Compared to the heat of the Badlands, it was relatively cool, but it was the all-powerful, vile humidity that made Salkir so unbearable. Even here, high up on the Ziggurat, there was barely any escape from the cloying heat.
She was beautiful, though, was Salkir. Ankh was not one given to sentimentality, and his sense of humour only appeared when he was being confronted by vicious, ravening ghouls; but even he could appreciate Salkir. The sun boiled down on a riotous profusion of mud-brick homes, all jammed together so as there were no streets whatsoever in the entire city, poked up from the homogeneous mass, sometimes by almost as much as a story. Greens and whites, blues and yellows and reds livened up the muddy terracotta of the bricks, as did a veritable sea of canopies, awnings, and stalls. Bright fruits were hawked by bright people to rivers of passersby; a thousand pickpockets gleaned Farhight's cheap money from careless pockets. The entire city positively teemed with life, thousands upon thousands of people from all nations. Beyond it, the river – the Sphinxwater - lay like a carelessly dropped thread, shining rich and green in its myriad twists, here in the late stage of its development. Beyond the river of the Sphinx's Gift, its fertile floodplains abounding with life all its own: fields upon fields of figs, chickpeas, and grain, all meant for Salkir. To the west, the Dragon's Teeth, the towering mountains that walled the Occidental Basin off from Farhight, stood snow-capped; to the east, the fertile fields petered out into the glimmering yellow wilderness of the south Farhighter desert, haunted by nomads and Blue Dragon rebels.
“Appreciating the view?” a deep rumble of a voice asked. Ankh steeled himself before looking around: Maathotep, the Farhighter monarch's advisor from the Sphinxes, was always unsettling. The stone sphinxes they sometimes found in the Badlands or in the desert always had a comforting, impossible artificiality about them: the human neck always fused onto the spine too cleanly, the wings never looked quite right. It managed to convince you that they weren't real. Maathotep was completely different: whenever his braided, perfumed beard shifted, one could see the fur running and thinning up his neck; his features had a faintly leonine cast to them, and the huge, broad white wings that he usually carried folded up had fur running up their spines, growing into feathers. How such an improbable creature had come about, Ankh didn't know and didn't care to speculate; they were almost certainly magical in origin. There was certainly no evolutionary advantage inherent in being a winged lion with an ape's head.
“The... er... the view is truly excellent from this height.” Ankh remarked. It wasn't a lie: the Ziggurat, whose myriad corridors served as accommodation for the Shahanshah's court. The sphinx nodded sedately; his long, perfumed Babylonian beard dipped with him.
“Nothing can compare with the view when one soars, I think. But I digress!” the sphinx rumbled, turning his sapphire gaze on Ankh again. “The Shahanshah is holding court. I believe a decision is to be made regarding the Blue Dragons. As official representative of the Duchy of Akar, you are expected to be present.”
“Ah... thank you. I will be there presently.”
* * *
“The monarchy,” the fat northerner roared, red-faced, spraying saliva over his audience, “must be preserved at all costs! We in the ancient nation of Ostmargue understand this above all else, as our enduring monarchy demonstrates! These communists must be repressed at all costs!”
Ankh sighed and propped his head against his hand. He had never heard of Ostmargue, nor had he any desire to; all he knew that it was somewhere to the north, that it was populated by creatures called Thurse – apparently, just bigger versions of normal people – and that they had sent this fat, pontificating ambassador to Farhight – with which, apparently, the Ostmargue people had a long and enduring relationship – to shout at everyone for the past half-hour about how monarchies were wonderful. As a Lanciar, Ankh had his own opinions on that, but if this man continued on much longer, he would never have a chance to air his opinions.
The court was taking place in a large, well-lit red-brick chamber, near the top of the Ziggurat, with a balcony running around it from about halfway up. All nearby nations – 'nearby'; Ankh hadn't heard of most of them – were represented on the balcony, including this Ostmargue, from whose section the fat man was shouting. Below, a host of courtiers and blow-ins clustered around the sphinx, Maathotep, and the palace guards, surrounding the Shahanshah himself.
The Shahanshah, a hugely-muscular, intelligent-looking man, seemed just as bored as everyone else was by the Ostmargue person's hyperbole. In fact, from the half-lidded eyes and propped-up head, Ankh strongly suspected he was dozing.
“...and with the recent death of the good Shahanshah's father,” the Ostmargue person continued, growing even redder and more salivary, “it is important that our friend the Shahanshah, Nes-Shapur III, realise some powerful and potent allies to help secure his throne from this dreaded scourge. We in Ostmargue believe we can supply such an ally, and as such, Ostmargue declares in favour of the Green Dragon faction!” The fat Thurse bowled backwards into his seat, mopping his forehead and looking pleased with himself. Finally, Ankh thought.
Maathotep trotted up from beside the Shahanshah's throne. “We thank the Osting - ” Ah, Ankh thought, that's what you call an Ostmargue person... “ - delegation for sharing their wisdom with us.” He reared up, regally. “The Shahanshah will hear the delegation from Markan!"
Another Thurse, this one a small, ratty creature almost as tiny as a normal human, stepped up. His delegation was small, from all the court gossip just like his nation.
“The people of Farhight have always been kind to the traders and merchants of Markan. We wish to preserve this fruitful relationship - Markan declares in favour of the Shahanshah!”
A courtier – Stafu, Ankh thought his name was - next to Ankh leaned over. “Markan used to be a Kamarean colony.” he whispered conspiratorially. “They still maintain strong ties. The Kamareans often fly a kite by getting the Markanians to announce something.”
“Thanks.” Ankh murmured, and returned to his perusal of the assorted nations. Ostmargue had been the first; the nations of Grailin, Kamar, the Eastern Duchy, Tyrenea, Akar, Lannding, and Camranova had yet to be heard, in addition to two conglomerates from the Urglenn Mountains – wherever they were – that nobody really seemed to know what to make of.
“The Shahanshah thanks the Markanian delegate, and will now hear the Camranovaean ambassador.” A tall man – a human, not a Thurse – stood up. Metal plate armour – the lorica segmentata, the Camranovaeans called their armour – shielded his body, but his greying head was uncovered.
“As all here know,” he began, “ever since Jinn II of Kamar led his armies east and founded New Kamar – Camranova – in what had been the untamed steppes of north-eastern Farhight, the Camranovaeans and the Empire of Salkir have been struggling for domination of Farhight. All know us to be bitter enemies. Yet we are honourable ones. While we will not attack Salkir in her time of weakness, neither will we lend her the strength of our sword-arms. Camranova abstains.”
Stafu whispered again. “That's unexpected. Camranova is very powerful – they could have dealt Salkir a killing blow with this rebellion. The Dead God now only knows how things will go.”
“The Shahanshah thanks the Camranovaean ambassador. We will now hear the emissary of Grailin.”
A hush settled over the hall, and every eye turned towards a small section of the balcony, where a few Thurse in grey uniforms and armour were surrounding a tall Thurse, wrapped in furs despite the heat. Slowly, the tall Thurse looked up, revealing a face of hard planes and icy eyes, old before its years, and stood.
“I am Sanric te Eleazar te Baldwin, Grand Marshal of the Grailinese Army, foremost military power... in the world, if I may be so modest.” He smiled condescendingly. No-one took offense – no-one dared to. “I am sure you have all heard of Grailin.” No, Ankh thought, feeling more ignorant by the minute.
“For those of you that haven't,” Sanric continued, “allow me to explain. Grailin is the future.” He paused to let that sink in. No-one stirred.
“We, in Grailin, have observed the state of this world. The once-mighty Kamarean Empire wastes its resources fighting southern barbarians - ” Ankh bristled “ - the equally fallen Farhight is torn by a pathetic rabble of rebels, and the lands of the Thurse are occupied by decrepit scholars, greedy merchants... and us.” Sanric smiled, predatorily. “We believe that the only way to keep this pathetic world from disintegrating into total war is to induce just such a war... one in which Grailin will be the victor. One in which the great cities – Orlan, Salkir, Orlanova, Caragean, all of them – will fly the wolf of Grailin. One in which unity, under the name of Grailin, prevails. It makes our Emperor's heart bleed to see nations still pretending to glory without Grailin. Grailin is, of course, ready to accept all submissions to our unstoppable power... but until that time, it is in our best interest to destabilise all established regimes. As such, Grailin declares in support of the Blue Dragon rebels!” he shouted.
The hall sat in stunned silence. The Grailinese orator sat back, a sharp smile playing about his lips. Then, into the silence, one of the human delegates jumped up and shouted:
“It is clear that, for the Eastern Duchy, the only logical choice is to side with our friends in Grailin and support the Blue Dragons!” The hall burst into a shocked murmur. Even the Shahanshah had been woken from his slumber: he watched the Grailinese ambassador, green in the face.
“Not one word that Sanric said was untrue.” Stafu said to Ankh. “Grailin is the next great empire. I suspect this will sway many of those undecided. As for the Eastern Duchy...”
Ankh knew the Eastern Duchy – well, as it happened. It was a neighbour to Akar, but its population was miniscule, its lands, right next to the Badlands, half-desertified, and its independence based on the fact that it had nothing worth stealing. He wasn't worried about the Easterners, but this Grailin lot would bear further watching.
“The Shahanshah will hear the Tyrenean ambassador.” Ankh leaned forward – Tyrenea was another neighbour of Akar's. The Tyrenean, a robed priest, was looking green in the face after Grailin's announcement.
“The Duchy of Tyrenea... aah... abstains.” He smiled weakly. Another human jumped to his feet, on the other side of the hall.
“The citizenry of Lannding will never condone the cowardice that the people of Camranova and Tyrenea have displayed! We must help our oppressed friends in the east, and declare for the Blue Dragons! Ye who have not declared, hear me and free the oppressed people of Farhight!”
“How dare you!” The Camranovaean delegate surged to his feet amid a chorus of roars, shouting the impertinent Lannding delegate down. “Had we the will to, we would march across the deserts and burn your pathetic country to the ground!”
“Silence!” Maathotep roared, a leonine sound that cut through the shouting. “The Shahanshah will hear the delegate of the Progressive faction now.” A tiny little man stood up, dressed in green tartans and a cloak cinched with an ornate golden brooch. No dwarf was he: he was an Erse, apparently a much smaller version of a human.
“For long years... ahem. Excuse me. In the Urglenns, we are not much used to public speaking. In the Urglenn Mountains, things don't change very fast. No.” The little Erse cleared his throat, growing redder with every minute. “In fact, it would be safe to say that tradition strangles every new idea born in my home. It is the goal of the Progressive faction to remove these stultifying traditions and thus free the Erse to claim their destiny. Considering...” The little man glanced nervously at the Shahanshah. “Considering... our rather similar goals and the fact that one of our number, Shamus of Borova, is so regarded among the Blue Dragons, the Progressive faction of the Urglenns... sides with the Blue Dragons.” The Erse sat down. On the other side of the hall, another Erse – this one with thick grey whiskers and moustache, and almost no head-hair – stood up.
“Given our intrinsic opposition, it can only be that the Traditionalist faction of the Urglenns, which I represent, supports the Green Dragons.” Maathotep nodded at the grey-haired, dignified little man. He sat down with nose in the air; the other Erse stared at him venomously.
“We thank the Traditionalist emissary for his support. The Shahanshah now calls on the Kamarean delegate to clarify his support.” The Kamarean delegate, across from Ankh, stood up. Pale and chubby, and dressed in a Kamarean suit and fedora which would have been stylish on anyone else, he cleared his throat nervously.
“L – ladies and gentlemen... my name is Isambard Hercules.” He looked around, and for a moment, his gaze and Ankh's crossed – and Ankh sat back in shock. In those eyes, he had glimpsed an intelligence so vast it beggared description. Despite his appearance, this man was clever enough to be Akar's worst enemy.
“It can be observed,” Isambard Hercules noted, “that a similar relationship exists between Kamar and Farhight as between Farhight and Camranova – that is, two great empires struggling for control of numerous provinces. We have fought long and hard against Farhight, but honourably too. But at least we are familiar with the Shahanshah's regime. These rebels, they are something new, something alien. And it may be that old enemies fight each other so long, they become allies unknowingly. Kamar declares in favour of the Farhighter monarchy.” The hall's murmuring started up again, and the Eastern and Lannding ambassadors looked distinctly uncomfortable. Ankh's eyes were on the Grailinese contingent – they looked delighted, for some reason.
“This is most unexpected.” Stafu whispered. “Kamar and Farhight are ancient enemies...” Ankh nodded. Stafu paused a minute. “I believe you're the only one left.” Ankh nodded again, considering.
“The Shahanshah would hear the Akarean delegate now.” Maathotep called. Ankh swallowed the lump in his throat, and – haltingly – he stood up. Every eye in the hall was on him; he could feel the Osting's eyes drilling him, imploring him to do the right thing; he could feel the Kamarean, Isambard Hercules, wondering about the ongoing war; he could see the Grailinese man's gaze weighing him and measuring him... and finding him lacking?
“I believe,” he began, then stopped. He cleared his throat, wondering what the people below were seeing – one of the legendary barbarian Lanciars, with their face-obscuring helmets and inhuman discipline, their famous prowess in battle, their lack of technology, the rumours of eugenics that floated about them. Akar's image was resting on him.
“I believe that the Kamarean ambassador's statements were, in essence, correct.” He swallowed – why was his throat so dry now, of all times? “Kamar and Farhight were and are ancient enemies, and traditionally, Akar has supported Farhight in these conflicts. Yet now, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma. Kamar and Farhight share a side. What, I ask you, am I to do?” He paused, this time for dramatic effect.
“Well, let it never be said that Akar is not forgiving. We will side with the Green Dragons, with the Kamareans, with whom we are currently at war. Akar will abandon her campaign against Kamar to pursue this common threat. As of this moment, Akar and Kamar are at peace.” The hall was silent. Ankh sat down. He could hear the murmurs: Akar and Kamar taking a side? Even the Grailinese wasn't looking as confident as he had. With the exception of Grailin's declaration, things had gone overwhelmingly in favour of the Green Dragons.
“The Shahanshah,” Maathotep bellowed, “thanks all his new allies. Ye of Grailin, Lannding, the Eastern Duchy, and the Progressive faction, leave here in shame. Farhight welcomes her new allies, Kamar, the Traditionalist faction, Ostmargue, Akar, and Markan to her bosom.” The hall erupted in applause, as the Grailinese and their new cronies swept out, spurned. Ankh released a sigh of relief: this rebellion should be over by winter.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Clash of Kings
Zorlac belched idly and tossed a crystal goblet somewhere behind him, spraying droplets of wine everywhere. Quick as a flash, Zanticus plucked it out of the air, set it upright, and wiped up the droplets of drink. Zorlac, being the self-obsessedly egotistical, lazy, decadent, and otherwise typical human that he was, never noticed.
“I say, Zorlac.” Zanticus began.
“Two things.” his rightful, thank you very much, sovereign cut across him. “Firstly, you say 'Zorlac'. You say 'Zorlac' very well. Secondly, remember that the last conversation you began with 'I say, Zorlac' ended with your swearing eternal bondage to me.”
“I didn't swear!”
“Well then don't make me make you. Savour what little freedom you have, my minion. And now, what do we do today?”
“Kill Lanciars.” Zanticus answered sulkily. No grown man should ever be sulky. It didn't become grown men. Zanticus was still sulky, though.
“I know that, Zanticus. I mean: kill what Lanciars, and when?”
* * *
Constantine watched the surrounding Kingdom of Lain through hard, suspicious eyes from the convenient woods. All around him, his Lanciars – mounted, this time; he was leading a force of Cataphracts – also watched the fertile fields. Considering that their helmets walled off all but a small circle of the world, this wasn't much good to them; but it was the thought that counted.
More specifically, Constantine watched the little train of wagons that bumped and rattled their way east along the vast, cobbled road known as the Lain Cross. Connecting the cities of Ostia, Kallipolis, Tyrenea, and Trapezus to the Lain capital of Caragean, it was an artery of trade in peacetime, which meant just about never. Once again, though, it was the thought that counted, and the gratuitously capitalist Lain Kamareans kept the road in good shape, for the use of trade caravans.
Such as this one. Coming from the Duchy of Tyrenea, a decayed Akaric state whose monarch was also the head of the Church of Benet – to which the Akareans ascribed – the city of Tyrene was important for more than its temples, and that was its factories. Almost as advanced as the Kamareans from whom they maintained a frail independence, the Tyreneans could produce wagonloads of cutlery, farm implements, industrial tools... or weapons.
This cart sold weapons.
Oddly, though, it seemed very lightly defended. Constantine had led his Cataphracts all the way through Lain to intercept this caravan – only to find that it was practically deserted, only its drivers and a few token guards to keep away the numerous bandits that the ongoing war had created. Considering the danger that the Kamarean army was in if the Lanciars should get their hands on gunpowder...
Well. It wasn't like a whole contingent of the Legio Magica was going to spring out of nowhere and ambush them or anything insane like that.
* * *
Zorlac watched the pretty fields from above. The aircraft circled silently, its engines muted as much as possible. Across from him was Zanticus, holding a sword with the conviction of an especially brave squirrel; also in the craft were nine other Legio Magica trainees. Only Zorlac had a squire, which was what Zanticus had ended up being. Technically, he shouldn't have been allowed, but, as Zanticus could attest, Zorlac wasn't easily refused.
“Just a raiding party to sharpen your swords, metaphorically speaking of course.” the commander had told them before sending them off. “Zorlac, I'm putting you in charge. Try not to die! Haha!” Most Kamareans' humours were feeble, but they were better than the Akareans. And it wasn't even worth going into, what Farhighters found amusing.
A voice crackled over the radio. One of the wagon drivers' voices came in.
“Tango One! Is that Tango One?”
Zorlac's commander wasn't the most imaginative of men.
“Tango One to Bait One.”
In fact, he had very little imagination indeed.
“Hook, line and sinker, Tango One. I repeat, hook, line and sinker!”
The radio went dead. Zorlac knew what 'hook, line and sinker' meant: he knew it well.
Sure enough, the Akareans Cataphracts burst out of a copse. Zorlac counted them: twenty shining, silvery knights, glittering like a miniature school of fish as they flowed along the ground in their mail and blue-and-red Akarean barding, Cataphracts' maces at the ready and circular Lanciar hoplon shields held before them. At their head rode their commander, distinguished from them by his red helmet-brush compared to their blue ones. The wagon drivers made a not-unconvincing impression of running as fast as their stubby legs would take them.
“Take us down, pilot.” Zorlac ordered, smiling. “It's been too long since I killed a Lanciar.”
Zanticus, as usual, spoiled the moment.
“You never killed a Lanciar, sir!”
“Shut up, Zanticus.”
* * *
Constantine looked up presciently and, with a relaxed surge of fear, saw the Kamarean aircraft, red and doom-laden, descending from the sky on wings of defeat. It wasn't that it was large that was bothering him – it was because it was small.
To Constantine's knowledge, there was only one way to fit a worthwhile ambush in ten men – and that was the Legio Magica. Sure enough, the men piling out wore the ebon-and-gold uniforms of the Legio Magica.
“Legio Magica, sir! Do we abort!” one of the Cataphracts shouted, not out of fear. Lanciars weren't afraid of very much, but they died like other men, and no-one knew that like they did.
“No! Ride them down – wait a minute... what the hell is that on their banner?”
* * *
Zorlac watched with a smile as Zanticus unfurled their banner.
“See, Zanticus? I told you those pictures of the Civitate of Thraxion near-naked would unsettle them, just like their brethren in the Akarean Quarter.” Zanticus looked up at the artists' impression of the grossly obese old Civitate hanging from the banner.
“That's as may be, sir, but it still isn't very nice.”
* * *
Constantine did his best to ignore the revolting banner and instead focused on the Legio Magica. To their credit, they were much more professional than the chaff he had previously been facing: they stood their ground, black uniforms shimmering in the weak light, drawing their weapons of choice. Constantine ignored them, focusing instead on the horse beneath his feet. One of the great Kallipolitan warhorses, from the level land around the Lanciars' capital, the sheer weight of armour and mailed man on top required them to be enormous – and enormously strong, if at the cost of speed.
Not that that mattered much on a downhill charge.
Constantine picked his target, a pompous-looking young man with perfectly primped hair and a stick he probably thought was a sword, shadowed by a pale, nervous sidekick. He felt the horse course beneath him, its hooves churning up the muck, its breath labouring out between its nostrils, its sweat oozing through the mail and the pretty blue-and-red barding. He wrenched out his mace, spinning it around to gain momentum – if it flew out of his hand, he always had his sword – and turned again on his foe. Downhill he was, most certainly, and the slope was certainly in Constantine's favour, he on his tall horse, whirling his mace, teeth gritted in determination as his helmet hid his thoughts, a solid tonne of man and horse bearing silvery doom down on the prissy lad -
And then the fight began in his mind.
* * *
Zorlac picked his target, the commander in front with the aura of determination, and faced him with the kind of confidence only Zorlac could muster when facing a tonne of angry Lanciar and armoured horseflesh barreling towards him. Unlike, however, most insufferably overconfident people, Zorlac had a very, very good reason for confidence.
This reason was magic.
Zorlac closed his eyes and refocused, opening the metaphorical third eye that one needed for magic. All the universe's dimension, fourth and fifth and sixth and eleventh, opened up to him and he existed in a transcendent state where he could see past the fragile three-dimensional shell of flesh that shielded the oh-so-confident Lanciar commander to the pulsating brightness of the mind beneath. Zorlac operated his magic – a natural force, akin to gravity, attracted to sentience as gravity was to mass – and reached into the man's mind.
And staggered back in shock.
For this was no normal man – no, no normal Lanciar, even. Nor was he some prophesied hero. He was simply a man who would do great things, a man who was courageous and honest and clever, a good man and a great one.
But he was no magician, and he was certainly no Zorlac.
* * *
Constantine's grip on the reins slackened and failed as a torrent of consciousness impacted his own. He felt an otherness, a person made of confidence, humour and a great, almost overwhelming intelligence, a dominating and righteous creature – but no evil one.
Evil or no, though, he was still inside Constantine's head. He concentrated, pushing the man out to the best of his ability -
And then he had bigger concerns, such as the ground.
* * *
Zorlac, linked with Constantine as he was, felt the pain of Constantine's head impacting the ground as keenly as Constantine himself did. He staggered for a moment, his perfectly primped curls going awry as his eyes boggled. He raised his hand to his head and nearly poked his eye out with the sword in it.
“Zanticus!” he called, for no particular reason. He was answered only by a frightened whimper.
“Zanticus!” he hissed at the craven squire, cowering behind a rock that did precisely nothing to hide him. “Get off your backside!” Zanticus whimpered and looked at something now behind Zorlac with white eyes.
“What are you so scared of – oh.”
It was Constantine.
* * *
Constantine wasted no time getting back up, clambering ungainly to his feet as his horse slowed in confusion at the lack of his rider. Pain lanced up his neck and back as he scrabbled upwards, his mail clinking and sliding, but if anything were broken, he'd be dead already. His shoulder had, thankfully, taken the worst of the blow, and the shoulderpad had taken the worst of that.
And Zorlac was still downhill.
He was less his mace, but not his sword, so he replicated his previous maneuver, without the horse this time. Oblivious, the boy squawked at his minion, who cowered terrifiedly – smart boy – behind an overgrown pebble. The minion squawked something in Kamarean and the boy turned around, surprise etched all over his pretty face -
Constantine brought his sword down confidently.
The boy met it just as confidently, and with a surprising strength in his wiry limbs. He danced back – typical prissy Kamarean! This is war, not ballet – and darted around Constantine's defenses. Constantine lumbered around, suddenly all too aware of the short-comings of his heavy armour, his own blade searching, seeking, slicing -
Thin air. The boy was gone again and -
Ack! Constantine grunted as the lad's sword glanced off his damaged shoulder. He tensed himself, pretending to huddle up in pain and the child advanced confidently -
And Constantine lashed around. His sword swept through the air, fast as lightning, lethal as a wrecking ball. The lad, taken off balance, just got his sword up in time -
The lad's blade snapped. Constantine's sword carried on into his stomach. He screamed in agony, his lifeblood bleeding out between his fingers as he grasped his side in an upwelling of gory dark redness. Constantine moved in for the coup de grace -
And Zanticus took him from behind.
Constantine almost didn't notice. Huge as he was, Zanticus barely knocked him off balance. Constantine simply batted the squire away with his shield – but it provided the requisite interval for Zorlac to regain his concentration. He looked at the towering Lanciar, an avatar of justice bedecked in shining mail and faceless helmet, and looked into the two circular eyeholes that were the helmet-visor's only feature.
Zorlac's brown eyes locked into Constantine's blue.
Both of them thought at the same instant, This is the man who will kill me.
Then Zorlac invaded Constantine's mind. Constantine had only a moment, and he used it well.
“Up the reserve!” he bellowed, an instant before a magical wedge delivered Zorlac's consciousness afresh into Constantine's skull.
Then the other eighty Cataphracts of Constantine's contingent burst out of the trees. Zorlac swore something foul, the mind-wedge retreating, and Constantine chuckled hoarsely.
“You didn't think I'd be sent to capture an armaments train with just twenty men, did you?”
Zorlac weighed up the options. The eighty Cataphracts thundering towards him probably equalled death, damnation or pain – possibly all three.
Then he did something unexpected.
He laughed.
“Damn you, you sneaky conniving old man.” And he set off towards the aircraft, Zanticus in tow, the other seven surviving members of the Legio Magica following him. Five Lanciars and three horses also lay dead – not bad odds against the wizards.
Constantine paused to take stock. For a skirmish of thirty men, it had been hard-fought but relatively bloodless, and now they were in possession of an armaments train.
One of dozens that flooded into Caragean every day.
“Do we head back towards Kallipolis, sir?” one of the Cataphracts asked. Slowly, Constantine shook his head.
“No. No, I have a better idea.”
“I say, Zorlac.” Zanticus began.
“Two things.” his rightful, thank you very much, sovereign cut across him. “Firstly, you say 'Zorlac'. You say 'Zorlac' very well. Secondly, remember that the last conversation you began with 'I say, Zorlac' ended with your swearing eternal bondage to me.”
“I didn't swear!”
“Well then don't make me make you. Savour what little freedom you have, my minion. And now, what do we do today?”
“Kill Lanciars.” Zanticus answered sulkily. No grown man should ever be sulky. It didn't become grown men. Zanticus was still sulky, though.
“I know that, Zanticus. I mean: kill what Lanciars, and when?”
* * *
Constantine watched the surrounding Kingdom of Lain through hard, suspicious eyes from the convenient woods. All around him, his Lanciars – mounted, this time; he was leading a force of Cataphracts – also watched the fertile fields. Considering that their helmets walled off all but a small circle of the world, this wasn't much good to them; but it was the thought that counted.
More specifically, Constantine watched the little train of wagons that bumped and rattled their way east along the vast, cobbled road known as the Lain Cross. Connecting the cities of Ostia, Kallipolis, Tyrenea, and Trapezus to the Lain capital of Caragean, it was an artery of trade in peacetime, which meant just about never. Once again, though, it was the thought that counted, and the gratuitously capitalist Lain Kamareans kept the road in good shape, for the use of trade caravans.
Such as this one. Coming from the Duchy of Tyrenea, a decayed Akaric state whose monarch was also the head of the Church of Benet – to which the Akareans ascribed – the city of Tyrene was important for more than its temples, and that was its factories. Almost as advanced as the Kamareans from whom they maintained a frail independence, the Tyreneans could produce wagonloads of cutlery, farm implements, industrial tools... or weapons.
This cart sold weapons.
Oddly, though, it seemed very lightly defended. Constantine had led his Cataphracts all the way through Lain to intercept this caravan – only to find that it was practically deserted, only its drivers and a few token guards to keep away the numerous bandits that the ongoing war had created. Considering the danger that the Kamarean army was in if the Lanciars should get their hands on gunpowder...
Well. It wasn't like a whole contingent of the Legio Magica was going to spring out of nowhere and ambush them or anything insane like that.
* * *
Zorlac watched the pretty fields from above. The aircraft circled silently, its engines muted as much as possible. Across from him was Zanticus, holding a sword with the conviction of an especially brave squirrel; also in the craft were nine other Legio Magica trainees. Only Zorlac had a squire, which was what Zanticus had ended up being. Technically, he shouldn't have been allowed, but, as Zanticus could attest, Zorlac wasn't easily refused.
“Just a raiding party to sharpen your swords, metaphorically speaking of course.” the commander had told them before sending them off. “Zorlac, I'm putting you in charge. Try not to die! Haha!” Most Kamareans' humours were feeble, but they were better than the Akareans. And it wasn't even worth going into, what Farhighters found amusing.
A voice crackled over the radio. One of the wagon drivers' voices came in.
“Tango One! Is that Tango One?”
Zorlac's commander wasn't the most imaginative of men.
“Tango One to Bait One.”
In fact, he had very little imagination indeed.
“Hook, line and sinker, Tango One. I repeat, hook, line and sinker!”
The radio went dead. Zorlac knew what 'hook, line and sinker' meant: he knew it well.
Sure enough, the Akareans Cataphracts burst out of a copse. Zorlac counted them: twenty shining, silvery knights, glittering like a miniature school of fish as they flowed along the ground in their mail and blue-and-red Akarean barding, Cataphracts' maces at the ready and circular Lanciar hoplon shields held before them. At their head rode their commander, distinguished from them by his red helmet-brush compared to their blue ones. The wagon drivers made a not-unconvincing impression of running as fast as their stubby legs would take them.
“Take us down, pilot.” Zorlac ordered, smiling. “It's been too long since I killed a Lanciar.”
Zanticus, as usual, spoiled the moment.
“You never killed a Lanciar, sir!”
“Shut up, Zanticus.”
* * *
Constantine looked up presciently and, with a relaxed surge of fear, saw the Kamarean aircraft, red and doom-laden, descending from the sky on wings of defeat. It wasn't that it was large that was bothering him – it was because it was small.
To Constantine's knowledge, there was only one way to fit a worthwhile ambush in ten men – and that was the Legio Magica. Sure enough, the men piling out wore the ebon-and-gold uniforms of the Legio Magica.
“Legio Magica, sir! Do we abort!” one of the Cataphracts shouted, not out of fear. Lanciars weren't afraid of very much, but they died like other men, and no-one knew that like they did.
“No! Ride them down – wait a minute... what the hell is that on their banner?”
* * *
Zorlac watched with a smile as Zanticus unfurled their banner.
“See, Zanticus? I told you those pictures of the Civitate of Thraxion near-naked would unsettle them, just like their brethren in the Akarean Quarter.” Zanticus looked up at the artists' impression of the grossly obese old Civitate hanging from the banner.
“That's as may be, sir, but it still isn't very nice.”
* * *
Constantine did his best to ignore the revolting banner and instead focused on the Legio Magica. To their credit, they were much more professional than the chaff he had previously been facing: they stood their ground, black uniforms shimmering in the weak light, drawing their weapons of choice. Constantine ignored them, focusing instead on the horse beneath his feet. One of the great Kallipolitan warhorses, from the level land around the Lanciars' capital, the sheer weight of armour and mailed man on top required them to be enormous – and enormously strong, if at the cost of speed.
Not that that mattered much on a downhill charge.
Constantine picked his target, a pompous-looking young man with perfectly primped hair and a stick he probably thought was a sword, shadowed by a pale, nervous sidekick. He felt the horse course beneath him, its hooves churning up the muck, its breath labouring out between its nostrils, its sweat oozing through the mail and the pretty blue-and-red barding. He wrenched out his mace, spinning it around to gain momentum – if it flew out of his hand, he always had his sword – and turned again on his foe. Downhill he was, most certainly, and the slope was certainly in Constantine's favour, he on his tall horse, whirling his mace, teeth gritted in determination as his helmet hid his thoughts, a solid tonne of man and horse bearing silvery doom down on the prissy lad -
And then the fight began in his mind.
* * *
Zorlac picked his target, the commander in front with the aura of determination, and faced him with the kind of confidence only Zorlac could muster when facing a tonne of angry Lanciar and armoured horseflesh barreling towards him. Unlike, however, most insufferably overconfident people, Zorlac had a very, very good reason for confidence.
This reason was magic.
Zorlac closed his eyes and refocused, opening the metaphorical third eye that one needed for magic. All the universe's dimension, fourth and fifth and sixth and eleventh, opened up to him and he existed in a transcendent state where he could see past the fragile three-dimensional shell of flesh that shielded the oh-so-confident Lanciar commander to the pulsating brightness of the mind beneath. Zorlac operated his magic – a natural force, akin to gravity, attracted to sentience as gravity was to mass – and reached into the man's mind.
And staggered back in shock.
For this was no normal man – no, no normal Lanciar, even. Nor was he some prophesied hero. He was simply a man who would do great things, a man who was courageous and honest and clever, a good man and a great one.
But he was no magician, and he was certainly no Zorlac.
* * *
Constantine's grip on the reins slackened and failed as a torrent of consciousness impacted his own. He felt an otherness, a person made of confidence, humour and a great, almost overwhelming intelligence, a dominating and righteous creature – but no evil one.
Evil or no, though, he was still inside Constantine's head. He concentrated, pushing the man out to the best of his ability -
And then he had bigger concerns, such as the ground.
* * *
Zorlac, linked with Constantine as he was, felt the pain of Constantine's head impacting the ground as keenly as Constantine himself did. He staggered for a moment, his perfectly primped curls going awry as his eyes boggled. He raised his hand to his head and nearly poked his eye out with the sword in it.
“Zanticus!” he called, for no particular reason. He was answered only by a frightened whimper.
“Zanticus!” he hissed at the craven squire, cowering behind a rock that did precisely nothing to hide him. “Get off your backside!” Zanticus whimpered and looked at something now behind Zorlac with white eyes.
“What are you so scared of – oh.”
It was Constantine.
* * *
Constantine wasted no time getting back up, clambering ungainly to his feet as his horse slowed in confusion at the lack of his rider. Pain lanced up his neck and back as he scrabbled upwards, his mail clinking and sliding, but if anything were broken, he'd be dead already. His shoulder had, thankfully, taken the worst of the blow, and the shoulderpad had taken the worst of that.
And Zorlac was still downhill.
He was less his mace, but not his sword, so he replicated his previous maneuver, without the horse this time. Oblivious, the boy squawked at his minion, who cowered terrifiedly – smart boy – behind an overgrown pebble. The minion squawked something in Kamarean and the boy turned around, surprise etched all over his pretty face -
Constantine brought his sword down confidently.
The boy met it just as confidently, and with a surprising strength in his wiry limbs. He danced back – typical prissy Kamarean! This is war, not ballet – and darted around Constantine's defenses. Constantine lumbered around, suddenly all too aware of the short-comings of his heavy armour, his own blade searching, seeking, slicing -
Thin air. The boy was gone again and -
Ack! Constantine grunted as the lad's sword glanced off his damaged shoulder. He tensed himself, pretending to huddle up in pain and the child advanced confidently -
And Constantine lashed around. His sword swept through the air, fast as lightning, lethal as a wrecking ball. The lad, taken off balance, just got his sword up in time -
The lad's blade snapped. Constantine's sword carried on into his stomach. He screamed in agony, his lifeblood bleeding out between his fingers as he grasped his side in an upwelling of gory dark redness. Constantine moved in for the coup de grace -
And Zanticus took him from behind.
Constantine almost didn't notice. Huge as he was, Zanticus barely knocked him off balance. Constantine simply batted the squire away with his shield – but it provided the requisite interval for Zorlac to regain his concentration. He looked at the towering Lanciar, an avatar of justice bedecked in shining mail and faceless helmet, and looked into the two circular eyeholes that were the helmet-visor's only feature.
Zorlac's brown eyes locked into Constantine's blue.
Both of them thought at the same instant, This is the man who will kill me.
Then Zorlac invaded Constantine's mind. Constantine had only a moment, and he used it well.
“Up the reserve!” he bellowed, an instant before a magical wedge delivered Zorlac's consciousness afresh into Constantine's skull.
Then the other eighty Cataphracts of Constantine's contingent burst out of the trees. Zorlac swore something foul, the mind-wedge retreating, and Constantine chuckled hoarsely.
“You didn't think I'd be sent to capture an armaments train with just twenty men, did you?”
Zorlac weighed up the options. The eighty Cataphracts thundering towards him probably equalled death, damnation or pain – possibly all three.
Then he did something unexpected.
He laughed.
“Damn you, you sneaky conniving old man.” And he set off towards the aircraft, Zanticus in tow, the other seven surviving members of the Legio Magica following him. Five Lanciars and three horses also lay dead – not bad odds against the wizards.
Constantine paused to take stock. For a skirmish of thirty men, it had been hard-fought but relatively bloodless, and now they were in possession of an armaments train.
One of dozens that flooded into Caragean every day.
“Do we head back towards Kallipolis, sir?” one of the Cataphracts asked. Slowly, Constantine shook his head.
“No. No, I have a better idea.”
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Devils in the Dust
He pressed a button, and a holographic view of the Occidental Basin, including the Kamarean Republic, the Duchy of Akar, and some of Farhight, flickered into view. He expelled a few bubbles from his gills, retracted his second set of eyelids, and leaned in close.
“It never fails to amaze me,” his partner – he thought it was a woman at the moment; among his kind, such things had an irritating habit of changing irregularly – harrumphed, “how no less than three subspecies can exist in such barbarism.”
“The sea is immeasurably ancient, my dear.” he began.
“My dear?! I'm a man!” his – former – partner spluttered. “It has been so for a month!” Damn. Forgot again. He shook his head, expelled a few more bubbles, and began again.
“The sea is immeasurably ancient, and we almost as much so. You forget that this site alone has been settled for more than twenty thousand years. Yet these humanoids, all three subspecies, they share a characteristic – they breed like rats.”
“Whereas our population,” his former partner mused, her – his – its – bass rumble carrying through the water in a stream of bubbles, “is in steady decline.”
“Yes. And certain of them – the Kamareans, and the Graylinese, far to the north – have become technologically advanced that – combined with their numbers – they could possibly represent a threat to us. I, for one, have no desire to live confined to the deeps.”
“You have never left the deeps in your life.”
“Yes – but I could if I wanted to! And no hairless monkey is going to stop me. Yet they are too many, and we too few.”
“So... turn the hairless monkeys against one another.” the other sea-creature mused. “But who to use as our puppets?”
“I was thinking of these...” One wet finger dipped into the hologram, roughly pinpointing the location of the Duchy of Akar, stronghold of the Lanciars.
* * *
However significant this mysterious discussion might prove, it meant precisely nothing to Ankh. In fact, Ankh was in the most distant place possible from the sea: the Badlands.
His pack-camel, a sorry, bent-backed thing, carried his Lanciarial armour; he wore, instead, traditional Shai Qadi robes: partly as a disguise, and partly because they had been designed for this choking heat. The sea sucked all the warmth out of the lands to the west, but even though it bordered the Badlands as well, it left the roasting heat untouched. The endless sands, large enough to swallow Akar four times over and more, were broken now only by the bulky silhouette of Barrowmount, to the north-west and, beside it, the last fading visible remnants of Magia. Its white towers were darkened by dusk: the sun laid itself to bed, and the stars took to shining.
But this was a bad thing in the Badlands.
He remembered what Pontifex-Decanus Calstrade had told him. “You might not remember the land of your birth, but you are a Farhighter, Ankh, and you speak Salkiri.”
“Yes.” Ankh had answered, although his Salkiri was poor at best. Ankh was nothing if not dutiful. In fact, if Ankh weren't so totally unfunny, it would have been funny how ridiculously uptight he could be.
“As the situation stands, the Archpontifex is convinced that the... aah... shooting star in the sky,” Calstrade had said, “has some meaning. In fact, the Archpontifex believes it may have actually... ah... landed, somewhere in eastern Farhight. Our intelligence network is fairly thin there, but it seems the Asphernaeans claim it.
“Oddly enough, a Green Dragon – loyalist – Farhighter army approaching Aspherna has vanished. As you know, although Akar stands officially neutral, the Farhighter monarchy has always been a friend to Kallipolis. If the Blue Dragons had found some way to harness whatever that shooting star was, then the Green Dragons will stand no chance. Therefore, you are to go to Salicir - ”
“Salkir, sir?”
“Salicir in Akarean, I thought you knew. You are to go to Salicir – or Salkir, if you prefer – and act as the official Akarean representative. Feel free, if the Shahanshah asks you, to train his armies somewhat. Don't give away everything, though - ”
“Of course not, sir.”
“I forgot how clever you were, Ankh. I'm sure you know what you have to do. You have two camels waiting for you near the main gate – you can go as soon as you are ready.” Ankh had turned to leave then.
“Oh, and Ankh – one thing.”
“Yes?”
“When it gets dark, get off the sands. I am not being cryptic. There are outcroppings here, here and here: if you take refuge in these, you should be safe.”
It was dark. Ankh was on the sands. Calstrade didn't joke.
But what was he afraid of?
Ankh was certainly afraid of one thing, and that was being lost. He saw no outcroppings at all, where he was sure there was to have been one. All around him were lakes, rivers, veritable oceans of sand, all utterly inescapable. Ankh began to feel a worry gnaw at his heart – before he stamped it out. Ankh didn't laugh, and he certainly didn't fear.
Somehow, it rang false.
His riding camel snorted, whuffing a blast of sand and night air. “What is it, boy?” Ankh asked, rubbing the beast's nose. It just snorted again, its eyes beginning to show whites. What does it sense? Ankh wondered. He peered into the deepening gloom -
And riveted on something.
A dust-devil. A little whorl of sand picked itself up from the desert, spinning about in a miniature imitation of a tornado. It was an innocuous enough sight, common in the Badlands when the dry, cold winds swept out to the sea.
But there was no wind.
Ankh was one of those logical people: he had had all the passion sucked out of him, leaving only a cold calculatedness. There was no wind, and the dust-devil yet had the tenacity to exist. How could the dust-devil pose a threat?
Or was that what Calstrade had been scared of at all? Did it bear any relation? Was he imagining things?
Ankh felt the worm of fear grow all over again.
And not without reason.
The sun dipped below the horizon, the moon beginning to rise, its watery, silvery light tinting the sands a deep silver-white – and something else. Ankh blinked, certain he had not seen correctly – surely there was no hunched shape, stealing off into the shadowy starlight?
He looked down. Beneath him, the sand rested.
“Move, boy.” he ordered absently, hitting his camel. It started forward, leaving Ankh to stew in his own juices. The sand was all around – how could he escape it? By moving, obviously. He should find an outcrop... sooner or later... one that would have a sandless cave in it...
A particle of sand whipped across Ankh's eyes.
Then another.
And another.
Ankh looked around – there was nothing, no shadowy monsters, no hunched shape, no dust-devil.
Another particle of sand shot across his field of vision.
No monsters. No shapes.
But he was in the dust-devil.
“Run!” he shouted, mostly for his own benefit, and the two scrawny camels lurched into bow-legged motion. More sand began to fly, blasting against his robes, tearing fabric and fur and flesh where it hit. The camels ran for all they were worth, their eyes closed, but Ankh couldn't close his eyes, because he was watching the thickening sandstorm that was following them.
And he was watching the shadows that prowled through it.
The sand howled now as it churned around them, so fast did it move, and the robes – and the camels – suffered for it. Ankh watched, horrified, as the pack-camel's fur began to strip away, worn and eaten thin by the sand-blasting. The creature yowled as thousands of tiny grazes began to etch themselves into its skin, releasing beady droplets of blood -
No. Ankh would not allow this.
He closed his eyes and refocused. His third eye, his mind's eye, opened fully, allowing access to the universe in all its eleven-dimensional glory, and he saw the camels, himself – and the sandstorm.
Just as he suspected. The sandstorm was a spell – but what was casting that spell? Ankh ignored that question for the moment, instead focusing on the sandstorm, vulnerable in eleven dimensions. Again, he focused, pushing his mind against the bright nebula of magic that constituted the sandstorm, drawing it into himself, dissipating the magic.
He opened his eyes, and the spellcasters came at him.
The night was his again, his to see and feel and breathe, the moonlight glinting down on sand and rock and the things that Calstrade had been so terribly afraid of. The camels put all their strength into their legs, running like the desert wind, but they couldn't outrun the horribly desiccated, loping forms behind them.
Ankh turned back for a better look.
It might have been human once, this creature, but that was before whatever curse ailed it had sunken its cheeks, atrophied its limbs, and given the stumbling four-legged non-grace of an overfed jackal. For all their reed-like thinness, its limbs, skin clinging to bone, ate up the ground beneath them; its skeleton, clearly visible beneath the papery thinness that served it as skin, clacked and jolted horribly against each other in a semblance of proper life. Its mouth, open as an empty grave, bristled with rotten, sand-eaten teeth, its nose had been pinched and twisted almost to nothingness; its whole body had had the moisture and the life sucked out of it, leaving nothing but a dry yet somehow functional mummy.
Its eyes were very much alive though. Shrunken and rolling and coloured like bloodshot ivory they may be, but they were very much alive.
It launched itself at Ankh, and he clove head from shoulders in a spray of sand. His sword sheared through the papery skin and brittle bone like a hot knife through butter. It flailed about, forcing out a reedy coughing sort of noise. He left it behind in the kickback from the camels' hooves, turning his face ahead.
For that reason, he only just saw the sand-creature picking up its head and setting it back on its neck. It wrenched and twisted, and those bones clambered up the neck – and it loped back towards Ankh.
And there were more of them.
The camels galloped faster, but now the sands were picking up again. The camels – having suffered the sandstorms' attentions once – brayed and went even faster. Run, Ankh prayed, watching the sand-ghouls chase them. Run for all you're worth.
An outcrop loomed out of the sand-winds, a stately, sand-blasted spire of limestone, antedating the desert.
And at its base, a hole. It was the outcrop Calstrade had talked about.
Ankh looked back. The sand-ghouls, awkward limbs flailingly gaining, trailed behind him like hounds behind a fox. But Ankh was determined that – unlike the fox – he would fight back.
He looked back and locked eyes with the first pursuer.
His third eye opened, and he saw the world in eleven dimensions, including the shrivelled, ancient consciousness that passed for the sand-ghoul's mind. Magic they might be, but only after a limited fashion. He dove into the creature's mind, ignoring the bumping and jouncing from beneath him -
And saw the creature the sand-ghoul once had been.
They were good to their people, the Badlands. The Shai Ala, the Shai Kazi, the Shai Sheliv, and all the other peoples of the Badlands, all knew how to get the bounty from the desert and live well. There were underground rivers and orchards, unknown to the wetlanders, remnants of the time when the Badlands were the irrigated, cultivated heart of a planetwide, foreign empire. Only the Shai Qadi refused to join in this bounty, preferring instead to live a hard, arid existence above in the sands, disdaining the soft existence of their brothers and sisters. The Shai Qadi, too, kept to the gods, a superstitious foolishness. What need had the Shai Ala, or any of the other tribes, of the gods when they had such ancient bounty, when they could just sleep away their time?
Naturally, the gods differed.
One night, the people of the desert never woke up. They lay in their hammocks and tents and orchards, sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. As they slept they starved and hardened and shriveled, till the Shai Qadi – the only ones spared the curse – watched their erstwhile brothers with horror where once there had been disdain.
Then, one night, the people of the desert woke up again.
They preferred to sleep rather than pray; therefore, they would live during the night and brood during the day, bringing to others the rest that was denied them. They were given power over the sands but forbidden to leave them. Any human in the Badlands, save the Shai Qadi, were fair game.
Sleep. The sand-ghouls didn't want to kill Ankh – they wanted to make him sleep, the long sleep the gods had forced on them.
Ankh's concentration was broken.
A warm tide of comfort, relaxation and dreams, at odds with the hideous exterior the sand-ghouls presented, rolled over his consciousness. He tried to fight it, his eyes wide open, but they sagged and closed -
No! He would fight! He drew on the utmost reserves of his power and punctured the drugging nebula, leaving the sand-ghoul's mind unprepared.
Like a fruit, he crushed it.
At long last, the sand-ghoul slept. It collapsed into the sand, finally dead -
And Ankh, he went inside the cave. Upwards, into the outcrop, it tunneled, leaving no sand inside -
- but the sand ghoul pursued him. Resigned, he vaulted off the back of his camel, leaving the two beasts to run to the end of the cave, his feet impacting the serried floor as the foremost sand-ghoul leapt and bounced up the passage -
And stopped, its foot balanced on one single grain of sand.
Ankh laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed, something both of us know he does very little, as the sand-ghouls flailed impotently, trying to find the sand to reach them. Still chuckling, he went to the very back of the tunnel and bedded down, the shrieks of the sand-ghouls being sweet music to his ears.
* * *
Ankh raced ahead, his pack-camel lagging behind. The sand-ghouls, released from meditation by the dawn of night, chased him across the sand. He had spent the entire day moving as fast as he felt the camels could, yet still night fell before he was safe. The familiar sands whipped around him, the familiar hunched shapes prowled after him, and he batted away attack after mental attack, trying to force him into sleep. But he was having none of it -
A rain of fire arrows slammed into the sands. Some hit the sand-ghouls, setting their desiccated bones alight. Ropes dropped all around him and he stopped, exhausted, as men in conical helmets slid down and attacked the sand-ghouls with whatever weapon it was that worked against them.
One of them picked him.
“It's okay,” he said to Ankh, in a thick accent. “we've got you. You're safe now. Welcome to Farhight.”
“It never fails to amaze me,” his partner – he thought it was a woman at the moment; among his kind, such things had an irritating habit of changing irregularly – harrumphed, “how no less than three subspecies can exist in such barbarism.”
“The sea is immeasurably ancient, my dear.” he began.
“My dear?! I'm a man!” his – former – partner spluttered. “It has been so for a month!” Damn. Forgot again. He shook his head, expelled a few more bubbles, and began again.
“The sea is immeasurably ancient, and we almost as much so. You forget that this site alone has been settled for more than twenty thousand years. Yet these humanoids, all three subspecies, they share a characteristic – they breed like rats.”
“Whereas our population,” his former partner mused, her – his – its – bass rumble carrying through the water in a stream of bubbles, “is in steady decline.”
“Yes. And certain of them – the Kamareans, and the Graylinese, far to the north – have become technologically advanced that – combined with their numbers – they could possibly represent a threat to us. I, for one, have no desire to live confined to the deeps.”
“You have never left the deeps in your life.”
“Yes – but I could if I wanted to! And no hairless monkey is going to stop me. Yet they are too many, and we too few.”
“So... turn the hairless monkeys against one another.” the other sea-creature mused. “But who to use as our puppets?”
“I was thinking of these...” One wet finger dipped into the hologram, roughly pinpointing the location of the Duchy of Akar, stronghold of the Lanciars.
* * *
However significant this mysterious discussion might prove, it meant precisely nothing to Ankh. In fact, Ankh was in the most distant place possible from the sea: the Badlands.
His pack-camel, a sorry, bent-backed thing, carried his Lanciarial armour; he wore, instead, traditional Shai Qadi robes: partly as a disguise, and partly because they had been designed for this choking heat. The sea sucked all the warmth out of the lands to the west, but even though it bordered the Badlands as well, it left the roasting heat untouched. The endless sands, large enough to swallow Akar four times over and more, were broken now only by the bulky silhouette of Barrowmount, to the north-west and, beside it, the last fading visible remnants of Magia. Its white towers were darkened by dusk: the sun laid itself to bed, and the stars took to shining.
But this was a bad thing in the Badlands.
He remembered what Pontifex-Decanus Calstrade had told him. “You might not remember the land of your birth, but you are a Farhighter, Ankh, and you speak Salkiri.”
“Yes.” Ankh had answered, although his Salkiri was poor at best. Ankh was nothing if not dutiful. In fact, if Ankh weren't so totally unfunny, it would have been funny how ridiculously uptight he could be.
“As the situation stands, the Archpontifex is convinced that the... aah... shooting star in the sky,” Calstrade had said, “has some meaning. In fact, the Archpontifex believes it may have actually... ah... landed, somewhere in eastern Farhight. Our intelligence network is fairly thin there, but it seems the Asphernaeans claim it.
“Oddly enough, a Green Dragon – loyalist – Farhighter army approaching Aspherna has vanished. As you know, although Akar stands officially neutral, the Farhighter monarchy has always been a friend to Kallipolis. If the Blue Dragons had found some way to harness whatever that shooting star was, then the Green Dragons will stand no chance. Therefore, you are to go to Salicir - ”
“Salkir, sir?”
“Salicir in Akarean, I thought you knew. You are to go to Salicir – or Salkir, if you prefer – and act as the official Akarean representative. Feel free, if the Shahanshah asks you, to train his armies somewhat. Don't give away everything, though - ”
“Of course not, sir.”
“I forgot how clever you were, Ankh. I'm sure you know what you have to do. You have two camels waiting for you near the main gate – you can go as soon as you are ready.” Ankh had turned to leave then.
“Oh, and Ankh – one thing.”
“Yes?”
“When it gets dark, get off the sands. I am not being cryptic. There are outcroppings here, here and here: if you take refuge in these, you should be safe.”
It was dark. Ankh was on the sands. Calstrade didn't joke.
But what was he afraid of?
Ankh was certainly afraid of one thing, and that was being lost. He saw no outcroppings at all, where he was sure there was to have been one. All around him were lakes, rivers, veritable oceans of sand, all utterly inescapable. Ankh began to feel a worry gnaw at his heart – before he stamped it out. Ankh didn't laugh, and he certainly didn't fear.
Somehow, it rang false.
His riding camel snorted, whuffing a blast of sand and night air. “What is it, boy?” Ankh asked, rubbing the beast's nose. It just snorted again, its eyes beginning to show whites. What does it sense? Ankh wondered. He peered into the deepening gloom -
And riveted on something.
A dust-devil. A little whorl of sand picked itself up from the desert, spinning about in a miniature imitation of a tornado. It was an innocuous enough sight, common in the Badlands when the dry, cold winds swept out to the sea.
But there was no wind.
Ankh was one of those logical people: he had had all the passion sucked out of him, leaving only a cold calculatedness. There was no wind, and the dust-devil yet had the tenacity to exist. How could the dust-devil pose a threat?
Or was that what Calstrade had been scared of at all? Did it bear any relation? Was he imagining things?
Ankh felt the worm of fear grow all over again.
And not without reason.
The sun dipped below the horizon, the moon beginning to rise, its watery, silvery light tinting the sands a deep silver-white – and something else. Ankh blinked, certain he had not seen correctly – surely there was no hunched shape, stealing off into the shadowy starlight?
He looked down. Beneath him, the sand rested.
“Move, boy.” he ordered absently, hitting his camel. It started forward, leaving Ankh to stew in his own juices. The sand was all around – how could he escape it? By moving, obviously. He should find an outcrop... sooner or later... one that would have a sandless cave in it...
A particle of sand whipped across Ankh's eyes.
Then another.
And another.
Ankh looked around – there was nothing, no shadowy monsters, no hunched shape, no dust-devil.
Another particle of sand shot across his field of vision.
No monsters. No shapes.
But he was in the dust-devil.
“Run!” he shouted, mostly for his own benefit, and the two scrawny camels lurched into bow-legged motion. More sand began to fly, blasting against his robes, tearing fabric and fur and flesh where it hit. The camels ran for all they were worth, their eyes closed, but Ankh couldn't close his eyes, because he was watching the thickening sandstorm that was following them.
And he was watching the shadows that prowled through it.
The sand howled now as it churned around them, so fast did it move, and the robes – and the camels – suffered for it. Ankh watched, horrified, as the pack-camel's fur began to strip away, worn and eaten thin by the sand-blasting. The creature yowled as thousands of tiny grazes began to etch themselves into its skin, releasing beady droplets of blood -
No. Ankh would not allow this.
He closed his eyes and refocused. His third eye, his mind's eye, opened fully, allowing access to the universe in all its eleven-dimensional glory, and he saw the camels, himself – and the sandstorm.
Just as he suspected. The sandstorm was a spell – but what was casting that spell? Ankh ignored that question for the moment, instead focusing on the sandstorm, vulnerable in eleven dimensions. Again, he focused, pushing his mind against the bright nebula of magic that constituted the sandstorm, drawing it into himself, dissipating the magic.
He opened his eyes, and the spellcasters came at him.
The night was his again, his to see and feel and breathe, the moonlight glinting down on sand and rock and the things that Calstrade had been so terribly afraid of. The camels put all their strength into their legs, running like the desert wind, but they couldn't outrun the horribly desiccated, loping forms behind them.
Ankh turned back for a better look.
It might have been human once, this creature, but that was before whatever curse ailed it had sunken its cheeks, atrophied its limbs, and given the stumbling four-legged non-grace of an overfed jackal. For all their reed-like thinness, its limbs, skin clinging to bone, ate up the ground beneath them; its skeleton, clearly visible beneath the papery thinness that served it as skin, clacked and jolted horribly against each other in a semblance of proper life. Its mouth, open as an empty grave, bristled with rotten, sand-eaten teeth, its nose had been pinched and twisted almost to nothingness; its whole body had had the moisture and the life sucked out of it, leaving nothing but a dry yet somehow functional mummy.
Its eyes were very much alive though. Shrunken and rolling and coloured like bloodshot ivory they may be, but they were very much alive.
It launched itself at Ankh, and he clove head from shoulders in a spray of sand. His sword sheared through the papery skin and brittle bone like a hot knife through butter. It flailed about, forcing out a reedy coughing sort of noise. He left it behind in the kickback from the camels' hooves, turning his face ahead.
For that reason, he only just saw the sand-creature picking up its head and setting it back on its neck. It wrenched and twisted, and those bones clambered up the neck – and it loped back towards Ankh.
And there were more of them.
The camels galloped faster, but now the sands were picking up again. The camels – having suffered the sandstorms' attentions once – brayed and went even faster. Run, Ankh prayed, watching the sand-ghouls chase them. Run for all you're worth.
An outcrop loomed out of the sand-winds, a stately, sand-blasted spire of limestone, antedating the desert.
And at its base, a hole. It was the outcrop Calstrade had talked about.
Ankh looked back. The sand-ghouls, awkward limbs flailingly gaining, trailed behind him like hounds behind a fox. But Ankh was determined that – unlike the fox – he would fight back.
He looked back and locked eyes with the first pursuer.
His third eye opened, and he saw the world in eleven dimensions, including the shrivelled, ancient consciousness that passed for the sand-ghoul's mind. Magic they might be, but only after a limited fashion. He dove into the creature's mind, ignoring the bumping and jouncing from beneath him -
And saw the creature the sand-ghoul once had been.
They were good to their people, the Badlands. The Shai Ala, the Shai Kazi, the Shai Sheliv, and all the other peoples of the Badlands, all knew how to get the bounty from the desert and live well. There were underground rivers and orchards, unknown to the wetlanders, remnants of the time when the Badlands were the irrigated, cultivated heart of a planetwide, foreign empire. Only the Shai Qadi refused to join in this bounty, preferring instead to live a hard, arid existence above in the sands, disdaining the soft existence of their brothers and sisters. The Shai Qadi, too, kept to the gods, a superstitious foolishness. What need had the Shai Ala, or any of the other tribes, of the gods when they had such ancient bounty, when they could just sleep away their time?
Naturally, the gods differed.
One night, the people of the desert never woke up. They lay in their hammocks and tents and orchards, sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. As they slept they starved and hardened and shriveled, till the Shai Qadi – the only ones spared the curse – watched their erstwhile brothers with horror where once there had been disdain.
Then, one night, the people of the desert woke up again.
They preferred to sleep rather than pray; therefore, they would live during the night and brood during the day, bringing to others the rest that was denied them. They were given power over the sands but forbidden to leave them. Any human in the Badlands, save the Shai Qadi, were fair game.
Sleep. The sand-ghouls didn't want to kill Ankh – they wanted to make him sleep, the long sleep the gods had forced on them.
Ankh's concentration was broken.
A warm tide of comfort, relaxation and dreams, at odds with the hideous exterior the sand-ghouls presented, rolled over his consciousness. He tried to fight it, his eyes wide open, but they sagged and closed -
No! He would fight! He drew on the utmost reserves of his power and punctured the drugging nebula, leaving the sand-ghoul's mind unprepared.
Like a fruit, he crushed it.
At long last, the sand-ghoul slept. It collapsed into the sand, finally dead -
And Ankh, he went inside the cave. Upwards, into the outcrop, it tunneled, leaving no sand inside -
- but the sand ghoul pursued him. Resigned, he vaulted off the back of his camel, leaving the two beasts to run to the end of the cave, his feet impacting the serried floor as the foremost sand-ghoul leapt and bounced up the passage -
And stopped, its foot balanced on one single grain of sand.
Ankh laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed, something both of us know he does very little, as the sand-ghouls flailed impotently, trying to find the sand to reach them. Still chuckling, he went to the very back of the tunnel and bedded down, the shrieks of the sand-ghouls being sweet music to his ears.
* * *
Ankh raced ahead, his pack-camel lagging behind. The sand-ghouls, released from meditation by the dawn of night, chased him across the sand. He had spent the entire day moving as fast as he felt the camels could, yet still night fell before he was safe. The familiar sands whipped around him, the familiar hunched shapes prowled after him, and he batted away attack after mental attack, trying to force him into sleep. But he was having none of it -
A rain of fire arrows slammed into the sands. Some hit the sand-ghouls, setting their desiccated bones alight. Ropes dropped all around him and he stopped, exhausted, as men in conical helmets slid down and attacked the sand-ghouls with whatever weapon it was that worked against them.
One of them picked him.
“It's okay,” he said to Ankh, in a thick accent. “we've got you. You're safe now. Welcome to Farhight.”
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Storm Breaking
For all anyone knew, the stone could have been there ten thousand years.
It certainly looked the part. It stood there, sand-blasted and parched, etched with queer, almost undiscernible hieroglyphs. Whatever shape it had had had had been worn away by the centuries, leaving only a yellow, oblong rock within sight of the city of Aspherna, yet shunned both by the desert nomads and the city folk.
Except one.
No-one with any sense even looked at the stone without making a sign to ward off bad luck, but the city folk all agreed that the young man who stared at the stone for hours on end, heedless of sand and sun, was equipped with less than the full complement of wits. Apart from staring at the shinned stone, he always covered his face, leaving only his inky black eyes and a strip of brown skin exposed to the air; and, on some of his more desperate days, he would get up on a podium and rant, endless sermons praising buried, forgotten gods, gods older than the Dead God of the Plains the Farhighter people of Aspherna worshipped, gods locked away beyond our own universe in the mythical city of Delirium, the gods of the sands and the void and the evil that lurks in all men's hearts.
At first, they hadn't listened to him. But that was before the Blue Dragons.
The empire of Farhight, to which the city of Aspherna belonged, was an absolute monarchy. The Shahanshah, the monarch, in Salkir, the capital, reigned at the top of a vast, thoroughly corrupt ancién régime maintained by legions of informers, spies and policemen, all working under the aegis of the Green Dragon, symbol of Farhight, to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But Farhight's armies were legendarily incompetent and, together with an Ersian guerrilla from the Urglenn Mountains called Shamus of Borova, a bunch of peasants had decided to kick down the rotten door of the Farhighter monarchy, adopting as their symbol the Green Dragon's mythical opponent, the Blue Dragon. For years, Blue Dragon guerrillas under Shamus' command had harried the monarchy's soldiers, winning raids and skirmishes left, right and centre. Eventually, the monarchy's forces – the Green Dragons, as they were dubbed – were forced to withdraw from much of the eastern empire, including Aspherna.
The Blue Dragons took the bait.
A mere month after the Blue Dragones established a communist utopia in Aspherna, the Green Dragons' army had appeared only a week's march from the city. The Blue Dragons' choices were hard: abandon the city and lose the support of the people, or stand and fight. Each option promised annihilation. The ever-wily Shamus of Borova elected to escape to the plains, leaving enough of a garrison to put up a fight, and leaving the Asphernans, vulnerable as they were to whatever punishments the Shahanshah's officials deemed prudent, in the lap of the gods. But the Dead God of the Plains was on the Green Dragons' side.
It was about then that someone remembered the mad young man and his vanished gods.
“Prove it to us!” a man had shouted at him, as he ranted from his lectern one day. “Give us a sign from your gods!” The young man had stopped talking, had looked at the man with those inky black eyes. His face-covering scarf had twitched in what might have been a smile.
That night, both the Asphernans and the approaching Green Dragon army had seen the light in the sky. So had Decanus Constantine in Akar, Crown Prince Zorlac in Orlan, Pontifex Ankh in Magia, Janin of the Sand's End Shai Qadi, atop Barrowmount, and hundreds of thousands of other people across the Occidental Basin and Farhight, each ignorant of the devastating effect it would have on each of their lves. Only the Asphernans knew what it meant, and they believed then.
“I told you!” the young man railed. “I told you, and ye of little faith believed me not! Only for your part in spreading the religion of the Amen-Ur will you be saved! This I know, people of Aspherna, this I know! And tonight, I say to you, tonight, I will go forth to the holy yellow rock – aye, holy, though shunned it may be – the holy yellow rock to meet no less than the earthly representative of the Amen-Ur, who will descend from the sacred light...” here the young man paused, panting for breath, “...to confer on me their holy wisdom! Watch and see, my people, watch and see!”
The people watched the red light. Its coming could be a coincidence, the more sceptical among them whispered, but sure enough, the strange light gave all appearance of growing closer – certainly larger – and more distinct.
It quickly became apparent that this was no burning rock. The lights shimmered and separated, becoming points defining a larger, as-yet unknown object – an object burning its way through the atmosphere towards Aspherna, piloted by an unknown – a divine? - hand.
When it landed, near the ill-omened oblong rock, the young man went out to meet.
And came back... different.
It certainly looked the part. It stood there, sand-blasted and parched, etched with queer, almost undiscernible hieroglyphs. Whatever shape it had had had had been worn away by the centuries, leaving only a yellow, oblong rock within sight of the city of Aspherna, yet shunned both by the desert nomads and the city folk.
Except one.
No-one with any sense even looked at the stone without making a sign to ward off bad luck, but the city folk all agreed that the young man who stared at the stone for hours on end, heedless of sand and sun, was equipped with less than the full complement of wits. Apart from staring at the shinned stone, he always covered his face, leaving only his inky black eyes and a strip of brown skin exposed to the air; and, on some of his more desperate days, he would get up on a podium and rant, endless sermons praising buried, forgotten gods, gods older than the Dead God of the Plains the Farhighter people of Aspherna worshipped, gods locked away beyond our own universe in the mythical city of Delirium, the gods of the sands and the void and the evil that lurks in all men's hearts.
At first, they hadn't listened to him. But that was before the Blue Dragons.
The empire of Farhight, to which the city of Aspherna belonged, was an absolute monarchy. The Shahanshah, the monarch, in Salkir, the capital, reigned at the top of a vast, thoroughly corrupt ancién régime maintained by legions of informers, spies and policemen, all working under the aegis of the Green Dragon, symbol of Farhight, to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But Farhight's armies were legendarily incompetent and, together with an Ersian guerrilla from the Urglenn Mountains called Shamus of Borova, a bunch of peasants had decided to kick down the rotten door of the Farhighter monarchy, adopting as their symbol the Green Dragon's mythical opponent, the Blue Dragon. For years, Blue Dragon guerrillas under Shamus' command had harried the monarchy's soldiers, winning raids and skirmishes left, right and centre. Eventually, the monarchy's forces – the Green Dragons, as they were dubbed – were forced to withdraw from much of the eastern empire, including Aspherna.
The Blue Dragons took the bait.
A mere month after the Blue Dragones established a communist utopia in Aspherna, the Green Dragons' army had appeared only a week's march from the city. The Blue Dragons' choices were hard: abandon the city and lose the support of the people, or stand and fight. Each option promised annihilation. The ever-wily Shamus of Borova elected to escape to the plains, leaving enough of a garrison to put up a fight, and leaving the Asphernans, vulnerable as they were to whatever punishments the Shahanshah's officials deemed prudent, in the lap of the gods. But the Dead God of the Plains was on the Green Dragons' side.
It was about then that someone remembered the mad young man and his vanished gods.
“Prove it to us!” a man had shouted at him, as he ranted from his lectern one day. “Give us a sign from your gods!” The young man had stopped talking, had looked at the man with those inky black eyes. His face-covering scarf had twitched in what might have been a smile.
That night, both the Asphernans and the approaching Green Dragon army had seen the light in the sky. So had Decanus Constantine in Akar, Crown Prince Zorlac in Orlan, Pontifex Ankh in Magia, Janin of the Sand's End Shai Qadi, atop Barrowmount, and hundreds of thousands of other people across the Occidental Basin and Farhight, each ignorant of the devastating effect it would have on each of their lves. Only the Asphernans knew what it meant, and they believed then.
“I told you!” the young man railed. “I told you, and ye of little faith believed me not! Only for your part in spreading the religion of the Amen-Ur will you be saved! This I know, people of Aspherna, this I know! And tonight, I say to you, tonight, I will go forth to the holy yellow rock – aye, holy, though shunned it may be – the holy yellow rock to meet no less than the earthly representative of the Amen-Ur, who will descend from the sacred light...” here the young man paused, panting for breath, “...to confer on me their holy wisdom! Watch and see, my people, watch and see!”
The people watched the red light. Its coming could be a coincidence, the more sceptical among them whispered, but sure enough, the strange light gave all appearance of growing closer – certainly larger – and more distinct.
It quickly became apparent that this was no burning rock. The lights shimmered and separated, becoming points defining a larger, as-yet unknown object – an object burning its way through the atmosphere towards Aspherna, piloted by an unknown – a divine? - hand.
When it landed, near the ill-omened oblong rock, the young man went out to meet.
And came back... different.
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