by Dan Rabarts
Time slowed for Hrodok, running backwards and forwards at once, slick like oil on water. He saw Sianna as she had been when first they met, warm and seductive and beautiful, her smooth human skin an unexpected bliss under his fingertips, her lips warm on his, her promises silver sweet. Yet he also saw her darker shade, the treacherous face which had twisted him to this path, and all its consequent pain. He saw where she was leading him: to greater agony, to power unfathomable, and madness complete.
He could leave her, let the taur discard her shredded body to the hungering fires beneath. But the past was powerful, memory bearing more weight than hope or despair. Maybe he still needed her, maybe not. But without her, he’d never know.
He blinked, appeared on the bullman’s shoulders, wrapped his arms around Sianna’s waist, and blinked away. The taur’s anger echoed around the cone. Hrodok stood on the crater rim, setting Sianna on her feet. Both began to cough, their eyes stinging from the noxious gases and intense heat. They were level with the bottom of the descending plinth, only feet from the lava. Through watering eyes Hrodok marvelled at the massive spinning blades beneath the platform, the same he’d needed to blink past when he’d climbed the armature, whose wind drove the fumes from the plinth. But it wasn’t the platform which interested him, even as his lungs and eyes burned. Time slipped and sluiced, a confusion of moment and place, pieces of light exploding against each other in a haze. On the platform stood the bullman and a short, tubby hornung, from another world, another life. This hornung was his brother Akmenos, but not. This was his brother when they had been but scrablings, children intent on mischief, racing pell-mell through the halls and tunnels of Kriikan. This was his little brother whom he had, once upon a time in a faraway land, looked out for, protected, and in the punch and swing of childhood, tormented for his own entertainment. Then the world had stripped that bonhomie away, and they had been marched off, the shackles of warlock, warmaster, and cook about their necks. This was the child he saw on the plinth; the boy with whom he had once laughed and tumbled through bright hazy days. That boy was now sinking into a pool of molten rock because of him, because of his ambition and where it had brought them. Because that boy had dared, at long last, to stand up and defy him.
Then he couldn’t breathe for the coughing. He caught Sianna as she crumpled and blinked again. Were he a true acolyte of the Eternal Stair, he should’ve left Sianna to die as punishment for her weakness. But Sianna promised power and destruction, and he needed her to achieve that. Part of him was also screaming out to sweep his brother off the plinth so all the wrongs of the past—Hrodok’s wrongs—could be set right, and was that not weak? Was that not failure? Saving Akmenos was no longer an option. His choices were made, his redemption forsaken.
Leaving his baby brother to die, he dropped onto the airship and laid Sianna down, where she began to heave violently, gagging on fresh air. With a final glance at the rim of the cone which obscured his brother’s inevitable demise, Hrodok engaged the anchor winch. This was all a dead end, a false road thrown up by the Holy Flame to lead the weak to their destruction. Now his quest for the Eternal Stair must start in earnest, and Sianna would be his guide.
Whether she liked it or not.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Massive hands set Akmenos on his feet.
“You have come far, Akmenos,” said a deep, smooth voice, like bronze polished with soft leather. “It is an honour to stand with you again.”
Akmenos wheezed, coughed. Heat roiled over him, and a lurid glow flooded his vision. Above, clouds shining like blood; all around, the bubbling glare of lava. The plinth continued its inexorable descent. They were about to be dipped in molten rock, the smooth brass armature the only possible path out. However adventurous he might’ve become, he wasn’t fool enough to think he could make it onto the arm, much less climb its length without slipping to his death.
“You…” Akmenos coughed again. “You…came for me?”
The taur laughed humourlessly. “No. We taur are slaves, no matter how hard we struggle for freedom. So it is written.” His hooves scraped the coarse, blunt text carved in the stone.
The writing on the plinth, the same as the last unknown language on the scroll case. “This plinth? The taur built it?”
“Long ago. Before we were made slaves. And the key you hold is ours too, though we had some help. But you will learn this soon.”
“Learn? Hadn’t you noticed? We’re about to die.”
The taur smiled, massive bovine lips splitting to reveal huge teeth. “You have the key to the Holy Flame. How can flame ever harm you? Now, I must leave you alone, or it will not go well for me.”
With that, the taur leapt onto the armature, hauling himself up to where the metal lay level with the cone, and ran nimbly along its length before dropping down, out of sight.
The plinth touched the lava, the mechanism churning molten rock. Magma spilled onto the stone. Akmenos gulped, backing away. Heat parched his skin and stung his eyes, burned his throat. He sank to his knees, coughing. The plinth was half-submerged in creeping lava.
Surely, it couldn’t end this way? The taur had said he couldn’t be harmed by the lava, but Akmenos didn’t trust him enough to take those words literally. He had a key, he’d said, not invulnerability to fire. Pulling the scroll case from his pocket, he rammed it into the hole in the middle of the plinth.
Something whirred. Something creaked. Something groaned. The lava wormed closer.
Stone shifted, and the middle of the plinth rose up, but this time there was no engine inside the glass-walled enclosure, and it was taller, tall enough, maybe, for one lone hornung to squeeze inside. Akmenos hauled open the brass-framed door and wedged himself in, slamming the door shut with a solid clunk as lava covered the plinth and smoked against the glass. With another series of mechanical noises, the glass-walled chamber dropped into the stone, and Akmenos was swallowed by darkness. His stomach fell away, and he was falling.
How far he might fall this time, and what would be there to greet him at the bottom, he would find out soon enough. Maybe, if he was lucky, it would be someone with a tea trolley, but he rather doubted it. Tea trolleys had been in fairly short supply on this escapade.
He gripped the hilts of his knives, pressed himself against the glass, breathed the cold, tainted air, and braced himself. Whatever else may come, he’d survived this far. How much worse could it get?
How much worse indeed?
~
Here ends Brothers of the Knife, Book 1 of the Children of Bane. Join Akmenos as his adventures continue in Book 2, Sons of the Curse.
About the Author
Dan Rabarts is a New Zealand author, editor and narrator, winner of four Sir Julius Vogel Awards and two Australasian Shadows Awards, occasional sailor of sailing things, part-time metalhead and father of two wee miracles in a house on a hill under the southern sun. His science fiction, dark fantasy and horror short stories have been published in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk. Together with Lee Murray, he co-edited the anthologies Baby Teeth— Bite-sized Tales of Terror and At the Edge and co-writes the Path of Ra crime/horror series from Raw Dog Screaming Press, starting with Hounds of Underworld and continued in Teeth of the Wolf. Find out more at dan.rabarts.com.
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