by Ben Galley
‘You came to me in the end, eh?’ she called up the dune, as she put bare feet to its slope. Her words were as malformed as her lips. Behind her, the remaining Ghouls were hauling themselves up and forming a pack. ‘Thought you might, somehow. You knew I wouldn’t stop, see? So you had to come finish it for yourself. And here you are, eh? Well, that proved fuckin’ successful, didn’t it? Ready to die, eh?’
Nilith was on the cusp of threatening to ruin the other side of Krona’s face when the sand beneath her began to quiver. With a lurch of her stomach, she felt the dune shift to the side. The grains around her boots danced away to reveal the ridges of a thick black carapace. Nilith dropped to her knees, hugging the edges of the shell as Krona tumbled from its side with a curse. Two whip-like antennae rose from the sand, each sporting a glowing purple tip. A low clicking began to rise, like clockwork being wound.
Up went the frenzied cry of ‘Dunewyrm!’ from the campfires. In the desert, few words had the power to chill a person. That just so happened to be one of them.
Eyes so wide they hurt her cheeks, Nilith watched the many legs unfolding, and the sand scattering from the creature’s sides in clouds. Five, ten, twenty, thirty feet of carapace was revealed, black as sin and solid as stone. The plates clanked noisily as ripples ran through its hide. A hissing joined the hum, as if it were some machine of steam. The wyrm’s head emerged from the sand. Black spines ringed its face; a horrifying crown to the gnashing, violet mandibles. Its antennae shivered as it let loose a deafening, burbling roar.
Nilith knew then it was too late to run. Instead, she wedged her sword’s hilt under the dunewyrm’s armour and hung on for all she was worth – not a moment too soon. The monster lurched forwards, travelling in one effortless surge. No canter or gallop, just speed and hungry intent. The rumble of its claws striking the sand drowned out the cries. Nilith had thought these creatures close to myth two moments ago. Now she was riding one.
The wyrm reared up over the nearest Ghoul. Noxious dribble spewed into the man’s eyes, and he managed only a short scream before the beast’s disjointed jaws enveloped him. The man’s armour split under three quick bites, and then he was swallowed whole. Nilith pressed herself close to the carapace, feeling the undulations pass beneath her as the creature’s gullet went to work.
A spear smashed into the wyrm’s carapace a yard from her hand. It barely punctured the shell, and its owner stared for a moment, confused and disheartened, before the dunewyrm’s spiked tail spread him across the sand like jam across grey toast.
Nilith could do nothing but cling on and pray to any god who was listening that the creature would be full by the time she was shaken free. For the moment, at least, she could view the carnage from a relatively safe – if not bizarre – position. The wyrm had no care for the Ghouls, batting aside, crushing or swatting aside anybody who dared to come close or couldn’t run fast enough. That meant pretty much the entire band.
Nilith watched as the brutal vengeance was doled out: for her, for the bodies in the tent, and for however many others these bandits had wronged. It didn’t matter that the revenge wasn’t being delivered by her hands; just that the Ghouls received it. After all, her hands couldn’t rip people in two.
As the wyrm paused briefly to look around for something else to gobble, a sword came swinging towards Nilith. She moved her leg just in time to avoid having it hacked off. The blade dug deep between the carapace instead, with Krona snarling on the other end of it. The dunewyrm screeched, thrashing its tail. Nilith hung on dearly as Krona was knocked flat.
Though it cut deep into her palms, Nilith grabbed the throwing knife and hurled it at the vile woman. To her delight, it skewered Krona through the bicep, and the Ghoul leader wailed as she realised she was momentarily pinned to the sand.
Krona gave Nilith a stare so full of hate, the empress felt her skin prickle. But Krona’s cries had attracted the attention of the dunewyrm. The creature turned on her, jaws gnashing, eager to finish the job Nilith had started.
‘No!’ Krona’s scream was cut short as everything above her chest was turned to mush with fierce snaps of razored mandibles.
Nilith was considering sliding off the beast and running for the nearest dune when another screech stopped her dead. Another monstrous shape surged out of the darkness, antennae aglow, jaws splayed and quivering. Nilith immediately realised what was happening; she had seen wolves fight over a deer carcass many times before. Her fear increased to mortal dread.
The newcomer wyrm charged straight for the first. Nilith tensed every muscle as they collided with ear-splitting screeches. Banks of legs clawed and clawed until they were entangled, and their mouths and front legs grappled. Their antennae whipped back and forth, cutting red stripes on Nilith’s forearms.
Noticing its opponent had a morsel clinging to its back, the second dunewyrm reared up to snap at Nilith. It was time to let go, she decided. It was either that or lose an arm. As the wyrm’s jaws opened up, looking like the ugliest orchid imaginable, Nilith wrenched the scimitar from the carapace and tumbled. Hot, stinking breath was all that caught her. The jaws snapped mere inches from her face, spraying her with foul green dribble.
A feverish glance over her shoulder told her the two wyrms were entangled in a writhing knot. Their armoured forms crashed about the camp, flattening anything that wasn’t already dead.
Nilith ran as fast as her tired legs would carry her. She wasn’t about to hang around to watch the monsters fight. Krona was dead, and that was half of what she had wanted from the evening. A small corner of the desert had been cleaned of its filth tonight. A very small corner, but it was something.
Nilith looked down at her hands and found them slick with snot-green wyrm saliva. She could feel it burning, as if the sun shone on it. She quickly wiped her face with her tunic, leaving red, patchy skin behind. She ignored the pain, clenched her fists and continued to flee.
With every turn, Nilith dreaded seeing purple lights rising into the night to lure her in. She expected every dune to explode in a shower of sand, and snapping jaws to come crashing down. The fear kept her insides tight as a triggerbow string, and her feet moving.
Perhaps her luck was strong that night, or maybe the commotion of the fight in the camp was a good distraction. In either case, not one dune moved during her mad dash back to the ridge. Still, she didn’t stop until she had climbed it.
Nilith flopped to the dirt like a gutted fish onto a cutting board. She stared up at the speckled sky with its saucer moon, and chased her breath. She clutched the copper coin to her bosom.
Ghyrab came into view between the stars. ‘You hurt?’
‘Somewhat.’
‘That bitch dead?’
‘Very.’
‘And the rest?’
‘Probably all the same by now.’
‘We heard a bang, and screams…’
Nilith rolled to pat Anoish on the rump. The horse was pretending to sleep. She saw the slits of his black eyes.
‘Dunewyrms. Two of them. Somehow, I think they saved me.’
‘This is why I stick to the river. Ain’t no bloody centipede dragons in the river.’ Ghyrab snorted, going back to his curled-up state against the black stone. ‘And your ghost?’
‘Gone. Still on the river, maybe,’ Nilith muttered, knowing the bargeman was already asleep. She could give him an hour, at least.
Nilith positioned herself so she could watch the lights die on the duneplain. The dying fires quivered as large shapes moved across them. One by one, the flames surrendered to the cold, and left the job of illumination to the moon and stars. Not a single smudge of blue could be seen; just lingering purple lights, roaming to and fro.
Nilith sighed to herself. ‘We’ll find him. I have no choice.’
No emperor should have to drag any body across a desert, never mind his own. It was an outrage. An injustice of the highest level. A foul crime against the glory of the Arctian royalty.
It was the toil of it,
more than anything. The only manual labour Farazar Talin Renala the Eighteenth had done in the last few years was raising wine to his lips and rutting with Belish concubines. He’d outdone a decade in a mere day of pulling his remains across the ever-undulating Duneplains. There was no sweat, of course, no strained muscles, not even a breath to gasp for. It was purely a mental strain. Though his hands did the gripping, his arms the hauling, it was his head that hurt from the constant tensing.
The river had failed him earlier that day, as had the barge, which had got something stuck around its steering pole and nosed into the shallows. Even if Farazar hadn’t been lacking in naval skills, the river had begun to widen and wallow, curving eastward for Araxes’ farther-flung districts. Farazar was left with no choice but to strike out toward the city on foot.
He spared a moment to stare at her again, blazing bright in the morning sun. White and yellow spires caught the daylight on their metal caps, spurs and crystal panes. A haze clung to the city, and in the desert heat, it seemed an anaemic brown hue. Farazar did not blame it on the pervasive dust, nor the spewing stacks of the docks and factory districts, but the morning mist from the Troublesome Sea.
Sea.
How he longed to see a sprawl of blue instead of puke-yellow and shit-brown rock. There was a reason his mighty city hugged the coast, and that was to be as far away from this sweltering, dusty arsehole of a landscape as possible. If he could have, Farazar would have ripped the whole city up and moved it to tropical Ede, or the Scatter Isles, where green things ruled over the land instead of the sun.
Even as he inwardly cursed it, the desert appeared to hear him. Sand scattered from the lip of a dune, showering the emperor and his body. He watched the grains fall through his glowing hands, slowing only momentarily, like pennies tumbling into a pool.
Farazar struck on, leaning against the weight of his baggage and the hot wind coming from the north. His borrowed, tattered smock helped somewhat, but he still felt hollow and nonexistent as the sand and air rushed through him.
His corpse seemed to gather weight with every mile. Perhaps it was the sand clinging to it, or the growing strain, but it slowed him to a crawl. The landscape did not help: the dunes had risen up in taller peaks and longer valleys, and their fine, wind-carved sands shifted even under his ghostly feet. On the steeper slopes, to go one step Farazar had to take three. At the very least, his body could slide down the other side and give him some rest. It wrinkled his lip to watch it, but the more time he spent as a shade, the more he saw the body more as meat rather than person. My person. Like every Arctian, he knew there was no way back from binding, but that didn’t stop him longing for one. Such was the desperation of loss.
With the sun overhead and no shade in the gaps between dunes, Farazar baked. He was somewhat used to it – perhaps something residual from his life and his breeding – but with the added work, he felt thinner than gossamer. He felt as if his vapours were evaporating.
Onwards, he trudged, until the sun was halfway closer to the horizon and Araxes blushed a deep gold. He used it as a lure to keep his legs moving. Whenever he crested a high dune, he stared out to Araxes and traced the wandering lines of paths escaping from the Outsprawls.
Farazar stared north for some time, blue eyes sliding between the wash of white and yellow buildings and the glimmering city, wondering which held more hope for him. After the Duneplains, there was a hundred miles of crowded city before he reached the Cloudpiercer. The question was, how would he walk those miles? Would it be dragging a body behind him, or as a free shade? The first dead emperor in history.
If there was anything an Araxes royal had a deep affection for, it was to be the first to do something. A thousand years of stabbing others in the back meant an ever-churning royal line. A lot of firsts had already been claimed. Even names were unlikely to be original. Yet here Farazar was, with his murderer lost behind him and his body at his side; a position coveted by any slain ruler of the Arc. He looked to the Outsprawls once more, blue tongue emerging from blue lips. If a Nyxwell could be found there, he had a chance to do what no royal had yet managed: to rule from beyond the grave. And, even more deliciously, Nilith’s plans would be foiled. All he had to do was bind himself before he was claimed, and make it back to the safety of the Core Districts. Then he would reign for a hundred years. Perhaps a thousand. He would crush Nilith’s precious Krass, and claim the whole Reaches as his.
With a grin, Farazar leaned to spit on his promise, but was swiftly reminded of his inability to do so. Instead, he just made a strange, vaguely determined noise.
The noise had an echo. Then a puff of sand drew his eyes. Two sharp and twisted spikes rose above a dune to his left, each the length of an arm. Farazar fell protectively over his body as a black, shiny head with wiggling antennae and beady eyes emerged. Two simple legs, hooked at the end, flopped over the ridge and hauled the creature’s body forwards. More dark carapace followed, huge jointed shoulders, and then an abdomen that dragged a rut in the sand.
The beetle burbled again, louder and more effusive. It seemed interested in the body under Farazar. However, it did not charge or muscle forwards as he expected, but sat upright, rearing at least eight feet tall, and tasted the air with the wiggling bits in its ugly face. There must have been a stench to the creature, but not one Farazar could smell.
‘Away, beast! Not for you!’ he yelled, finding his voice.
It warbled, but didn’t move. Insects, unlike horses and other beasts, were not spooked by shades. Farazar recalled that after spending several minutes waggling his hands, trying to shoo it away. Even when he got close enough to punch it in the nose, or the beetle equivalent, it didn’t rear or gnash at him. Instead it just warbled away until he was forced to assume the insect was mentally impeded, and left it alone.
Buoyed by purpose and with the outpost fixed in his mind, Farazar pulled his corpse down the slope of the dune. To his annoyance, the beetle followed, kicking sand at him with its spindly legs. Farazar wished he had something to poke its eyes with. He doubted his vaporous fingers would do a good job.
There was a moment when the creature looked close to tumbling on top of him, but it scrabbled to a halt disturbingly close to Farazar and immediately plopped itself down in the sand again. It seemed almost… apologetic. It was then that an idea came to him, but he shoved it away.
Kings did not ride beetles. Stallions or carriages, yes, but not beetles. Beetles were the steeds of desert scroungers and Outsprawlers, lowly traders and others who couldn’t afford or steal good horseflesh. Insects were also unpredictable creatures, with an intelligence far below that of a horse, and a blank coldness only a fish could mimic.
This one looked docile enough, and irritatingly dutiful; the beetle followed like a hound no matter which direction Farazar walked in. Only once did it make a move on his corpse, but it just tripped instead. Farazar saw then the strange bend in one of its legs. It had been lamed in the past.
‘Go away! Back to your master! Or family! Or nest, or what have you!’
No amount of shouting seemed to dissuade the beetle. When Farazar resorted to kicking sand back at it, it would retreat a little, but then come clomping back. He tried some running, using the slope to his advantage. When he finally stopped at the base of the next dune, the beetle was right there behind him, and Farazar the weaker for it.
‘Fucking insect,’ he cursed, looking to the blue above for patience. Then, with a sigh, he gave in to his idea.
Dragging the body in a wide arc around to the beetle’s rump, Farazar slung the rope of his corpse around a horn-like protrusion on the creature’s back. His clumsy fingers worked a knot that would have made a sailor weep. All the while, the beetle stayed put. Whether that was because it was dumb or well trained, Farazar didn’t know. It muttered away happily through its ugly jaws.
Farazar kept the tail of the rope in his hands, and he flicked it like a whip against the gleaming carapace. The beetle jerked forwards, much to his satisfac
tion. Walking on beside it, he tugged on the rope, and lo and behold, the creature followed dutifully.
He could have laughed at the joke of it all. It certainly sounded like a joke: an emperor, a corpse and a beetle walking across the Duneplains. Yet no smile curled his lips. No chuckle came from his throat. For it was he who was the joke. He was the punchline. Here he was, Emperor Farazar Talin Renala the Eighteenth, dragging his own body across a desert.
His growling filled the silence.
Chapter 15
Damned Fates
Beer is the murderer of all good intentions.
Words of the philosopher Themeth
I felt wretched. More drained than I had ever been in life. I felt hollower than any cloud of vapour should. It was small comfort that I had come to my senses, and realised the error of my self-indulgence.
Four times I had tried to vacate my spot, only to stagger so much I decided the attention wouldn’t be worth it, and went back to ‘rest’ in my hollow.
The first and second attempts were feeble efforts that took me halfway down the alley and back.
The third time, a blind old woman had come out to offer me tea, not realising I was a ghost. The tea had looked more like whale-oil to me, so I declined, and she went back to banging and crashing about her tiny hovel.
On the fifth attempt, with Pointy offering meagre encouragement, I finally made it to the street. I say encouragement. It was more mockery than anything. He still preferred to sulk, and so did I. It was all I felt good for that day.
Speaking of days, one had already passed me by. The second was gradually slipping into evening. I would soon be stuck in the night once more.