by David Hair
It’s a curious thing, Naxius thought, this letting one’s birds fly free. He wondered if this was how parents felt. He’d never wanted children; his work had always been enough for him, and in any case, companionship was for weaklings: empathy destroys rationality.
But seeing this young woman made other parts of him awaken. ‘And Glamortha shall lay down with Lucian and beget the new race of daemons,’ he said out loud. He’d written it and now he would make it so.
I hope some part of her appreciates my genius . . .
He had a glimpse of what empathy might feel like as he willed her to succeed, to become, to fulfil all her promise – that in doing so, she would be condemned to eternity inside Lucian’s mind was incidental.
It had been decades since he’d last enjoyed a woman, natural desires subsumed by his passion for research, but as the two daemon bodies fell into each other, Lucian took substance and form – and Naxius was right there, inside the daemon lord, as it reached for her . . .
*
Cloaked in mist, Lyra and her companions slipped through the ruined city, a vast emptiness of broken stone, tumbled colonnades and smashed statues. Her mind churned over what Dirklan had told them, of how the Blessed Three Hundred, their ancestors, had visited fire and destruction on the pagan south.
The first magi slaughtered the almost helpless Rimoni soldiers and civilians, then salted the earth for a hundred miles around so no one could live here. Millions were displaced, a whole race stigmatised: was that truly Kore’s will?
She found it ironic that once they’d destroyed the Rimoni, the Rondians set about imitating them; Rym architecture and art proliferated in the north and they’d copied virtually every Rimoni law and institution. She’d not even realised the first magi had ‘Rimonised’ their names, so Baram became Baramitius; Fastǽ was now Fasterius, and so on . . . and yet the fate of Rimoni was still invoked to cow resistance to the rule of Pallas.
No wonder everyone hates us, Lyra thought, following Dirklan and Valdyr down a shattered street. No birds sang, no animals stalked the desolation, not even windblown weeds grew here in this eternal wasteland.
Tarita and Ogre were flanking the group, the little Jhafi woman skipping through the ruins like a haunting sprite, the lumbering Ogre almost silent despite his size. She could sense they were mentally linked, feeding each other information – and banter, judging by the occasional chuckle. And Gricoama ghosted through the ruins like a wraith, a shadow come to life.
Dirklan stopped and bent over something, then waved them forward. ‘Hoof prints,’ he breathed, pointing to some almost obliterated marks in the dust; they were heading deeper into the city. The spymaster turned to Ogre. ‘Can you tell if this is the right way?’
Ogre looked around, although they could see little in the thick mist. It wasn’t one she and Valdyr had summoned to conceal them; perhaps the fogbanks were natural here.
Finally Ogre conceded, ‘I don’t know. The Master never brought me here. But in the Daemonicon, he writes sometimes of gazing across Lake Patera, and of the sunset silhouetting the old Rondian watchtower on the far side of the lake in spring. That tells me he has a window looking west across the lake. We need to find the lake and work along the shore, seeking signs of activity.’ Then he pulled out the dented lacquer mask Cadearvo had worn. It glowed in his hands and he pointed southwest. ‘That way – but the closer we get, the less precise the reading becomes.’
Lyra was fascinated at the construct’s thoughtful nature, such a stark contrast to his lumbering body and misshapen skull. He and Tarita were so very much in tune that it made her wonder if Hobokin and Glymahart might ever end well. Then she shook herself.
End well? It’s likely going to end completely today, if we ever find his Master . . .
She glanced at Valdyr, suddenly struck by the fear that they might never have a chance to find out what was growing between them – that she’d never hold Rildan again . . . that she’d lose everything and everyone, for ever.
Stop it, she berated herself. Be brave.
Dirklan made them all wait while he tracked the hoof prints across the plaza. He came back to tell them they’d vanished down a street running west. ‘We’ll take the more southerly exit. The mist is hiding us, but we’re likely to encounter some kind of perimeter watch soon and it’ll almost certainly be possessed, so we must somehow bypass or eliminate them unseen. And there may be gnostic traps too, so I’m going to go ahead and seek them out.’ He turned to Tarita. ‘Lady Merozain, will you come as second scout? Ogre, stay with Valdyr and Lyra and follow us in five minutes.’
He and Tarita vanished into the mist, veils of illusion wrapping around them. A few moments later Gricoama padded in and nudged Valdyr with his muzzle, then took up guard over their tiny group.
Lyra, Valdyr and Ogre huddled in silence on the steps of a building with a cracked marble façade: a courthouse perhaps, or an imperocrat’s administrative headquarters. At last Tarita returned and laying a hand on Ogre’s shoulder, announced, ‘The plaza’s clear, as is the first part of the southern path. Wait three minutes, then Ogre will lead you on.’
In the Fey Tales, Lyra thought, heroes journeyed together for months. They became like brothers and sisters. But we’re going to have learn to trust each other despite still being strangers. She looked at Valdyr and smiled cautiously. At least you’re not a stranger to me.
He took her hand and they silently communed, trying to ignore Ogre watching them with big, sad eyes. A minute or two passed, then he muttered, ‘We must go.’
*
Tarita flitted through the misty streets, reflecting that of their group, only she could match Dirklan’s stealth. The queen moved like a court lady, while Ogre and Valdyr were just too big for sneaking around. Leave it to ‘Lady Merozain’, she thought, following the old Volsai’s footprints as the fog stirred and broken pillars and statues loomed eerily into view. It was easy to imagine eyes watching her from the gloomy shadows.
Then she heard a rattle of stones from the northern approach to the crossroads she was about to enter and sank behind a low wall an instant before a dark shape detached from the fog: a rider on a black horned horse, a khurne of Rondian myth. It had natural eyes, she noticed, so it wasn’t possessed.
She wondered about that: perhaps these daemons refused to bear each other? She was struck by something she’d not considered before: despite their shared intellects, the possessed men she’d fought had never fought as a team: they passed information and took orders from their masters, but although they might share sensations, they remained essentially selfish. They’re not really one intellect at all: they’re yoked together – and I bet they hate it. Given that, an independent but subservient mount made perfect sense.
She moved her attention to the rider, who had a goat’s head with two curling, bone-coloured horns, a hunched torso and backward-jointed legs, shaggy below the waist. It slid from the khurne’s back and started sniffing the dust, emitting a low braying sound, then glancing left and right.
It’s spotted traces of Dirklan’s passing – and the others will be here in a few minutes. If it doesn’t move on, I’ll have to do something . . . She weighed her choices and smiled. Ai, that might work . . .
The goat-man and his mount began to track Dirklan’s faint footprints in the dust, and she ghosted along in their wake. Mistress Alhana had prepared her meticulously for stealth missions: her eyes moved constantly, assessing every footfall, until she ducked behind a low wall barely thirty feet from her prey.
She opened her senses to the sound of the daemonic host: the vile whispering, snarling murmur in the aether came off the possessed construct in waves. Tuning into it with clairvoyance and mysticism, she concentrated on the feel of it until she was satisfied she could recreate it herself.
The possessed goat-man moved on and she rose carefully, spotting Dirklan behind a nearby pillar. His eyes met hers as he drew a stiletto.
If he sees Dirklan, all his kin will know . . .
She gestured for Dirklan to go still, then conjured illusory black eyes and created an echo of the daemon’s voice in her mind, before casting a veil over her deeper self. Then she rose and said,
The goat-man spun, face perplexed, and she felt his abrasive, churning intellect scrape over hers – and meet the daemonic mental mask she’d built, maintained with an Ascendant’s strength. He brushed her mind and withdrew – and there was no change in his visage.
‘See, a possible intruder,’ he growled hungrily, indicating the footsteps in the dust.
She feigned the same animal hunger. ‘Show me.’ She moved closer, with the total certainty of one who knows the other being is the same as them and no threat.
It worked: the goat-man stepped aside and showed her Setallius’ boot-prints. What the spymaster’s making of this I can’t guess, she thought as she made a show of examining the tracks, then met the daemon’s gaze . . .
He had no defences raised, so with a sly burst of mesmeric-gnosis, she wrapped his mind in coils and fed him a lie of being alone in the city. The goat-man succumbed silently as she locked kinesis around him, then conjured Air- and Earth-gnosis, letting the swirling rock dust envelope him, calcifying even as she knifed a Chain-rune into his psyche, instantly shutting down his gnosis. Within a few seconds, he was just a crude statue of a misshapen goat-man, locked inside stone and powerless to move, while an illusion looped ceaselessly through his mind, for that was still linked to the daemon Abraxas and his vast interlocked awareness. By the time her illusion dissipated, the goat-man would have suffocated and died.
She stood and turning to face the shadows, collapsed the illusions she’d wrapped herself in. As the black eyes and subsonic litany of malice vanished, she called to Dirklan in a low voice, ‘You can come out now.’
The one-eyed spymaster slipped from behind his pillar. ‘You almost had me believing you’d been taken,’ the Volsai said, his voice a mix of awe and uncertainty.
She pulled out her argenstael dagger and placed it to her cheek. ‘Just illusion.’
‘Impressive. You might have shared that little trick with us before.’
‘I only just thought of it,’ she admitted.
Dirklan gave a low whistle of appreciation. ‘Then you really are damned good. Would you like a job?’
‘After this, I’m going somewhere it doesn’t rain where I can walk around naked and never again feel the cold.’
‘Then perhaps I’m the one who should be asking you for a job,’ he laughed, then he gestured west. ‘That way’s a dead end – I was just coming back when I saw that creature. Let’s try another.’
They tethered the khurne, aware it would die if they never returned, but not wanting to let it wander. Leaving a mark in the dust for Ogre at the crossroads, they turned south, where they found yet more remains of ancient statues, caved-in temples and mausoleums and the stumps of pillars jutting into the sky. All empires come to this, the ancient city seemed to whisper.
‘I grew up in Coraine, where it’s often misty,’ Dirklan commented. ‘My sister and I called fog “The Nothing”. When it swallowed up the ground around our house, we imagined it was eating up the world.’
‘Cheery,’ Tarita replied. ‘No wonder you turned out a Volsai.’
Within five minutes they were scrambling through a gap between two immense palaces subsiding into rubble, their leaning towers like the broken ribs of a stone giant, towards the shore of the lake. They could see no horizon, just a few feet of black water lapping coldly at their toes and extending away into the murk.
As they waited for Ogre’s group, Tarita examined the shoreline, although there was little to see beyond a tumble-down mess shrouded in Dirklan’s Nothing. The air remained still and silent, barely lit by the pallid sun floating above the mist.
A few minutes later, Gricoama formed out of the mist, Lyra, Valdyr and Ogre behind him. When they gathered round, Dirklan reported what they’d found. ‘This is a bay on Lake Patera: we can go due west and we’ll likely hit the northern point of the cove, or we can follow the coastline south. There’s no sign of life so far, apart from a scout Tarita dealt with.’ He looked at Lyra and Valdyr. ‘Can either of you reach Jehana?’
Lyra closed her eyes for a moment, then said, ‘No, I can’t sense her – and the dwyma is weak here. There’s so little life . . .’ She turned to Valdyr and he faced her. They both closed their eyes and linked hands.
Tarita groaned inwardly. They could be gone for hours . . . She turned to Ogre. ‘What about you, Big Man?’
Ogre pulled the crumpled Cadearvo mask out again. ‘I don’t like using it, not so close,’ he murmured, but he stroked the lacquered copper, listening for the harmonics of the gnostic link built into it. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered. ‘I can’t fix on a direction now . . . but maybe . . .’
Before Tarita could stop him, he placed the mask against his face – and the metal gripped his skin—
*
Ogre acted without thought, on impulse. When the lacquered copper tingled and then adhered to his skin, a wall of sound struck him, the hate-babble of a daemon, and a tangle of imagery overwhelmed him, some hideous but most prosaic, just visions from other eyes – and none of them reacted to his presence.
That calmed him, although he was aware he was breathing hard. Tarita had seized his hand and was speaking to him, but the words washed past him – he raised a finger to still her, then listened with all his being, feeling the way, trying to sense distance and direction . . .
There . . .
He raised a hand and pointed, though he was too caught up in the link to know which way he was indicating. He heard gasps of triumph from his companions and felt Tarita’s small fingers squeeze his hand.
Then he heard a voice – his Master’s voice, declaiming as if to an audience, ‘—never been a valid reason not to push the boundaries of knowledge. Only I have truly seen this truth. So called “great minds” like Meiros and Baramitius were hamstrung by their own morality – a form of cowardice, in my view. But on this day – the Last Day – their lack of vision will be made clear . . .’
Ogre pulled the mask from his face, the copper releasing his skin reluctantly, and blinked in the dim light. That loathed rasp faded from his senses, but he shuddered at the intense memories, wondering to whom the Master spoke.
At times he would lecture empty rooms, Ogre remembered, debating with people who weren’t there. Is he doing that again?
‘This way,’ he rumbled, looking along his still extended arm. It was pointing southeast.
‘Well done, Ogre,’ Dirklan said.
When Tarita breathed, ‘You’re the best—’ he felt himself go scarlet.
Then Valdyr and Lyra stirred and they all turned to see what they had learned . . .
*
To Lyra’s inner eye, she and Valdyr were floating above the city. There was no fog, so she could see the full expanse of the shattered ruins, like the bones of murdered giants, scattered beside a still, dark lake. It was a chilling vista, but she took comfort from Valdyr’s presence and the feeling that the whole weight of their world wasn’t just on her shoulders. Together they focused on the dwyma, but with no flora or fauna and even the soil lifeless for many feet, the dwyma was all but smothered by the poisonous miasma.
When the magi destroyed this place, they were beyond thorough.
But water and light were two of the building blocks of life and not even the ancient magi could extinguish that spark for ever. The threads were tenuous, but present enough for them to tap into a current of deeper energy. At last they realised that one knot of dwyma wasn’t weak at all, just different. Focusing on it, they plunged in – and recoiled immediately, appalled by an overwhelming sense of wrongness. To Lyra it felt almost familiar: like her Winter Tree after Ostevan poisoned it. And there was a groaning female voice . . .
They opened their eyes. ‘She’s that way,’ Lyra said, raising an arm – and saw that Ogre also had an arm extended. His point
ed southeast; hers pointed west.
‘But Naxius is that way,’ Tarita insisted, indicating the direction Ogre pointed.
‘I heard the Master,’ Ogre whispered. ‘He said the Last Day is today.’
They all fell silent, staring at each other.
‘West or south?’ Dirklan mused. ‘Together or separate? And why are they not together?’
They all floundered, unable to unpick the tangle.
Then Valdyr spoke up. ‘A dwyma place isn’t safe for magi,’ he said, ‘and all the wrongness comes from there.’ He looked at Gricoama, who growled softly and nodded his big head. ‘I don’t think Lyra and I can help you against Naxius; nor can you help us.’
Dirklan set his jaw. ‘Then we must separate, and Kore grant we’re doing the right thing.’ Abruptly he pulled Lyra close, hugging her tightly. ‘Do what’s needed, Daughter, and come back.’
‘You too, Father,’ she murmured, trying to hold back her tears. ‘You too.’
Tarita and Ogre shared a surprised glance and Lyra belatedly realised that they’d broken their unspoken agreement to conceal their true relationship. She was further mortified to see Valdyr colour, then look away awkwardly. ‘Sorry, I was going to say . . .’ she mumbled apologetically.
‘Anything else I should know?’ he asked caustically.
She shook her head, then turned to Tarita and Ogre and said, ‘Please, be safe.’
‘Safe is dull,’ Tarita told her. ‘Let’s just be victorious.’ Ogre growled in agreement.
Dirklan shook Valdyr’s hand, his one eye skewering the Mollach prince like a lance. ‘She’s in your hands,’ he told her, his voice somewhere between plea and threat. Then abruptly he turned away and led Tarita and Ogre into the mist.
She turned to Valdyr – and Gricoama, watching her with ancient, wise eyes. ‘I did mean to say,’ she began, ‘but . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, with some restraint. ‘But no more secrets, please.’
She impulsively stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. ‘I’m sorry, it’s a secret we conceal from almost everyone, because he’s not meant to be my father. It weakens my legitimacy for the throne, and – well, it’s a long story.’ She pointed to the westward shore. ‘Are you ready?’