by Damien Lake
“Not in this case,” Rail agreed, downing the last of his head-clearer. “The accounts say the temple collapsed on top of them. Killed the entire group before the rest of us could carry them away on our shoulders to worship forevermore.”
“Can a god actually be killed? It seems incredible! Man shouldn’t be able to kill a god.”
“I don’t expect man can. Not truly. The gods aren’t mortals, so even if you shred them to pieces and jump on the remains, they’re stuck enduring it all. Or so I believe. Being immortal means suffering the worst, no matter how bad, without ever escaping through death. I wouldn’t want it. And don’t ask me where the cringing whelp has been lurking ever since, because I don’t have the foggiest.”
“The God of Earth,” Marik mused. “I should have realized that much. His partner goddess is Lor’Velath. What else could be the opposite of magic?”
“A hammer, mayhap. Or a plow. Which is what he’s supposed to be well-to-do on.”
“I can’t see any god being proud of that. And I never heard anything about this great war.”
“It was a real piss-a-row. The old Merinor kingdoms were united with Arronath’s ancestors and a whole slew of others against the earth lad’s followers. Who knows how many millions were involved in that.”
Marik felt his brow crawl upward. “That many? How can an entire kingdom forget about something as big as that? Despite the Unification!”
“I’d lay the likeliest reason for that on the fact that everything I just laid down happened over sixteen centuries before Basill popped his head out of his mother’s crotch to say hello. Most of it had been forgotten by then. Whatever was remembered was only thought to be legend and fairytale.”
They fell silent in contemplation. That, by no means, meant the room was quiet. Shaw had finished making his rounds, talking to the disparate men, examining each dog with the interest of a man holding his newborn son for the first time.
Upon reaching the bar he lifted a four-inch hammer meant for the purpose and rang a brass bell. The peal cut cleanly through the din. Far from silencing the room, the bell elicited enthusiastic cheers from the crowd, nobleman and chimneysweep alike.
“Two to the midnight bell,” Shaw called out. The men roared in appreciation. “So it’s time, then! Light up the pit!”
For the first time Marik noticed numerous ship’s lanterns hanging from the rafters over the circular construction. They would shine their light in whichever direction the crew needed, no matter the foul weather. These had been set to shine straight down onto the whitewashed floor.
Two men quickly lit them until all nine made the ‘pit’ the brightest spot in the room. Shaw strode to the narrow space between the slat-board walls and the counter while both men vanished up the steps.
The crowd pressed together around the pit’s walls, except for Shaw’s area which they accepted as off limits. They were packed tighter than Marik had ever seen. Elbows were usually in a neighbor’s mouth rather than pressed hard to their owner’s torso. The spectacle enthralled him.
“Right then. If you brought a fancy for a badger, you’re out of luck tonight, I’m afraid,” Shaw announced.
Over the thick noise, a louder voice could be heard to shout, “A piss on your badgers, Shaw!”
That brought a rolling wave of laughter. Before the good humor died, the dogs abruptly went wild, restrained only by their leashes and owners’ hands. The two men were reemerging down the steps. Each carried a large basket made from wire. From the squealing, turbulent roil of furry bodies within, Marik could see they were filled with rats.
“You gentlemen shut your fancies up!” Shaw roared. It was a fruitless effort. No force in the world could quiet the dogs once they caught scent of the rodents. “Clean sport, gentlemen! Every one swabbed out from a country house. No plaguers in the lot, ‘pon my honor. Who wants to try a rat?”
Several men in the crowd immediately replied. Shaw pointed to one, a man who looked like a clerk from the most prosperous counting house in the capitol. The vest was a dead giveaway, though he wore a long coat over it that hung open. After he forced his way through the tight knot with his dog, a squat gray bulldog with more wrinkle than smooth to its face, Shaw hoisted it onto the counter. Apparently the odd device at the opposite end to where Marik sat was a giant scale.
“Twenty-nine pounds,” Shaw called out. When the smaller man placed his mouth to the ex-fighter’s ear in order to be heard, Shaw continued in his bellowing voice that overrode the crowd’s with apparent ease. “He’s called for twenty rats. Let’s give it four minutes for the weight. You men all wager as you like.”
Shaw selected a miniature sandglass from a line of various sizes. The two men began pulling rats from the wire cages and dropping them into the pit. Marik leaned closer to his father.
“Are they crazy, grabbing rats bare-handed like that?”
“Have to,” Rail returned. “Proves the rats really are country-born. Rats from the city usually have any disease you can put a name to. No man wants to risk his trained sporting dog to that.”
Marik could barely see into the pit through the narrow gap between Shaw’s large form and the last man ringing the slat walls. The rats had gathered into a writhing ball in one corner. Or as much a corner as a circular arena could have.
At the bar, the dog’s owner was looking it in the eye, baring his teeth and growling menacingly, shaking his head in all directions. The dog, getting further into the mood, growled and barked back.
Men leaned over the slat boards. All manner of coins were clutched in each fist. When the man held his dog over the whitewashed floor, the crowd started chanting, “Send in the wind! Send in the wind!” No matter his social station, each man blew hard with their full lungs, making the rats’ fur spike. It agitated the vermin further.
“Go on then,” Shaw ordered. He flipped his sandglass over.
The owner dropped his dog into the pit. He immediately fell to his knees, his chin resting on the slats. “Come on then, Darko! Go! Go! Grrrrr! Go on, grab it! Bite! Grrrr! Bite it! Now drop it! It’s dead! Get another, Darko! Drop it and get another! Grrr, Grrr!”
With the crowd fixated, Marik and Rail sat in their side-corner in total privacy. Marik forced his gaze from the ratting sport to meet his father’s.
“Oh yes,” Rail said knowingly, reading the unspoken question in his son’s eyes. “As good as the tale is for sitting around a hearth, what does any of it have to do with us?”
Marik nodded.
Rail answered while the crowd’s excited shouts enveloped them. “What do you think happened to that statue after that, eh? It was the catch-all to the entire war. With their power gone, the priests in their green robes were hunted down like you wouldn’t believe. The leader of the opposing armies had the temple’s ruins torn apart. They recovered a good portion of the obsidian fragments that were left, but not enough to completely reform a statue as large as that bugger was. Where the rest went, no one can say.
“But those obsidian chunks are the meat of the problem. Red says anything touched by a god is forever afterward marked by that contact. I don’t see how he could possibly know that for a hard line, since as far as I know the only object any god ever touched with his naked hands is that blasted statue. It seems true enough to make no difference, though.”
“Forever afterward,” Marik echoed. “Is that what you’ve been doing? Looking for pieces of it? That doesn’t seem likely.”
“That’s because that’s not what we’ve been doing. Red’s made a crusade of hunting down pieces of the Earth God’s statue, because when they crop up like a stone long buried in a farmer’s field, they tend to be a nuisance.”
“A big stone can break a plow blade.”
“Yeah. And a black obsidian chunk can cause all sorts of nasties, depending on who finds it. Red’s pretty cheeky when you ask him how many times before he’s tracked down pieces of it. My guess is he’s been at it a long time. I have a suspicion why, but he won’t say
yea or nay on that score.”
When Rail stopped there, Marik knew this was a point he would not elaborate on. “So this man, whoever you were chasing…he found a piece of obsidian.”
“That’s the size of it. And before you ask, I’ll tell you that no, there’s no chance he’s an innocent little lamb who doesn’t realize what he’s got. Whatever lingering malice is imbedded in the stone has been changing him. I found…” Rail trailed off, debating how much he should say. “Let’s say I’ve found people he’d done things to. Things that make you have to look twice before you could be certain they were people. Or had been.”
“The shepherd family you mentioned?” Rail offered no comment. Musing aloud while his thoughts did cartwheels, he saw the most likely truth. “So, he’s practicing as a harvester, then. Walking the blood paths. Gathering etheric energy by torturing and killing people. Probably that’s what those green-robed priests were doing in the first place back then, too.”
Rail’s hand grasped Marik’s wrist firmly. It yanked his thoughts back to the present. His father kept silent, eyes closed. Marik had no idea what was happening…then felt that slight tingle in his spine as he had before. He could see no mage workings being performed, see no disturbances in the purple mists of the mass diffusion, but clearly a mage utilized his talent nearby.
Sighing so audibly that Marik caught it over the crowd’s noise, Rail released his wrist from the iron band his own hand had become. “I was afraid of that.” The exhaustion and weariness returned. It weighed his entire body down. “The second I saw you lifting my sword, I suspected. As soon as I recognized you, I was damn near certain. How long ago did your talent manifest?”
Marik, not entirely surprised, nevertheless felt amazed that his father must also plainly possess the same curse of mage talent that had been laid on him. While he groped for the words to convey the awful truth about his nature, the crowd’s voice united in a new chant.
“Twister! Twister!”
Through the narrow gap Marik could see the bulldog, Darko. It hopped wildly into the air, trying to shake off the rat that had bitten into its fleshy face. The rat fought back, maintaining its desperate hold, refusing to be thrown, twisting in every direction from the dog’s gyrations.
Every man in the crowd cheered at such delightful blood sport.
Marik finally found his tongue when Shaw called time. Several men in the crowd groaned along with Darko’s owner. Four rats were still alive, which the two men deftly scooped back into the cages before the dog could slaughter them after the fact. Coins in various denominations changed hands.
When Marik reached the end of retelling his latest near-death encounter, Rail raised both eyebrows and pursed his lips in a show of being impressed. “Sounds like Harbon, if your reckoning is spot on. He’s no one-trick wonder, that one.”
“Who is that? Not the one you were chasing!”
“No. There’d be nothing left of you if it had been Xenos behind the punches. He’s the blackest dog in the hells’ hunting pack, and no mistake there! Except even Vernilock wouldn’t touch that bastard, even to damn his soul for all eternity.”
“Then tell me who you were talking about.”
“Red’s been tracking Xenos for a long time. Too copping long, if you ask me. We should have taken care of his ass a long time ago. Red likes to know whatever he can before he makes his move, though. It’s no secret around Arronath that Harbon, and his buddy Mendell, were shuffled into the army ranks by Xenos. They’re a pair of cringing toadies if I’ve ever seen any at all.”
Marik started to ask how this man Xenos could have managed such a feat, had opened his mouth to do so, when he realized Rail had deliberately shifted the topic. “You skipped over mentioning any detail about how you knew I had mage talent.”
Rail propped his head on one hand. He caught Dryden’s attention when the barman pulled a steaming hot fire-poker from a fresh gin cask. Dryden filled several glasses at once, depositing one in front of Rail before distributing seven others in fewer than half as many steps.
“You know damned well the only way I could have known. You’re lucky enough that your talent is awake. If it were still dormant, then we’d have a skunk to look out for.”
“Lucky?” An incredulous laugh escaped Marik. “I’ve never once thought of myself as lucky for having…this!”
“Luck is what you make of it, lad. If you had mage talent locked away inside you, talent that was dozing and had never awakened on its own, then we’d have to make damn certain you got away from Red before he sunk his hooks into you. He’d tell you it was your own choice, string you along like a fat trout until he’d shown you just enough to make sure you reached the decision he wanted you to make. Then you might as well be shackled for a murderer as a second-story man.”
“What did he do to you? A sort of…magical compulsion? What?”
Rail snorted. “Nothing so easy to get around as that. Worse. He makes it your business. Takes things you had nothing to do with and makes sure you see that they damned well could become your business!” He sipped his fresh glass. “And this isn’t your bleeding business, Marik. You stay well clear of it. You don’t need chains wrapped around your heart all of your own making. Troubles enough in the world without forging new ones.”
“From the sound of it, I don’t have much to worry about on that front. I can’t imagine what it has to do with anything, but I didn’t think dormant talents could be forced open. They either awaken on their own naturally, depending on the person, or they need a catalyst to trigger them. In my case it was either wrestle the bull out of the pen or turn to ashes.” He glanced sideways at his father. “Did he use a kind of catalyst to force your talent to wake up?”
“No. That would have made me same as any other fledgling mage, wouldn’t it? What made me such a sweet find to a cunning lizard like him was my current state back then. A sleeping mage talent, about average in strength, never before disturbed in any way. A perfect tool for one of his kind.”
“Kind? He’s a gods damned harvester?” The reasons behind this Red Man’s desire to track down obsidian fragments took on new, sinister dimensions.
“I’m not so great a fool as to take up with their ilk, boy,” Rail shot back. “I meant his people. I’d never heard of them before Red walked up to me in Spirratta. I haven’t learned much from him over the years, either, except they call themselves eul’kkandr.”
“That’s the old language,” Marik identified at once. “Like Vallan’zul. Except I don’t know what either means.”
“It doesn’t matter much.”
“Only to the extent that wherever he comes from, it’s from a place where his people still remember the old language. He can’t be Galemaran, or Tullainian, or from Nolier. Their histories must be filled with the things we’ve forgotten.”
Rail nodded, his lips fastened to the gin glass. “He knows a copping lot, that’s no bet. He’d been chasing Xenos for awhile, and not having much luck at it. From the things that snake was about, Red guessed the fragment Xenos held was starting to cause blacker trouble by the day.”
“Like what? I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“Can’t say for certain. There’s no telling what sort of blow-out craziness might happen when a fragment is at the root. It’s never predictable, what ends up happening. This time it was making Xenos into a bloodthirsty power slut.
“I came into it because it had reached the point where Red decided he needed a kkan’edom to help him out. Before you ask, I do know what that one means. In a general sense, anyway. Edom means servant, or a special type of servant. Sort of like a personal bodyguard or trusted agent. Kkan refers to the eul’kkandr, Red’s people. Anything belonging to them starts with kkan.”
“A…a servant who works for this eul…this, whatever people? I don’t like to think of you as belonging to anyone! It sounds like slavery.”
“At times I’ve wondered at that. But as Red loves reminding me, I chose to accompany him and t
ake up the mantel. However many nuggets he keeps giving me as payment, it seems rather shallow at this point.”
Suspicious, Marik asked, “How many has he given you so far?”
“I think we’re up to fifteen. I’ve spent three, sent the rest on ahead.”
“Mother only ever received the first four.”
Rail blinked. “Bastards,” he swore. “Never trust a Rubian! What other race would have invented tools for removing and replacing wax seals secretly?”
A brownish-gold terrier with thick locks of fur was pulled from the pit, having successfully killed its fifteen rats under the three minutes set by Shaw. Next, a familiar breed was hoisted onto the scales. Marik had never learned the name. Its body was mostly black except for the squared head which bore a brown muzzle. The huge animal must tip the weights at fifty pounds easy, he believed, especially after he had struggled in a death battle against one in the pouring rain.
“It can’t be so simple,” Marik resumed. “The old words never were so easy to translate as that.”
“Of course. There are whole other dimensions to it. What it comes down to is that the eul’kkandr have long mastered ways to take a raw, unawakened talent and sculpt it to their purposes. As long as it was still dormant, Red was able to remake it to fit his need. He taught me fighting abilities only a kkan’edom can make use of by blending his magical nature to his fighting spirit. Different eul’kkandr have had their kkan’edom take different approaches, but since the beginning, the kkan’edom have always been warriors before mages. Magic, in the traditional sense, is of little use to the eul’kkandr since…well, for various reasons. They prefer solid fighters, which made me an especially juicy tidbit.”
The new dog’s owner had to hold the beast to his chest since it was too heavy to suspend over the pit’s floor. He had requested thirty of Shaw’s best. Given the size the monster canine commanded, Shaw cut the time from six minutes to five in order to give it a handicap and make the outcome harder to predict.