Verain and the other cultists – what few of them that were left by now – stood dumbly examining this movements of a civilization across the landscape, through the Realm Gates. This was the tail end of an invasion force and she knew, without knowing how, that they were making war on the cities on the next island south. From what she had seen of their work already, she felt remorse for whoever would have to oppose them.
Dartun’s words were mumbled sentences at first, until the wind died down. He urged them on, his strong voice calling out for them to hasten their progress. Dogs barked and tugged on their reins, their four sleds skidding forwards, the brightness of the light now like some vision of a heavenly realm, but no sooner had they moved through the thick flakes of snow when they came to a halt.
She could feel her pulse in her throat. I just want to get out of here, please . . .
A few of the red-skin rumels approached them on horseback and for some reason she could not get used to the fact that this variation of the race could exist in another dimension. Three sentries examined Dartun in the blinding light of the Realm Gates. She observed the matrix of tiny purple lines within a much brighter glow – that was where home would be. That was where she longed to return.
There came orders from behind, and in harsh tongues, there appeared to be an exchange between silhouettes in the Realm Gates’ light, and the rumels before them.
Presently the cultists were all ushered forward, free to go now, finally, with nothing but sleds and dogs. The cultists of the Order of the Equinox set out across the snow and back into their home-world.
*
Later, much later.
And from the sanctuary of her hood, Verain peered back over her shoulder, but thankfully could no longer see the gates. Snow stormed around their small group, vicious spirals of whiteness that obscured both the horizon and the foreground. Moments of calm revealed rolling hills or ice sheets, blackened trees that clawed the grey skies. Everything here seemed identical to the moment they left, the same vistas, the same terrain, the same forests and villages.
And the ceaseless snow . . .
They paused, their sleds sliding to a stop. Strands of her coal-black hair wafted before her eyes and she tucked them behind her ears. She appeared to be, and felt like, a mess. She was slender before she had come all the way out here, but now she felt dangerously malnourished.
There were ten of them. Ten, from the dozens who had journeyed out beyond the Realm Gates, trailing Dartun and his lust for answers and the knowledge to extend his life. Now garbed in thick clothing and furs, they had little sense of where they were headed. A couple of dogs barked, a bizarre tinny edge to their cacophony. They, too, had been altered – she knew it, though her mind wasn’t clear as to how or why.
Her mind was not clear at all.
Dartun Súr stepped out alongside her. There was a silvery sheen to his face, and patches of some substance could be seen beneath where his skin had been ripped along his neck. If she stared hard enough she could see that his eyes were glowing red, his movements fluid – yet it was still him, the leader of their order, the man who had dominated the culture of the cultists in Villjamur. A man who pushed for progress and had great visions for the future.
A man she loved.
Only now he bore the marks of having been . . . there.
His cloak was now frayed along the edges, his clothing worn in places. His musculature had been enhanced. He now possessed the posture of a hardened soldier, not hunched from studying ancient relics well into the night. He seemed ragged yet powerful. Dartun Súr had led them to another world in search of eternal life, and he looked like he had found it.
Images flooded back to Verain – impressions of that other place, beyond the Realm Gates.
Memories slammed into her mind:
A world enveloped by night. Dust-storms and eternal thunder. A landscape littered with the remnants of cultures, of shattered cities and of bonescapes. War raged in pockets of wasteland, creatures she had never imagined, or those that she thought originated from prehistoric cultures, clashed with ferocity.
Verain attempted to piece together what had happened. She realized she had no sense of time – Bohr, her mind was a mess. How long had it been since they’d first entered the gates? How much time had passed exactly? In her mind, it seemed months had gone. It seemed important to make sense of her presence here. The Order of the Equinox had followed Dartun in his quest and they had found that their relics, their pieces of ancient technology, were quite useless against this highly evolved culture. And they had been captured, imprisoned and tortured. Yet why was she here, relatively unscathed from these events?
She shuddered and erased the thoughts from her mind, and hoped the scars would leave her memory. What was important now was that she survived; because she would not have escaped merely to perish so uselessly. I will not let myself die out here.
FIVE
Ulryk’s Journal
I woke with the first rays of our dying red sun, and used its light to guide me to the ancient city, that throng of spires & bridges, that place of legend.
Villjamur.
By horse I rode across snow-smothered fields, through villages littered with little broken shacks. Botanic specimens poked up through ridges of snow, dead or naked and no longer able to offer anything to the world, no culinary or medicinal benefit. How my old brethren would have abhorred such a sight. Bones of animals lay strewn about without dignity along dirt tracks, stripped of all the value they had been deemed to possess. Abandoned.
I could not ascertain the age of any buildings out here. They were perhaps hundreds, maybe thousands of years old, or perchance they had crumbled very recently from small-scale conflicts or were disabled by the weather. They were snow-tipped and crippled and devoid of life. This dying earth showed no remorse.
Villages and towns were settlements directly from hell. There existed – though barely – some very desperate people. Forgotten men and women scraped together a way of life from this noble land; and they came to me in groups, hoping I could help. For the most part all I had were guiding words, ones crafted from the very form of Bohr Himself (if I still believed in them), and I prayed that such utterances could offer solace.
In one village I was able, with caution, to utilize the book I carried and disaggregated the ice from a local lake. They intended to fish there, though I was not confident they would find much, but I left them with the hope – because without hope they would most certainly perish quickly.
Many of the people in rural areas seemed vacant inside – I saw it in their eyes, though they were different from the dead who, kept mobile by some fake cultist trickery, drifted between shadows; a presence that tormented the locals.
But some have sunk to terrible depths. On one dark night, through a village I do not wish to name, I witnessed people feasting on the flesh of other humans. I could barely meet the whites of their eyes, focusing instead on the morbid morsels within their fingers and the kin-blood that dripped onto the frozen ground. It did not take second sight to know these moral turpitudes were not few and far between. Skeletons were hanging from trees, bones rattled against bark in the wind – my instincts suggested some kind of local law was in operation out here, away from Imperial soldiers which, I noted, were in short supply, and I knew better than to question the presence of these execrable totems.
Of true humanity, I noted very little present.
*
I progressed further, as the echoes of the past came to my mind yet again.
Nightmares.
I saw the burning buildings and heard the screams, which still ricocheted around my skull. Those things really happened. I saw the hired militias hauling supporters and protectors into the street and their heads being severed before their families. Women being taken to one side as payment, and raped repeatedly. Those things really happened.
And my secret shame was that all I could do was watch; watch as civilization began to crumble on a far-off island. I
watched lives disappear or be ruined. And their sins? Simply protecting me, protecting the truth, protecting my path to Villjamur. Because of what I knew, because I was betrayed, because I put my faith in those close to me.
Those things really happened.
In the distance I could see it, finally, the capital of this Empire. The oldest city we had on these islands, though it did not always go by this name. In written history – for what that was worth – Vilhallan was how she was born, eleven thousand years ago, before the so-called Treaty of Science, where the cultists allied themselves with a society crafted by King Hallan Hynur. An ice age destroyed much of that, though I suspect that was a natural phenomenon. Not like this . . . How few people knew these facts of the city in which they lived?
I saw the giant walls and the dark mass of people banking up against them, and leading in that direction was the smeared, well-trodden mud-road that pulled the landscape open like a wound. There were plumes of smoke drifting above like devil-wraiths. The city needed spiritual attention. Garudas circled the city, weaving between those bridges which span almost from cloud to cloud – paths one could believe the gods may tread. The spires went ever upwards, beyond comprehension, and from many of those buildings were banners rippling in the onshore breeze.
It was exactly how I remembered, and it had been so for millennia. It was the home of many of our ancestors, of heritage and culture, and being so it was my last hope. Perhaps it was to be the hope of every one of us left alive.
Villjamur.
If only you knew of the magic you were hiding . . .
SIX
The cut-throat razor lay in the bucket of hot water. He plunged in his hand to retrieve it, and began to shave: gentle scrapes, always two strokes down before moving along, two strokes then move along, carving away thick lines of foam. Rumels’ skin was tough and leatherlike, and he had only to shave once a week because of the slow rate of hair-growth, but his was still a routine of perfection. When he had finished he rinsed the razor before placing it to one side.
Wearing only a pair of breeches, Investigator Fulcrom faced himself in the mirror, his damp brown skin shimmering in the lantern light. He had a slender face and body for a rumel, who were normally broad and relatively squat creatures, and he had wide black eyes that, so the ladies told him, were adorable. Making postures at his reflection, he noted that his intensified workout regime had really worked. All those sit-ups and push-ups each night were clearly taking effect. Absent-mindedly, he brushed a finger down his ribs over an old knife wound.
He investigated his well-defined face for any missed areas and, after dabbing his skin with a towel, he slicked his mop of silver hair across to the left – always to the left.
For a rumel he was still young, but had recently felt deeply unsatisfied with his life. Well, with his work at least. He had been a full investigator for a decade now, but when he’d worked with old Investigator Jeryd on one of his darkest cases, things had changed dramatically for him. Villjamur had been – still was – plagued by refugees, and there had been a plot to dispose of them in the tunnels under the city, in what amounted to genocide. Urtica was at the core of it, but he had blamed it on the then-Empress Rika. Only Jeryd and Fulcrom knew of these events, but couldn’t prove anything, couldn’t tell a single person. All they could do was rescue the refugees from execution, only to release them back outside, beyond the walls of the city, into the hostile ice. Time dragged by, and one by one, the refugees probably perished of hypothermia or disease or starvation. Meanwhile, no one in Villjamur knew what had happened to Jamur Rika since she fled the city with her sister just before she was due to be executed. There had been no reports on her progress, and he was wary of enquiring through any official channels, just in case anything untoward should happen to him. There are some questions you just don’t ask . . .
Ever since then, Fulcrom had found it difficult to believe there was much justice to be found in Villjamur. It certainly wasn’t like the stories that inspired him as a kid, or like the notions that MythMaker peddled in those sketches. Back then he’d loved those tales of slick and smooth investigators stalking the evening in search of villains.
Fulcrom put on a clean undershirt, a formal shirt then an over-cloak. His top-floor apartment on the fifth level of the city was not too close to the raucous bars, but near enough to where things went on in the city.
A pterodette gave a reptilian squawk outside his window, and he took a glance out to regard the cityscape beyond, as the green creature flapped its scaly wings and darted up into the cloud-base. The view from his window was impressive: turrets and spires and bridges, thousands of years of architecture, and low sunlight that forced half of Villjamur into shadow. The octagonal structure of the Astronomer’s Glass Tower glittered from above the roofs of the opposite buildings.
A final look in the mirror, a quick adjustment of his collar and, picking up his Inquisition medallion, he set off for work.
*
Villjamur was still dripping after the previous night’s snow – not as much as usual, which led Fulcrom to question if the ice age was just an empty threat of the politicians. For years people had talked of the coming of the ice, what the causes might have been, and what it now meant. Imperial astronomers had given their predictions and, staying true to them, temperatures had plummeted, but just recently, there seemed to be a recovery. No matter how cold it was, people always ventured outside, every day, as if in bloody-minded defiance.
Like some ancient beast, Villjamur woke from its slumber. Little streams of smoke drifted up from chimney tops. Granite blended into patches of time-eroded limestone.
Citizens milled around backstreets and main avenues, a blur of furs, cloth and boots. Traders, some of whom were draped in cheap gold, strode half asleep to the irens at Gata du Oak, hauling handcarts or, if they were lucky, leading horses loaded up with wares. All along Matr Gata, pots were simmering with oysters, dumplings, breads stuffed with offal, the vendors regarding the street with bored glances and calling out prices. From the back of a converted caravan a member of the Aes tribe was giving an illegal shell reading. Only one religion was permitted in the Empire, the Jorsalir tradition – a pact that bound the church and state together – and as soon as Fulcrom approached him, the tribesman, who was wearing furs and a number of teeth around his neck, packed up his accoutrements and smiled his apologies before backing off down an alleyway.
A jingle of chains and something was launched up to a high open window to the side of the massive ornate facade of the Hotel Villjamur. A pretty grey-skinned rumel girl stepped down its faded gold-edged steps, wearing a blue cloak and matching head-scarf, and she smiled at Fulcrom as he walked past. Kids scampered by, and one of them arced a snowball that splattered against a window pane of the Dryad’s Saddle inn, narrowly missing Fulcrom as he slipped and slid his way to one of the bridge staircases.
The bridges themselves began to vibrate under the strain of activity. Any ice that had formed overnight peeled itself away from the city’s high places to plummet towards the ground. Much of it ricocheted off slate roofing, stalling its descent, but some thick chunks clattered into the cobbles, narrowly missing people. Every day someone would be killed or seriously injured. It was also starting to cause massive structural damage, accelerating the ageing of the stone, pushing cracks in masonry further apart. The ice was bringing the city to its knees.
Fulcrom’s relationship with Villjamur was uneasy. Born and raised in the city, he had a strong affinity for the place, and the beauty was here to see every morning; but he knew there were other sides to it. Out here, on the levels of the city before Balmacara, people were well-to-do, healthy, stayed on the right side of the law, and had something of a decent existence. The buildings were beautiful – thin, three- or four-storey constructions, painted in a variety of weather-worn shades.
But there was also Caveside, a larger section of the city, one hidden from view. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in Villjamur, but the ma
jority of them suffered in relative darkness. Fulcrom had heard tell that most of the residents had descended from the cave dwellers who had lived there before the city was founded eleven thousand years ago. It was the oldest part of the city and very few people ventured from one sector to the other. If the rumours were to believed, it was like hell on earth.
*
Fulcrom criss-crossed alleyways to navigate the wet, labyrinthine backstreets of the city, towards the headquarters of the Villjamur Inquisition. The entrance was a large yet discreet black double door that stood at the top of wide, crumbling steps. There was nothing ornate here, no fancy brickwork, merely two cressets set behind glass. Only the two brutish-looking guards indicated that something went on inside this building. They nodded to Fulcrom as he flashed his Inquisition medallion at them.
‘Sele of Urtica, sir,’ one grunted, opening the door for him.
Fulcrom entered and passed Ghale, the human administrative assistant, who was dressed as smartly as always in a frilly white shirt, green shawl and long black skirt. Her blonde hair was pinned up in one of those new styles.
‘Sele of Urtica, investigator,’ she announced. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘Good morning, Ghale. No, I’m fine, thank you.’ He made to move on.
‘A drink, perhaps?’ She held her hands out in front of her.
‘No. Thank you anyway.’ Smiling awkwardly, Fulcrom headed immediately into his office.
It was a drab affair, like many of the rooms within the arterial layout of the Inquisition headquarters. Musty old rumels lingering in their chambers for hours, working by lantern-light, poring over administration, missives or fine-tuning the legal framework of the city. Such an existence was not Fulcrom’s preferred way of helping the city – being left to rot behind a desk would be a nightmarish future.
Book of Transformations Page 5