he shrugged it aside. Guilt was a useless emotion and could wait until after he had finished his bloody work.
To the east and storming toward him was a great and terrible beast. He did not know if it was a god or a servant of a god, but whatever the case it was coming toward him to stop him.
There was fear in the heart of the creature. Dread tainted its very being and desperation pushed it to attack the mountains themselves. He felt the waters bombard the skin of the Broken Blades and shatter parts of it. The mountain held, but near the base cracks started to form and the raging tide pushed through the rough surface and broke into the vast chamber where a dead god rested.
In that moment Brogan understood finally
that what he saw was only a fraction of what Walthanadurn sensed. The god was dead, but could not truly die. The god existed but wanted something else. The god saw, and tasted, and touched, and smelled, and heard the universe around itself and wanted to either live or be free from the memories that drowned the vast corpse as surely as the waves were about to.
“NO!” Brogan did not know if he spoke or if Walthanadurn’s fading mind did. In any event his body shuddered and he turned to look at the titanic wave crashing against the mountain. The thing that rode inside that wave grabbed at the crystalline blades piercing the Broken Swords and pulled itself up the side of the mountain, bringing a surge of ocean tide with it that shook the mountains of the range to their roots.
Brogan knew that if nothing was done he and his companions would be crushed.
He did not know if he was the one who reacted or if it was Walthanadurn, but he reached to defend against the vast power in that wave and–
Walthanadurn’s corpse moved with him.
His hands reached, and the dead god lunged. The vast hands of the fallen god grabbed the closest shard of crystal, the very blade that had struck the god dead eons ago, and–
Outside of the vast hollow mountain, the waves bashed themselves against the stone, and the shell around Walthanadurn cracked.
Inside the cavernous heart of the mountain an impossible corpse shimmered. Light flowed from bones and formed the shapes of muscles, of organs, of flesh.
Walthanadurn stood, and the mountain above him exploded, hurling tons of rock and debris into the air, scattering earth and snow and everything that rested atop the mountain into the sky.
Brogan let out a roar as his body stood and grabbed the massive crystalline shard.
The dead god stood and looked around and found its enemy far below.
There had been a time when the nameless shape in the water had been kin to Walthanadurn. In those faraway times he had gifted his daughter with a thousand names and control of the seas. By way of thanks she and her siblings had driven their blades into his body countless times until, finally, he fell to the ground and died as much as any god can truly die. They had betrayed him. They had slaughtered him that they might take even more of the world and the universe for themselves.
He would have left, would have traveled the stars, but they denied him that opportunity.
Brogan felt a god’s cold rage in his soul.
It was not as potent as his own fury, but it was strong enough and Walthanadurn reached out and drove the vast splinter of sword deep into his daughter, struck her with all the force that he could muster and impaled her on the weapon that had murdered him. The remains of Sepsumannahun’s sword remained as potent as they had been millennia earlier.
In one simple stroke the dead giant drove the blade through the very center of his daughter’s heart and killed her.
But gods do not die easily.
The vast shape that had shattered half the continent retreated, tearing the blade from her father’s dead hands as she fled, dying, to the oceans she ruled.
Brogan looked down through eyes that should not have been, and saw the impossible body he inhabited. He stood taller than the mountains. He towered into the clouds and storms that reached as far as the Gateway that tried to hide his children from him.
No. Not his children. Walthanadurn’s.
Except they were one and the same. They shared the same mind. The same bodies. Somewhere inside of him he lay resting and the people with him were scattered.
From his impossible height he considered that possibility. He was a god. He was Brogan McTyre. Both could not be true. The god was dead. Brogan was alive.
That would not be the case for long, because now that the god had finished killing its daughter and defending itself, it wanted to be dead again.
The glowing flesh and muscles that had surrounded Walthanadurn faltered.
For one impossible moment in time Brogan had been one with a god. That moment was passing.
The body of a dead god shuddered and began to collapse.
A corpse that towered three times higher than the highest part of the mountains looked across the vast worldscape and Brogan saw all that it saw even as the consciousness of Walthanadurn began to pass.
The voice spoke to him directly this time, not through Faceless. The sounds that had shaken his flesh previously were now a fading whisper.
“These last gifts I give to you, Brogan McTyre. I send you and yours to safety and I touch you with my power. You are not a god. You will never be a god. But as you have sought, so you have found. You may touch the gods.”
The massive skeleton came apart then. The bones that should never have moved again tilted and slid to the side. The mountains were shattered around it. The hollowed world that had been its coffin was ruined and the giant that had rested in the heart of those hollow places fell toward the sea and the remains of ruined Saramond.
That was the last that Brogan saw before he hit the sand.
He closed his eyes for a moment, disoriented and lost in the sensations he had just drowned in.
When he could finally open his eyes he saw that he was, indeed, resting on pristine sand not far from a placid ocean.
In the distance he could see the mainland and the storms, but here, at this moment in time, the skies above were clear.
Five feet way Faceless lay prone. Closer to him Anna was curled in a fetal position and whimpering. Roskell Turn was in similar shape. Almost a hundred yards further on, he saw the taller man, who had failed to introduce himself, pushing himself up from the sand. His face and body were painted with the granules and he had a wild-eyed expression that Brogan could understand all too well.
They should have been dead.
They’d dared to touch a god and they should have been dead. All that Brogan had thought he knew was gone, replaced by the memories of walking in a god’s steps and sharing his mind with a being of nearly infinite power.
When Brogan stood, his limbs trembled and his skin shook. His eyes seemed half blind. His ears struck mostly deaf. He could smell the sea but it seemed weaker than it should have.
“We are in Louron.” The taller man spoke. Brogan looked his way and for an instant wished he knew his name. The information came to him without bidding. The man was called Jahda and he was as close to a king as the Kaer-ru islands had. He was from Louron, which was both of this world and not of this world. He and his people walked pathways unseen by most. Brogan had seen them for a moment, when he and the god were one. That sight was gone now, along with so much that he had known.
He wanted to weep. All that he had learned was already fading and that seemed horribly unfair when he considered all that he had already lost.
He closed his eyes and felt the body moving under him, responding. He felt the impact of a god’s blade as it drove through the heart of another god.
Anna moaned and slowly pulled herself into a sitting position.
The cloak of the Undying that had been his only garb crumbled. The material fell away in ashen pieces and he knew that, at last, one of the Undying had truly died. The power of a god is enough to kill anything a god might make.
His voice when he spoke was hoarse. “Anna, I hope you’ve clothes somewhere in that bag of yours.”
She chuckled and looked away from his naked body. “I can manage something, I expect.” Her voice shook. He understood all too well why.
“Did you succeed, Brogan McTyre?”
He looked at Roskell Turn, surprised. “How can you ask? Did you not see?”
“I saw the shape we stood in move. I felt mountains falling. After that I felt nothing. I thought I was dead.”
“Walthanadurn offered one last boon.” Brogan looked at the smaller man and offered what he hoped was a smile. “He spared us and sent us here instead of letting us die with him.”
“Why?”
“Because I helped him kill his daughter.” Brogan smiled. It was not a kind expression and he knew it. It
was the grin of a wolf that had finally managed to bring down its prey. “I have killed one of the gods.”
Anna looked up at him, her eyes wide.
“They’ll be so very angry.”
Brogan nodded. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?” Her voice strained and her expression demanded more from him. “What else would they be?”
“They might be angry, Anna, but for now, they are also very afraid.”
He looked at his hands. They seemed unchanged.
“Afraid? Afraid of what?”
“I have what we sought. I can touch the gods now.” He looked over at Faceless, who was beginning to stir, and at the axe he had used on so many occasions. “And if I can touch a thing, I can kill it.”
Far to the north the Gateway remained. He knew that. He had seen it with the eyes of Walthanadurn. If they were in the Kaer-ru, then they would surely find a ship to take him where he needed to go.
“I’ll have their throats in my hands, Nora.” He spoke only to the memory of his wife, but others heard him. “I’ll have their throats in my hands and I’ll kill them all for you.”
To the north the storms raged and lightning lashed down from the heavens to the ground and the godless seas. Brogan thought of the fallen god he had helped to fell and saw that it was good.
Amen.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Marc, Alejandro, Nick, Penny, Mike, Phil and, well, basically everyone at Angry Robot for being such delightful Evil Robot Overlords. You guys make it look like I know what I’m doing.
About the Author
James A Moore is the award-winning, bestselling author of over forty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under the Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring antihero, Jonathan Crowley) and his popular Seven Forges series. In addition to writing multiple short stories, he has also edited, with Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, The British Invasion anthology. His first short story collection, Slices, sold out before ever seeing print. He is currently at work on several new projects, including book three in the Tides of War series. Along with Jonathan Maberry and Christopher Golden, he hosts the popular Three Guys With Beards podcast. He lives in Massachusetts, USA.
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