The Emperor of a Thousand Deaths remains on the throne.
A foreign army uninterested in negotiation approaches.
A champion who is a god will soon draw his sword.
Karos Invictad has the hands of a child. A vicious child, crooning as he watches them pull out the entrails of his still-alive pet cat. Or dog. Or abject prisoner in one of his cells. A child, yes, but one unleashed, free to do and be as he pleases.
By the Errant, children are such monsters.
Tonight, the Chancellor realized, he would summon a child for himself. For his own pleasure. And he would destroy that child, as only an adult with beautiful hands could. Destroy it utterly.
It was the only thing one could do with monsters.
The one-eyed god standing unseen in the throne room was furious. Ignorance was ever the enemy, and the Errant understood that he was under assault. By Chancellor Triban Gnol. By Hannan Mosag. The clash of these two forces of the empire was something that the Emperor on his throne barely sensed – the Errant was sure of that. Rhulad was trapped in his own cage of emotions, terror wielding all its instruments of torture, poking, jabbing, twisting deep. Yet the Errant had witnessed with clear eyes – no, a clear eye – in the fraught audience now past, just how vicious this battle was becoming.
But I cannot fathom their secrets. Neither Triban Gnol’s nor Hannan Mosag’s. This is my realm. Mine!
He might renew one old path. The one leading into the Chancellor’s bedroom. But even then, when that relationship had been in fullest bloom, Triban Gnol held to his secrets. Sinking into his various personas of innocent victim and wide-eyed child, he had become little more than a simpleton when with the Errant – with Turudal Brizad, the Consort to the Queen, who never grew old – and would not be moved from the games he so needed. No, that would not work, because it never had.
Was there any other way to the Chancellor?
Even now, Triban Gnol was a godless creature. Not one to bend knee to the Errant. So that path, too, was closed. I could simply follow him. Everywhere. Piece together his scheme by listening to the orders he delivers, by reading the missives he despatches. By hoping he talks in his sleep. Abyss below!
Furious, indeed. At his own growing panic as the convergence drew ever closer. His knowledge was no better when it came to Hannan Mosag, although some details were beyond dissembling. The power of the Crippled God, for one. Yet even there, the Warlock King was no simple servant, no mindless slave to that chaotic promise. He had sought the sword now in Rhulad’s hands, after all. As with any other god, the Fallen One played no favourites. First to arrive at the altar…No, Hannan Mosag would hold to no delusions there.
The Errant glanced once more at Rhulad, this Emperor of a Thousand Deaths. The fool, for all his bulk, now sat on that throne in painful insignificance – so obvious it hurt to just look at him. Alone in this vast domed chamber, the thousand deaths refracted into ten thousand flinches in those glittering eyes.
The Chancellor and his retinue were gone. The Ceda away with his broken handful as well. Not a guard in sight, yet Rhulad remained. Sitting, burnished coins gleaming. And on his face all that had been private, unrevealed, was now loosed in expressive array. All the pathos, the abject hauntings – the Errant had seen, had always seen, in face after face spanning too many years to count, the divide of the soul, the difference between the face that knew it was being watched, and the face that believed in its solitude. Bifurcation. And he had witnessed when inside crawled outside to a seemingly unseeing world.
Divided soul. Yours, Rhulad, has been cut in two. By that sword, by the spilled blood between you and each of your brothers, between you and your parents. Between you and your kind. What would you give me, Rhulad Sengar of the Hiroth Tiste Edur, to be healed?
Assuming I could manage such a thing, of course. Which I cannot.
But it was clear to the Errant now that Rhulad had begun to understand one thing at least. The fast approach of convergence, the dread gathering and inevitable clash of powers. Perhaps the Crippled God had been whispering in his sword-bearer’s ear. Or perhaps Rhulad was not quite the fool most believed him to be. Even me, on occasion – and who am I to sneer in contempt? A damned Letherii witch swallowed one of my eyes!
The growing fear was undisguised in the Emperor’s face. Coins bedded in burnt skin. Mottled pocking where the coins were gone. Brutal wealth and wounded penury, two sides of yet another curse to plague this modern age. Yes, divide humanity’s soul. Into the haves, the have-nots. Rhulad, you are in truth a living symbol. But that is a weight no-one can bear for very long. You see the end coming. Or, many endings, and yes, one of them is yours.
Shall it be this foreign army that has, in Triban Gnol’s clever words, proclaimed itself a champion?
Shall it be Icarium, Stealer of Life? The Wanderer through Time?
Or something far more sordid – some perfect ambush by Hannan Mosag; or one final betrayal to annihilate you utterly, as would one committed by your Chancellor?
And why do I believe the answer will be none of those? Not one. Not a single thing so…so direct. So obvious.
And when will this blood stop seeping from this socket? When will these crimson tears end?
The Errant melted into the wall behind him. He’d had enough of Rhulad’s private face. Too much, he suspected, like his own. Imagined unwatched – but am I too being watched? Whose cold gaze is fixed on me, calculating meanings, measuring weaknesses?
Yes, see where I weep, see what I weep.
And yes, this was all by a mortal’s hand.
He moved quickly, unmindful of barriers of mortar and stone, of tapestry and wardrobe, of tiled floors and ceiling beams. Through darkness and light and shadows in all their flavours, into the sunken tunnels, where he walked through ankle-deep water without parting its murky surface.
Into her cherished room.
She had brought stones to build platforms and walkways, creating a series of bridges and islands over the shallow lake that now flooded the chamber. Oil lamps painted ripples and the Errant stood, taking form once more opposite the misshapen altar she had erected, its battered top crowded with bizarre votive offerings, items of binding and investiture, reliquaries assembled to give new shape to the god’s worship. To the worship of me. The gnostic chthonic nightmare might have amused the Errant once, long ago. But now he could feel his face twisting in disdain.
She spoke from the gloomy corner to his left. ‘Everything is perfect, Immortal One.’
Solitude and insanity, most natural bedmates. ‘Nothing is perfect, Feather Witch. Look, all around you in this place – is it not obvious? We are in the throes of dissolution—’
‘The river is high,’ she said dismissively. ‘A third of the tunnels I used to wander are now under water. But I saved all the old books and scrolls and tablets. I saved them all.’
Under water. Something about that disturbed him – not the obvious thing, the dissolution he had spoken of, but…something else.
‘The names,’ she said. ‘To release. To bind. Oh, we shall have many servants, Immortal One. Many.’
‘I have seen,’ the god said, ‘the fissures in the ice. The meltwater. The failing prison of that vast demon of the sea. We cannot hope to enslave such a creature. When it breaks free, there will be devastation. Unless, of course, the Jaghut returns – to effect repairs on her ritual. In any case – and fortunately for everyone – I do not believe that Mael will permit it to get even that far – to escape.’
‘You must stop him!’ Feather Witch said in a hiss.
‘Why?’
‘Because I want that demon!’
‘I told you, we cannot hope to—’
‘I can! I know the names! All of the names!’
He stared across at her. ‘You seek an entire pantheon, Feather Witch? Is one god under your heel not enough?’
She laughed, and he heard something splash in the water near her. ‘The sea remembers. In every wave, every current. Th
e sea, Immortal One, remembers the shore.’
‘What – what does that mean?’
Feather Witch laughed again. ‘Everything is perfect. Tonight, I will visit Udinaas. In his dreams. By morning he will be mine. Ours.’
‘This web you cast,’ the Errant said, ‘it is too thin, too weak. You have stretched it beyond all resilience, and it will snap, Feather Witch.’
‘I know how to use your power,’ she replied. ‘Better than you do. Because us mortals understand certain things far better than you and your kind.’
‘Such as?’ the Errant asked, amused.
‘The fact that worship is a weapon, for one.’
At those dry words, chill seeped through the god.
Ah, poor Udinaas.
‘Now go,’ she said. ‘You know what must be done.’
Did he? Well…yes. A nudge. What I do best.
The sceptre cracked hard against the side of Tanal Yathvanar’s head, exploding stars behind his eyes, and he staggered, then sank down onto one knee, as the blood began flowing. Above him, Karos Invictad said in a conversational tone: ‘I advise you, next time you are tempted to inform on my activities to one of the Chancellor’s agents, to reconsider. Because the next time, Tanal, I will see you killed. In a most unpleasant fashion.’
Tanal watched the blood fall in elongated droplets, spattering on the dusty floor. His temple throbbed, and his probing fingers found a flap of mangled skin hanging down almost to his cheek. His eye on that side ebbed in and out of focus in time with the throbbing. He felt exposed, vulnerable. He felt like a child among cold-faced adults. ‘Invigilator,’ he said in a shaky voice, ‘I have told no-one anything.’
‘Lie again and I will dispense with mercy. Lie again and the breath you use to utter it will be your last.’
Tanal licked his lips. What could he do? ‘I’m sorry, Invigilator. Never again. I swear it.’
‘Get out, and send for a servant to clean up the mess you’ve left in my office.’
Nauseated, his throat tightening against an eager upswell of vomit, Tanal Yathvanar hurried out in a half-crouch.
I’ve done nothing. Nothing to deserve this. Invictad’s paranoia has driven him into the abyss of madness. Even as his power grows. Imagine, threatening to sweep away the Chancellor’s own life, in Triban Gnol’s own office! Of course, that had been but the Invigilator’s version of what had transpired. But Tanal had seen the bright gleam in Invictad’s eyes, fresh from the glory of his visit to the Eternal Domicile.
It had all gone too far. All of it.
Head spinning, Tanal set out to find a healer. There was much still to do this day. An arrest to be made, and, split-open skull or no, Karos Invictad’s precise schedule had to be kept. This was to be a triumphant day. For the Patriotists. For the great Letherii Empire.
It would ease the pressure, the ever-tightening straits that gripped the people – and not just here in Letheras, but across the entire empire. Too many fraught rumours, of battles and defeats suffered. The strictures of not enough hard coin, the strange disappearance of unskilled labour, the tales of once-secure families falling into Indebtedness. The whisper of huge financial holdings tottering like trees with rotted roots. Heroic victories were needed, and this day would mark one. Karos Invictad had found the greatest traitor ever, and he, Tanal Yathvanar, would make the arrest. And they will hear that detail. My name, central to all that will happen this day. I intend to make certain of it.
Karos Invictad was not the only man skilled at reaping glory.
Ancient cities possessed many secrets. The average citizen was born, lived, and died in the fugue of vast ignorance. The Errant knew he had well learned his contempt for humanity, for the dross of mortal existence that called blindness vision, ignorance comprehension, and delusion faith. He had seen often enough the wilful truncation people undertook upon leaving childhood (and the wonder of its endless possibilities), as if to exist demanded the sacrifice of both unfettered dreams and the fearless ambition needed to achieve them. As if those self-imposed limitations used to justify failure were virtues, to add to those of pious self-righteousness and the condescension of the flagellant.
Oh, but look at himself, here and now, look at what he was about to do. The city’s ancient secrets made into things to be used, and used to achieve cruel ends. Yet was he not a god? Was this not his realm? If all that existed was not open to use and, indeed, abuse, then what was its purpose?
He walked through the ghostly walls, the submerged levels, acknowledging a vague awareness of hidden, mostly obscured patterns, structures, the array of things that held significance, although such comprehension was not for him, not for his cast of mind, but something alien, something long lost to the dead ages of the distant past.
No end to manifestations, however, few of which captured the awareness of the mortals he now walked among – walked unseen, less than a chill draught against the neck – and the Errant continued on, observing such details as snared his attention.
Finding the place he sought, he halted. Before him stood the walls of an estate. None other than the one that had belonged to the late Gerun Eberict. It stood abandoned, ownership mired in a legal tangle of claims that had stretched on and on. Gerun Eberict had, it seemed, taken all his wealth with him, a detail that amused the Errant no end.
The huge main building’s footprint cut across the unremarked lines of an older structure that had once stood bordered on three sides by open water: two cut channels and a stream born of deep artesian wells filled with cold black water beneath a vast shelf of limestone that itself lay below a thick layer of silts, sand lenses and beds of clay. There had been significance to these channels, and to the fact that the fourth side had possessed, beneath what passed for a street seven thousand years ago, a buried tunnel of fire-hardened clay. In this tunnel, kept distinct from all other local sources, there had flowed water from the depths of the river. Thus, all four sides, the precious lifeblood of the Elder God who had been worshipped in the temple that had once squatted in this place.
Eberict should have been mindful of that detail, in which a hired seer might well have discerned Gerun’s eventual demise at the blunt hands of a half-breed giant. It was no accident, after all, that those of Tarthenal blood were so drawn to Mael, even now – some whispering of instinct of that first alliance, forged on the water, between Imass and Tarthenal – or Toblakai, to use their true name. Before the Great Landings that brought the last of the giants who had chosen to remain pure of blood to this and other shores, where the first founders would become the vicious, spiteful gods of the Tarthenal.
But it was not just Gerun Eberict and the countless other citizens of Letheras who dwelt here who were unmindful – or, perhaps, forgetful – of the ancient significance of all that had been swept clean from the surface in this city.
The Errant moved forward. Through the estate’s outer wall. Then down, through the cobbles of the compound, sliding ghostly past the rubble and sand of fill, down into the foul, motionless air of the clay-lined tunnel. Knee-deep in thick, soupy water.
He faced the inner sloping wall of the tunnel, gauging his position relative to whatever remnants of the old temple remained beyond. And strode forward.
Shattered stone, jammed and packed tight, stained black by the thick, airless clays now filling every space. Evidence of fire in the burst cracks of foundation blocks. Remnants of ore-laden paints still clinging to fragments of plaster. Ubiquitous pieces of pottery, shapeless clumps of green copper, the mangled black knuckles of silver, the defiant gleam of red-tinged gold – all that remained of past complexities of mortal life, reminders of hands that had once touched, shaped, pressed tips to indent and nails to incise, brushed glaze and paint and dust from chipped rims; hands that left nothing behind but these objects poignant with failure.
Disgusted, nauseated, the god pushed his way through the detritus, and clawed his way clear: a steeply angled space, created by the partially collapsed inner wall. Blue tesserae to
paint an image of unbroken sea, but various pieces had fallen away, revealing grey plaster still bearing the grooved patterns left by the undersides of the minute cut tiles. In this cramped space the Errant crouched, gasping. Time told no bright tales. No, time delivered its mute message of dissolution with unrelieved monotony.
By the Abyss, such crushing weight!
The Errant drew a deep breath of the stale, dead air. Then another.
And sensed, not far away, the faint whisper of power. Residual, so meagre as to be meaningless, yet it started the god’s heart pounding hard in his chest. The sanctification remained. No desecration, making what he sought that much simpler. Relieved at the thought of being quickly done with this ghastly place, the Errant set out towards that power.
The altar was beneath a mass of rubble, the limestone wreckage so packed down that it must have come from a collapsing ceiling, the huge weight slamming down hard enough to shatter the stones of the floor beneath that runnelled block of sacred stone. Even better. And…yes, bone dry. He could murmur a thousand nudges into that surrounding matrix. Ten thousand.
Edging closer, the Errant reached down and settled one hand on the altar. He could not feel those runnels, could not feel the water-worn basalt, could not feel the deep-cut channels that had once vented living blood into the salty streams filling the runnels. Ah, we were thirsty in those days, weren’t we?
He awakened his own power – as much as she would give him, and for this task it was more than enough.
The Errant began weaving a ritual.
Advocate Sleem was a tall, thin man. Covering most of his forehead and spreading down onto his left cheek, reaching the line of the jaw, was a skin ailment that created a cracked scale pattern reminiscent of the bellies of newly hatched alligators. There were ointments that could heal this condition, but it was clear that the legendary advocate of Letherii law in fact cultivated this reptilian dermatosis, which so cleverly complemented both his reputation and his cold, lifeless eyes.
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