Zorlac stumbled blindly through the carnage, eyes wild, fingertips sizzling. He had lost Zanticus somewhere – well, he had lost most of him. There was an arm somewhere back that had looked a lot like Zanticus' -
No! Oh Bopol, he shouldn't think of that! That arm had probably washed Zorlac's smallclothes or something! Oh Bopol! Who was going to wash Zorlac's smallclothes now? He couldn't do it himself! Oh gods...
Maybe he should have taken the arm along. No, it wouldn't be any use to Zanticus now. Oh gods...
"Zorlac!" Could it be... It was!
"Zanticus! Yes!" They ran towards each other, splashing through the reddened muck, as friends reuniting on a battlefield tend to do.
"Zorlac, it's good to see you – ow! Why are your fingers so hot?" Zorlac peeled himself off of his minion.
"Oh, it's magic, Zanticus. Flinging fireballs and all." he answered airily.
"Really?"
"That and that near-miss with the laser."
"Listen, Zorlac, there's someone who wants to talk to you..."
"Mage!" a dry voice roared. "Mage!" Zorlac turned around.
"Duke Scalax. My old enemy." The bony, ancient monarch picked his way through the carrion to rivet his cold gaze on Zorlac.
"I know you don't like me, son, but I trust you have a reasonable head on you. You saw what we just fought – those lightning guns - "
"Lasers. Lasers, we call them."
"Lasers. We need means to combat these lasers and whatever other tricks the Blue Dragons may have up their sleeves, and you know – probably better than I do – how unexplored, how mysterious, Elleria is. I am leaving it up to you to go out and find some way to fight the Blue Dragons. That is a request, not an order."
"Why me?"
"You are the most able." Zorlac puffed up like a preening peacock.
"Well, then, I'll most certainly do it."
* * *
That wasn't all that happened. Days passed.
Ankh closed his eyes, raised his hands towards the statue in the proper position of adulation, and tried to sink into the cool reflectiveness of prayer. But every time he closed his eyes, the visions would come again.
Flashing. Screams. A field of corpses, dotted by bonfires and watered with blood. Men with the swarthy, long-limbed look of the Eastern Duchy about them, chasing down pale Kamareans. Flashing, horizontal lightnings – like the sort thrown by wizards out of tales – striking down Lanciars, and these coming out of strange, pipe-festooned tubes gunned by dark-skinned Lanndings. A thousand ends leaped into his head, grinning Eastern bandits driving axe blades into thrashing Lanciars, Lanndings coolly gunning down dozens of red-coated Kamareans, and every so often, an Easterner or Lannding falling to a Lanciar or Kamarean. Kamareans – and a few Lanciars – turning on their erstwhile allies, shouting the supremacy of the Blue Dragon. Lanndings and Easterners outnumbered ten to one, driving forward into the red ranks and silver-armoured phalanxes of their foes with the savage certainty of victory, the balance tipped by the strange lightning-guns.
Ankh tried to banish the images, but nothing worked. He tried to imagine himself back in the chapel at Magia, the closest thing he had to a home. That almost worked; it wasn't the soft red stone of the walls that gave his pretense the lie, or the ever-present din of Salkir filtering through the walls, in the end, but the heat. The Badlands, where Magia was situated, were hotter than this, but whatever way the Lanciars built their buildings, they were always cold on the inside – like the Lanciars themselves. Ankh was, technically, a Lanciar, but – for having been born outside the caste, for having been inducted in on the basis of his intelligence and magical ability - he would always remain something of an outsider.
And therein, he suspected, lay his problem. He was a magician; not the most gifted, but more able than most to affect that universal force which itself affected all sentient beings. But even though most people couldn't use magic, they were still detectable with it. What Ankh was detecting through his visions was a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.
As if the visions themselves hadn't told him that.
Footsteps sounded behind him, and Ankh turned around to see the Osting ambassador from the north. The corpulent man – or not-quite-man; the Ostings, apparently, belonged to a different subspecies of human – looked at all the statues adorning the walls of the chapel.
"I can't understand you dwarfs at all." he began, but quietly – though Ankh was the only worshipper in the chapel. "What is the point of addressing your prayers to the Dead God of the Desert, like the Farhighters do, if he's dead? What is the point of having a god and not building temples or sacrificing to him, like the Kamareans? And what is the point of this zoo you call a pantheon?" The Osting ran his eyes around the statues.
"Hadr is represented as a human." Ankh answered coldly.
"Every zoo needs a keeper. The gods of the north, though... the world is a conflict between nature and artifice. We understand this in Ostmargue. Animals and the unenlightened thrash around amidst the chaos of nature, drowning themselves in the relentless green tide that can be evidenced in the thousand lost cities of Elleria – consider the ancient, fallen civilisation of Mistocre. Are not her cities swallowed by the greenery?"
"So it would seem."
"The enlightened strive to leave the chaos of nature behind and become artificial. The gods of Ostmargue are beings who have achieved this feat."
"Machine-gods." Ankh extrapolated, flatly.
"Yes."
"At least a zoo doesn't need batteries." The Osting laughed: under normal circumstances, he probably would have had a deep, jolly laugh, but there was a brittle, forced edge to it. Ankh thanked the gods that he had remembered that machines need batteries; there were few enough machines in Akar.
"Tell me about your gods, dwarf."
"Tell me what you came here to say, giant."
"Tell me about your gods, Lanciar, and steel yourself while you do it. You will want to be prepared to take this news." Ankh took a deep breath; he was rarely discomforted, but what with the visions...
"The rabbit? She is Benet, queen of the gods."
"How did a rabbit become queen of the gods?? Surely you'd have issues dividing up your inheritance..." The Osting chuckled again. Ankh didn't laugh.
"Oh, was that a joke? I'm sorry, I have no sense of humour. To answer your question, it was bequeathed to her by Bil, the Soulforger. The Soulforger made the earth and all its plants and animals, and all the peoples that lived on it. Lastly, he created the other gods, each with a specific purpose. Benet's purpose was to rule, even over him."
"That was altruistic of him." the Osting remarked.
"He's a god, he's not like other people." Ankh answered, keeping a completely straight face while saying so. "In any case, he created Muir – the fish – to rule the seas; he created Cera, Bera, and Trichos to answer for the beasts of the wild, he made the Leafscale for the plants and the farmers, he made Gibann – the grinning man – to teach humanity the basics of civilisation and to take care of thieves and rogues; and he made Greenskin Blackeye – it's obvious who he is – to teach humanity magic and mathematics. He made White Pyk and Bathyrax, the Sheltering Shadow, to ward humanity – though against what is never specified. Second-last he made Hadr, the Herald of the Gods, to summon the gods and the faithful should they ever be needed; and last of all, he made Benet, the youngest of the Gods, to act as queen."
"And have you a hell?"
"When the world was newly-created, so the myth goes, it attracted the attention of a horde of demonic creatures, only a few of whom are named – Miclose the Starwyrm; Black Pyk – we don't know of any connection between it and White Pyk; Nightpinion, the Shadow in the Sky; all sorts. Interestingly, a supreme demon is alluded to but not named."
"Fascinating."
"Surely. In any case, Bil made the... aah... place, I suppose... and called it Delirium, locking all the demons away into it. But some lesser demons escaped – the myth goes, they prowl the oceans to this day, sailing on the Scabbard's Whisper, a demon-ship. In response, Bil took the city – Delirium manifests itself as a city, so it would seem – and cast it outside the boundaries of our universe, however you choose to interpret that. Interestingly," Ankh continued in a dry, flat voice, his mind elsewhere, "there was a cult in Mistocre, in an Akarean colony, about a century ago whose stated aim was to free these demons from Delirium. It even corrupted a few Lanciars in the end. When the Lanciars stormed the stronghold, half of them came out raving mad about the 'shoggoth-masters', the 'dark ones from beyond the stars', 'the power of the stone', and all sorts of similar rubbish. There was a gelatinous, acidic mass – apparently dead, if it was ever alive – which the Lanciars identified as a 'shoggoth', and there was a stone artefact as well. I believe the artefact is now in the vaults of Magia." Ankh took a deep breath. "I can't talk any longer. Tell me what you have to say."
"Ah... there was a battle. Twenty-seven thousand Green Dragons clashed with eight thousand Lanndings and Easterners."
"The Green Dragons were slaughtered." Ankh answered flatly.
"It was a Pyrrhic victory." Ankh closed his eyes and thanked the gods whose chapel he was in. A victory! "The Lanndings brought large numbers of... aah... lightning guns, for lack of a better term, with them. No-one can count the dead, but it looks like thirteen or fourteen thousand Kamareans and five thousand Lanciars died. Duke Scalax led the countercharge himself, when the Green Dragons were on the point of breaking; the Easterners fought well, so it would seem, but the Lanndings broke and fled. The entire opposing army was slaughtered, at huge cost in life, and twenty of these lightning-guns were captured. The Kamareans are in a huge fuss over it; apparently they had prophesied the technology but had not developed it. No-one knows how the Lanndings developed it, or if they didn't, who they got it from."
"Another mystery. But Elleria has plenty of mysteries. Where is Scalax now?"
"He was planning to invade Lannding when the message left, so I imagine he must be almost at Lanndar by now." Ankh closed his eyes. They'd won. Gods, it had been a close victory, but they'd won.
"Is that all."
"That is all."
"Do you know if the Shahanshah has given me leave to depart?" His pulse quickened – once they were done conquering Lannding, he might return to Magia and -
"He has not."
"What?"
"In celebration of the news, he has ordered an expedition to Aspherna, to the east. And he wants you to come."
* * *
Nor was that the extent of it either.
"Where are we now?" Constantine asked the commander of the Tyreneans, trying to keep the worry out of his voice. Guilder turned the map upside down, shook it a bit – for some reason – scanned the surrounding landscape – miles and miles of stony, sandy half-desert that could have been in any one of a thousand places in Lannding or the Eastern Duchy – then looked at Constantine, and shrugged.
"Lannding, sir? Possibly?"
"Oh Benet's bones. I've got ninety Lanciars and four thousand Tyreneans the former Patriarch has given and I can't even find Lanndar. Can we find anything??!"
"Ahh, sir..."
"I mean, Benet's bones, it's not a big country, Lannding! In fact, it's actually quite a small country! More of a city-state, really!"
"Sir?"
"It could even be classed as a province if you dispute the legality of Lannding's - "
"Sir?"
"What?"
"I think something may have found us."
Constantine looked at the... the... the thing settling itself comfortably onto the soil and disgorging more things onto the soil as if this were the most natural thing in the world. He rubbed his eyes. He pinched his cheek. He rubbed his eyes again.
"Is this how you humans greet each other?" the towering, slimy-skinned creature asked, in gravelly and heavily accented but grammatically perfect Akarean Mistocren.
"Umm... not traditionally, no."
"Well, I bid you greetings in the name of Kahruisge, the city beneath the waves." the creature said, in what it probably thought was a pleasant voice. Constantine couldn't take his eyes off of it. It was nine foot tall and had slimy skin and a big wedge-shaped head with a little tentacley tuft on its chin and it had black robes like they showed Megas with in the statues. It was alien. "I am Kantor, the Nimble Mind, and this is my nephew, Altyr the Curious. I have studied your endearingly primitive race for many years, and I would like to propose an alliance with the great human kingdom of Akar."
"Aaah..."
"No pressure. Mull over it. I'm sure we have much we could offer each other."
"Aaah..."
"Take your time."
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