by Dylan Doose
Aldous emerged from the woods, his hands behind his back. Beneath the shadowy canopy of forest and the night sky, Theron saw the rope around Aldous’s neck and the smiling golden faces emerging behind him.
“You were supposed to get the jump on them, Aldous,” Theron said. “Send them off the cliff in balls of fire. What went wrong?” He sighed. The torches cast light onto more of the masked men. The Golden Sons.
“I was having trouble with the ascent. They heard me coming,” Aldous said. “I’m sorry…I let you down.” The wizard’s head bent forward, and he looked at the earth instead of Theron and Ken.
“I should have climbed that rock,” Theron said.
“Dismount, and don’t reach for anything, either of you.” The voice came from behind, along with the sound of several bows being drawn back. They were surrounded, completely.
“Or I,” Ken said.
“Don’t be hard on yourselves. We have been aware of you for months,” the voice said.
“Months?” Aldous gasped.
The speaker, a green-cloaked man wearing a golden mask formed to look like a jovial, smiling face, ignored the interruption. “We are the Glorious Sons of the Glorious Sun, the Luminescent’s rangers, the light in the woods.” He held a torch and it reflected and glinted off the gold. “I am Chevic A’Vidam, or in the common tongue, Chevic the Cheery. We have known of you three since you killed the wolf-hag and her pack back in that tavern, near the northern border.” Chevic paused, then continued, “The Luminescent foretold your arrival. He told the Patriarch that you were his soldiers—”
“We are no soldiers of the Luminescent,” Theron said.
“—that whether you accept this or not, you saved the helpless, pious souls at Dentin—”
“Dentin? How do you know of Dentin?” Theron asked. He had come to this country in search of Dammar, in search of a creature of the Leviathan. Yet these men belonged to the Patriarch, and the Luminescent. Images of the great Leviathan with its swarm of green-scaled necks and heads bursting from a roiling sea stirred in his mind. He had been unaware entirely of being watched by the Patriarch’s hounds. Served him right for being lost in drink and mindless fighting.
“We know much. You are a good tracker, a fine pathfinder, and a legendary fighter, Theron Ward. Kendrick is the same, and you travel with a wizard. You three are a trinity most dangerous. This ambush took careful planning. We did not want to lose any friends to you. It would make working together that much more difficult.”
“Working together? Is this the way you start all your relations with collaborators?” Theron asked. “By kidnapping them?”
“I am sorry, but I do not know this word kid-naping? Our lord, the great saint, the Patriarch, extends his invitation to you.”
“You are abducting us,” Theron snarled, and he heard bowstrings tighten to the anger in his tone. “Rapire, huh? You understand that? Rapire.”
“Ahh, this means kid-naping?”
“Yeah, it means kid-naping,” Ken clarified for the kidnappers.
“No, this is not like that. We are inviting you to the house of our lord on earth, and our lord in heaven.” Theron could not see beyond Chevic’s mask, but as Chevic walked closer to him, he was sure the bastard was smiling behind the smiling golden mask. “We are his sons, you see, and good sons always carry out the will of the father.”
Theron hardly heard the last words; his head still ached from the morning, the nauseating smell of the swine had stayed with him since he spilled the beast’s blood at midday, and his fury was ever rising.
“Listen to me…Chevic,” Theron began. More shapes stepped from the darkness, and now spear points were added to the number of sharp projectiles aimed in his direction. But Theron was angry, and when he was angry, his belief in destiny was at its strongest. His belief in his own invulnerability was at its strongest.
“Chevic the Cheery,” Chevic corrected as he raised a hand to put his men at ease.
“That was our damn gold, you know,” Theron said. “In the chest in that cart that you and your smiling cohorts so…so…flagrantly sent off the edge of the mountain. That was our stake, what we earned here in your damned country. Killing your god damned beasts, and dealing with your god damned nobles. That was ours, and as I see it, you owe it to me.”
“Theron,” Ken said from behind. Several of the rangers now closed the gap. “I don’t think this is the best time for negotiations…or blasphemy.”
“I have to agree with Ken,” Aldous said, Chevic in front of him, archers and spearmen at his back. “Maybe we should accept the Patriarch’s invitation.”
“You are weary, hunter. You have struggled in the woods and the mountains for long enough. Listen to your friends. I forgive your anger and your unholy speech. We will take you to Brasov. You will accept the invitation of the Patriarch, and then you will accept the contract. And when it is done, all the riches and fine things of the White City will be at your fingertips. These were the Patriarch’s very own words.” Chevic bowed once again and then stood up and tilted his head to one side, his golden mask smiling like a plump, joyous babe. “It should hardly be a choice.”
Theron was weary, he was tired, and the hospitality of a man with as much power as the Patriarch would be a much-relished recovery. But that was not going to happen. If it were, their invitations would have come in a town, in the day, on a bird or from a messenger on horseback, sealed letter in his hand. This invitation came from masked men with torchlight under the night sky and the shadow of the trees at the end of spears and bows and with my wizard in a noose.
Theron was sure of nearly twenty at his front, and though he couldn’t count them, he suspected the same or more at his back. So the options were kill Chevic the Cheery then be mowed down by his men, or allow Chevic the Cheery to abduct them, bring them to the most feared and loved man in the country, and carry out for him a contract. The noose round Aldous’s neck seemed to be around all three of their throats now, and tightening.
The maelstrom of chaos puts before us a chance to grab hold of our destinies once again. The path reaches out to me; it pulls me back. Perhaps the swine did speak the truth, but I will not allow it to be my prophecy of doom, only that of the fiend’s.
“I concede,” Theron said.
“You do?” Chevic asked, sounding a little surprised and all too pleased.
“We accept your lord’s invitation. We will hear out the contract. But take that collar off my wizard immediately, or I’ll accept nothing but gutting you before I drop dead.”
“Of course,” Chevic said, and he turned to his men. Aldous sighed with relief and rubbed his throat as the noose was removed.
But Theron felt no such relief.
Part II
Contracts
* * *
That was the second time I was a prisoner with Theron Ward and Kendrick Solomon Kelmore, and it would not be the last. Back then, with my skills as minimal as they were and my confidence in myself more minimal still, my happiness was enough to almost bring me to tears when I saw that they were alive, and being taken with me to wherever it was we were to be taken.
It was our destiny, Theron often said, and for years he refused to admit that he nearly got us all killed with his temper, by drawing his sword in that lush glade. In the jagged mountains of a foreign place, the beasts of the wood would have consumed our corpses, and the legend of Theron Ward and his friends would have been halted there and never been told.
But Theron kept his temper, calmed himself with reason superior to rage, and our destiny was accepted.
Chevic the Cheery and the Golden Sons of the Golden Sun escorted us to the carriage—or more like prison wagon—that was hidden away with a full score more rangers in the wood two miles south of where we were captured. There, our hands were bound, gently but still bound, and we were assured it was simply a precaution.
“Do you think me some animal?” Theron had snapped at Chevic. And in his jovial voice the man replied, “Theron
Ward, you three are things far more dangerous and unpredictable than that.”
We were helped into our transport; Chevic alone joined us in the back of the wagon.
I remember praying to the Luminescent, a god I rarely believed in, and, after that night, although I saw him, I never believed in him again. So a hypocrite I was, but I prayed nonetheless. I prayed that Chevic would be wise enough to not push Theron in those closed quarters. For I knew what Theron could do; I knew what Ken could do in an instant, in such a small space. Their hands being bound meant nothing.
It wasn’t that I enjoyed being a prisoner. It was that I felt we needed to reach the end of this road, that something great and terrible waited for us there.
Chevic saw the threat; he understood and appreciated this, and so he did not push the volatile hunter. As the wagon bumped down the road at a remarkable pace pulled by two stout horses, native and ideal for rugged country, the entourage of Golden Sons kept up on foot, or so they must have, for they had no steeds that I saw but for Theron’s and Ken’s. They said the sun and the Luminescent’s love was the only sustenance they could ever need… I doubted that, but they didn’t, so they kept up with the carriage. I have always been intrigued by the mind of the fanatic, and the hidden powers it can unlock within the body.
I remember listening to Chevic’s happy voice as he told us of Romaria, the Romaria that we had chosen until then not to involve ourselves with, the one where people turned in on themselves, like a cancer that could not be seen until the tumor burst. Romaria was already dead; this was just the decay.
Seventy-six years ago, he began, a decade before the church pressed out southeasterly, before they stretched the Luminescent’s blazing hands into Kehldesh and its great city of Kahlibar, the Church of the Luminescent went northeasterly into Romaria. The takeover was not attempted with hostility but subtlety. Missionaries were sent into this land of forest people and cave dwellers, mountain folk and river tribes. These missionaries were to live among the people, learn their language, and when they were familiar and accepted, the missionary would inform the pagans to the error of their ways; they would have them understand that they were no more than dogs roving in packs until they accepted the blessings of the light.
For a decade, every missionary that entered that wild land of beauty and suffering became saint and martyr. For the natives did not like being told they were dogs by small men in white robes, no matter how subtly the remark was made.
At one point, Ken made to hush the tide of words, but Theron stopped him. I knew why. There were hidden secrets in tales such as these, and Theron wanted those secrets.
“Hark, the Patriarch arrived,” Chevic had exclaimed in excitement, when he reached this point of the lecture on Romaria’s bloody past. “The Patriarch was no sniveling priest, hunched forward and mumbling nonsense, constantly fingering the sun sigil round his neck. No, the Patriarch was a warrior, from origins unknown. With fury and the Luminescent in his heart he set out to do what the saints showed him he must do. He went where it was darkest and with him he brought the light. He went to finish the mission of those before him, or to join them in the most violent passage to martyrdom yet in the land of the forest god.” And the pagans who lived without dogma but for the worship of death and chaos, or as the heathens called it, “change”… That was how Chevic had explained things.
Long after that night in the cart, I asked a Romarian tribal shaman what they meant by that, worshiping the god of change, and the shaman smiled and said to me, “Everything is possible. Nothing is certain. Time is naught, and each and every one of the infinite realities that flows through the eternal abyss of the celestial sea is as fragile and malleable as a dream.”
If the Enlightened priests and the Patriarch were, in a word, fanatics, the pagans of Romaria were, in a word, lunatics.
The Patriarch did as they did, lived among them, hunted and even battled to earn his place among a great clan; he came to love the pagans and they came to love him, rely on him. When he told the chief the error of his ways, the chief did what no other had done before him. He rejected the forest and accepted the sun. His people did the same, and the very first Enlightened clan lived, hunted, fought, prayed, and repented on their knees together in the lands of Romaria.
There was a neighboring tribe, and they did not like this man who talked of the sun god; they did not like that he had poisoned the minds of neighbors when only the season before they had feasted and sacrificed to Dammar—they had danced and loved one another.
This tribe thought to remove the poison from the forest before it spread, so in the night, while the Patriarch and his flock slept, the pagans struck. It was a massacre; the Patriarch fought and killed many. But he was defeated and beaten relentlessly. The pagans took the surviving women and children prisoner. All the other men were slaughtered. The Patriarch they kept alive, to watch.
One by one the women and children were made to kneel. The pagans demanded they renounce this new god and return their souls to Dammar. Not one did so; as they were scalped they did not break, and as the blood poured from their throats they anticipated their eternity in the sun.
The Patriarch was beaten as he was made to watch, and he too was commanded to renounce the Luminescent.
The sixth child was kicked to the ground, grabbed by the hair, and as the Patriarch looked into the eyes of a young girl, defiant of Dammar and faithful in the Luminescent, he uttered prayer, and from the heavens lightning tore down in an assault of bolts, and when it was done every single pagan that took part in the raid was smitten dead where he stood. All but the chief, and as he stared in wonderment and horror at the miracle and fury of the true god, he kneeled and the patriarch stood, and the child ran to him, and he lifted her and held her close.
This was the manure history that Chevic poured into our ears before he got to the present. We had heard different versions of the tale, whispered by crones at decaying inns or men too far into their cups. Less flattering versions.
During the telling of Chevic’s fantastical tale, Theron and Ken sat still and silent, gathering information from both the words that Chevic spoke, and those he did not.
“A monstrous party, a religious holiday large enough to fill the streets, will be held this night in Brasov,” Chevic said. “In the Enlightened faith, the New Year’s celebration is known as ‘First Night Before First Morning,’ and it signifies the day that the Luminescent brought man forth below to take back the world from the dark age of the beast. The devoted remain awake all night praying and repenting until the rise of the morning sun.”
I had already heard much of such praying and repenting. To increase the popularity of the religion, the Patriarch adopted the pagan practice of enjoyment and turned the night’s prayer and repentance into nights of miracles, dancing, feasting, and drink. The rich and poor from round the world, pilgrims of many faiths, would all converge on Brasov, as they had for decades. But in the past year the state of what was until then an endless civil war of village raids and cloak and dagger tactics on both sides had reached a peak of violence and a full-scale battle, one that would very well decide the war, was on the horizon. It was the Patriarch’s belief that his enemy, the whole of his enemy in physical form, Dammar the god—or demon—would soon manifest and make its assault on the White City of Brasov.
I was skeptical of all Chevic said, skeptical of a god made flesh coming to crash his rival’s party. But then I thought of the swine’s decapitated head, its glowing eyes of prophecy, the magic I felt ache through me with its words as it promised that we would meet “him,” promised we would fight “him,” and promised devastation.
I was afraid, as I often was in those days. Visions of Dentin flashed, Chayse dead, headless…Theron screaming as a greater Upir in black armor gouged out his eye, and Ken’s pale face, streaked with blood and frantic agony as he burned shut the stump of his severed limb. Of course I was afraid, but if this was our destiny, and if we were to die tonight, we would die together. As
if sensing my growing melancholy, one massive shoulder bumped mine from the left—Ken—and a second massive shoulder bumped mine from the right—Theron—and while I was no safer than I had been a moment past, I was a little less afraid.
We reached Brasov, a city smaller than Norburg, but a good deal larger than Dentin, and within it there was more wealth than those two places and all their surrounding townships combined. It was an artful place, as if every inch of the marble and gold and white stone of which the city was built had been perfectly put in place by a master artisan. And how a place like that could be built, with the caravans of stone from the quarry to the city being under constant attack from pagans, was a testament to the church’s force in that place. Less than seven decades seemed an impossibly short time to have built such a city, and other smaller ones like it.
I believed then, and still do, that the known history of Brasov’s construction is debatable—as all history is. Whether or not the Patriarch had been responsible for orchestrating Brasov’s construction, or the foundation of the city had already been left there by a more ancient and advanced civilization, were questions I had at once, and later discovered that many scholars shared my same queries. I’ve come to figure it doesn’t matter one way or the other; the truth rarely does. If the Luminescent descended and explained his agenda to the whole world tomorrow, it would still be questionable to many. I would question it. I would doubt it. And if it conflicted with my agenda, I’d contest it. But that is the man I became and not the boy I was then.
We were guided from the wagon, through back alleys, many doors, and flights of stairs, each of which I remember successfully tripping on. Strange the things one remembers, the small things that remain even in the presence of the far more remarkable.
At length, we were standing, hands and feet free in the center of the Basilica’s high tower, the sun tower, it was called, because the spherical dome that contained the room was entirely gold. It was gold and translucent, so that a distorted, glimmering view of the night sky and the moon and stars was visible. I felt to be in a place far off in time; in future or past, I could not tell.