The Hod King

by Josiah Bancroft

  There’s a side door ahead, and if she hasn’t been turned around it’ll open up near where they came in, and that’s where they’ll find Spar.

  Before they can get to it, the door opens and out comes a Tallowman.

  Blazing eyes in a pale, waxy face. He’s an old one, worn so thin he’s translucent in places, and the fire inside him shines through holes in his chest. He’s got a huge axe, bigger than Cari could lift, but he swings it easily with one hand. He laughs when he sees her and Rat outlined against the fire.

  They turn and run, splitting up. Rat breaks left, scaling the wall of the burning library. She turns right, hoping to vanish into the darkness of the garden. Maybe she can hide behind a gibbet or some monument, she thinks, but the Tallowman’s faster than she can imagine. He flickers forward, a blur of motion, and he’s right in front of her. The axe swings, she throws herself down and to the side and it whistles right past her.

  Again the laugh. He’s toying with her.

  She finds her courage. Finds she hasn’t dropped her knife. She drives it right into the Tallowman’s soft waxy chest. His clothes and his flesh are the same substance, yielding and mushy as warm candle wax, and the blade goes in easily. He just laughs again, the wound closing almost as fast as it opened, and now her knife’s in his other hand. He reverses it, stabs it down, and her right shoulder’s suddenly black and slick with blood.

  She doesn’t feel the pain yet, but she knows its coming.

  She runs again, half stumbling towards the flames. The Tallowman hesitates, unwilling to follow, but it stalks her, herding her, cackling as it goes. It offers her a choice of deaths—run headlong into the fire and burn to death, bleed out here on the grass where so many other thieves met their fates, or turn back and let it dismember her with her own knife.

  She wishes she had never come back to this city.

  The heat from the blaze ahead of her scorches her face. The air’s so hot it hurts to breathe, and she knows the smell of soot and burning paper will never, ever leave her. The Tallowman keeps pace with her, flickering back and forth, always blocking her from making a break.

  She runs towards the north-east corner. That part of the House of Law is on fire, too, but the flames seem less intense there. Maybe she can make it there without the Tallowman following her. Maybe she can even make it before it takes her head off with its axe. She runs, cradling her bleeding arm, bracing herself all the while for the axe to come chopping through her back.

  The Tallowman laughs and comes up behind her.

  And then there’s a clang, the ringing of a tremendous bell, and the sound lifts Carillon up, up out of herself, up out of the courtyard and the burning building. She flies high over the city, rising like a phoenix out of the wreckage. Behind her, below her, the bell tower topples down, and the Tallowman shrieks as burning rubble crushes it.

  She sees Rat scrambling over rooftops, vanishing into the shadows across Mercy Street.

  She sees Spar lumbering across the burning grass, towards the blazing rubble. She sees her own body, lying there amid the wreckage, pelted with burning debris, eyes wide but unseeing. She sees—

  Stillness is death to a Stone Man. You have to keep moving, keep the blood flowing, the muscles moving. If you don’t, those veins and arteries will become carved channels through hard stone, the muscles will turn to useless inert rocks. Spar is never motionless, even when he’s standing still. He flexes, twitches, rocks—yes, rocks, very funny—from foot to foot. Works his jaw, his tongue, flicks his eyes back and forth. He has a special fear of his lips and tongue calcifying. Other Stone Men have their own secret language of taps and cracks, a code that works even when their mouths are forever frozen in place, but few people in the city speak it.

  So when they hear the thunderclap or whatever-it-was, Spar’s already moving. Rat’s faster than he is, so Spar follows as best he can. His right leg drags behind him. His knee is numb and stiff behind its stony shell. Alkahest might cure it, if he gets some in time. The drug’s expensive, but it slows the progress of the disease, keeps flesh from turning to stone. It has to be injected subcutaneously, though, and more and more he’s finding it hard to drill through his own hide and hit living flesh.

  He barely feels the heat from the blazing courtyard, although he guesses that if he had more skin on his face it’d be burnt by contact with the air. He scans the scene, trying to make sense of the dance of the flames and the fast-moving silhouettes. Rat vanishes across a rooftop, pursued by a Tallowman. Cari … Cari’s there, down in the wreckage of the tower. He stumbles across the yard, praying to the Keepers that she’s still alive, expecting to find her beheaded by a Tallowman’s axe.

  She’s alive. Stunned. Eyes wide but unseeing, muttering to herself. Nearby, a pool of liquid and a burning wick, twisting like an angry cobra. Spar stamps down on the wick, killing it, then scoops Cari up, careful not to touch her skin. She weighs next to nothing, so he can easily carry her over one shoulder. He turns and runs back the way he came.

  Lumbering down the corridor, not caring about the noise now. Maybe they’ve got lucky; maybe the fire drove the Tallowmen away. Few dare face a Stone Man in a fight, and Spar knows how to use his strength and size to best advantage. Still, he doesn’t want to try his luck against Tallowmen. Luck is what it would be—one hit from his stone fists might splatter the waxy creations of the alchemists’ guild, but they’re so fast he’d be lucky to land that one hit.

  He marches past the first door out onto the street. Too obvious.

  He stumbles to a huge pair of ornate internal doors and smashes them to flinders. Beyond is a courtroom. He’s been here before, he realises, long ago. He was up there in the viewer’s gallery when they sentenced his father to hang. Vague memories of being dragged down a passageway by his mother, him hanging off her arm like a dead weight, desperate to stay behind but unable to name his fear. Heinreil and the others, clustering around his mother as an invisible honour guard, keeping the press of the crowd away from them. Old men who smelled of drink and dust despite their rich clothes, whispering that his father had paid his dues, that the Brotherhood would take care of them, no matter what.

  These days, that means alkahest. Spar’s leg starts to hurt as he drags it across the court. Never a good sign—means it’s starting to calcify.

  “Hold it there.”

  A man steps into view, blocking the far exit. He’s dressed in leathers and a grubby green half-cloak. Sword and pistol at his belt, and he’s holding a big iron-shod staff with a sharp hook at one end. The broken nose of a boxer. His hair seems to be migrating south, fleeing his balding pate to colonise the rich forest of his thick black beard. He’s a big man, but he’s only flesh and bone.

  Spar charges, breaking into a Stone Man’s approximation of a sprint. It’s more like an avalanche, but the man jumps aside and the iron-shod staff comes down hard, right on the back of Spar’s right knee. Spar stumbles, crashes into the doorframe, smashing it beneath his weight. He avoids falling only by digging his hand into the wall, crumbling the plaster like dry leaves. He lets Cari tumble to the ground.

  The man shrugs his half-cloak back, and there’s a silver badge pinned to his breast. He’s a licensed thief-taker, a bounty hunter. Recovers lost property, takes sanctioned revenge for the rich. Not regular city watch, more of a bonded freelancer.

  “I said, hold it there,” says the thief-taker. The fire’s getting closer—already, the upper gallery’s burning—but there isn’t a trace of concern in the man’s deep voice. “Spar, isn’t it? Idge’s boy? Who’s the girl?”

  Spar responds by wrenching the door off its hinges and flinging it, eight feet of heavy oak, right at the man. The man ducks under it, steps forward and drives his staff like a spear into Spar’s leg again. This time, something cracks.

  “Who sent you here, boy? Tell me, and maybe I let her live. Maybe even let you keep that leg.”

  “Go to the grave.”

  “You first, boy.” The thief-taker moves,
almost as fast as a Tallowman, and smashes the staff into Spar’s leg for the third time. Pain runs up it like an earthquake, and Spar topples. Before he can try to heave himself back up again, the thief-taker’s on his back, and the stave comes down for a fourth blow, right on Spar’s spine, and his whole body goes numb.

  He can’t move. He’s all stone. All stone. A living tomb.

  He screams, because his mouth still works, shouts and begs and pleads and cries for them to save him or kill him or do anything but leave him here, locked inside the ruin of his own body. The thief-taker vanishes, and the flames get closer and—he assumes—hotter, but he can’t feel their heat. After a while, more guards arrive. They stick a rag in his mouth, carry him outside, and eight of them heave him into the back of a cart.

  He lies there, breathing in the smell of ash and the stench of the slime the alchemists use to fight the fires.

  All he can see is the floor of the cart, strewn with dirty straw, but he can still hear voices. Guards running to and fro, crowds jeering and hooting as the High Court of Guerdon burns. Others shouting make way, make way.

  Spar finds himself drifting away into darkness.

  The thief-taker’s voice again. “One got away over the rooftops. Your candles can have him.”

  “The south wing’s lost. All we can do is save the east.”

  “Six dead. And a Tallowman. Caught in the fires.”

  Other voices, nearby. A woman, coldly furious. An older man.

  “This is a blow against order. A declaration of anarchy. Of war.”

  “The ruins are still too hot. We won’t know what’s been taken until—”

  “A Stone Man, then.”

  “What matters is what we do next, not what we can salvage.”

  The cart rocks back and forth, and they lie another body down next to Spar. He can’t see her, but he hears Cari’s voice. She’s still mumbling to herself, a constant stream of words. He tries to grunt, to signal to her that she’s not alone, or that he’s still in here in this stone shell, but his jaw has locked around the gag and he can’t make a sound.

  “What have we here,” says another voice. He feels pressure on his back—very, very faintly, very far away, like the pressure a mountain must feel when a sparrow alights on it—and then a pinprick of pain, right where the thief-taker struck him. Feeling blazes through nerves once more, and he welcomes the agony of his shoulders unfreezing. Alkahest, a strong dose of blessed, life-giving, stone-denying alkahest.

  He will move again. He’s not all stone yet. He’s not all gone.

  Spar weeps with gratitude, but he’s too tired to speak or to move. He can feel the alkahest seeping through his veins, pushing back the paralysis. For once, the Stone Man can rest and be still. Easiest, now, is to close eyes that are no longer frozen open, and be lulled into sleep by his friend’s soft babbling …

  Before the city was the sea, and in the sea was He Who Begets. And the people of the plains came to the sea, and the first speakers heard the voice of He Who Begets, and told the people of the plains of His glory and taught them to worship Him. They camped by the shore, and built the first temple amid the ruins. And He Who Begets sent His sacred beasts up out of the sea to consume the dead of the plains, so that their souls might be brought down to Him and live with Him in glory below forever. The people of the plains were glad, and gave of their dead to the beasts, and the beasts swam down to Him.

  The camp became a village in the ruins, and the village became the city anew, and the people of the plains became the people of the city, and their numbers increased until they could not be counted. The sacred beasts, too, grew fat, for all those who died in the city were given unto them.

  Then famine came to the city, and ice choked the bay, and the harvest in the lands around wilted and turned to dust.

  The people were hungry, and ate the animals in the fields.

  Then they ate the animals in the streets.

  Then they sinned against He Who Begets, and broke into the temple precincts, and killed the sacred beasts, and ate of their holy flesh.

  The priests said to the people, how now will the souls of the dead be carried to the god in the waters, but the people replied, what are the dead to us? Unless we eat, we will be dead, too.

  And they killed the priests, and ate them, too.

  Still the people starved, and many of them died. The dead thronged the streets, for there were no more sacred beasts to carry them away into the deep waters of God.

  The dead thronged the streets, but they were houseless and bodiless, for their remains were eaten by the few people who were left.

  And the people of the city dwindled, and became the people of the tombs, and they were few in number.

  Over the frozen sea came a new people, the people of the ice, and they came upon the city and said: lo, here is a great city, but it is empty. Even its temples are abandoned. We shall dwell here, and shelter from the cold, and raise up shrines to our own gods there.

  The people of the ice endured where the people of the city had not, and survived the cold. Many of them died, too, and their bodies were interred in tombs, in accordance with their customs. And the people of the tombs stole those bodies, and ate of them.

  And in this way, the people of the ice and the people of the tombs survived the winter.

  When the ice melted, the people of the ice became the people of the city, and the people of the tombs became the ghouls. For they were also, in their new way, people of the city.

  And that is how the ghouls came to Guerdon.

  By Josiah Bancroft

  THE BOOKS OF BABEL

  Senlin Ascends

  Arm of the Sphinx

  The Hod King

  Praise for

  The Books of Babel

  “Senlin Ascends is one of the best reads I’ve had in ages … I was dragged in and didn’t escape until I’d finished two or three days later.”

  —Mark Lawrence, author of Prince of Thorns

  “Senlin Ascends crosses the everyday strangeness and lyrical prose of Borges and Gogol with all the action and adventure of high fantasy. I loved it, and grabbed the next one as soon as I turned the last page.”

  —Django Wexler, author of The Thousand Names

  “Senlin is a man worth rooting for, and his strengthening resolve and character is as marvelous and sprawling as the tower he climbs.”

  —Washington Post on Senlin Ascends

  “What is remarkable about this novel, quite apart from its rich, allusive prose, is Bancroft’s portrayal of Senlin, a good man in a desperate situation, and the way he changes in response to his experiences in his ascent.”

  —Guardian on Senlin Ascends

  “Senlin Ascends is an adventure rife with character, voice, and beauty—a well-polished knife drawn out slowly.”

  —Sam Sykes, author of The City Stained Red

  “Brilliant debut fantasy …. This novel goes off like a firework and suggests even greater things in the author’s future.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Senlin Ascends (starred review)

  “Senlin Ascends is a unique masterpiece. A brilliant debut. Highly recommended!”

  —Michael R. Fletcher, author of Beyond Redemption

  “With deceptive simplicity, Bancroft brings this gothic place and its denizens to colorful life …. I loved it!”

  —Adrian Selby, author of Snakewood, on Senlin Ascends

  “An impressive display of imagination and humor.”

  —SciFiNow on Senlin Ascends

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

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