by Darius Hinks
“Isten!” cried Puthnok, grabbing her arm and pointing across the crowds.
For a moment, Isten thought the flames had reached up into the night sky, forming a column of fire, but then she realized her mistake. The flames were being reflected by a towering colossus that was wading through the crowds. It was identical to the one that killed Amoria and the one she saw fighting headhunters in Brauron.
“An Ignorant Man,” she whispered, as the giant automaton broke into a run, causing the ground to shudder as it pounded across the square. Its mane of metal coils was curling and growing as it ran, flashing in the firelight, adding to the impression that the giant was alight.
Behind it, at the back of the square, Isten could see the phraters, hunched over their braziers, hurling powders and oils, their golden masks lit from beneath as their sorcery blazed in the metal bowls. The Old King was watching calmly as the Ignorant Man ran towards Isten, leaning on his copper staff as though he were watching a boring play.
The crowds parted in terror as the giant passed, abandoning their protest and scattering through archways and alleys.
Even the hiramites faltered at the sight of the metal titan. They backed down the steps and left the Exiles alone on the scaffold as the Ignorant Man thundered towards them.
Isten thought of the dead fox, rigid and twisted in mounds of rubble. “No,” she said quietly, looking down at Puthnok. “I won’t let it happen.”
The Ignorant Man extended its hand, fingers splayed, and the flagstones detonated, splitting into shards of gold. A glittering explosion engulfed the crowds. Screams cut through the night. People were ripped apart. Blood shimmered as body parts clanged across the square, half metal and half flesh, trailing wires and intestines.
The fighters around Puthnok fired a barrage of crossbow bolts and the giant’s head jolted back, kicking up sparks and causing the Ignorant Man to stagger and raise its arm in a defensive gesture, as though swatting flies.
None of the bolts pierced its mask and, surrounded by dozens of screaming, wounded people, the Ignorant Man calmly raised its palm again, aiming it at the scaffold.
Isten could see the intricate circle engraved into the giant’s hand, glowing with heat.
Images streamed through her mind: Amoria, dead in the warehouse; the corpses in Brauron, piled on the riverbank; Alzen’s terrified victims, weeping as he ripped their souls out. So much death. So much pain. All wrought by the Elect. Finally, she saw the Sisters of Solace – Naos, bidding her farewell in the library of Alabri House with the words: “The future is not fixed.”
All those deaths. All those poor souls robbed to create Alzen’s power. Their deaths could be worth something. For weeks, Isten had known what she carried. The monster coiled beneath her skull. She had tried to hide from the truth, but here it was, charging towards her across Verulum Square, preparing to murder every brave soul who had stood with Puthnok. The Elect had to be destroyed. And she had the power to do it.
Isten relaxed, allowing the flame at the back of her thoughts to erupt, billowing through her head. Light filled her eyes – the light she had stolen as Alzen died in the theatre, grasping at infinity.
She reached out with her right hand and her body convulsed, jolting as the light ripped through her palm, tearing the darkness open, crossing the heads of the crowd and slamming into the Ignorant Man.
It staggered, engulfed by a blaze of golden filaments.
The crowds below were bathed in brilliant light and Puthnok and the others backed away from Isten, lit up by the glare, shaking their heads in wonder as her body shuddered. The same metal threads that had engulfed the Ignorant Man were also erupting from Isten, surrounding her in a golden cocoon.
The crowds stared as the blast grew in brightness and ferocity, pummelling the Ignorant Man.
The giant staggered again, its hands raised in front of its face; then it fell, hitting the flagstones like a falling tower, shaking statues and throwing up a cloud of embers and dust.
Isten was barely aware of what was happening in the square. Her thoughts were already elsewhere. Her mind had leapt to a thousand places, racing across the city, tumbling down the Saraca, blazing through windows, roaring down streets, expanding, growing, engulfing Athanor’s unmappable sprawl. She laughed. She could see everything. Feel everything. Her veins meshed with walkways and spires. She was becoming the city. It was orbiting her, turning in her wake, caught in her gravity.
The city shifted and strained at her touch, stretching and growing, like leaves kissed by the sun. As Isten’s mind soared around the outer walls, she was flooded with joy and comprehension. She heard the city’s heart beat and it was not, as she might have guessed, in the temples of the Elect. It was in a brothel, in the gardens of Alabri House, cradled by the Sisters of Solace. They were the soul of Athanor. And they had sent Alzen to her. They had foreseen this moment. They kept her alive for this. Her final reservations fell away and she focused her thoughts back on Verulum Square, revelling in her ferocious power.
The Ignorant Man was little more than a sparking heap of scrap, its back arched and one of its arms raised to the heavens in a silent plea.
Most of the crowds had reached the relative safety of the streets around the square, but they were still watching to see what happened next.
Back in her own flesh, Isten was shocked by the din that surrounded her. Her body was inside a tornado of metal strands. They were humming and clicking around her like insects, fluttering across her skin and buffeting her hair.
“Isten!” cried Puthnok. Her face was anguished and afraid. “What are you doing? What’s happened to you?”
Isten was about to reply, when she saw movement on the far side of the square. The Curious Men were working furiously over their braziers. Plumes of smoke were rising into the darkness, filled with embers and flashes of light.
In a second, she understood, seeing easily into the minds of the phraters. They were summoning more Ignorant Men. The effort of producing so many was half-killing them. They cried out in pain as the columns of smoke took form, solidifying, becoming golden titans.
“Isten!” cried Puthnok again, sounding even more horrified, but Isten had no time to respond. The Ignorant Men were already running across the square, lights flashing at the joints of their armoured bodies. There were six of them and, as they ran, their weight split the flagstones and toppled the statues of the Elect watching over the tombs.
As she watched the statues fall, Isten remembered the corpses that were seated at their base, way beneath the ground in the catacombs – the bodies of Curious Men, preserved over centuries.
She smiled, realizing the perfect way to stop the attack. She plunged her thoughts down into the catacombs and into the dusty flesh of the corpses under the statues. Synapses flared and muscles twitched as Isten’s power pulsed through the cadavers. All across the catacombs, the corpses of long-dead phraters rose from their seats, trailing shreds of skin as their eyelids rolled back from empty sockets.
Up on the surface of the square, the Ignorant Men slowed and halted, confused to see architecture coming to life around them. As Isten’s will animated the corpses, they in turn roused the statues built in their likeness.
Isten was still laughing as she sent the crumbling fifty-foot statues lumbering across the square and smashing into the Ignorant Men.
The Ignorant Men punched and grappled with the statues, shedding chunks of marble and gold, filling the night with an apocalyptic din.
The phraters on the far side of the square staggered back from their braziers, smoke trailing from their masks as they collapsed, exhausted and shocked. Only Seleucus remained standing, watching the clashing giants with the same calm dispassion he had shown all evening.
As Isten’s power continued to grow, more of the statues shrugged off centuries of dust and lurched into movement, pounding into the fray, slamming lichened fists into the Ignorant Men.
Isten enjoyed the irony of the scene for a while, but the energy
jolting through her soon made it absurd to pretend this was a physical fight. She raised her arms and the square exploded: statues, giants, tombs and sepulchres; everything detonating at once, filling the air with metal and rock. The noise grew even louder and the figures next to Isten on the scaffold dropped to their knees, howling, their hands over their ears.
“Isten!” wailed Puthnok, trying to call her back from the apocalypse.
Isten’s perception was now so heightened she could feel every molecule of the inferno, every cell, warping and changing in the heat.
One by one, the phraters collapsed, crumbling like coals in a brazier, their robes erupting into flame and their helmets melting into their skulls.
Too late, the Old King decided to act, striding through the flames towards her. She could see his thoughts as clearly as her own. He was afraid and furious. He raised his staff and pointed it at her, his lion running after him, preparing to attack, but it was absurd. He was like a rat attacking a tornado.
Light flashed at the end of his staff and something spat through the air.
A shard of gold sank into her chest. It should have been enough to stop her heart, but it did no more damage than an insect bite.
She crushed him. Ending his reign with a casual swipe of her hand, flattening him with a golden tsunami, ripping him apart with razor-sharp beauty. Shock waves rippled through the air and smashed into the lion, shattering it, scattering shards of emerald through the crowd.
With the Elect lying mangled and crushed, Isten embraced the city, feeling its extremities as clearly as she could feel her blazing fingertips. She could mould it and reform it with a thought, casting streets into the sky and ripping buildings from the earth. Athanor was hers. As she reached out into the stars, she realized that she could send the city anywhere. Conjunction, the power hoarded by the Elect for all these centuries, was hers.
As the storm raged around her, Isten felt a moment of doubt. Her whole life she had been a disaster – ruining everything she touched. What kind of ruin would she wreak now? What would she do with this kind of power at her command?
Someone was screaming her name. With incredible difficulty, Isten managed to bring her gaze back to the scaffold.
Most of the Exiles were lying face down on the splintered wood, hands clamped over their heads as a metal tempest raged around them, but Puthnok was still on her knees, reaching through the tumult, tears streaming down her face, pleading with her to stop.
Isten walked towards her, carried on waves of metal, light bleeding from her eyes.
She grabbed Puthnok’s hand.
Puthnok could barely look at her. She squinted into the glare, shielding her eyes as Isten leant closer.
“Help me,” said Isten. She had intended her words to be a whisper, but the air shook with the force of them.
Puthnok shook her head, buffeted by shreds of metal, gasping for breath. “How?” she cried, hanging desperately onto Isten’s hand as the storm continued to grow.
“You are the good in me.” Isten’s voice was a thunderclap. “Make me more than a weapon. Tell me what to do,” she looked up at the metal-lashed sky. “Tell me what to do with this.”
Puthnok stared at her with a mixture of terror and dawning recognition. “What can you do?”
“Anything!” laughed Isten.
Despite the violence of the storm, Puthnok’s anguish started to fade. Clinging to Isten’s hand, she managed to stand, staggering like she was on the deck of a listing ship. “Can you take us home?”
Everything fell away: doubt, grief and guilt, transformed by an alchymia greater than anything Alzen could have imagined.
Isten embraced Puthnok, nodding and weeping with joy, flooding the city with light, hurling it into the void.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Marc, Penny and Nick at Angry Robot for all your support and guidance and for steering Athanor so skilfully onto the printed page. You are the nicest kind of angry and I’ve had great fun working with you.
Matt Keefe, you’ve probably learned your lesson (never ask Darius if he needs anything reading!) but your feedback on those early drafts was invaluable, as was your final edit, and I can’t thank you enough for all your help and insight.
Nick Kyme, you had nothing whatsoever to do with this book. However… I would never have had the confidence to invent my own worlds without the help you gave me when I was writing about other people’s.
Mum and dad, you filled my childhood with books and a love of stories, which is probably where all my problems began, so thanks for that.
Arthur and Joe, fruit of my loins, I would like to thank you for being a constant reminder that life is boundlessly wonderful and always worth fighting for.
Lastly, I’d like to thank my wife, Kathryn, for listening so patiently, reading so carefully, for being the most honest person I ever met, and for not kicking me in the balls when I said I’d like to be a full-time author.
About the Author
Darius Hinks works and lives in Nottinghamshire, England. He spent the nineties playing guitar for the grunge band, Cable, but when his music career ended in a bitter lawsuit, he turned to writing. His first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award and, so far at least, none of his novels have resulted in litigation.
dariushinks.com • twitter.com/dariushinks
By the Same Author
Warrior Priest
Sigvald
Island of Blood
Razumov's Tomb
Sanctus
Stormcast
Mephiston: Blood of Sanguinius
Mephiston: Revenant Crusade
Warqueen
Blackstone Fortress
The Orion Trilogy
The Vaults of Winter
Tears of Isha
The Council of Beasts
Social Robotics
Get all the news by joining our mailing list, the New Robot Army
Follow us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Gaze in awe at Instagram
ANGRY ROBOT
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
20 Fletcher Gate,
Nottingham,
NG1 2FZ • UK
angryrobotbooks.com
twitter.com/angryrobotbooks
Feed on dreams
An Angry Robot paperback original 2019
Copyright © Darius Hinks 2019
Darius Hinks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
UK ISBN 978 0 85766 789 2
US ISBN 978 0 85766 789 2
EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 790 8
Cover by John Coulthart.
Set by Argh! Nottingham.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.
ISBN: 978-0-85766-790-8
lter: grayscale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share