House of Chains

‘I shall call upon Sha’ik—’

  ‘No,’ she shrieked, curling tight on the sand. ‘No! She needs him! She needs him still!’ Her words were blunted by broken lips but understandable none the less.

  L’oric sank back, struck mute by the horror. Not simply a wounded creature, then. A mind clear enough to weigh, to calculate, to put itself aside . . . ‘She will know, lass—she can’t help but know.’

  ‘No! Not if you help me. Help me, L’oric. Just you—not even Heboric! He would seek to kill Bidithal, and that cannot be.’

  ‘Heboric? I want to kill Bidithal!’

  ‘You mustn’t. You can’t. He has power—’

  He saw the shudder run through her at that.

  L’oric hesitated, then said, ‘I have healing salves, elixirs . . . but you will need to stay hidden for a time.’

  ‘Here, in Toblakai’s temple. Here, L’oric.’

  ‘I will bring water. A tent.’

  ‘Yes!’

  The rage that burned in him had contracted down to a white-hot core. He struggled to control it, his resolve sporadically weakened by doubts that he was doing the right thing. This was . . . monstrous. There would be an answer to it. There would have to be an answer to it.

  Even more monstrous, he realized with a chill, they had all known the risk. We knew he wanted her. Yet we did nothing.

  Heboric lay motionless in the darkness. He had a faint sense of being hungry, thirsty, but it remained remote. Hen’bara tea, in sufficient amounts, pushed the needs of the outer world away. Or so he had discovered.

  His mind was floating on a swirling sea, and it seemed eternal. He was waiting, still waiting. Sha’ik wanted truths. She would get them. And then he was done, done with her.

  And probably done with life, as well.

  So be it. He had grown older than he had ever expected to, and these extra weeks and months had proved anything but worth the effort. He had sentenced his own god to death, and now Fener would not be there to greet him when he finally stepped free of his flesh and bones. Nor would Hood, come to that.

  It did not seem he would awaken from this—he had drunk far more of the tea than he ever had before, and he had drunk it scalding hot, when it was most potent. And now he floated on a dark sea, an invisible liquid warm on his skin, barely holding him up, flowing over his limbs and chest, around his face.

  The giant of jade was welcome to him. To his soul, and to whatever was left of his days as a mortal man. The old gifts of preternatural vision had long vanished, the visions of secrets hidden from most eyes—secrets of antiquity, of history—were long gone. He was old. He was blind.

  The waters slipped over his face.

  And he felt himself sliding down—amidst a sea of stars that swirled in the blackness yet were sharp with sudden clarity. In what seemed a vast distance, duller spheres swam, clustering about the fiery stars, and realization struck him a hammer blow. The stars, they are as the sun. Each star. Every star. And those spheres—they are worlds, realms, each one different yet the same.

  The Abyss was not as empty as he’d believed it to be. But . . . where dwell the gods? These worlds—are they warrens? Or are the warrens simply passageways connecting them?

  A new object, growing in his vision as it drifted nearer. A glimmer of murky green, stiff-limbed, yet strangely contorted, torso twisted as if caught in the act of turning. Naked, spinning end over end, starlight playing across its jade surface like beads of rain.

  And behind it, another, this one broken—a leg and an arm snapped clean off yet accompanying the rest in its silent, almost peaceful sailing through the void.

  Then another.

  The first giant cartwheeled past Heboric, and he felt he could simply extend a hand to brush its supple surface as it passed, but he knew it was in truth far too distant for that. Its face came into view. Too perfect for human, the eyes open, an expression too ambiguous to read, though Heboric thought he detected resignation within it.

  There were scores now, all emerging from what seemed a single point in the inky depths. Each one displaying a unique posture; some so battered as to be little more than a host of fragments and shards, others entirely unmarred. Sailing out of the blackness. An army.

  Yet unarmed. Naked, seemingly sexless. There was a perfection to them—their proportions, their flawless surfaces—that suggested to the ex-priest that the giants could never have been alive. They were constructs, statues in truth, though no two were alike in posture or expression.

  Bemused, he watched them spin past. It occurred to him that he could turn, to see if they simply dwindled down to another point far behind him, as if he but lay alongside an eternal river of green stone.

  His own motion was effortless.

  As he swung round, he saw—

  —and cried out.

  A cry that made no sound.

  A vast—impossibly vast—red-limned wound cut across the blackness, suppurating flames along its ragged edges. Grey storms of chaos spiralled out in lancing tendrils.

  And the giants descended into its maw. One after another. To vanish. Revelation filled his mind.

  Thus, the Crippled God was brought down to our world. Through this . . . this terrible puncture. And these giants . . . follow. Like an army behind its commander.

  Or an army in pursuit.

  Were all of the jade giants appearing somewhere in his own realm? That seemed impossible. They would be present in countless locations, if that was the case. Present, and inescapably visible. No, the wound was enormous, the giants diminishing into specks before reaching its waiting oblivion. A wound such as that could swallow thousands of worlds. Tens, hundreds of thousands.

  Perhaps all he witnessed here was but hallucination, the creation of a hen’bara-induced fever.

  Yet the clarity was almost painful, the vision so brutally . . . strange . . . that he believed it to be true, or at the very least the product of what his mind could comprehend, could give shape to—statues and wounds, storms and bleeding, an eternal sea of stars and worlds . . .

  A moment’s concentration and he was turning about once more. To face that endless progression.

  And then he was moving towards the nearest giant.

  It was naught but torso and head, its limbs shorn off and spinning in its wake.

  The mass burgeoned swiftly before him, too fast, too huge. Sudden panic gripped Heboric. He could see into that body, as if the world within the jade was scaled to his own. The evidence of that was terrible—and horrifying.

  Figures. Bodies like his own. Humans, thousands upon thousands, all trapped within the statue. Trapped . . . and screaming, their faces twisted in terror.

  A multitude of those faces suddenly swung to him. Mouths opened in silent cries—of warning, or hunger, or fear—there was no way to tell. If they screamed, no sound reached him.

  Heboric added his own silent shriek and desperately willed himself to one side, out of the statue’s path. For he thought he understood, now—they were prisoners, ensnared within the stone flesh, trapped in some unknown torment.

  Then he was past, flung about in the turbulent wake of the broken body’s passage. Spinning end over end, he caught a flash of more jade, directly in front of him.

  A hand.

  A finger, plunging down as if to crush him.

  He screamed as it struck.

  He felt no contact, but the blackness simply vanished, and the sea was emerald green, cold as death.

  And Heboric found himself amidst a crowd of writhing, howling figures.

  The sound was deafening. There was no room to move—his limbs were trapped against him. He could not breathe.

  A prisoner.

  There were voices roaring through his skull. Too many, in languages he could not recognize, much less comprehend. Like storm-waves crashing on a shore, the sound hammered through him, surging and falling, the rhythm quickening as a faint reddish gleam began to stain the green. He could not turn, but did not need to, to know that the wound was
moments from swallowing them all.

  Then a string of words reached through the tumult, close as if whispered in his ear, and he understood them.

  ‘You came from there. What shall we find, Handless One? What lies beyond the gash?’

  Then another voice spoke, louder, more imperious: ‘What god now owns your hands, old man? Tell me! Even their ghosts are not here—who is holding on to you? Tell me!’

  ‘There are no gods,’ a third voice cut in, this one female.

  ‘So you say!’ came yet another, filled with spite. ‘In your empty, barren, miserable world!’

  ‘Gods are born of belief, and belief is dead. We murdered it, with our vast intelligence. You were too primitive—’

  ‘Killing gods is not hard. The easiest murder of all. Nor is it a measure of intelligence. Not even of civilization. Indeed, the indifference with which such death-blows are delivered is its own form of ignorance.’

  ‘More like forgetfulness. After all, it’s not the gods that are important, it is the stepping outside of oneself that gifts a mortal with virtue—’

  ‘Kneel before Order? You blind fool—’

  ‘Order? I was speaking of compassion—’

  ‘Fine, then go ahead! Step outside yourself, Leandris! No, better yet. Step outside.’

  ‘Only the new one can do that, Cassa. And he’d better be quick about it.’

  Twisting, Heboric managed to look down, to catch a glimpse of his left forearm, the wrist, the hand—that was not there. A god. A god has taken them. I was blind to that—the jade’s ghost hands made me blind to that—

  He tilted his head back, as the screams and shrieks suddenly rose higher, deafening, mind-numbing. The world turned red, the red of blood—

  Something tugged on his arms. Hard. Once. Twice.

  Darkness.

  Heboric opened his eyes. Saw above him the colourless canvas of his tent. The air was cold.

  A barely human sound escaped him, and he rolled onto his side beneath the blankets, curling tight into a ball. Shivers thrummed through him.

  A god. A god has found me. But which god?

  It was night, perhaps only a bell from dawn. The camp outside was silent, barring the distant, sorrow-filled howls of desert wolves.

  After a while, Heboric stirred once more. The dung fire was out. No lanterns had been lit. He drew aside the blankets and slowly sat up. Then stared down at his hands, disbelieving.

  They remained ghostly, but the otataral was gone. The power of the jade remained, pulsing dully. Yet now there were slashes of black through it. Lurid—almost liquid—barbs banded the backs of his hands, then tracked upward, shifting angle as they continued up his forearms.

  His tattoos had been transformed.

  And, in this deepest darkness, he could see. Unhumanly sharp, every detail crisp as if it was day outside.

  His head snapped round at a sound and a motion—but it was simply a rhizan, alighting light as a leaf on the tent roof. A rhizan? On the tent roof? Heboric’s stomach rumbled in sudden hunger.

  He looked down at his tattoos once more. I have found a new god. Not that I was seeking one. And I know who. What.

  Bitterness filled him. ‘In need of a Destriant, Treach? So you simply . . . took one. Stole from him his own life. Granted, not much of a life, but still, I owned it. Is this how you recruit followers? Servants? By the Abyss, Treach, you have a lot to learn about mortals.’

  The anger faded. There had been gifts, after all. An exchange of sorts. He was no longer blind. Even more extraordinary, he could actually hear the sounds of neighbours sleeping in their tents and yurts.

  And there, faint on the near-motionless air . . . the smell of . . . violence. But it was distant. The blood had been spilled some time earlier in the night. Some domestic dispute, probably. He would have to teach himself to filter out much of what his newly enlivened senses told him.

  Heboric grunted under his breath, then scowled. ‘All right, Treach. It seems we both have some learning to do. But first . . . something to eat. And drink.’

  When he rose from his sleeping mat, the motion was startlingly fluid, though it was some time before Heboric finally noted the absence of aches, twinges, and the dull throb of his joints.

  He was far too busy filling his belly.

  Forgotten, the mysteries of the jade giants, the innumerable imprisoned souls within them, the ragged wound in the Abyss.

  Forgotten, as well, that faint blood-scented tremor of distant violence . . .

  The burgeoning of some senses perforce took away from others. Leaving him blissfully unaware of his newfound singlemindedness. Two truths he had long known did not, for some time, emerge to trouble him.

  No gifts were truly clean in the giving.

  And nature ever strives for balance. But balance was not a simple notion. Redress was not simply found in the physical world. A far grimmer equilibrium had occurred . . . between the past and the present.

  Felisin Younger’s eyes fluttered open. She had slept, but upon awakening discovered that the pain had not gone away, and the horror of what he had done to her remained as well, though it had grown strangely cold in her mind.

  Into her limited range of vision, close to the sand, a serpent slipped into view directly in front of her face. Then she realized what had awoken her—there were more snakes, slithering over her body. Scores of them.

  Toblakai’s glade. She remembered now. She had crawled here. And L’oric had found her, only to set off once again. To bring medicine, water, bedding, a tent. He had not yet returned.

  Apart from the whispering slither of the snakes, the glade was silent. In this forest, the branches did not move. There were no leaves to flutter in the cool, faint wind. Dried blood in folds of skin stung as she slowly sat up. Sharp pains flared beneath her belly, and the raw wound where he had cut flesh away—there, between her legs—burned fiercely.

  ‘I shall bring this ritual to our people, child, when I am the Whirlwind’s High Priest. All girls shall know this, in my newly shaped world. The pain shall pass. All sensation shall pass. You are to feel nothing, for pleasure does not belong in the mortal realm. Pleasure is the darkest path, for it leads to the loss of control. And we mustn’t have that. Not among our women. Now, you shall join the rest, those I have already corrected . . . ’

  Two such girls had arrived, then, bearing the cutting instruments. They had murmured encouragement to her, and words of welcome. Again and again, in pious tones, they had spoken of the virtues that came of the wounding. Propriety. Loyalty. A leavening of appetites, the withering of desire. All good things, they said to her. Passions were the curse of the world. Indeed, had it not been passions that had enticed her own mother away, that were responsible for her own abandonment? The lure of pleasure had stolen Felisin’s mother . . . away from the duties of motherhood . . .

  Felisin leaned over and spat into the sand. But the taste of their words would not go away. It was not surprising that men could think such things, could do such things. But that women could as well . . . that was indeed a bitter thing to countenance.

  But they were wrong. Walking the wrong trail. Oh, my mother abandoned me, but not for the embrace of some lover. No, it was Hood who embraced her.

  Bidithal would be High Priest, would he? The fool. Sha’ik would find a place for him in her temple—or at least a place for his skull. A cup of bone to piss in, perhaps. And that time was not long in coming.

  Still . . . too long. Bidithal takes girls into his arms every night. He makes an army, a legion of the wounded, the bereft. And they will be eager to share out their loss of pleasure. They are human, after all, and it is human nature to transform loss into a virtue. So that it might be lived with, so that it might be justified.

  A glimmer of dull light distracted her, and she looked up. The carved faces in the trees around her were glowing. Bleeding grey, sorcerous light. Behind each there was . . . a presence. Toblakai’s gods. ‘Welcome, broken one.’ The voice was the sound
of limestone boulders grinding together. ‘I am named Ber’ok. Vengeance swarms about you, with such power as to awaken us. We are not displeased with the summons, child.’

  ‘You are Toblakai’s god,’ she muttered. ‘You have nothing to do with me. Nor do I want you. Go away, Ber’ok. You and the rest—go away.’

  ‘We would ease your pain. I shall make of you my special . . . responsibility. You seek vengeance? Then you shall have it. The one who has damaged you would take the power of the desert goddess for himself. He would usurp the entire fragment of warren, and twist it into his own nightmare. Oh, child, though you might believe otherwise—now—the wounding is of no matter. The danger lies in Bidithal’s ambition. A knife must be driven into his heart. Would it please you to be that knife?’

  She said nothing. There was no way to tell which of the carved faces belonged to Ber’ok, so she could only look from one to the next. A glance to the two fully rendered Toblakai warriors revealed that they possessed no emanation, were grey and lifeless in the pre-dawn darkness.

  ‘Serve us,’ Ber’ok murmured, ‘and we in turn shall serve you. Give us your answer quickly—someone comes.’

  She noted the wavering lantern light on the trail. L’oric. ‘How?’ she asked the gods. ‘How will you serve me?’

  ‘We shall ensure that Bidithal’s death is in a manner to match his crimes, and that it shall be . . . timely.’

  ‘And how am I to be the knife?’

  ‘Child,’ the god calmly replied, ‘you already are.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Teblor have long earned their reputation as slayers of children, butcherers of the helpless, as mortal demons delivered unto the Nathii in a curse altogether undeserved. The sooner the Teblor are obliterated from their mountain fastnesses the sooner the memory of them will finally begin to fade. Until Teblor is no more than a name used to frighten children, we see our cause as clear and singular.

  The Crusade of 1147

  Ayed Kourbourn

  THE WOLVES LOPED THROUGH THE ALMOST LUMINESCENT FOG, THEIR eyes flashing when they swung their massive heads in his direction. As if he was an elk, struggling through deep snow, the huge beasts kept pace on either side, ghostly, with the implacable patience of the predators they were.