The Ragged Man Read online

  Emin didn’t reply. His mind was racing, frantically trying to work out who or what would be so casually callous as to wear Gennay’s face. After a moment he realised the impersonation was not perfect; Gennay Thonal’s eyes had been a glittering ice-blue, like her younger brother’s.

  It’s a God, it must be — and if my guess is right, one not usually clothed in female flesh.

  ‘Another wager won,’ Emin said grimly. ‘Morghien told me I was being arrogant when I suggested one of you would make me an offer.’

  ‘But did you expect me?’ asked the yellow-eyed God, unperturbed that its guessing game was already over.

  ‘The list of suspects wasn’t long. Few of the Pantheon would deign to visit me nowadays.’ Emin took a breath to regain his composure. ‘If you want a Mortal-Aspect, your best bet is the man who was here a few nights past.’

  ‘Daken?’ she said, laughing. ‘Oh please; the man is useful for getting rid of inconveniences, but you insult me by suggesting it.’ She tilted her head in thought. ‘At any rate the man bears something of a grudge. I don’t believe he’s suitably grateful for the gifts bestowed upon him.’

  Emin gaped. ‘He’s aligned to your Trickster Aspect, Larat! I can’t believe Litania has an agreeable influence on anyone’s life, but to be her plaything . . . ?’

  The God of Magic and Manipulation shrugged. ‘He thrives, what more does a white-eye wish for? It smacks of ingratitude. Nevertheless, to link myself to that oaf? I would prefer a Mortal-Aspect to complement my intellect, not muddy the waters.’

  ‘He’s no fool,’ Emin countered, ‘and if you think to win me by flattering my intelligence — ’

  Larat raised a hand to cut him off. ‘Your intelligence is what it is; your ego equally so. Concerning Mortal-Aspects, let us say I remain unconvinced. A bold move, perhaps, but as I see it, one yet to bear fruit.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ asked Emin, mystified. ‘Your Lord has made His feelings towards me most clear. You could find few breakfast companions more out of favour with Lord Death. I am barred from His temples; I will not receive any aid from Him or His followers . . .’

  ‘How you must be weeping into your pillow,’ Larat broke in. ‘Are your feelings stung? Let me offer this salve; Death is lord of us all and as we are assailed, so He bears the brunt of it. He has lost many followers and Aspects — one of whom has bloomed in the meantime — so do not imagine you are so special in His treatment of you.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ Emin repeated. He didn’t really expect a straight answer — that was not in Larat’s nature — but he’d had an uneasy night and his patience was worn thin.

  ‘Can I not enjoy the company of mortals? As you can imagine, Lord Tsatach’s sense of humour is somewhat limited. After a few centuries one has heard them all.’

  Despite his ill temper Emin pictured the few Chetse he’d known in his life and almost smiled at the image. Then he caught himself and realised it was the God’s attempt to manipulate his mood. He dug his thumbnail into his finger as hard as he could, something Morghien had taught him. Pain sharpened the mind, just as the glamour of the Gods dulled it.

  ‘Might I suggest you pay your social calls on someone with a little less to do? I have guests I must speak to.’

  ‘Ah yes, the intriguing Legana, that shadow of herself. One of many interesting new flavours to this Land. Still, when things get desperate and down to the bone I find it is ancient methods that serve us best.’

  Emin’s eyes narrowed, sensing the significance of what he was being told, without understanding it. ‘The ancient isn’t really my domain; I leave that to others.’

  The God wearing his sister’s face smiled indulgently. ‘Time you paid it a little more attention. This kingdom of yours isn’t what we planned for humanity, but some of us appreciate that change comes to all things. Mild impieties and direct threats to the greatest of Gods aside, it stands as a better future for the Land than others.’

  ‘Please, enough of the flattery,’ Emin said. ‘My queen would be upset if I started getting a high opinion of myself.’

  ‘I can remind you of your inadequacies easily enough,’ Larat said, ‘but I see no profit in doing so at present.’

  Larat leaned forward and put one elbow on the table, resting her chin on one hand with a fluid motion that no mortal beyond a Harlequin could achieve.

  Emin recognised the pose, from the painting of Gennay, but the gesture only hardened his resolve.

  ‘The Farlan are in chaos,’ Larat continued, ‘something that will only increase in the years to come. Lord Styrax is building himself an empire and collecting artefacts powerful enough to kill Gods. It is only a matter of time before he crosses your borders.’

  ‘That I know. I’m already making preparations.’

  ‘But have you yet realised why he is collecting these artefacts?’

  ‘I don’t know enough about them to deduce that.’

  Larat’s young face was now stern and serious. ‘The Skulls are objects from the dawn of time. Aryn Bwr found them and reforged them to their present form, but they are far older, and the last king’s changes were not extensive, however ingenious.’

  ‘But what is their significance? Did Aryn Bwr upset the balance of the Land by reforging them?’

  ‘In unison there is very little they cannot do. It is no coincidence that they number twelve.’

  ‘Twelve?’ Emin hesitated. ‘The Upper Circle of the Pantheon? That little detail has been omitted from every scripture I’ve ever read. And does it go further than that? Are you aligned to a specific Skull, bound to it, even?’

  ‘The bearer of each is permitted to ask a question of the one aligned to it. Some knowledge should not be shared — the very act would upset the balance of the Land.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you are telling me, what you’re asking of me.’

  ‘There are forces in this Land that would like the balance to be upset, things to come undone.’

  ‘Who? The Vukotic family?’

  ‘Among others. What I am telling you is to survive — to keep the Land a place where the Gods are still welcome. It is the natural order of things; without it you will find this world far less of a paradise than it is at present.

  ‘Lord Styrax was a mistake of ours — when Aryn Bwr’s soul did not find its way to Ghenna we knew he had prepared some sort of contingency plan.’

  ‘If you’re so concerned,’ Emin broke in, ‘why not take a stand? Damned by Death or not, I’m not as powerful as a God of the Upper Circle. And somehow I suspect you’re not here to announce the Gods will march with me against Lord Styrax.’

  Emin felt the room grow cold as Larat stiffened in her seat. ‘We have learned that lesson already.’

  ‘To let others do the killing for you?’

  ‘To not allow others to murder the divine,’ Larat said, a warning look in her eyes. ‘One of our kin has already died in this war; we do not intend others to run that risk.’

  ‘You would run such risks to avoid even one of your kin dying? This is a war you could win — if you were willing to accept losses.’

  ‘Losses are unacceptable,’ Larat snapped, ‘as are too many of the Upper Circle being weakened. None of our own will ally against the Upper Circle, but do not think we are so united that the victors in any war wouldn’t risk being turned on by their own kind. The majority rule of the Upper Circle prevents lesser Gods falling like jackals upon each other, but with losses — or more weakened, as Ilit was at the Last Battle — a new war might be sparked.’

  Emin was silent a while as he tried to digest what Larat had told him. These were truths unacknowledged in the mortal Land. Just as kings kept secrets from their own people, some things even a king should not know too much about. The fact that a God was sharing secrets was a worrying development.

  The king nodded, having to clear his throat before he could speak. ‘I understand — it is safer to use mortals than to walk the Land and become a target for your own kind
— and daemons too, perhaps?’

  So completely was his last comment ignored that Emin guessed he had scored a hit.

  ‘Kastan Styrax was intended to be the Saviour of the tribes of man, the leader to defeat Aryn Bwr when he returned. Our mistake was to make the man too powerful, too skilled, and he turned against us.’ For a moment Larat’s expression fell blank, further reminding Emin that the God only wore his sister’s image. Gennay had been an animated, passionate girl. Her face had never been so blank until death.

  ‘Aryn Bwr was only defeated when we forced a decisive confrontation; until then he had avoided large-scale battle because he knew Death and Karkarn in particular were too powerful for him. Follow his example; history’s lessons should be learned well.’

  Larat stood. ‘And now it is time for you to wake up,’ the God said with a snap of the fingers.

  Emin’s head jerked up from the table. He looked around, bleary-eyed and dizzy, his senses trying to resolve the conflict as he moved into a position he thought he was already occupying. He was at the small table where Daratin’s porridge was still cooling, a waxy film on its surface. He pushed himself to his feet, groaning at a building ache in his head. It felt like he had a hangover as bad as any he remembered, a crown of thorns within his skull that scratched and scraped.

  ‘Damn Gods,’ he muttered, heading for his bedroom to find appropriate clothes for the rest of the castle, ‘like frisky old spinsters. The more you run from them, the more interested they are in you.’

  She waited all day, barely moving from her concealed hollow, while the Elves fussed and prepared at the stream below. Unused to feelings of any kind, the Wither Queen found time to savour what ran through her now: a strange sense of anticipation and excitement, coupled with an innate apprehension.

  They are inventive, these mortals. How their hatred has driven them!

  The small camp had been at the stream for weeks preparing the ground, but now a team of slaves had arrived and were readying the ground upstream for the final stage. It was fascinating — and horrifying. When the Wither Queen had come across the camp, deep in the empty forest and far from prying Farlan eyes, she had been about to scour it clean when her spirits had noticed a strange shrine.

  She had probed the ground with infinite patience and care, careful to avoid the notice of the two mages who were there so she could watch them at her leisure. They would all die soon enough, that was beyond doubt, but their actions had intrigued her. The shrine had awakened some sense of curiosity she had not known she possessed. That flicker had grown stronger when she found a second shrine not far downstream.

  Two shrines? But Elves do not pray.

  The entire race had been cursed, cast out after the Great War, so what were they doing playing with shrines? She sent her darting spirits out to watch and listen, before some innocuous comment had allowed the truth to flower in her mind.

  They were farming.

  Astonishingly — born of desperation, and a hunger for any small measure of revenge — the Elves were farming Gods.

  The Wither Queen fought to control the screaming rage inside her when she realised, but it hadn’t taken long for her fury to be eclipsed by something else: the desire for power, the recognition of an opportunity there for the taking.

  The spirits the mages had enslaved were, in some fashion, local Gods. The difference was power, the quintessence of Godhood: they were made of magic, and changed by it, moulded by the elements they were associated with and the worship they received.

  Like some insects had different stages of growth which bore no resemblance to the others, except at their core, so the spirits the Elves had found were unlike the Gods . . . they were at an early stage, and they could be controlled, and cultivated, and developed into weapons.

  She could not imagine how many such shrines there might be hidden in the forest. Their prophets must have given them warning of Aryn Bwr’s impending rebirth, and while the Elven race was broken and scattered, some semblance of order must have remained for them to maintain their systems of nobility and slavery.

  Her lips widened into a sliver of a smile at the thought of this practice extended throughout the Great Forest. Little shrines beside each river, lake, hill or copse — anywhere spirits might gather. It was remarkably simple: the mage’s acolytes would find a likely spot and prepare the ground, somewhere they had fished, or simply been so thirsty they were sufficiently appreciative of the water to give thanks. They built a small shrine of stones and left an offering. That would be enough to gather the wandering, formless spirits found throughout the Land, restlessly searching for purpose, for belief, for praise.

  While keeping the mages well away the prayers would continue, the offerings too, until one spirit had latched onto the shrine and made the place its home. A shape would start to develop, a presence or image, the more worship that took place. This stream had two shrines with different characteristics: the upper stretch was deep and fast and the lower was shallower and slower, so two spirits could be attracted to a relatively small stretch of water.

  Given time the two would come into conflict and one would be absorbed by the victor; the Wither Queen knew that all too well. When a God reached a certain power, it was impossible to entirely be subsumed by another God - that was how Aspects were created: linked and subservient, but able to retain some measure of the self. A God strove for power, it was part of their very being, and it might well be that several competing spirits had come across the shrine and tried to make some connection with the acolyte before the strongest won out.

  The Wither Queen watched the slaves. They had a great pile of sacks filled with earth and boulders and they were waiting for the order to begin. She thought it might happen during twilight, when the Gods withdrew slightly from the Land; a basic precaution whenever the work was heretical. As the sun dropped the Wither Queen waited with a growing hunger, determined to gather these two more spirits to her. She had already taken more than a score — every Elven mage she had encountered had possessed at least one — and while they were all very weak, they would grow stronger as she did.

  At last the sun began to fall below the horizon and with a clipped command the slaves were set to work damming the stream. They worked quickly, fast enough to panic the spirits inhabiting each stretch. The Wither Queen could imagine them experiencing a new sensation: fear at the prospect of being just a voice on the wind again. They would reach out in whatever direction they could, begging their new followers for help as the flow of water began to dwindle. By some great fortune their followers were mages too, barely children, but with a flicker of talent that was enough to make it an option to those with none.

  As the gloaming descended the Wither Queen sensed movement, a sparkle of life and energies. The spirit from the upper section had grown strong enough to have a corporeal self and now it appeared like a ghost before the kneeling acolyte: the outline of a child with wild flowing hair, looking around at the camp but unable to see the others waiting on its fringes. After a while it entered the acolyte and not long after the weaker spirit did the same, but with less hesitation. Once that was done, the inhabited acolyte walked away from the stream while the guards moved in to destroy the shrines, leaving the spirits with no place to return to.

  They had started to cart away the stones to dump in the forest when the Wither Queen rose from her hiding place. Her own slaves, some like pale pinpricks of light, the strongest scampering like spectral rats, had encircled the camp by the time she was spotted and the alarm raised. The mages put up a fight, but it was a poor one. Every touch brought their twisted, malformed bodies out in boils and blisters, plague spreading so fast that the last few cut their own throats rather than suffer such horrors.

  She didn’t care what they did, as long as they were dead. Only the mages mattered; the imperative to scour the forest of Elves was fading from her mind and she felt Lord Isak’s compulsion to murder them all gradually wither. She would still do so because of what she was, but once
her strength grew beyond a certain point she would be able to kill any mortal, bargain or no bargain. They worshipped her in Lomin, and at the two other shrines set up for that purpose, but it was a feeble thing now that the boy was dead. No bargain lasted beyond death and that meant it would not bind her as soon as worshippers stopped going to the temples.

  Once her bargain was broken, then ... then the more she killed, the more they would flock to praise her — the more they would beg her to spare them. The Wither Queen tasted the fear on the air and smiled. Her time was coming.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mihn felt that familiar ache of guilt as he set the bowl of food on the bed near Isak’s head. It was irrational, he knew, but seeing his friend so changed, his body so battered and abused, was hard to bear. No part of him had been spared; even his eyeballs bore signs of torture. It was not hard to see why the white-eye had retreated deep into himself: the only way to save what scrap of sanity he could.

  The daemons had torn and ripped and burned and shredded his flesh, endlessly, feeding on the fear and pain from every new attack — small wonder Isak had cringed when Mihn had sharpened a knife a few days back. He was more careful now, not to do anything that might evoke memories best forgotten.

  The witch had delved into Isak’s mind to find the blackest knots of horror, and had used her magic to rip them free — but she couldn’t get them all. Only the worst had been taken, the memories that could not remain if Isak was ever to speak again, rather than spend any waking minutes shrieking aloud, his sleeping moments sobbing as he relived each horror in his nightmares. Other memories might be lost alongside them; they did not know, but it was a risk they had to take.

  Mihn saw Isak’s nostrils flare slightly at the scent of food: that faint recognition hadn’t yet gone so far as to prompt Isak to action, but it was a start. The puppy lying outstretched next to Isak was more receptive: he stirred and looked up. Mihn wasn’t sure what sort of dog it was — though young, it showed the promise of powerful body and legs, and he guessed it was bred for guarding, maybe even fighting, rather than hunting. Right now it tired easily, growing too fast to be boisterous for long, but that would change soon.