by Jon Kiln
“Oh get over yourself. I am back in you, aren’t I?” The devil sighed theatrically, as much as an incorporeal spirit can sigh, anyway. “Did you think that I would have left you to die out there, crippled and alone?”
“Yes,” Vekal said out loud. “That is precisely what I think that you would do.”
“Well, old habits and all that…” There was a curious feeling from the devil inside, and for a moment Vekal wondered if it might be shame, but knew that it couldn’t be. Perhaps evasion. Perhaps just more lies. “You have to admit, you did look pretty dead, even from the inside. Can you blame me for trying to jump ship?”
Jumping ship… The words of the imp made Vekal think of the Emerald and the night that the storm had hit. He had never seen waves so high as they had thrown the fat-bellied boat this way and that. The sight had gone beyond mere waves, and it had felt like the entire sea had risen up and sent its mountains of water against them. The crew of the Emerald—the ungrateful crew, he thought a little unkindly—had elected to throw their strange new passenger overboard in the height of the storm, certain that he and his evil were to blame for their sudden misfortune.
Maybe I was, Vekal mused, looking at the grey and dirty-blue seas and the quickly departing fisher boat ahead of him.
“What? You think that you have annoyed those bird-brained gods of yours by healing a few salty sailors in the middle of the Inner Sea?” The devil buzzed with mirth inside of him, referring to the fact of Vekal’s new found ability to ‘heal’ people when he heard their confessions. “And so they decided that the only recourse was to drown the lot of you? That’s not very forgiving, is it?”
“I never said that the gods were big on forgiveness,” Vekal muttered, and that at least touched a nerve with the spirit, as it fell silent. The priest guessed that it didn’t really bode well for the devil if the gods weren’t likely to pardon him his sins.
“And you tried to possess those poor people,” Vekal said. “How do you think the gods will look upon that behavior?” But from inside of him there was still no answer. Good, the priest thought, massaging his aching eyes and looking around him for the first time.
He stood on a thin strip of shingle and stone pebbles that must count as a beach in the Shattering Coasts. It was clear to see why they had got their name. Behind him the land shot upwards in rocky cliffs and headlands, speckled with thorny and shrubby sorts of trees. The cliffs were striated with deep lines of darker ores and cracks like the veins on a plant, which it appeared would grow wider and flake off easily under any amount of pressure. Around him the cliffs formed a small bay of freezing water, and spires and shelves of rock from these shattered cliffs stuck out in all directions, making this coast line probably one of the most hazardous to approach in anything bigger than a rowboat.
The air was filled with noise of surf against pebbles, and the harsh, mocking laughter of the many white-winged gulls of the cliffs. No sign of habitation, the priest thought. It would probably make sense that the terrified fisherman had deposited him in the remotest, most dangerous part of the coasts in revenge.
“Well, maybe you saved me from drowning just so that we could starve,” Vekal said with a morose grin. The idea of it seemed almost hysterically funny to him for a moment, and he wondered if he were losing his mind.
“No, more’s the pity,” Ikrit buzzed into his forebrain before receding just as easily below the blanket of his subconscious.
With a renewed feeling of purpose, even if it was only purpose born from wanting to spite the devil of the prize of his mind, Vekal turned and walked up the beach towards the gentlest of the rocky cliffs. His feet crunched on the shingle and stone underfoot, the only manmade sound it seemed in all of eternity. Up ahead he spied a place where an old watercourse had driven a channel deep into the rock, and formed a natural sort of stairwell before it had dried up or become diverted into new channels. He chose that as a good place to start, feeling his muscles ache and shake from his recent endeavors.
Come on, fiend! Vekal thought. “At least earn your keep! Give me strength to get up this cliff and maybe we’ll both be closer to our goal.”
“Foolish human. How on earth did your kind ever make it to spreading over the entire world?” Ikrit snarled in response. “You have next to zero awareness of your body. You haven’t eaten in little under a week, and I slowed your heart and stoppered your lungs while you were under water like you were a bug in a cocoon, waiting for spring. If it weren’t for my energies keeping your limbs moving and your heart pumping, and not to mention your spine in place, you’d be dying this very moment! It’s not an easy thing, managing so many squishy bits of you all at once you know.”
But despite the devil’s moans and grumbles, the priest still felt a small trickle of warmth spread through his arms and legs as the devil lent what magical powers that it had left to the task.
It would be enough, Vekal hoped. It had to be enough.
***
The gully should have been easy to climb for even a child, but in Vekal’s current condition it proved far more arduous than anticipated. Despite the devil’s threats, cajoling, and eventual encouragement, the priest moved up the old watercourse slowly and painfully. The strength that the devil had lent him was running out as his hands clasped rock and woody stem, and his back was throbbing ominously as he neared the summit.
The priest had no time for thought, all ounce of energy taken up in the physical task, and he had even less energy to spend on being wary as he hauled himself over the final rocky boulder and onto a grassy headland beyond.
“Get up! Get up, get up, get up!” the devil was repeating into his mind, but it seemed that both of them were at the end of their tether and ready to collapse. Vekal wondered if he would die of exhaustion, despite the devil’s best interests, or whether he would just become a walking mummified corpse, no flesh on his bones but the barest spark of vitality in sunken eyes.
“Give me a moment’s peace, imp,” Vekal coughed.
“Any more peace and you’ll be dead, and my foul old soul will drag yours all the way to hell with me. And I have no intention of going back there,” Ikrit exhorted. “Now get up and say hello like the civilized sort of sap you are.”
That piqued Vekal’s interest at least, as he cracked open his eyes to see, standing a little way away and regarding him with heavy eyes, a child.
The priest opened his mouth but no sound came out.
The child was a girl, with hair like the color of burnt paprika and blood. Her face was smattered with freckles under the grime, and she wore a collection of ragged robes that looked as though they had been cobbled together from at least a dozen different dresses. She was sitting on a rock not so far away, and looking at him as if he were the strangest thing to ever crawl up out of the sea, which, the priest thought, he probably was.
“Hello?” He found his voice, and as soon as he did the girl’s eyes widened and she sprang from her rock, seizing a tall stick that had been across her knees, and ran down the headland and into the shadow of the trees.
“Great. Nice way to go, milk-sap. Frighten the first chance we have of finding food.” Ikrit sighed.
“I didn’t mean to.” Vekal coughed, but the strange occurrence had at least given him the impetus to start to crawl and stumble his way towards the spot where the girl had been. From this closer vantage he could see that the girl hadn’t run away desperately, but had at least followed a sort of path between the trees—little more than a large animal hollow through thin and spindly hazel trees. With a groan, the priest forced himself to his feet and stumbled onto the path, catching at the trees as he half fell and half walked into the dark wood.
They hadn’t traveled very far by the time that the devil spoke up once more inside the priests’ mind. “Are you certain that this is the wisest course of action?” it said, as it had to block Vekal’s mind from experiencing yet another lancing pain of thorns entering his feet. His shoes, like half of his clothes it seemed, had disappeared
in the storm or his long watery hibernation. The Sin Eater did not know it as the devil was blocking all sensation from reaching him, but his feet were actually raw and bleeding.
The woods were thick and crowded, so much so that the priest thought that this must all be new growth, or cursed growth. Tree’s that were barely thicker than his arm or his midriff swung across his path and shot at crazy angles across each other, each searching for the watery light that filtered down from above. At his feet there also grew smaller shrubs with leaves the shape of hearts, flushed with green and edged in purple. The priest was so famished he might even try eating them.
The priest trudged and stumbled and fell along the path, but did not see any sign of the child. He was starting to think that it might even be some sort of hallucination, until a smell came to his nose. It wasn’t the smell of sodden wood and forest dirt, his senses marveled, and it wasn’t the smell of the sea salt air and mineral-laden rocks beyond. It was a smell that was as close to heaven as the priest could think of at that moment.
“Meat!” Ikrit and Vekal both thought at the same time, their feet stumbling a little faster down the path. They started to see a glimmer through the trees—a flash of brighter light when, finally, their knees gave out and they came crashing to the forest floor.
“Just a little further now,” the devil inside coaxed softly, itself tired almost to the point of quietude.
“I can’t,” Vekal was saying, tears in his eyes. “I just can’t. I’ve been beaten, drowned, starved…”
“You are one of the Unliving!” Ikrit rallied itself around anger, screaming the litany of the priestly caste known as the Sin Eaters at its last adherent. “What do you care for ill-health and pain? You cast no shadow, you will feel no fear—or was that all a lie?”
“No,” Vekal whispered, his eyes flickering open. “But I am just so tired.”
“You’ll get no sleep even when you’re dead, and one of your kind knows that for a fact. Now get up. Move that sack of bones and skin you call a body.” The devil’s words were harsh and unforgiving, just like the croaks of the albino desert crow, sacred to Lord Annwn.
Somehow, amazing even himself, Vekal tottered to his feet and took step after step along the mud and moss of the floor towards the source of the sustenance that might just save him. His vision was fading in and out, but the priest could sense the light and breeze on his face growing stronger as he staggered out of the tree cover and into a clearing barely big enough to hold the stilted hut inside. There were thick rushes on the roof, and a small stone chimney from which poured forth the white smoke of a new fire.
“By the Deep Seas and Wooden Father,” said a voice, much deeper and richer than Vekal thought the girl would possess. There was the sound of the wooden door banging open and a figure stepping down to the clearing beyond. Vekal caught an impression of flame-red hair and a shirt as deep green as the strange heart-shaped leaves underfoot.
“Karis, get the water pail, now, child!” the woman was saying as Vekal took another haltering step, before starting to feel incredibly faint as he fell to the floor.
6
Today’s bloodshed started very civilly, Suriyen thought—if war and bloodshed can ever really be thought of as civil. The teams of guards atop the Gate of Fuldoon had barely set aside their bowls of porridge and drank their flagon of stiff wine when the Menaali drums started up, followed by a loud cheer from below.
“They’re moving,” Ruyiman at her side said, wiping his mouth from his own food and peering over the ramparts. There were still the occasional spark and rattle of arrow against the wall, but Captain Suriyen could see that these were only the occasional and off-handed shots by Menaali archers trying their luck, not the co-ordinated volleys.
Suriyen scanned the empty bridge and the other side of river where columns of people were starting to convulse and move. They were many hundreds of feet away, and so she couldn’t make out much detail, but she wished that the Menaali captains would wear some sort of sash or flag. It would make them easier to pick out and kill, she thought wistfully.
The war drums were starting to beat, their pace gaining in pitch and intensity as Suriyen watched the army near the far bank. It was too far for her plan to work, but she knew that all she had to do was wait.
The sudden screeching wail of the war horns added to the mix. Each one the size of a man, and sat atop their own especial carts. Even now, many years later from the first time that she had ever heard them, they still sent a shiver down Suriyen’s spine. Just as, it appeared, they sent fear coiling through the rest of her own troops, as Ruyiman looked at her urgently.
“Orders, captain. Give ‘em something to fight for,” he said, nodding at how a few of the younger spearmen were looking decidedly pale.
“Like what?” Suriyen felt bad tempered and frustrated. “Try not to die? Try to kill as many as possible? What can I say to any of them that’ll keep them alive?”
Ruyiman looked at her for a moment in disgust, and then shook his head as he himself stood up and turned around, bellowing to the troops. “Right, head’s low and stay sharp, boys and girls!” He started to walk down the line, clapping arms on helmets and rattling spears and punching shoulders as he did so. “We got a whole load of unwashed brutes out there who want some of what we got, right? And we ‘ain’t gonna give it to them are we?”
A half-hearted chorus of “no” from half of the troops there.
“What was that?” Ruyiman laughed, the picture of scandalized mirth. “You’re almost opening the doors for them! Who are we, boys and girls—we’re Fuldoon! Fuldoon’s finest! Fuldoon the greatest city in the South! Fuldoon that’s never been conquered, never fallen. Who are we?”
“Fuldoon!” The cry came back a little heartier than before.
“Say what?” Ruyiman shouted.
“Fuldoon!” The shout came louder.
“Who’s not going to fall today?” Ruyiman walked up and down the line.
“Fuldoon!” Every soldier now shouted.
“Who’s going to teach those northern horse traders a lesson they’ll never forget?” Ruyiman was screaming.
“Fuldoon! Fuldoon! Fuldoon!” The shout became a chant, as Ruyiman jogged back to the captain’s position and collapsed with his back against the wall.
“If you pardon me, but that is what you’re supposed to tell ‘em ma’am,” he said a little heavily. All his captain sitting beside him could think was that the chant and the war drums of both sides seemed to meld into one unholy cacophony, an ode to the imminent bloodshed and terror they were all about to unleash.
“There!” Suriyen hissed, peering across the bridge to where something strange was happening. Unlike the previous few days, before the armies of the Menaali started to march across the bridge to once again try and batter down the reinforced gates of Fuldoon, there was a commotion on the far bank and a small band of people broke from the lines and strode forward, a few steps onto their side of the bridge.
“What is it—some heathen priests?” Ruyiman was whispering.
Suriyen watched as one smaller shaped stopped and raised its hands—was it a woman? Did it have long hair? And beside it stood a larger figure, and they both let the final third figure in the middle stand clear. He was a great, hulking shape. Almost twice the proportions of the woman, with rounded metal at his shoulders and a helmet like a great horned goat. A chill went down the captain’s spine.
“Get me a bow!” She stood up, shouting out loud, before leaping up atop the battlements themselves, and not behind them.
“Captain?” Ruyiman was looking at her oddly. She was clearly visible from the other side, and all it would take would be one of those lucky Menaali archers…
“Get me a spear then. Now!” Suriyen snarled, thrusting her hand out to the nearest of the wall guards who looked nervously from second-in-command Ruyiman to the wall-captain above him.
The large, hulking figure in the horned helmet started to walk casually across the bridge towards
Fuldoon, looking for all the world as if he expected the gates and all of the defenses to melt away before him.
“Soldier,” Suriyen hissed again. “Give me your god’s be-damned spear now if you want to live.”
“I-I, yes, sir,” he said, handing up his nearly six-foot lance that he would use for stabbing at Menaali wall climbers and ladder scalers when the time came. Above him, Suriyen snarled in delight as she pivoted on her heels and looked down at the almost gigantic man striding nonchalantly towards her across the bridge. As Ruyiman looked up at her, the only figure atop the battlements, it seemed as though he might be looking at a spirit or a phantom. Her face went pale and her eyes narrow as she pointed with the spear down at the figure.
“Hear me now! I know you, Dal Grehb. I am Suriyen, and I know what you are.” And, with a grunt of frustration and anger, Suriyen bent her back and almost knelt down, before springing up to hurl the spear high into the clear and bright skies over the siege, and everyone held their breath as they watched the spinning needle swoop and fall, heading straight towards the onlooking warlord, Dal Grehb.
***
Suriyen felt her heart slow as she watched the spear. Could this really be it? Could this be the moment that it all changed? That I finally know peace? The spear arched through the dome of the sky, before plummeting downwards like the vengeance of a god themselves straight towards the figure who stood below, looking upwards at its oncoming doom.
The warlord was almost halfway across the bridge, and had stopped. He didn’t move.
The sound of the spear biting the heavy wooden planks of the road surface could be heard across the whole battlefield, and Suriyen thought that perhaps the same could be said of the sound of her heart breaking. What had she been thinking? That she was good enough to kill at over a hundred yards?