by David Hair
Milosh asked frankly, ‘Is there any hope we can cling to, Kirol Kyrik?’
Kyrik didn’t wish to speak of his brother, but could offer some hope. ‘Rothgar Baredge has gone to the Tuzvolg to lead the Vlpa riders here. If they can arrive at our enemy’s rear, in sunlight and well-armed, they could yet save us.’
Milosh had likely been one of those who had decried Kyrik for bringing the Vlpa into Mollachia. ‘The Tuzvolg is several days’ ride away,’ he muttered, but he was visibly heartened.
We all need a hope to cling to, Kyrik thought.
‘How does Queen Hajya fare?’ Milosh asked. His voice was kind but hesitant, as if unsure he had the right to ask. ‘They say Asiv tormented her personally.’
‘Thank you – she is improving,’ Kyrik replied. She’d not left the royal suite, but she was calm. ‘She’s been deeply unwell, but she’s coming right.’
Kip belched thoughtfully, rose and stretched. ‘Best we get doing,’ he said grimly.
‘Do you think we have a chance?’ Milosh asked him outright.
‘Yar, of course, there is always a chance,’ the Schlessen replied nonchalantly. ‘But Minaus doesn’t count the odds, only the heads as they roll. We’re all bound for the grave eventually, so who cares where or when? It’s how you die that matters.’ He made the horned-hand gesture for luck and swaggered away.
But I do care, Kyrik thought. This is my land, my people. I don’t want to face Kore knowing I led them to ruin.
Freihaafen
Ogre was drowsing in his secret chamber when he was awakened by the sound of a woman’s voice, shouting in Dhassan. It was Sabina, Fridryk Kippenegger’s Eastern wife, calling, ‘Sal’Ahm, Masakh? Ogre? I’ve brought you breakfast.’
The women had taken to bringing him food since Kyrik had led the fighting men to Hegikaro, for he’d been so wrapped up in his task he’d been forgetting to eat. But he’d never allowed himself to be caught asleep before. He stumbled to his feet, managed a ragged conjuration of gnostic light and shouted, ‘I’m coming—’ but to his chagrin, Sabina was already making her way into his hidden chamber, wrinkling her nose at the stale air.
Even in the shadows, Sabina shone, tawny eyes full of empathy, her narrow oval face framed by gleaming dark hair falling to her waist.
Ogre immediately felt ugly and unworthy. She is very beautiful . . . but she pales before my Tarita.
He tried to block her view, but her eyes were already widening. ‘Oh my,’ she breathed, taking in Tarita’s face etched on every surface, half a hundred portraits. ‘You are an artist, friend Ogre.’
‘No, I’m not,’ he mumbled. ‘These are nothing.’
Her small hand gripped his bulging forearm, freezing him in place. ‘Poor Ogre.’
He didn’t know if Tarita had said anything before leaving, but Sabina clearly knew.
Yes, I love her, he admitted to himself. She befriended me, fought alongside me, shared jokes and laughter instead of treating me like a freak, and trusted me enough that she slept against my side knowing I would never threaten her. She saw things in me I never did. And now she’s gone.
Sabina let go of his arm and examined his work, lifting her candle to illuminate the coal-etched walls. Pausing before one picture of Tarita looking pensive, she murmured, ‘Three years ago, my love and I argued. To prove his adoration, he spent three days carving a lightning-struck tree into a giant image of me.’ She giggled, adding, ‘Me with nothing on and six months pregnant!’
‘Did it work?’ Ogre found himself asking.
Sabina snorted. ‘I already knew he loved me. I just disagreed with something he’d done. I didn’t need him to carve a giant wooden statue, but to come home and do what I wanted.’ She straightened and put her hands on hips. ‘Which he finally did.’
‘But he knew you loved him.’
‘Not right then he didn’t: not when he’d agreed that we Bullheads would sell ourselves into the service of a tribe even other Schlessen believed barbaric.’ She scowled at the memory. ‘I was furious with him.’
Ogre couldn’t quite grasp what she was trying to tell him. ‘Um . . . what became of the wooden carving?’
‘People began to leave offerings. In a few years I’ll be a goddess.’ She laughed, then fixed him with a purposeful eye. ‘Ogre, men will make stupid grand gestures to win a woman, when all they need to do is love us. That carving was a stupid waste of energy – but at least while he was brooding he was thinking, and he did come to his senses, so perhaps it had some value.’
He hung his head. ‘I did tell her, when I thought I was dying. She made a joke of it, then told me it was impossible. A few days later she went south with Waqar.’
‘Well, I think it is for you to decide if she’s right. Is she? Is it impossible?’
He looked at his feet, feeling profoundly uncomfortable, but he answered, ‘I’m a construct, not even a proper person. I’m probably mostly some kind of animal. Normal people are repulsed by me. I can’t offer her anything but a life in hiding, when she was born to shine. I’m ugly where she is lovely. I’m almost twice her height and thrice her bulk – we could not even . . . um . . . embrace . . . even should she be so insane as to want me. She’s right: it is impossible.’
But my heart won’t listen.
He turned his head so she wouldn’t see the tears welling in his eyes.
‘Well, it certainly is if you’re just going to sulk about it,’ Sabina sniffed. ‘But I don’t think of you as an animal, and neither does anyone else. Especially Tarita. My husband is not handsome – he’s a big, broken-nosed brute covered with scars and warts – but he is my steadfast rock. He’s easily twice my size, but he’s gentle and he has put two babies in me. Ogre, do not forget a woman’s body is built to push out children – an ordinary woman could lie with you if you were gentle, as I know you would be. The real question is whether she is big-hearted enough to look past your imperfections.’ She stared at him. ‘And whether you are.’
‘She left with Waqar,’ Ogre groaned.
‘She left because of the war,’ Sabina corrected him, and now she was sounding exasperated.
‘She said impossible,’ he growled.
‘Ogre, she likely doesn’t know her heart any better than you do. Look past what she says to what she doesn’t say. I’ve seen you two together. She is always touching you, which tells me she trusts you, utterly. She laughs and is serious with you, talks about shallow and deep things. That tells me that your souls have a connection. She’s only twenty, don’t forget, so be her true friend, don’t pressure or condemn her, just give her time to make up her mind. And don’t waste your time on grand gestures. Get out and breathe the air.’
*
For a long while after Sabina was gone, Ogre sat and pondered her words and decided that she was right: he needed to breathe cleaner air and remind himself of what he was fighting for.
So he left the cave and squinting into the sunlight, walked out into a cold, crisp morning. He could hear the lowing of the female Mantauri as they laboured, building their new homes, and nearer at hand were children’s voices, shrieking and laughing. It was all music. He hesitated, then trudged out of the trees to the lake’s edge.
Ignoring the wide eyes of the staring children, he stripped off his leather tunic and waded out through the freezing water to where the steam rose from the thermal vents. Immersing himself fully in the blissful warmth, he slowly stretched, getting all the kinks out of his muscles, before rolling onto his back and floating there.
Give her time. Think of what she doesn’t say.
It felt like it would be a long, lonely wait. But I’ll endure . . .
He closed his eyes to shut out the splash and clamour of the children – until he suddenly realised that it was all around him and he sat up just as someone launched themselves onto his shoulders with a shrill yell – then a dozen more crashed into him and there was triumphant shouting as he went under in a flurry of limbs, before rising with a bellow, sending boys and
girls flying in all directions.
Everyone stopped to see his reaction – and at his great roar of laughter, the children hurled themselves at him again, shouting battle-cries and vowing to ‘Kill the Masakh!’ There was no malice, just hilarity, and he threw himself wholeheartedly into the game, hooting and calling, trying to make sure he didn’t hurt anyone and that everyone got a turn to ride on his shoulders.
Finally a couple of the women summoned the children to lunch and Ogre looked around, blinking. He hadn’t realised how long he’d been playing, and then he realised that he’d never actually played before . . .
It occurred to him that he was happy.
He waded ashore, shivering through the colder water, feeling cleansed, not just physically but emotionally too.
Sabina’s words echoed in his mind as he dried himself and returned to his cave: Listen to what she doesn’t say aloud . . .
‘How do I listen to something unsaid?’ he asked himself. ‘How do I see what’s not there?’ Then, peering at the wall covered in meaningless symbols from the code he couldn’t break, ‘By the shape of that absence . . .’ He took a deep breath and looked at all his abortive working anew as his jumbled thoughts became clearer.
The Master had sometimes used shortened scripts to take swift notes: brk could mean bark, break or broke; it was the context that provided the omitted letters. ‘How could I have forgotten that?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Is this what this is? Such systems can only work for alphabets that use symbols for sounds – and the language might not even be Rondian . . . ah! But Lantric is the Master’s birth-tongue!’
Suddenly invigorated, Ogre rubbed out a previous attempt and began hurriedly scrawling, eliminating all the vowel sounds . . .
*
By midnight, after hours of trial and error, he’d broken the code. It had been a quick enough job to prove he’d been right: the Master had written the Daemonicon in a shortened script using made-up symbols to replace Rondian letters. It took another hour to determine that the tongue wasn’t Lantric but Rimoni. Then the letters had to be deciphered, each word sounded out and placed into context, although it became a little easier as he became familiar with the symbols and more used to groping through the tones until they formed actual words . . .
It took another three hours to read the first page, which turned out to be, by way of an introduction, a self-congratulatory love-letter written by Naxius to himself, crowing about what he’d learned.
That page chilled Ogre’s soul.
The Daemonicon di Naxius wasn’t a diary of daemonic contacts but a thesis, the distillation of thousands of experiments towards one stupefying goal. From anyone else, it would have been laughable – but Ervyn Naxius had written it, and that made it credible.
Ogre returned to the final paragraph and read it aloud.
‘The daemonic world is not chaotic, but ruthlessly unified. It is a more efficient world than our own, yet these immortal, eternal super-beings made of thought, who devour lesser intellects and become stronger with each feast, desire the one thing we have that they do not: our physical world – because once, they were us. I now know enough to bring about the ascent of the daemons, which will mean the fall of humanity. I know how to open the gate from their world to ours – and I know enough to become the Master Daemon who will rule this new world and all its inhabitants, mortal and immortal, for the rest of eternity.
‘That is now my goal.’
*
Ogre found himself sorely tormented by the Master’s Daemonicon. That Naxius held humanity in contempt was no great revelation, nor was the suggestion that he was prepared to turn people’s lives into a living Hel in the service of knowledge. It was the scope of his plan – the sheer audacity – that appalled him. Daemons, Naxius wrote, and Ogre could almost taste the admiration, are pure: pure refined hunger. He was preparing to overthrow Nature, to cast down mankind and replace them with pitiless, depraved spirits, because he thought he could control them more completely.
He hadn’t thought he could hate the Master any more than he already did, but it turned out he could. Much more. His skin crawled when he read about himself: how he’d been bred, and why, and what Naxius had learned. ‘There are faults to be eradicated, so I have destroyed his siblings, but Ogre has residual value,’ Ogre read aloud, his voice shaking, ‘so I let him live. The next batch, however, will be superior.’
I had siblings. He never told me . . .
But so far all Ogre had deciphered was intent. How this ‘grand reconstitution of Urte’ was to be achieved, he had yet to discover. There was still much work to be done.
The Elétfa
There was neither sunrise nor sunset to measure time as Valdyr and Gricoama climbed through the dimly lit world of the great tree, but as they spiralled ever higher, Valdyr began to notice changes. Squirrels chased each other along the branches while birds were flitting among the leaves of the distant canopy. There were more branches, too, some bearing edible fruit.
How long have I been gone? he wondered, the thought goading him onwards, but doubts crept in: should he have gone down? Should he try another branch? Was this a puzzle, not an endurance test? He started skipping sleep, pushing himself harder – but for all that, he felt a profound oneness with this place. The dwyma was effortless here, pulsing through the veins of the leaves, beating through the wings of the insects and birds, flowing in the sap of the tree itself, ever-changing, ever-constant, eternity in motion. Whether he was doing the right thing or not, it felt like a gift, just being here.
Then, abruptly, things changed. They rounded the next bend and found the path bisected: one branch continued the spiralling climb around the trunk, but a second passed into the tree itself through an arch beautifully carved with old Frandian knotwork. The gap exuded cold, clammy air ripe with decay and a strange sense of malice. As he got closer, he saw the carving was worm-eaten and the stink of rotting bark filled his mouth and nostrils: the foetid stench of death.
He felt his pulse quicken as a pale shape formed in the opening: Luhti, young and golden-haired, as she’d been when she died on Watcher’s Peak. ‘Valdyr,’ she called, ‘welcome.’
He thought her a ghost, but she embraced him and then Gricoama, her body solid and warm, and smelling of wholesome herbs.
‘You’re not dead,’ he said redundantly.
‘There’s no death for the likes of you and me.’ She gestured at the carved opening where Zlateyr, the great Mollach founder, now reclined against the carven frame. The hero gave Valdyr an ironic wave. ‘But there are different paths we can take,’ Luhti said. ‘Sometimes the darkest paths are those which help us grow.’
‘But shouldn’t I just continue on?’ Valdyr asked, pointing at the stairs, which continued to wind up the outside of the trunk.
‘Ysh, but you’ll learn nothing new,’ Zlateyr replied. ‘If you don’t learn, you won’t prevail.’
Valdyr faced the passage, flinching as Asiv’s distinctive scent of stale sweat and musk wafted from it. He remembered how he’d frozen in terror at Cuz Sarkan when confronted with his abuser. That’s why they test me: they know I failed at Cuz Sarkan.
‘This . . . this won’t be real . . . will it?’ he stammered.
‘What would be the point of a false test?’ Luhti asked. ‘What would you learn?’
He had no answer to that. ‘And what happens afterwards?’
Luhti patted his arm. ‘You go on climbing, until you find the place you need to be, if you are to save us all.’
He stared at her. ‘To save us all? From what? And why me—?’
‘A darkness is gathering, a storm that even this great tree cannot withstand,’ Zlateyr said. ‘Just as a genilocus is weak without a dwymancer to articulate and shape its will, so this tree is impaired without a living dwymancer to bond with it. Right now, there’s only you.’
‘But Nara of Misencourt—’
‘She has still to find the Elétfa, so it is up to you to become what we need.’ Luhti poin
ted to the dark doorway again. ‘This is part of that journey.’
Valdyr took a deep breath. Gricoama came to stand beside him, hackles rising against the stench gusting through the hole like the exhalations of a dying man, a toxic mix of vomit, smoke and opium. The wolf growled, then barked out a challenge.
Valdyr wished he felt as brave, but when Zlateyr and Luhti moved either side of him and laid hands on his shoulders, he felt renewed strength. ‘What can I expect?’ he asked.
‘The worst,’ Luhti replied in a tight voice. ‘It would not be a true test if it were not the worst.’
That’s what I was afraid of.
He turned his head and took a gulp of clean air, and another, trying to slow his heartbeat, but it kept accelerating, even as his skin went cold.
He walked away from his dead mentors, first one step, then another, and with Gricoama pacing at his side, they entered the notch, stepping into darkness. The floor was squishy and damp, like rotten timber, and the air was now so foul with shit and perfume that he staggered, retching. He reached for the wall, but it felt as unsteady as the floor, noisomely warm and unpleasant to the touch.
With a great c-r-r-r-r-rack! the opening behind him snapped shut.
‘Hey!’ he shouted, turning to hammer on the wood, shouting for Luhti as darkness engulfed him. He turned back blindly, calling, ‘Gricoama? Boy? Where are you?’
There was no response. There was no sound at all but for the weird breathy tones of the passage itself.
He was utterly alone.
9
East and West
Hospitality
Many cultures pride themselves on their hospitality, holding that strangers are welcome, but any cursory examination of history quickly disproves this myth. I’m loath to abandon the ideal, however, for strangers should be welcome. The world is great enough to share. This is an ideal worth striving for.
ANTONIN MEIROS, ORDO COSTRUO COLLEGIUM, HEBUSALIM 811
Norostein, Noros