Blackhand

by Matt Hiebert

  Thousands of them stood shoulder to shoulder, stretching from one side of the peninsula to the other, bearing armloads of the black stones that gave them life. None of them were armed. Dust had settled upon their shoulders and powdered their gray flesh. For months they had stood there, motionless, tireless, patient. Waiting for him.

  And now he had arrived.

  He pulled out his sword. The god in him awakened, made giddy by the feast before it. He felt something like laughter resonate from the Agara blade.

  As he moved down the slope, one of the Thogs saw him, its head turning slightly to capture his approach. As one, the entire army became animate. They stomped their feet and flung their arms out wide, dropping the black spheres they held to the ground. Touching fingertips, the Thogs adjusted their line as if playing some children's schoolyard game.

  Quintel analyzed the action, trying to figure out what tactic it could possible fulfill. He did not ponder long.

  The earth quaked. Boulders shed from the mountains and fissures crawled across the landscape. The convulsion intensified, uprooting trees and buckling shelves of earth toward the sky. Quintel fought to remain standing.

  As he watched, the Thogs changed. Their forms became pliable, losing shape, melting like candles. A haunting, unified scream rose from the liquefying beasts, drowning the rumble from the quaking earth. The stones in their chests splashed to the ground with the others and their bodies dissolved to wet clay, blending into a gray, viscous river. Attracted to each other by some invisible force, the stones rolled together and fused into a long helix stretching out of sight.

  Then the earth exploded.

  A shockwave rippled across the landscape as if the ground were made of water. The wave shattered the terrain and sent Quintel flying into the air like a spider shaken from a blanket.

  A sheer vertical wall sprung from the earth where the Thogs fell, collecting rock and earth as it grew into the air. The wall writhed and twisted, plowing through forests and crushing mountains beneath its expansion. It rose into the sky, a living thing being born. Then it stopped.

  Silence fell heavy over the land. Quintel stood.

  The wall was half a mile high and stretched from one edge of the peninsula to the other. It flexed and moved, contracting and pulsing, a titanic worm of stone, earth and Thog flesh.

  The wall’s movement was grotesque, but what evoked Quintel's revulsion was its surface. It was covered in eyes. Some small and humanlike, others larger than wagon wheels.

  As he approached the living barrier, all the eyes followed him. Many were set on tall stalks which bent to track his every step. Others had slit lenses like a cat and stared at him unblinking.

  Walking closer, he heard a low moan of agony rise from the wall, inspired by its own existence. It creaked and rumbled with restless movement. Inside, he saw a complex, but random, collection of muscle, bone and nerves saturated in a wan light cast from the stone helix at its center. Flocks of birds circled frantically above the barrier, panicked by its sudden presence.

  Sword in hand, he approached the structure, still uncertain how Ru thought it could stop him. While its massive flanks soared into the clouds, their height meant nothing to him. He had already fallen from the top of the world and survived. He could scale the wall in seconds.

  As he neared its base, a portion of the wall lunged at him like the foot of a gigantic slug. Its speed surprised him and he threw himself backward just as the great foot fell where he stood. The edge of the fleshy skirt caught his boot and plucked it from his foot. The mass shredded the leather with stony protrusions resembling fingers. The wall pulled the remnants of the boot into its body and contracted around them. The earth trembled.

  Quintel pulled off his other boot and threw it aside. He now knew how the wall could stop him. It was not a common barrier to block his passage, but a trap meant to imprison him. The thing might even be able to tear him apart.

  In the sky above the rim of the wall, he sensed Sirian Ru watching all that had transpired, amused by Quintel’s confusion and pleased with his own handiwork.

  From a distance, Quintel weighed his options. Going over the top was impossible and tunneling beneath the monolithic barricade seemed risky, for he was certain the thing could reach as deeply as he could dig. With its ability to move with such speed, rounding its ends also did not seem likely.

  Able to do nothing, Quintel stood and studied the creation. His mind’s eye traced over every contour of the living structure, seeking any flaw. As near as he could tell, there was no way around or through the thing. But he kept looking.

  When Aul’s army finally came up behind him, he was so engrossed in the puzzle he barely noticed their arrival.

  The legion, a weary collection of Abanshi soldiers, Vaerian guardsmen and converted Forestlanders, pitched camp a good distance away. Quintel felt their fear of the wall’s presence and enormous dimensions.

  After a while, he sensed Aul approach him from behind. There was no love in her light.

  “What monster has your existence inspired this time, little brother?” she said in greeting. “What hideous new creation has come to life because of you?”

  At first he did not turn to her, but his desire forced him to look. A fresh, angry scar ran down the right side of her face. Her arms bore the reminders of many more wounds.

  He said nothing, but ached from the hatred that seethed from her. The feeling was almost as great as her love had been. How could love and hate be so close a thing?

  She locked her eyes with his, her light held no color but red.

  “It took us a month to extract ourselves from the tunnel,” she hissed in an angry whisper. “Ten thousand dead before the battle began. Rotting bodies choked the passage. The Forestland armies converged their towers and sealed us in. We did not free ourselves until the twisted new Thogs appeared and began attacking them from behind. Then we charged.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “What jest that Sirian Ru’s monsters ended up freeing us. How grateful I was you could not kill them all.”

  Quintel still did not speak. He knew he had no choice at the tunnel, but the pain of his betrayal to her, and the venom Aul spat now, caused the god in him to recoil and embrace itself so it did not have to hear her words. Or was that his human side?

  “The Forestlands put up little struggle after that. The Thogs had taken the fight from them. There were a few battles. Argoth. Huk’s fortress,” she continued. “The rest saw the error in trusting Ru and joined us. The Thogs gave us the most trouble. Our saviors they might have been, but not for long.”

  He managed to gather enough courage to speak. He was going to tell her he was sorry.

  “Aul, I….”

  “Do not address me, traitor,” she said softly. Had she spoken in anger, the words would have hurt less. “God or not, you have no voice among the Abanshi now.”

  As she spoke, he glimpsed the horror she had experienced over the last few months, the stench of her dead, the piles of bloated bodies in the tunnel, the terror she felt watching her soldiers halved with the stroke of a Thog ax.

  “And for what final prize?” she circled around him. She wore no armor and was dressed in robes bearing Forestland colors. “A stalemate?”

  She was silent in a way that gave him permission to speak.

  “I am sorry, Aul,” he said. “I had no choice.”

  “How I am tired of hearing your apologies,” she answered through a bitter smile. “You had no choice but to turn your might on the Vaerian weapons? Was it their effectiveness you loathed? Fifty of our dead fell by your own hand. They were your countrymen!” She paused for a moment, her hands shaking at her sides, letting her rage fade back to hate. “But no matter. There is victory here.”

  Head high, she gazed beyond him toward her troops in the distance. She raised her arm and made a sweeping gesture as if encompassing everything behind him.

  “Look! Look at my new kingdom,” she said. “It reaches from the Abanshi mountains to the foot of th
is... living wall. And, Sirian Ru's barrier seals two ways. You are locked out, but the god is locked in.”

  She was right. The god had severed himself from the outside world to keep Quintel away. In that, there was some level of victory. But the god had won as much. In fact, Quintel knew Ru had escaped with a greater prize.

  He thought Aul should be satisfied with such an outcome. The god was imprisoned. Her permeating anger should have been softened by the end of the thousand year war. Then he realized her pain did not come from the battle. In the center of her red soul, he saw a hollow place. A hole left by lost love.

  “And so it ends, dear brother,” she continued. “The war. The struggle. The evil god's desire. The purpose of your existence. All has come to a final stop.”

  Quintel looked back to the wall which looked back at him. What was his next step? What could he do? Nothing.

  “Stand here and wait, Blackhand Thogstacker,” she said. “Impotent and useless. Already a legend of a past age. Stand here and wait for the wall to wither beneath the rain. You have nothing else. Worshiped you may be, but the life left in you will be empty. For no one remains to love you.”

  She walked back to her troops and he heard them break camp to begin their journey home. Soon the sounds of the army faded into the distance. A few of the soldiers remained so they could be near him. They were Forestlanders who saw him as a deity, the enemy god who saved their people despite their sins against him.

  Their adoration gave him no joy, for he knew it was misplaced. He would gladly trade their worship for one more kiss from Aul. But he knew such a thing would never come again.

  Chapter 39

  What now, little Abanshi? Sirian Ru thought to himself as he sat upon his throne. What steps do you have left? Try and circumvent the wall and see how far it can reach. Try and tunnel beneath its base and learn the depth of its roots. Let it seize you and rip you to pieces. Live forever in its gullet as butchered meat. Become a memory to all who adore you. Move to the world of legend.

  It was over now, at least this chapter. Ru knew the monster could not bridge the wall. He had been afraid his power would not be great enough to create the structure. He had no precedent to support his plan. The tactic had a high probability of failure. While the creature was massive in size, its construction was simplistic. The obsolete Thogs provided the template to give the wall order, the spare soulstones provided the power for it to exist. Its single duty was to crush the Abanshi monster if he got too close.

  Yet where did the tactic leave Ru? All humanity had turned against him, thankless for what he had done for them. He was trapped behind the wall as much as the abomination was trapped outside. He had created a prison for himself in exchange for his life.

  Ru wondered if he had done the right thing. Perhaps he should have faced the monster. There was a good possibility he could have killed it. But he did not want to risk his one life on possibilities. They cut both ways no matter how thin.

  At least food was not an issue. He had enough for an eternity. A hundred thousand humans were sealed in with him. That gave him plenty to eat as long as they kept mating. And Ru knew there was no keeping them from that. Wonderful creatures, humans.

  But Ru had no intention on staying in his self-created prison for an eternity. The Vaerians had resurrected devastating technologies from the Pastworld. It was only a matter of time before they figured out some way around the wall. He could not rest. His machinations must continue. He had to strike a final blow.

  Ru had learned much from making the Demonthane and improved Thogs. Injecting variety in the process gave him new ideas. Bits and pieces of these ideas could be melded to form a single brilliant idea. One thought in particular had already proven profitable. The Abanshi monster could not fly, and Ru made things that could.

  “I may be out of your reach, horrible thing, but you are not out of mine,” Ru said to the empty room.

  The Agara's wings had been the most successful aspect of the creation. While the Abanshi had found a way past its impenetrable flesh, he had trouble reaching the Demonthane when it was airborne.

  Ru would explore that feature further.

  Aside from steel-like flesh, there were other ways to make his creations impervious. Size needed to play a role. If he made a creature large enough, it could simply survive more strikes from the Abanshi's blade. The wall proved his methods could be adapted to such a scale.

  But the most effective feature was found in the improved Thogs. Their ability to make decisions had sent the Abanshi bolting in a thousand different directions. Many of the Thogs escaped his wrath simply by running away. Giving them the power to think worked far better than draping them within hardened flesh.

  Ru let his imagination play with the formula. Many possibilities appeared and he realized he should have been pursuing these from the beginning. No matter. He now had time, a few moments to breathe, a few years to put some of his new ideas into service. Already, he gathered his strength to create a soulstone greater than any previously pulled from his body. He wanted to make something larger and more refined than even the prototype housing the Agara – which the Abanshi had cleverly formed into a weapon. Something on such a scale would be invincible. The effort would take years -- perhaps decades – but the end result could remove all the obstacles that plagued him.

  Yuul was another factor troubling him. His rival had been curiously quiet throughout the entire ordeal. The young god should have been giving his creation some kind of assistance during the conflict, yet they didn't seem to be in contact at all. Yuul had always offered tactics and advice to its minions atop the safety of God’s Finger. Perhaps circumstances had struck the young god mute. Without someone to summon it, Yuul could not enter the physical realm. With the Vaerian minion dead, the Abanshi was the only living thing that knew how to bring the upstart deity into existence. Yet he made no attempt to do so and had all but ignored God's Finger.

  Something was suspicious there. Yuul was up to mischief.

  Ru grew weary of such thinking. The subtleties tired him. This is not what he wanted for his world. This was not how things were supposed to be. Sometimes Sirian Ru thought he should just give Yuul a portion of the world so the child wouldn't be such a nuisance. He could let the younger god rule the western lands and receive the worship it craved. But he knew if he did, the giving would not end. Yuul would not stop coveting until it owned the entire wedge.

  And such opportunity had already expired. All humanity was against Ru, and he had sealed himself in a prison of his own making. The monster stood at his doorstep, the Vaerians were developing better weapons and the Lanya had emerged from hiding. Those issues all had to be dealt with immediately.

  On that list, killing the Abanshi was Sirian Ru's first priority. No Vaerian weapon could rival that threat and the Lanya could be dealt with in other ways. The Abanshi was a single-minded, half-divine being who wanted him dead. Ru had to squash that problem as soon as possible. But he had to learn more about the creature first. He didn't even know its name.

  Sirian Ru rested on his throne and considered his next move. He knew the time had come to pay the Abanshi a visit.

  ***

  Oh, how Yuul hoped the Lanya queen had not misled him! What risk it ventured by following her advice! How could it be in a more dangerous position than it was now?

  As the other Thogs wandered outside of Ru's factory, Yuul tried to emulate them in movement and behavior. This basically entailed walking around and snarling at other Thogs if they crossed its path. A few of the more intelligent ones knew something was different about Yuul, but their attention did not stay on the god long enough to threaten its disguise.

  The Lanya queen had sent Yuul directly to Ru's castle to prepare for such a gambit. Even the god was amazed at her foresight. If she was right, of course.

  How could she have such vision? How could she foresee such a complex end to the struggle?

  Yet already parts of her plan had become solid. Sirian Ru had rai
sed a wall that effectively prevented Quintel from fulfilling his threat. Had Yuul not gone directly to the peninsula as she commanded, the young god would have been locked outside with Quintel, ineffective and useless. If her strategy followed its course, it would be Yuul who finally brought an end to the elder god. Although Yuul was not quite sure when or how that moment would arrive.

  The Thogs did not experience boredom, but Yuul did. Days of walking around grunting and snarling had left the god exhausted. It took to playing elaborate tricks on the hulking creatures. Poorly balanced building stones fell and crushed clawed feet. Misplaced lengths of rope entangled the clumsy beasts in complex combinations of coincidence, leaving them dangling upside down from scaffolding.

  Yuul avoided the humans who milled about the factory. While none of them were looking for a god in the guise of a Thog, the slightest suspicion could get it killed.

  The god was not certain what would happen next. It knew it was in the right place, but had no idea what it was supposed to do. The Lanya queen had said to wait, so that's what Yuul would do. Perhaps Ru would show himself and Yuul would have the opportunity to drop a building stone upon his head.

  Such waiting could last centuries, but Yuul would be at the right place when the moment came.

  Out of boredom, the god weighed the risk of entering Ru's castle and taking matters into its own hands. How close could it get to its rival before being noticed? Probably not very. The inside of the castle was a labyrinth that could not be solved. More than likely, Yuul would become lost in the structure's innards and render itself as useless as Quintel.

  So it grunted among the beasts, lost in their numbers, patiently waiting for the moment when it would know what to do.

  In the meantime, a loose wagon wheel was about to fling off its hub and crash into the tentacled giant who took Yuul's ration of food the night before.

  Chapter 40

  For months, he stood motionless, studying the wall, waiting for some revelation that would allow him passage. Ru's work on the living barrier was haphazard and sloppy, but the end result was successful. Quintel could find no way around.