‘Bored with everything, and everyone. I search for something I cannot name. A beacon, perhaps, in the darkness of perpetual ignorance. A spark of defiance among the wilfully obtuse. This endless drone irritates me, the frenzied flurry of busyness for little purpose beyond perpetuating a dissatisfying life. The constructs of the intellect are delusional, and so I become the fist of unreason. The gods, I say, care nothing for machines. Care nothing for the lies of habit, nothing for the tyranny of how things were always done and therefore must always be. The gods are deaf to excuses, rationalizations, justifications. Instead, they listen in the silence beyond the machines for the whispered opening of a single heart.’
K’rul had halted during this speech. He studied his companion, this towering, reptilian assassin, slayer of dragons, who had uprooted mountains and lifted them into the sky. ‘You speak of love,’ he said. ‘This is your beacon, your spark of defiance.’
‘The K’Chain Che’Malle look into the night sky and build for it laws and principles, as if the act of definition suffices, serving as justification prior to invasion, conquest and exploitation. Should they ever succeed, they will infect the heavens with the same wars, the same venal desires and hungers, the same witless adherence to those laws and principles by which they shackle all they see, and all they claim to know. Tell me, K’rul, when you look up into this coming night, what do you see?’
‘What I see matters less than what I feel.’
‘And what do you feel?’
‘I feel … wonder.’
Skillen Droe nodded. ‘Just so. And wonder, my friend, is the intellect’s most feared foe. Its path is love, and love is the language of humility. The rational mind would stand over it with a bloodstained sword, and in the empty bleakness of its eyes you will see its triumph.’ The assassin shook his head and fanned wide his wings. ‘This I have learned, among the K’Chain Che’Malle. This, K’rul, is why I stand at your side. The magic you offer – oh, they will seek to cage it, in laws and principles, in rules and squalid structure. But we both know that they will fail, for their minds are trapped in cages of their own making, and all that lies beyond will remain forever unknown, and unknowable, to them. And this they cannot abide.’
‘They will fail,’ K’rul agreed, ‘because I am unknowable.’
‘Yes. And your gesture, K’rul, was an act of love, yielding unending wonder. What you have done will infuriate the world.’
K’rul shrugged. ‘That will … suffice.’
They resumed their journey.
* * *
A broad, flat stone, ten paces across, squatted above the tideline, at the very edge of the caustic miasma that drifted from the Vitr. Long before the unnatural sea’s birth, in the age when the Builders were content working with raw rock, earth and trees, this massive stone had been worked into an altar, its surface roughly flattened by antler picks, with the spiralling grooves left to the elements to soften through seasons of rain, snow, heat and cold.
But none of this had prepared the altar for the acidic bite of the Vitr’s roiling breath. The patterns upon its surface were mostly gone, and the grooves that remained were brittle to the touch. Just as faith died with a people’s death, so too this obelisk and the worship it embodied.
The Thel Akai, Kanyn Thrall, crouched upon the flat surface, leaning on his short-handled, double-bladed axe. The weapon had once belonged to a Thelomen chieftain. Its forger had pronounced it cursed, unsurprisingly, after Thrall had killed the chief in single combat. Such trophies could only be claimed with a touch of irony, an acknowledgement that edges cut both ways. Kanyn Thrall had smiled when he discarded his broken spear, its famed point blunted and barely recognizable beneath a welter of gore, and collected up the cursed axe.
Some weapons possessed only a single moment of triumph within them. Clearly, the axe he now held was biding its time.
With that thought foremost in his mind, lingering in an idle way, he tilted his head slightly as he regarded the dragon drawn up upon the Vitr’s strand, directly opposite him and interceding itself between him and the hovering, crackling gate of Starvald Demelain. The gate had been born, in rupturing fury, far to the south, where it had spilled out a broken storm of dragons, but it had since migrated here, sung close by his mistress’s siren call, and day after day she strengthened the anchors now holding the gate in place.
Songs like the silky strands of a spider, a web very nearly complete. All that remained, he reminded himself, was some sorry bastard’s soul torn loose and stuffed into the gaping wound that was Starvald Demelain. A soul to seal the maw, and pray it’s a mighty soul, a stubborn soul, a soul made to suffer.
Not mine, then.
The dragon had clearly split away from the broken storm – as, he suspected, had most of the others – and circled round, possibly to flee back through the gate. But then, what was stopping it?
Not me. Not my mistress. Not our guest, still half starved, still entirely lost. No, this dragon seems determined to stand in my stead. But I need no help guarding this gate.
And still it refuses to speak.
He reached one hand up to rub at his face, shocked yet again at the deep lines that furrowed it. Shifting slightly – even a Thel Akai born to crouch and squat could know aches in the posture, eventually – he turned his gaze back over his right shoulder, to where the Second Temple stood in tilted disregard amidst lifeless sand dunes. Second Temple. So she calls it, with that mocking smile. ‘While you, Kanyn Thrall, you claim the first one. That flat stone, that eroded failure soon to dissolve beneath the waters of the Vitr. Not that my abode will last much longer, of course. Still, I am optimistic. Its Chamber of Dreaming remains empty, but still, on late nights, I enter it, listening for her whisper.’
Foolish woman. Your lover drowned, and you’ll not again lie with your queen. Just as I will never again lie with my king, since no two men can ever shit out an heir. This is how things are, Ardata. Let’s make use of our guest’s soul, swollen as it is with self-pity, and stopper the gate shut, and then let us leave, seeking some other worthy cause.
He couldn’t see her. Somewhere inside the Second Temple, he surmised, drifting from empty room to empty room, fingers making patterns in the air that lingered like floating webs in her wake.
Come the night she’d take his cock, the lesser pleasure being the only pleasure, and he’d take her wet hole, for much the same reason. It was, all things considered, comical.
A Thel Akai tale to be sure, a long joke’s sudden punchline. I see the host rocking back in delighted laughter, enough to drown the sting to be sure. Though my king’s eyes would look on, veiled behind the fixed smile. Old men should never linger.
The guest, however, was there, seated upon a toppled column below the shattered steps, whetstone motionless in one hand, sword-blade resting across his thighs. He was staring out at the Vitr, his mouth somewhat open, somewhat hanging. A man not yet old enough to take stock of his orifices, snapping them shut to all worlds but the intimate one. No, instead he gawks, and gawps. He works at something and then that mouth hinges open, to show the heavy drama of his deed. Pant pant pant, each breath almost but not quite silent. Irritating as all the hells Ardata claims to have survived. Whatever ‘hells’ are.
He had stumbled into them some time back, this stranger, this guest. Walking, he told them, from a dead horse – the fool had carried the saddle to prove it – up from the south, a dying wanderer, or perhaps a refugee, or even a criminal. Choose the title you like, just add ‘dying’ to it and that’ll do.
Kanyn was of no mind to lend aid. His days of offering salvation were far behind him. But the Mistress had insisted, and it was only much later that the Thel Akai warrior had divined her unspoken motivation.