The Godlost Land

by Curtis, Greg

  Realising that the hour was getting late, Harl got up to leave. Even though the minotaur was not yet burnt to ash and someone could perhaps come along and see its burning remains, it was time to go. The afternoon sun was starting to dip a little lower in the sky, and he still had a ways to travel before he was home and safe once again. So he grabbed his dropped pack, checked that the pile of ore he'd chipped out of the nearby mine was still intact, and set off down the track.

  At least he could still go back to his house. He didn't need to start running once again. This creature had probably not come hunting him he decided. And even if it had come for him it had not come to his home. It had most likely just been out on patrol, looking for anyone who wasn't a follower. How the priests gave them that ability he didn't know, but the beasts were able to discern those who refused to bend their knee to the Goddess from those who didn't. Either way it surely had no idea where he lived. Still, he would keep watch through the night. Just in case. And he would celebrate another victory. Another kill. Another battle he'd survived.

  Tonight he decided he would dine well. But not perhaps on the salted beef he'd just traded from old man Seran. Suddenly he just didn't have the stomach for it.

  Chapter Two

  Terellion the Bright strode the great halls of his castle with a troubled look on his face. He wasn't in the mood to pay his usual attention to the beautiful marble tiles of the floors, or the elegant arched windows that towered above his head. He scarcely noticed the art works hanging from the stone walls, and didn't look up as he normally did to wonder at the huge lattice work of great oak beams that supported the great arched roof thirty feet above him.

  The beauty of his surrounds aside, he should have at least noticed the women as they rushed to serve him. After all, he gave the positions only to the fairest and then dressed them in revealing golden gowns. But they barely registered on his thoughts. He paid absolutely no attention to the guards in their green and black livery.

  This day he had important matters on his mind. Too important to waste his time considering aesthetics. But despite his distraction and the look on his face he wasn't as worried as he might have appeared. He was however, concerned. Concerned that the demon king was once again trying to trick him. Though how he didn't know exactly. He was also more than a little angry at the thought.

  Terellion was getting tired of Xin's tricks. More than tired. And he hated having to keep feeding the foul creature as payment for what always turned out to be worthless prizes. Never trust a demon they said, and for the past five years he'd been learning the truth of that miserable saying. In truth he wanted the Xin dead. After five years of the demon king's lies that weren't lies, he hated him. He wanted him to suffer for eternity in the underworld for what he'd done.

  But of course Xin was safe in his demonic underworld. He ruled it after all. And Tartarus was far beyond the reach of any wizard. All of Hades was, and Tartarus, the home of the most vile and wicked of souls, was even further out of Terellion's reach. He could open a portal there, but unless the demon king chose to step through willingly – something almost no demon would willingly do – he could not be touched. The realm of the dead was lethal to the living. Worse, even if he had been able to touch him, the demon king was far more powerful than him.

  So the king of demons – or prince of Tartarus as he was otherwise known – continued to sit safely in his realm, feeding on the lives of the people Terellion allowed his beastly armies to kill, getting fat and failing to live up to his end of the bargain. And while he did so he continued to promise Terellion everything that he wanted – promises that always turned out to be lies. It had been that way from the beginning.

  Some days Terellion wanted to simply tear up the deal he had made with the demon king and walk away. The frustration of the continuing hope and the endless disappointment was just too much. But he couldn't. Not just because if he did then all hope of him gaining his immortality would be lost. Not just because every day he could feel his mortality coming closer. But because he couldn't. The bargain could not be broken by just one party.

  The deal had been sworn as a binding. The lives as well as the magic of the twelve most powerful wizards in the five kingdoms had been bound into it. His life had been bound into it. And he feared finding out what would happen if the deal was broken when his was one of those lives. At the least he was certain it would kill him.

  Had it been a mistake including his own life in the binding? Terellion wondered about that some days. After all, he could have simply controlled a few others, sacrificed them in his place. That was what he would normally do. He had learned early on in life that that was what other people were good for. To be used as he needed. To be sacrificed when necessary. Even as a young child they had done whatever he wanted. That was his gift.

  It had been a good thing until one day in a fit of temper he had told his parents to go away and they had done exactly that. And they had never come back. That was the day he'd realised that he was truly alone in the world. The only one that mattered. Because no one else could be relied upon. So logically it would have been safer and wiser to send others in his place. But Xin had insisted he was part of the binding since he was the leader of the Circle and the one making the deal. And he needed the deal if he was to become immortal. The alternative was unthinkable.

  Some courses in life you just had to stay with, and this was one of them. So he would stay the course, and when the answers were finally his and he ascended, he would take his revenge on the demon king. A vengeance so vicious that no demon for the rest of time would ever forget it. He would also make sure that they knew for the rest of eternity what he would do to them if they tried to trick him. They would learn fear.

  “Sir!”

  A soldier stepped into the hall and immediately stamped his foot and nodded officiously at him.

  They were forever doing that and Terellion wished they wouldn't. It was annoying. When he'd taken the castle in Lion's Crest for himself it hadn't been for prestige or to be seen as the new king. That was a meaningless title. Indeed he refused to accept any title other than the one he had earned as a wizard of the Circle. Master Terellion. But really only another wizard would address him that way. The rest just called him “Sir” and he left it at that. He was no simple fool to be swayed by the baubles of power and wealth, nor flattered by the words of those too simple to truly understand him. He wanted real power and that had nothing to do with a bunch of soldiers wandering around behind him all day jumping to do his bidding. Especially when they were mercenaries who only cared about the pay they received.

  Unfortunately paying them was going to become a problem soon. As the population of the five kingdoms slowly decreased, the amount of coin the survivors could send the Circle to pay for their armies was decreasing as well. It was a balancing act. A riddle worthy of Pan himself. The Circle had to provide Xin with his lives or he would stop helping them even as much as he did. He would stop providing them with his armies of chimera. And Terellion's chances of finally discovering the answers to the six great mysteries and taking his place in the heavens would end. But if the Circle stopped paying the mercenaries Terellion would end up with only the other wizards by his side, facing the demon king's followers and his beast armies alone. His bargaining position would be greatly weakened.

  It was for that reason that he'd started the preparations for the war with the dryads. With the five kingdoms broken he needed more funds, and the dryads had gold. They didn't have much in the way of coin – they were strange about such things – but they had gold mines. Lots of them. Some nearly as bountiful as Midland Heights. He needed that gold.

  The wars didn't trouble him. He knew they would win. So in time Inel Ison and Pariton would be his. What troubled him was the question of what came after them? The two dryad realms would only provide enough wealth to keep paying the mercenaries for a time. Maybe another couple of years. And the way things were going he had no certainty that he would have achieved his goals
by then. After that came the nearby realms of the satyrs. But while they had enough lives to keep Xin happy, they had nowhere near enough gold to pay his mercenaries. His problems would begin again.

  “What is it soldier?”

  The man frowned suddenly. Probably because he had some sort of rank judging from the bits and pieces of gold on his green and black uniform. But Terellion had never bothered to learn about such things. In the end he didn't care about them. Neither their ranks nor the soldiers themselves. They were just mercenaries. He only cared about the answers to the mysteries. Everything else was a distraction. Especially when he was getting older and he could feel his life slipping away day by day. When he could feel his flesh decaying on his very bones.

  “We received a pigeon from the southern wastes Sir. The High Priestess is being brought here.”

  The High Priestess! Now there was another distraction he didn't need. But still, she presented a bargaining tool nevertheless. Xin wanted her. And he wanted her enough to offer a few more of the precious snippets of information they needed to recite the answers.

  Maybe when it was over and she'd been given to the demon king he'd finally be able to recite the first of the answers to the six great mysteries. He knew which one it would be. Immortality. That in the end was the one that mattered most to him. Ascendancy to the heavens was important. Divine knowledge was important. But before any of those he needed to live. To be young and virile again. That was why he'd started down this road in the first place. And everything else came second to that.

  When Terellion had turned seventy and realised that his best days were behind him he'd known he had to act. Until then he'd been young and foolish. He'd sought the usual things that people sought. Power and wealth. Respect. An easy life and all the pleasures a man could want. And thanks to his gift he'd achieved all of those things.

  If he'd wanted to gamble or drink he'd done it. If he'd needed wealth people had given it to him. If he'd wanted a woman he'd had her. If someone had got in his way he'd destroyed them. And if he'd wanted respect or adulation he had simply taken it.

  It was easy to convince people that he was a wizard of great power and character when, as a wizard of the mind he didn't have to actually prove either of those things – just convince others that he had. Wealth and comfort came the same way. They had ever since he'd been a small boy. So Terellion had made himself a Circle wizard in a staggeringly short time and there simply hadn't been a lot more left for him to achieve after that. He'd been toying for a while with taking the throne before that, but it had seemed like a waste when he had already had the king doing whatever he wanted and all the wealth and titles were already his. In fact people loved him. They didn't know any better.

  People were stupid. A lifetime of simply telling them to do whatever he wanted had taught him that. The only value people had was in serving him. If they had any spark of intelligence or will they would have refused. But they never did. They were just things put there for his benefit. So he used them and thought nothing more of it. But still he was always careful not to reveal his true gift, and simply pretended to be a mere summoner. If no one knew what he could do they couldn't know what he'd done. And most importantly, they couldn't stand against him.

  But the day he'd turned seventy he'd realised that none of the things he'd done, none of the pleasures he'd enjoyed, would let him live a single heartbeat longer. He was going to die. And it was then that he'd understood that nothing other than that mattered. Not once the day came when his own body had first betrayed him.

  His seventieth birthday had coincidentally been the day he'd first collapsed. And that had been his first true understanding that he was mortal. There had been problems before that of course. Bones got old and joints creaked a bit. He grew weary when he walked too far and climbing too many stairs left him breathless. But they had seemed like small things. Even when he had occasionally failed in the bedchamber it had seemed minor. As long as he was the leader of the wizard's Circle – even if unofficially – and people knew to pay him the respect he was due, that had been what mattered to him.

  But the day he had collapsed in the street and had to be helped to his feet like a frail old man everything had changed. Because it was then that he'd understood that he was going to die. And before then he would become old and feeble. He might well start losing his mind. He could end up bedridden. Suddenly he had realised that everything else he had gained – the power and the respect, the wealth and the women – all had been a waste. They had no value. Since then he had thought of nothing other than the fact that he could allow that to happen. Nothing else had seemed important after that. Not the wealth he owned. Not the people bowing to him. Not the women. Not even the absolute control he had over others through his magic. He used them. He enjoyed them. But he knew them for what they were. And they weren't helping him recover his youth.

  Other people could die. But not him. He was Terellion the Bright. He had to live. Forever! But more than that, he had to be young again. He wouldn't want to live forever as a relic clinging to life. He needed to find the secret of immortality.

  But no one knew it. No one even knew if true immortality was even possible. No one human anyway. It was one of the six great mysteries that every wizard for thousands of years had tried to fathom. So far no wizard had. No mortal of any sort could so the sages claimed. Terellion was determined to prove them wrong.

  In the end the only place to find the secret of immortality was among the six great answers, since if it existed it was one of them. And the answers were known only by the gods themselves. It was claimed by the sages that having those answers was what had made them gods. But he had realised early on that some of the answers were also known by the demons. After thousands of years of war with them, they'd managed to steal a few things from the gods. The odd snippet of information.

  The gods of course would not help. They would never give such knowledge to mortals. Not even Prometheus, though he had prayed to the god of wizards all his life. The trickster god had brought man fire and magic, but even he would not bring him immortality. The gods guarded their secrets carefully.

  But the demons didn't have the same concerns. They would happily give away the answers – for a price. But there was only one trade they would accept. Not coin, not gold and not knowledge. The only thing a demon would want was lives. The lives of people.

  So the Circle had had to have “goods” to trade. And not just a few poor souls, but thousands. Demons were hungry and there were a great many of them. The lesser ones liked to consume flesh and bone. Sometimes blood and other body parts. But the greater ones had moved beyond those things. They consumed the life force itself. Normally they had ways of obtaining what they wanted even when they were mostly forced to remain in their own realm. Their normal way was to make a deal with some unfortunate, turn him into their thrall and then send their minions into the world to kill for them and let the life force of the victim flow through the minion to the portal or gate they'd created and on to them. As for their thralls they were usually the most unlucky of all. Whatever they'd accepted in return for their service was never usually worth anything, and when the demons had run out of use for them, they killed them too.

  Terellion had developed a plan to give them what they needed without offering his service. He wasn't that stupid. He had instead gone for a straight trade. It was what he had to do. It had taken five long years, and for every one of those years he had felt more and more of his life slipping away. He had felt his body slowly failing him – it seemed that it failed even faster than those of the people around him. But that had only spurred him on as he knew he had even less time.

  First he had captured the Circle, or as many of the Circle as he could. They were the most powerful wizards in the land and he'd known he would need them. And not just as a people he could occasionally bend to his ends, but as slaves. As creatures that he completely dominated. So he had bound them to him one by one. He had possessed them. He had to because h
e had always worried that one of them would sooner or later be able to defy him otherwise. That they would realise that he had a gift. Or worse that another one would cause him endless problems like Maynard. But they hadn't and in time he had bound eleven of them to him, all of them capable only of thinking what he wanted them to think.

  After that he had needed power, and that meant the court and the nobility. It had no longer been enough to just control the king; he had to own the entire kingdom. So he had taken control of them too, readying himself for the day. For them though all he'd needed to do was change their thoughts so that they believed him their most trusted ally. Possessing them completely as he had the Circle would have been too much. Even his gift had limits and dominating eleven wizards had stretched them. Fortunately the court was easily amenable to his persuasion as was everyone else. Just as long as he kept reinforcing his will every so often and didn't make them do anything completely contrary to their wills.