Gates of the Dead

by James A. Moore

  As the docks slowly dwindled in scale Tully let herself look at the waters more and more. She had never been to the ocean before coming to Torema and now she rode across the waters toward a ship that looked as large as a building in her eyes.

  A towering construction of wood, with three masts, the name Wave Dancer was painted on the side and a wooden figure of a winged serpent adorned the front. As they approached she saw Hillar Darkraven herself gazing down from the prow and looked on as the woman instructed the crew to lower a collection of wooden slats and ropes for them to climb.

  Stanna went up first, and Tully followed quickly behind her with Temmi on her heels. The ladder had Stanna trembling, an unsettling sight to be sure, but for Tully it was the easiest part of the trip. When she once again had solid footing Stanna was as calm as ever.

  The city was a smear in the distance from where they were, and the sky above it was black with smoke and clouds alike.

  “Torema is finished,” Stanna said. “It’s dead and has no notion that it’s dead.”

  “Oh, I think it knows.” Temmi shook her head. “We had to fight our way across the docks.”

  Hillar said, “You made it here. We’ll be on the way to the Kaer-ru in short order.”

  Not three seconds after she spoke another person called out and pointed into the waters.

  There, barely visible, was a very small vessel.

  And on that vessel were four men.

  One of those men, battered and badly wounded, was named Odobo.

  Within fifteen minutes of the captain pulling the four men from the sea, everything changed for Tully and her companions.

  Daivem Murdrow

  Torema burned. What did not burn bled, and what little there was that did not burn or bleed died in agony.

  Daivem knew and understood. Some places are not meant to continue on and that was the case with Torema and everything to the east of the Broken Swords. She considered that for a moment and shook her head. Probably true of everything to the west of them as well. She had seen the giant that crawled from the mountains and then collapsed. She had watched the form beneath that giant as it died. She had been drawn to that death as she had been drawn to the angry soul of Niall Leraby, as a moth is drawn to a flame, though in the case of the thing that died with the – God! It was a god and it killed another even as it fell! – vast creature on what had once been the desert of Arthorne, that flame had blazed near as bright as the sun before it faded to a minor ember.

  The staff in her hands hummed within her grasp, though she was surely the only one that would have noticed.

  Niall Leraby’s essence, his wraith, very nearly roared with anger. That was sometimes the case with those who seemed weakest in life. “Meek in life, courageous in death,” was one of the sayings her brother, Darsken, had hammered into her when he was training her to become an Inquisitor.

  The air was bitter cold, and the storms above raged and thrashed and the things that either dwelled within those clouds, or possibly created them, were nearly as angry as Niall.

  “Do you ever calm down, boy?” Daivem spoke softly, though at that moment no one was quite close enough to hear her.

  The Inquisitors spent most of their time in other worlds. The Louron were not from the Five Kingdoms though they had long had a place in the Kaer-ru islands. It was their blessing to know the Shimmer and to walk between worlds. It was a gift they used as best they could to help the dead when the time came, and much as she would have preferred to be in her homeland, she was here now, because the dead of the Five Kingdoms were so very angry and needed help. Niall was not the only one. He was merely the loudest.

  Well, second loudest.

  Niall could not speak in words. That gift died with his tongue. Had he a body, she could have forced that form to speak, but his body was beyond repair and fed the fat ravens where he fell from the sky.

  But he could speak in his own fashion. He could thrust images at Daivem and hope that she read them properly and responded well. Mostly what he offered again and again was a memory of his body plummeting toward the ground as he looked up at the He-Kisshi that dropped him.

  They had a history, he and that agent of the gods, and it was not a pleasant history at all.

  “There’s nothing I can do for you. I don’t have the time or agency to hunt down things that serve the gods of this world. I can try to help you find peace, but that is all.”

  She tilted her head as he responded. “How? That I don’t know, either. But we’ll figure it out along the way.”

  Inquisitors were not common. The man who led the Kaer-ru was not an Inquisitor, though he had obviously been trained. Jahda understood what she did and why she was there, though he offered no guidance.

  So she did what her kind always did and tried to puzzle out how best to give the dead their peace.

  And all the while, Torema burned, bled, and died. She was far enough away to watch it happen without being involved in the conflict. Pardume, the king she had met before, wanted the city for his people and it looked likely he’d have it, but there were others to the west fighting back and they were as cornered animals in a burning building, desperate to escape no matter how they had to find a way out. For each one the soldiers cut down, two more were there with weapons of their own, or a plan to unseat the horsemen and take their beasts.

  She did not know the Five Kingdoms well, but she knew that the people of Hollum were cunning and more likely to attack from the shadows than to simply attack.

  “It is hard to fight shadows, especially when the night falls.” Another of her brother’s sayings. She helped the dead in her way and he in his, but his words were often mottos she lived by.

  The winds howled along the hill and sleet fell from the sky. She pulled her cloak tighter to her body and shook her head.

  She had to leave this place, or be taken with it. The dead were a rising tide in the area, so many of them lost and scared, so many more, angry and seeking to lash out. She had not been there for the other towns and cities and as much as Daivem wanted to help, the notion also terrified her.

  There was already so much held within her walking stick.

  Each Inquisitor was trained in how to carve one of the sticks. They were more than wood and less than steel, and every one of them was unique and told a story that only the bearer could fully understand. In some of the lands she had been to, there were sorcerers who used long staffs that helped them focus their power. In others, wizards used wands. It was possible that those items were similar. All she knew was that Inquisitors had to deal with the dead. They employed necromancy in places where the dark magic was not allowed, and even in places where no magic was permitted. Their walking sticks helped with that and allowed them to shelter the spirits of the departed from the forces that could cause them harm.

  There were limits, however.

  There are always limits on power.

  The dead could cause her little harm, but what she carried was more than the usual energies. Some part of a god lingered with her. Not by her choice, either. That entity had come to her without warning and she’d held the walking stick while it poured itself into the vessel.

  What it was, what it wanted, she did not know. How long it would stay with her was another question she could not answer.

  Through long weeks and months and years she had carved her story into the walking stick, each design a part of her that she placed in the wood, her hands guided by the Shimmer, perhaps, or by the dead. Currently she could feel the wood in her hand changing, moving without her careful touch, shaping itself at the whim of whatever it was that lay inside the vessel she had created the day she started walking the path of the necromancers.

  She was not frightened by that fact, but she was very curious.

  To her knowledge no spirit had ever been powerful enough to alter what a necromancer created.

  Around her Torema burned, and bled, and died.

  And in her h
and a being of immense power bent the laws of reality as she knew it.

  She looked toward the sea and considered her options.

  Daivem had a long way to go, she knew that much. She simply had no idea what her final destination might be, or how she was supposed to get there.

  For now that was a secret the dead around her intended to keep to themselves.

  There are those who need boats and those who can cheat as they move around the world. The Louron were blessed with the Shimmer. What exactly it was, they could not say. Where it came from they could not hope to guess, but the Shimmer was kind to her people as long as they were not foolish and Daivem Murdrow was not known for being foolish.

  She asked the Shimmer to help her and felt the twist in reality that always preceded the actual opening of a portal. To the naked eye the world was unchanged, save for a faint flicker of distortion that could be seen from the corner of the eye.

  Daivem stepped into that flicker, into the Shimmer, and moved on, away from the dying Torema.

  She had places she needed to go, if only she could figure out the way to reach them.

  Brogan McTyre

  “There. That is all that remains of Hollum.” Roskell Turn’s voice was conversational and his hand pointed to the darkness on their right.

  “You’re daft.” Brogan shook his head.

  The sky above them was dark as night. There was no sun, though if one looked far enough to the south spears of sunlight still punctured the caul that now seemed to cover most of the world.

  The land was visible, though there was little to see but more darkness. If there were people out there, they had no fires burning. If there were towns or cities, they hid away amongst the ruins and floods.

  “The city is gone. The floods took it.” He paused. “And the storms. The very ones that are crushing Torema right now.”

  Brogan looked at the black shape of the coastline against the nearly black sky. No stars. No hope of a star. The wind roared along and blew colder than he could have imagined. It seemed nearly impossible that the ocean itself hadn’t yet frozen solid.

  “Hollum is gone? What about Adimone? What of Elannis?”

  The smaller man looked out at the waters and shrugged. “All gone.”

  Brogan felt cold grip his heart again. He knew that he had done the right thing when he fought for his family and yet, now, he had his doubts all over again. It was one thing to think that the world is ending. Another to see the proof. The very shoreline was different. There was something…

  “There should be hills here, yes?”

  Roskell spread his arms. “The rains have washed them away. This is all that remains.”

  Brogan tried to speak, but could think of no words.

  The Galean spoke before he could come up with anything worth saying. “The gods did not make the world, Brogan McTyre. They remade it in their image. It’s written in the books of Galea. They fought and killed their predecessors, as you already know. And then they took the world and built it anew.”

  The man stroked his neatly trimmed beard and then pointed toward the land again. “The hills that were there are gone now, not because of what you did, but because the gods have decided it is time.”

  “You say I am not to blame?”

  “No. You have your share of blame, but if it had not been you it would have been someone else. The gods have not been calm and that started long before you committed your misdeed.”

  Brogan shook his head. “No misdeed, Roskell Turn. I did what I had to do in order to save my family.”

  Turn nodded. “Then perhaps I could choose better words, but in the eyes of the gods you betrayed their orders and tried to take what did not belong to you. To them you and I and everyone else, we are but small parts of the whole and they rule over that whole. To have you disobey them is to have a leaf from a tree decide that they are wrong. Would you listen to a leaf?”

  “I would not burn down the forest because one leaf dared fall.”

  “That makes you wiser than the gods in this case, Brogan. My point is that they would have found a reason for what they are doing. They might have waited another hundred years or a thousand, but they would have eventually decided to end the world because that is what gods do.”

  “I don’t understand.” Brogan clenched his hands into fists, angered by the notion that all he did was for nothing. If all he had gone through was as nothing, then surely all he did to rectify the situation he felt responsible for was nearly useless.

  “You’ve seen a dead god – he died because the newer gods came along to kill him. I have read the stories they told Galea. Not all of them, but more than most. They rose up because the older gods locked them away, bound them to the world and forced them to suffer in their prisons for lifetimes without count.”

  Brogan frowned. “I thought that was the fate of demons.”

  The Galean smiled, but it was not a happy expression. “Just so. Now there are other demons who have been locked away, held at bay for endless lifetimes.”

  “So the gods are trying to do what then? Punish the demons a second time?”

  “For the first time in our history, people have turned from the gods and sought other answers, Brogan McTyre. You have heard of the Marked Men?”

  “Of course.” He did his best to avoid them. They were relentless hunters and trackers who would stalk an enemy into the ground if necessary.

  “Jahda spoke with their king, Parrish of Mentath.”

  Brogan sneered. He knew Parrish well enough and no love was lost between the kingdoms.

  “Parrish admits to dealing with demons in an effort to gain power and to move away from the gods.”

  “Then why not punish Parrish?”

  “Parrish is being punished. Everyone is being punished.” Roskell touched the bench next to him and then the deck railing of the ship. “But Parrish is merely another leaf. The demon he turns to is a different story. The demon has grown in power, just as the gods themselves once grew in power. It has stayed in its prison, and studied, and learned, and become something else.”

  “What has it become then?”

  “It has become a godling that seeks to overthrow the gods in control of everything.”

  The man had surely lost his senses. Demons were gods? Nonsense! Gods were gods.

  “I have read over one hundred volumes of the books of Galea. I have studied the gods in particular because they have a history that is fascinating. The gods are tired and, more importantly, the gods are angry. They have been waiting for a very long time to have their battle with the demons that would replace them and now you have given them a reason to strike.”

  “Then why involve people at all?”

  “Some things I cannot answer. The gods gave Galea many answers, and told her many secrets, but in a lifetime I could not hope to know all of those answers, and why the gods care about mortals is one of the answers I could never find.”

  Brogan thought back to his family, Nora, and the twins, and little Braghe. His mouth pulled down, his teeth clenched. The gods wanted people? No, they wanted death.

  “They like to make us suffer. They like to watch.”

  “For all I know, Brogan, that is true.” Roskell looked again at the dark land mass. “This is also true, the city of Hollum used to shine in the night right there. The torches along the Street of Champions were lit every evening before the sun finished setting and you could see those lights along the edges of the trees and sometimes could even see their glow on the underbelly of the clouds.”

  Brogan turned to the north again, already knowing the answer to his next question. “Saramond?”

  “Saramond belongs to the sea. The city is gone. Lost to the waters and all the people are dead. The end came too quickly there.”

  “Yet you say my actions did not do this?”

  “Not alone.”

  “Then we should get to the Gateway as quickly as we can. The gods must be
made to pay before they notice us and act on their own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are not hidden from the gods, unless you have managed to hide us when I was not looking. Sooner or later the He-Kisshi will come, and sacrificed to the gods or not, they will have their messages for us.”

  The Galean looked to the skies above them. In the distance a crackle of lightning strobed across the bottom of the clouds for a moment, revealing very little. “Then I hope you are very good with your sword, Brogan McTyre.”

  Chapter Eight

  As The Gods Demand

  Opar

  If Edinrun was the jewel in the crown of the Five Kingdoms, then Torema was the gold that crown was forged from. The city had wealth, a population larger than any other city in all the land, and a history that was rich in tales of wonder and decadence alike.

  Opar looked upon the city and shook his head, rain falling from the brim of his hat.

  “We are done. There is nothing left.” The voice came from his cousin, Rithman. Rithman was a hard warrior and for that reason he had been chosen to lead the armies alongside Opar. He was also trustworthy and that helped.

  “There is nothing left to conquer or nothing left?”

  Rithman nodded his head. “Yes, well, the latter is close to true.” From where they sat the docks could clearly be seen and the harbor beyond, despite the rains. There were no ships left in the area. They had all fled to the Kaer-ru or possibly even to distant Pressya. The seas were choppy with waves and the docks rolled back and forth as those same waves thrashed themselves to death against the land.

  “Even if we had the time, we could not build ships from what is left, and I am hardly a ship builder.” Opar scowled, and then unceremoniously spat phlegm across the cobblestones.

  His father would have been horrified. His mother would have disowned him. As both of them were dead, and the world seemed in a rush to join them, he found he did not care.