I could talk you into killing yourself.
Is it possible? That this is where friendship can take us?
What would I do then?
I would bury you. And weep over the stones. For my loss, as friends will do.
The city was his genius – Mappo could see that truth in every line – but as he drew closer, squinting at the strangely flowing light and shadows in the facets of crystal, he saw evidence of occupation. His steps slowed.
Broken husks of fruit, fragments of clothing, the musty smell of dried faeces.
The sun was beginning to rise – had it been that far? He approached the nearest, broadest avenue. As he passed between two angular buildings, he froze at a flicker of movement – there, reflected from a facet projecting from the wall to his right. And as he stared, he saw it again.
Children. Walking past.
Yet no one was here – no one but me.
They were wending their way out of the city – hundreds upon hundreds of children. Stick-thin limbs and bellies swollen with starvation. As he watched the procession, he saw not a single adult among them.
Mappo walked on, catching glimpses in the crystals of their brief occupation, their squatting presence amidst palatial – if cold – splendour. Icarium, I begin to understand. And yet, cruellest joke of all, this was the one place you could never find again.
Every time you said you felt close … this city was the place you sought. These crystal machines of memory. And the trail you hunted – it did not matter if we were on another continent, it did not matter if we were half a world away – that trail was one of remembering. Remembering this city.
He went on, piecing together the more recent history, the army of children, and many times he caught sight of one girl, her mouth crusted with sores, her hair bleached of all colour. And huge eyes that seemed to somehow find his own – but that was impossible. She was long gone, with all the other children. She could not be—
Ah! This is the one! Voicing songs of incantation – the banisher of the d’ivers. Opals gems shards – this is the child.
He had come to a central square. She was there, looking out at him from a tilted spire of quartz. He walked until he stood in front of her, and her eyes tracked him all the way.
‘You are just a memory,’ Mappo said. ‘It is a function of the machine, to trap the life passing through it. You cannot be looking at me – no, someone has walked my path, someone has come to stand before you here.’ He swung round.
Fifteen paces away, before the sealed door of a narrow structure, Mappo saw a boy, tall, clutching a bundled shape. Their eyes met.
I am between them. That is all. They do not see me. They see each other.
But the boy’s eyes pinned him like knife points. And he spoke. ‘Do not turn away.’
Mappo staggered as if struck.
Behind him, the girl said, ‘Icarias cannot hold us. The city is troubled.’
He faced her again. A boy had come up beside her, in his scrawny arms a heap of rubbish. He studied the girl’s profile with open adoration. She blew flies from her lips.
‘Badalle.’ The tall boy’s voice drifted past him. ‘What did you dream?’
The girl smiled. ‘No one wants us, Rutt. Not one – in their lives they won’t change a thing to help us. In their lives they make ever more of us, but when they say they care about our future, they’re lying. The words are empty. Powerless. But I have seen words of real power, Rutt, and each one is a weapon. A weapon. That is why adults spend a lifetime blunting them.’ She shrugged. ‘No one likes getting cut.’
When the boy spoke again, it was as if he stood in Mappo’s place. ‘What did you dream, Badalle?’
‘In the end we take our language with us. In the end, we leave them all behind.’ She turned to the boy beside her and frowned. ‘Throw them away. I don’t like them.’
The boy shook his head.
‘What did you dream, Badalle?’
The girl’s gaze returned, centring on Mappo’s face. ‘I saw a tiger. I saw an ogre. I saw men and women. Then a witch came and took their children away. And not one of them tried to stop her.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Mappo whispered. But it was.
‘Then one rode after them – he wasn’t much older than you, Rutt. I think. He was hard to see. A ghost got in the way. He was young enough to still listen to his conscience.’
‘It wasn’t like that!’
‘Is that all?’ asked the boy named Rutt.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘but he’s heard enough.’
Mappo cried out, staggered back, away. He shot a look back and saw her eyes tracking him. And in his skull, she said, ‘Ogre, I can’t save you, and you can’t save him. Not from himself. He is your Held, but every child wakes up. In this world, every child wakes up – and it is what all of you fear the most. Look at Rutt. He has Held in his arms. And you, you go to find your Held, to fill your arms once more. Look at Rutt. He is terrified of Held waking up. He’s just like you. Now hear my poem. It is for you.
‘She made you choose
which child to save.
And you chose.
One to save,
the others to surrender.
It is not an easy choice
But you make it every day
That is not an easy truth
But the truth is every day
One of us among those
You walk away from
Dies
And there are more truths
In this world
Than I can count
But each time you walk away
The memory remains
And no matter how far or fast
You run
The memory remains.’
Mappo spun, fled the square.
Echoes pursued him. Carrying her voice. ‘In Icarias, memory remains. In Icarias waits the tomb of all that is forgotten. Where memory remains. Where he would have found his truth. Do you choose to save him now, Ogre? Do you choose to bring him to his city? When he opens his own tomb, what will he find?
What do any of us find?
Will you dare map your life, Ogre, by each dead child left in your wake? You see, I dreamed a dream I cannot tell Rutt, because I love him. I dreamed of a tomb, Ogre, filled with every dead child.
It seems, then, that we are all builders of monuments.
Shrieking, Mappo ran. And ran, leaving a trail of bloody footprints, and on all sides, his reflection. Forever trapped.
Because the memory remains.
‘Will you ever tire, Setch, of gloom and doom?’
Sechul Lath glanced across at Errastas. ‘I will, the moment you tire of all that blood on your hands.’
Errastas snarled. ‘And is it your task to ever remind me of it?’
‘To be honest, I don’t know. I suppose I could carve out my own eyes, and then bless my newfound blindness—’
‘Do you now mock my wound?’
‘No, forgive me. I was thinking of the poet who one day decided he’d seen too much.’
Behind them, Kilmandaros asked, ‘And did his self-mutilation change the world?’
‘Irrevocably, Mother.’
‘How so?’ she asked.
‘Eyes can be hard as armour. They can be hardened to see yet feel nothing, if the will is strong enough. You’ve seen such eyes, Mother – you as well, Errastas. They lie flat in the sockets, like stone walls. They are capable of witnessing any and every atrocity. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Now, that poet, he removed those stones. Tore away the veil, permanently. So what was inside, well, it all poured out.’
‘But, being blinded, nothing that was outside could find a way in.’
‘Indeed, Mother, but by then it was too late. It had to be, if you think about it.’
‘So it poured out,’ grumbled Errastas. ‘Then what?’
‘I’d hazard it changed the world.’
‘Not for the better,’ Kilmandaros muttered.
‘I hav
e no burning need, Errastas,’ said Sechul Lath, ‘to cure the ills of the world. This one or any other.’
‘Yet you observe critically—’
‘If all honest observation ends up sounding critical, is it the honesty you then reject, or the act of observation?’
‘Why not both?’
‘Indeed, why not both? Abyss knows, it’s easier that way.’
‘Why do you bother, then?’
‘Errastas, I am left with two choices. I could weep for a reason, or weep for no reason. In the latter we find madness.’
‘And is the former any different?’ Kilmandaros asked.
‘Yes. A part of me chooses to believe that if I weep long enough, I’ll weep myself out. And then, in the ashes – in the aftermath – will be born something else.’
‘Like what?’ Errastas demanded.
Sechul Lath shrugged. ‘Hope.’
‘See this hole in my face, Knuckles? I too weep, but my tears are blood.’
‘My friend, at last you have become the true god of all the living worlds. When you finally stand at the very pinnacle of all creation, we shall raise statues marking your holy wounding, symbol of life’s ceaseless suffering.’
‘This I will accept, so long as the blood leaking down my face isn’t my own.’
Kilmandaros grunted. ‘No doubt your worshippers will be happy to bleed for you, Errastas, until the Abyss swallows us all.’
‘And I shall possess a thirst to match their generosity.’
‘When we—’
But Kilmandaros’s hand suddenly gripped Sechul’s shoulder and spun him round. ‘Friends,’ she said in a rumble, ‘it is time.’
They faced the way they had come.
From the ridge where they stood, the basin to the west stretched out flat, studded with rocks and tufts of wiry grass, for as far as they could see. But now, under the mid-morning light, the vista had begun to change. Spreading in a vast, curved shadow, the ground was bleaching, all colour draining away. From grey to white, until it seemed that the entire basin was a thing of bone and ash, and in the distance – at the very centre of this blight – the earth had begun to rise.
‘She awakens,’ said Kilmandaros.
‘And now,’ whispered Errastas, his lone eyes glittering bright, ‘we shall speak of dragons.’
A hill where no hill had been before, lifting to command the horizon, bulging, swelling – a mountain—
They saw it explode, a billowing eruption of earth and stone.
Huge cracks ripped across the basin floor. The entire ridge rippled under them and all three Elder Gods staggered.
As the column of dust and ashes rose skyward, as the cloud opened like a mushroom to fill half the sky, the sound finally reached them, solid as a rushing wall, igniting stunning agony inside their skulls. Sechul and Errastas were battered to the ground, sent tumbling. Even Kilmandaros was thrown from her feet – Sechul stared across at her, saw her mouth opened wide in a terrible scream that he could not hear amidst the howling wind, the crushing thunder of that eruption.
Twisting round, he stared at the vast, roiling cloud. Korabas. You are returned to the world.
Within the maelstrom spinning vortices of dirt, dust and smoke had begun to form. He watched them coil, pushed out to the sides as if buffeted by some unseen column of rising air at the very centre. Sechul frowned.
Her wings? Are those made by her wings? Elder blood!
As the roar died away, Sechul Lath heard Errastas. Laughing.
‘Mother?’
Kilmandaros was climbing to her feet. She glanced across at her son. ‘Korabas Otataral iras’Eleint. Otataral, Sechul, is not a thing – it is a title.’ She turned to Errastas. ‘Errant! Do you know its meaning?’
The one-eyed Elder God’s laughter slowly died. He looked away. ‘What do I care for ancient titles?’ he muttered.
‘Mother?’
She faced the terrible blight of earth and sky to the west. ‘Otas’taral. In every storm there is an eye, a place of … stillness. Otas’taral means the Eye of Abnegation. And now, upon the world, we have birthed a storm.’
Sechul Lath sank back down, covered his face with dust-stained hands. Will I ever tire? Yes. I have. See what we have unleashed. See what we have begun.
Errastas staggered close, falling to his knees beside Sechul, who looked up into that ravaged face and saw both manic glee and brittle terror. The Errant smiled a ghastly smile. ‘Do you see, Setch? They have to stop her! They have no choice!’
Yes, please. Stop her.
‘She has begun to move,’ Kilmandaros announced.
Sechul pushed Errastas to one side and sat up. But the sky revealed nothing: too much dust, too much smoke and ash – the pall had devoured two-thirds of the heavens, and the last third looked sickly, as if in retreat. The unnatural gloom was settling fast. ‘Where?’ he demanded.
His mother pointed. ‘Track her by the ground. For now, it is all we can do.’
Sechul Lath stood.
‘There,’ she said.
A broad swathe of bleached death, stretching in a line. ‘Northeast,’ he whispered, watching the slow, devastating blight cutting its slash across the landscape. ‘All that lies beneath her …’
‘Where she passes,’ said Kilmandaros, ‘no life shall ever return. The stillness of matter becomes absolute. She is the Eye of Abnegation, the storm’s centre, where all must die.’
‘Mother, we have gone too far. This time—’
‘It’s too late!’ shrieked Errastas. ‘She is the heart of sorcery! Without the Eye of Abnegation, there can be no magic!’
‘What?’
But Kilmandaros was shaking her head. ‘It is not as simple as that.’
‘What isn’t?’ Sechul demanded.
‘Now that she is freed,’ she said, ‘the Eleint must kill her. They have no choice. Their power is magical, and Korabas will kill all that magic depends upon. And since she is immune to their sorcery, it must be by fang and claw, and that will demand every Eleint – every storm, until T’iam herself is awakened. And as for K’rul, well, he can no longer refuse the Errant’s summons – he was the one who harnessed the chaos of the dragons in the first place.’
‘They have to kill her!’ cried Errastas. The blood leaking from his eye was now black with dust.
Kilmandaros grunted non-committally. ‘If they truly kill her, Errastas, then the storm dies.’ She faced him. ‘But you knew this – or at least guessed the truth. What you seek is the death of all sorcery bound to laws of control. You seek to create a realm where no mortal can hurt you, ever again. A realm where the blood is sacrificed in our name, but in truth we have no power to intervene, even if we wanted to. You desire worship, Errastas, but one where you need give nothing in return. Have I guessed right?’
Sechul Lath shook his head. ‘They cannot kill her—’
Errastas wheeled on him. ‘But they must! I told you! I will see them all destroyed! The meddling gods – I want our children dead! K’rul will understand – he will see that there’s no other way, no way to end this venal, pathetic tragedy.’ He stabbed a finger at Sechul. ‘You thought this was a game? Cheating with the knuckles, and then a wink to the moll? I summoned the Elder Gods! K’rul thinks to ignore me? No! I have forced his hand!’ He suddenly cackled, his fingers twitching. ‘She is a blood clot let loose in his veins! And she will find his brain, and he will die! I am the Master of the Holds, and I will not be ignored!’
Sechul Lath staggered back from Errastas. ‘They chained her the first time,’ he said, ‘because killing her was not an option – not if they wanted to keep the warrens alive.’ He whirled on Kilmandaros. ‘Mother – did you – did …’
She turned away. ‘I grew tired of this,’ she said.
Tired? ‘But – but the heart of the Crippled God—’
Errastas spat. ‘What do we care about that dried-up slab of meat? He’ll be as dead as the rest of them by the time this is done! So will the Forkrul Assail –
and all the rest who’d think to challenge me! You didn’t believe me, Setch – you chose to not take me seriously – again.’
Sechul Lath shook his head. ‘I understand you now. Your real enemy is the Master of the Deck of Dragons. Dragons who are warrens – all that new, raw power. But you knew that you could not hope to match that Master – not so long as the gods and warrens remained dominant. So you devised a plan to kill it all. The Deck, the sorcery of the Dragons, the Master – the gods. But what makes you think that the Holds will somehow prove immune to the Eye of Abnegation?’
‘Because the Holds are Elder, you fool. It was K’rul’s bartering with the Eleint that made this whole mess – that brought the warrens into the realms, that forced order upon the chaos of the Old Magic. K’rul’s conniving that saw one dragon selected among the Grand Clan, chosen to become the Negator, the Otataral, while all the others would chain themselves to aspects of magic. They brought law to sorcery, and now I will shatter that law. For ever more!’
‘K’rul sought peace—’
‘He sought to trump us! And so he did – but that ends today! Today! Sechul Lath, did you not agree to end it all? By your words, you agreed!’
I wasn’t serious. I’m never serious. That’s my curse. ‘So, Errastas, if you will not seek the heart of the Crippled God, where will you go now?’
‘That is my business,’ he snapped, turning to study the bleached scar crossing the land. ‘Far away.’ He faced Sechul again. ‘Mael finally comprehends what we have done here – but tell me, do you see him? Does he charge towards us now in all his fury? He does not. And Ardata? Know that she too now schemes anew. As does Olar Ethil – the Elders once more approach ascension, a return to rule. There is much to be done.’
The Errant set off, then. Southward.
He flees.
Sechul turned to Kilmandaros. ‘I see my path now, Mother, from this moment onward. Shall I describe it for you? I see myself wandering, lost and alone. With only a growing madness for company. It is a vision – I see it clear as day. Well,’ and his laugh was dry, ‘every pantheon needs a fool, drooling and wild-eyed.’