He could see daylight through the outer doors – the morning was dragging on. Yet from the passage at their backs there had been…nothing. Were they all dead in there? Bleeding out on the altar stone? Or had they found themselves somehow trapped, or lost with no answers – was Clip now dead, or had he been delivered into the Dying God’s hands?
The attackers were running out of space – too many corpses – and most now crawled or even slithered into weapon range.
‘Something’s wrong,’ gasped Kedeviss. ‘Skintick – go – we can hold them off now. Go – find out if…’
If we’re wasting our time. I understand. He pulled back, one shoulder cracking into the frame of the entranceway. Whirling, he set off along the corridor. When horror stalked the world, it seemed that every grisly truth was laid bare. Life’s struggle ever ended in failure. No victory was pure, or clean. Triumph was a comforting lie and always revealed itself to be ephemeral, hollow and shortlived. This is what assailed the spirit when coming face to face with horror.
And so few understood that. So few…
He clawed through foul smoke, heard his own heartbeat slowing, dragging even as his breaths faded. What – what is happening? Blindness. Silence, an end to all motion. Skintick sought to push forward, only to find that desire was empty when without will, and when there was no strength, will itself was a conceit. Glyphs flowed down like black rain, on his face, his neck and his hands, streaming hot as blood.
Somehow, he fought onward, his entire body dragging behind him as if half dead, an impediment, a thing worth forgetting. He wanted to pull free of it, even as he understood that his flesh was all that kept him alive – yet he yearned for dissolution, and that yearning was growing desperate.
Wait. This is not how I see the world. This is not the game I choose to play – I will not believe in this abject…surrender.
It is what kelyk offers. The blood of the Dying God delivers escape – from everything that matters. The invitation is so alluring, the promise so entrancing.
Dance! All around you the world rots. Dance! Poison into your mouths and poison out from your mouths. Dance, damn you, in the dust of your dreams. I have looked into your eyes and I have seen that you are nothing. Empty.
Gods, such seductive invitation!
The recognition sobered him, abrupt as a punch in the face. He found himself lying on the tiles of the corridor, the inner doors almost within reach. In the chamber beyond darkness swirled like thick smoke, like a storm trapped beneath the domed ceiling. He heard singing, soft, the voice of a child.
He could not see Nimander, or Desra or Aranatha. The body of Clip was sprawled not five paces in, face upturned, eyes opened, fixed and seemingly sightless.
Trembling with weakness, Skintick pulled himself forward.
The moment he had bulled his way into the altar chamber, Nimander had felt something tear, as if he had plunged through gauze-thin cloth. From the seething storm he had plunged into, he emerged to sudden calm, to soft light and gentle currents of warm air. His first step landed on something lumpy that twisted beneath his weight. Looking down, he saw a small doll of woven grasses and twigs. And, scattered on the floor all round, there were more such figures. Some of strips of cloth, others of twine, polished wood and fired clay. Most were broken – missing limbs, or headless. Others hung down from the plain, low ceiling, twisted beneath nooses of leather string, knotted heads tilted over, dark liquid dripping.
The wordless singing was louder here, seeming to emanate from all directions. Nimander could see no walls – just floor and ceiling, both stretching off into formless white.
And dolls, thousands of dolls. On the floor, dangling from the ceiling.
‘Show yourself,’ said Nimander.
The singing stopped.
‘Show yourself to me.’
‘If you squeeze them,’ said the voice – a woman’s or a young boy’s – ‘they leak. I squeezed them all. Until they broke.’ There was a pause, and then a soft sigh. ‘None worked.’
Nimander did not know where to look – the mangled apparitions hanging before him filled him with horror now, as he saw their similarity to the scarecrows of the fields outside Bastion. They are the same. They weren’t planted rows, nothing made to deliver a yield. They were…versions.
‘Yes. Failing one by one – it’s not fair. How did he do it?’
‘What are you?’ Nimander asked.
The voice grew sly, ‘On the floor of the Abyss – yes, there is a floor – there are the fallen. Gods and goddesses, spirits and prophets, disciples and seers, heroes and queens and kings – junk of existence. You can play there. I did. Do you want to? Do you want to play there, too?’
‘No.’
‘All broken, more broken than me.’
‘They call you the Dying God.’
‘All gods are dying.’
‘But you are no god, are you?’
‘Down on the floor, you never go hungry. Am I a god now? I must be. Don’t you see? I ate so many of them. So many parts, pieces. Oh, their power, I mean. My body didn’t need food. Doesn’t need it, I mean, yes, that is fair to say. It is so fair to say. I first met him on the floor – he was exploring, he said, and I had travelled so far…so far.’
‘Your worshippers—’
‘Are mostly dead. More to drink. All that blood, enough to make a river, and the current can take me away from here, can bring me back. All the way back. To make her pay for what she did!’
Having come from chaos, it was no surprise that the god was insane. ‘Show yourself.’
‘The machine was broken, but I didn’t know that. I rode its back, up and up. But then something happened. An accident. We fell a long way. We were terribly broken, both of us. When they dragged me out. Now I need to make a new version, just like you said. And you have brought me one. It will do. I am not deaf to its thoughts. I understand its chaos, its pains and betrayals. I even understand its arrogance. It will do, it will do.’
‘You cannot have him,’ said Nimander. ‘Release him.’
‘None of these ones worked. All the power just leaks out. How did he do it?’
One of these dolls. He is one of these dolls. Hiding in the multitude.
The voice began singing again. Wordless, formless.
He drew his sword.
‘What are you doing?’
The iron blade slashed outward, chopping through the nearest figures. Strings cut, limbs sliced away, straw and grass drifting in the air.
A cackle, and then: ‘You want to find me? How many centuries do you have to spare?’
‘As many as I need,’ Nimander replied, stepping forward and swinging again. Splintering wood, shattering clay. Underfoot he ground his heel into another figure.
‘I’ll be gone long before then. The river of blood you provided me – my way out. Far away I go! You can’t see it, can you? The gate you’ve opened here. You can’t even see it.’
Nimander destroyed another half-dozen dolls.
‘Never find me! Never find me!’
A savage blur of weapons as Salind charged Seerdomin. Each blow he caught with his tulwar, and each blow thundered up his arm, shot agony through his bones. He reeled back beneath the onslaught. Three steps, five, ten. It was all he could do simply to defend himself. And that, he knew, could not last.
The Redeemer wanted him to hold against this?
He struggled on, desperate.
She was moaning, a soft, yearning sound. A sound of want. Mace heads beat against his weapon, sword blades, the shafts of spears, flails, daggers, scythes – a dozen arms swung at him. Impacts thundered through his body.
He could not hold. He could not—
An axe edge tore into his left shoulder, angled up to slam into the side of his face. He felt his cheekbone and eye socket collapse inward. Blinded, Seerdomin staggered, attempting a desperate counter-attack, the tulwar slashing out. The edge bit into wood, splintering it. Something struck him high on his chest, snapping a c
lavicle. As his weapon arm sagged, suddenly lifeless, he reached across and took the sword with his other hand. Blood ran down from his shoulder – he was losing all strength.
Another edge chopped into him and he tottered, then fell on to his back.
Salind stepped up to stand directly over him.
He stared up into her dark, glittering eyes.
After a moment Nimander lowered his sword. The Dying God was right – this was pointless. ‘Show yourself, you damned coward!’
Aranatha was suddenly at his side. ‘He must be summoned,’ she said.
‘You expect him to offer us his name?’
The Dying God spoke. ‘Who is here? Who is here?’
‘I am the one,’ answered Aranatha, ‘who will summon you.’
‘You do not know me. You cannot know me!’
‘I know your path,’ she replied. ‘I know you spoke with the one named Hairlock, on the floor of the Abyss. And you imagined you could do the same, that you could fashion for yourself a body. Of wood, of twine, of clay—’
‘You don’t know me!’
‘She discarded you,’ said Aranatha, ‘didn’t she? The fragment of you that was left afterwards. Tainted childlike, abandoned.’
‘You cannot know this – you were not there!’
Aranatha frowned. ‘No, I was not there. Yet…the earth trembled. Children woke. There was great need. You were the part of her…that she did not want.’
‘She will pay! And for you – I know you now – and it is too late!’
Aranatha sighed. ‘Husband, Blood Sworn to Nightchill,’ she intoned, ‘child of Thelomen Tartheno Toblakai, Bellurdan Skullcrusher, I summon you.’ And she held out her hand, in time for something to slap hard into its grip. A battered, misshapen puppet dangled, one arm snapped off, both legs broken away at the knees, a face barely discernible, seemingly scorched by fire. Aranatha faced Nimander. ‘Here is your Dying God.’
Around them the scene began dissolving, crumbling away.
‘He does not speak,’ Nimander said, eyeing the mangled puppet.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Curious.’
‘Are you certain you have him, Aranatha?’
She met his eyes, and then shrugged.
‘What did he mean, that he knew you? And how – how did you know his name?’
She blinked, and then frowned down at the puppet she still held out in one hand. ‘Nimander,’ she whispered in a small voice, ‘so much blood…’
Reaching out to Clip, Skintick dragged the man close, studied the face, the staring eyes, and saw something flicker to life. ‘Clip?’
The warrior shifted his gaze, struggling to focus, and then he scowled. His words came out in an ugly croak. ‘Fuck. What do you want?’
Sounds, motion, and then Nimander was there, kneeling on the other side of Clip. ‘We seem,’ he said, ‘to have succeeded.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know, Skin. Right now, I don’t know anything.’
Skintick saw Aranatha standing just near a massive block of stone – the altar. She was holding a doll or puppet of some sort. ‘Where’s Desra?’ he suddenly asked, looking round.
‘Over here.’
The foul smoke was clearing. Skintick lifted himself into a sitting position and squinted in the direction of the voice. In the wall behind the altar and to the left, almost hidden between columns, there was a narrow door, through which Desra now emerged. She was soaked in blood, although by the way she moved, none of it was her own. ‘Some sort of High Priest, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Trying to protect a corpse, or what I think is a corpse.’ She paused, and then spat on to the floor. ‘Strung up like one of those scarecrows, but the body parts…all wrong, all sewn together—’
‘The Dying God,’ said Aranatha, ‘sent visions of what he wanted. Flawed. But what leaked out tasted sweet.’
From the corridor Kedeviss and Nenanda arrived. They both looked round, their faces flat, their eyes bludgeoned.
‘I think we killed them all,’ said Kedeviss. ‘Or the rest fled. This wasn’t a fight – this was a slaughter. It made no sense—’
‘Blood,’ said Nimander, studying Clip – who remained lying before him – with something like suspicion. ‘You are back with us?’
Clip swung his scowl on to Nimander. ‘Where are we?’
‘A city called Bastion.’
A strange silence followed, but it was one that Skintick understood. The wake of our horror. It settles, thickens, forms a hard skin – something lifeless, smooth. We’re waiting for it to finish all of that, until it can take our weight once more.
And then we leave here.
‘We still have far to go,’ said Nimander, straightening.
In Skintick’s eyes, his kin – his friend – looked aged, ravaged, his eyes haunted and bleak. The others were no better. None of them had wanted this. And what they had done here…it had all been for Clip.
‘Blood,’ said Clip, echoing Nimander, and he slowly climbed to his feet. He glared at the others. ‘Look at you. By Mother Dark, I’d swear you’ve been rolling in the waste pits of some abattoir. Get cleaned up or you won’t have my company for much longer.’ He paused, and his glare hardened into something crueller. ‘I smell murder. Human cults are pathetic things. From now on, spare me your lust for killing innocents. I’d rather not be reminded of whatever crimes you committed in the name of the Son of Darkness. Yes,’ he added, baring his teeth, ‘he has so much to answer for.’
Standing over him, weapons whirling, spinning. Seerdomin watched her with his one remaining eye, waiting for the end to all of this, an end he only faintly regretted. The failure, his failure, yes, that deserved some regret. But then, had he truly believed he could stop this apparition?
He said I was dying.
I’m dying again.
All at once, she was still. Her eyes like hooded lanterns, her arms settling as if the dance had danced its way right out of her and now spun somewhere unseen. She stared down at him without recognition, and then she turned away.
He heard her stumbling back the way she had come.
‘That was long enough.’
Seerdomin turned his head, saw the Redeemer standing close. Not a large man. Not in any way particularly impressive. Hard enough, to be sure, revealing his profession as a soldier, but otherwise unremarkable. ‘What made you what you are?’ he asked – or tried to – his mouth filled with blood that frothed and spattered with every word.
The Redeemer understood him none the less. ‘I don’t know. We may possess ambition, and with it a self-image both grandiose and posturing, but they are empty things in the end.’ Then he smiled. ‘I do not recall being such a man.’
‘Why did she leave, Redeemer?’
The answer was long in coming. ‘You had help, I believe. And no, I do not know what will come of that. Can you wait? I may need you again.’
Seerdomin managed a laugh. ‘Like this?’
‘I cannot heal you. But I do not think you will…cease. Yours is a strong soul, Seerdomin. May I sit down beside you? It has been a long time since I last had someone to speak to.’
Well, here I bleed. But there is no pain. ‘As long as I can,’ he said, ‘you will have someone to speak to.’
The Redeemer looked away then, so that Seerdomin could not see his sudden tears.
‘He didn’t make it,’ Monkrat said, straightening.
Gradithan glowered down at Seerdomin’s corpse. ‘We were so close, too. I don’t understand what’s happened, I don’t understand at all.’
He turned slightly and studied the High Priestess where she knelt on the muddy floor of the tent. Her face was slack, black drool hanging from her mouth. ‘She used it up. Too soon, too fast, I think. All that wasted blood…’
Monkrat cleared his throat. ‘The visions—’
‘Nothing now,’ Gradithan snapped. ‘Find some more kelyk.’
At that Salind’s head lifted, a sudden thirst burning in her eyes. Seeing this, Gra
dithan laughed. ‘Ah, see how she worships now. An end to all those doubts. One day, Monkrat, everyone will be like her. Saved.’
Monkrat seemed to hesitate.
Gradithan turned back and spat on to Seerdomin’s motionless, pallid visage. ‘Even you, Monkrat,’ he said. ‘Even you.’
‘Would you have me surrender my talents as a mage, Urdo?’
‘Not yet. But yes, one day, you will do that. Without regrets.’
Monkrat set off to find another cask of kelyk.
Gradithan walked over to Salind. He crouched in front of her, leaned forward to lick the drool from her lips. ‘We’ll dance together,’ he said. ‘Are you eager for that?’
He saw the answer in her eyes.
High atop the tower, in the moment that Silanah stirred – cold eyes fixed upon the pilgrim encampment beyond the veil of Night – Anomander Rake had reached out to still her with the lightest of touches.
‘Not this time, my love,’ he said in a murmur. ‘Soon. You will know.’
Slowly, the enormous dragon settled once more, eyes closing to the thinnest of slits.
The Son of Darkness let his hand remain, resting there on her cool, scaled neck. ‘Do not fear,’ he said, ‘I will not restrain you next time.’
He sensed the departure of Spinnock Durav, on a small fast cutter into the Ortnal beyond Nightwater. Perhaps the journey would serve him well, a distance ever stretching between the warrior and what haunted him.
And he sensed, too, the approach of Endest Silann down along the banks of the river, his oldest friend, who had one more task ahead of him. A most difficult one.
But these were difficult times, he reflected.
Anomander Rake left Silanah then, beneath Darkness that never broke.
North and west of Bastion, Kallor walked an empty road.
He had found nothing worthwhile in Bastion. The pathetic remnant of one of Nightchill’s lovers, a reminder of curses voiced long ago, a reminder of how time twisted everything, like a rope binding into ever tighter knots and kinks. Until what should have been straight was now a tangled, useless mess.
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