Текст книги "Black Halo"

Автор книги: Sam Sykes

Соавторы: Sam Sykes
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Текущая страница: 38 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

Thirty-Eight

THE DEAD, HONOURED AND IMPOTENT

Gariath did not fear silence. Gariath feared nothing.

Still, he found himself deeply uncomfortable with it. Ordinarily, discomfort wasn’t such a problem; the source of it, after a few stiff beatings, would eventually become a source of much more manageable anger, which would warrant further beatings until only tranquillity remained.

But those sources of anger and discomfort were frequently made of flesh, meat. Silence was not. And he could not strangle the intangible.

He had tried.

And he had failed, so he remained in uncomfortable, awkward, intangible, fleshless silence as he stalked through the forest.

Occasionally he paused, fanning out his ear-frills to listen for an errant whisper, a trace of muttered curse, even a roach’s fart. He heard nothing. He knew he would continue to hear nothing.

Grandfather had left him.

He wasn’t sure what had happened to cause it, but he was certain of it now. Not merely because he hadn’t seen, heard or smelled the ancestor since he had dragged himself out of the surf last night. It was a deeper absence, the perpetual, phantom agony of a limb long lost.

Or a relative …

He continued on through the forest. The silence continued to close in around him, seething on his flesh as though it were new, raw. Not so unreasonable, he thought; he had lived his life without silence thus far. As near as he remembered, the Rhegawere a people of perpetual noise, living in a world that thundered against them: the barking of pups met with the roar of rivers, the mutter of elders accompanied by the rumble of thunder.

Since then, he had experienced any number of howls, groans, shrieks, screams, grunts, cackles, chuckles and countless, countlessbodily noises. That, too, seemed long ago, though.

For the first time, he heard silence.

He didn’t like it.

And yet, he pressed ahead, instead of returning to the cheerful, stupid noises and their fleshy, meaty sources. Theirs was silence of another loud and useless kind, though today it had become a melancholy, self-loathing silence.

He had smelled them in a musky cocktail of guilt, hatred, despair and abject self-pity. All of them carried it, some daubed with scant traces of it, others wearing it like a mane about their heads.

Well, he corrected himself. Almost all of them.

It was unusual enough to find Lenk without a smell that it had given Gariath pause when they briefly crossed paths that morning. Usually, the young man bore the most varied odours, usually varying scents of exasperation. Today, when they brushed past each other without a word and exchanged a fleeting glance, he knew the young man was different. Today, the dragonman had inhaled deeply and scented nothing. Today, he had felt a chill when he met Lenk’s eyes.

Just a fleeting sensation, there and gone in less than an instant; the human was the same human who had cried out like a coward last night, the same human who had fallen into useless babble, the same human whom Gariath had graced with one and only one glance before he leapt overboard to pursue the Shen.

But it had been clear in Lenk’s eyes, in a silence that struck the whistle of the breeze dead, that Gariath was not the same dragonman from that night.

And that dragonman had told him nothing, about the pointy-eared one’s plot to kill him, about the demons on the island, about the longfaces, about anything. Because the man he had seen was not the man from that night, and the man he had seen would brook nothing but silence.

He snorted to himself; too much silence, too little meaning in it all. It was starting to aggravate him. Absently, he began glancing around for things that would make the most noise when struck. Trees, rocks, leaves: all defiantly, annoyingly mute.

He pressed forward, stomping his feet on the earth as he did, crunching leaves under his soles. He needed to break the silence, he thought as he pushed through the underbrush and stepped into a great clearing amidst the forest. He needed something to speak to.

And, in the instant he felt the sun upon his skin, he knew he had found it.

He craned his neck up to take it all in: its massive, unblemished grey face; its weathered, rounded crown; its tremendous earthen roots extending into the lapping waters of a great pond.

An Elder, the familial rock from which all Rhegabegan and ended, loomed over him. He surveyed it, unmarked and unadorned as it was, and felt a smile creep across his lips. The Elders were the basis, the focus, the stability behind any Rhegafamily. And, judging by this one, it had borne many burdens of many of his people.

His people.

They had been here in numbers great enough to raise this rock and call it their earth, once.

Once …He felt his smile fade at the words echoing in his head. And a long time ago.

The scent here was faint; that couldn’t be right, he thought. The Elder was titanic. The scent of the Rhega, of their memories, their families, their children, their wounds, their feasts, their births, their elders … he should have been overwhelmed, brought low to his knees by the sheer weight of the ancestral aroma.

But the smell was one of stagnant rivers, moss-covered rocks. Not alive, not dead, like the rot between a dying winter and a bloody newborn spring, barely faint enough for a single memory, a single statement to make itself known.

But it did make itself known.

Over and over.

Ahgaras succumbed to his wounds and died here, the scent said.

Raha bled into the earth and died here.

Shuraga fell and, his arms ripped from his body, died here.

Ishath held his dead pup in his arms and ate no more …

Garasha screamed until his breath left him …

Urah walked into the night and never returned …

Pups fell, elders fell, all fell …

He drew in their scent, though he did so with ever-diminishing breath, his heart conspiring with his lungs, begging him to stop smelling the memories, to stop wrenching them both. But he continued to breathe them in, searching the scent for anything, any birth, any mating, any defecation, anythingbut this endless reeking list of death.

But he found nothing.

He felt them, each one of them, in his nostrils.

And in each expulsion of breath, he felt them, each one of them, die.

‘Five hundred.’

At the sound of the voice, he turned without a start. His body was drained, a shell of red flesh and brittle bones in which there dwelt no will to start, to snarl, to curse. All he could do was turn and face the grandfather with eyes that sank back into his skull.

‘Exactly,’ the grandfather said.

‘What?’

‘There were five hundred Rhegathat fell here,’ the ancestor said as he walked wearily to the water’s edge. ‘I spent over a year taking in their scents to find their names, Wisest. I doubt you have that long.’

‘I don’t have anywhere to be.’

‘You do … You just don’t know where yet.’

They stood, side by side, and stared. The waters of the pond lapped soundlessly against the shore. The wind in the trees had nothing to contribute. The Elder was the grave into which all sound was buried and lost, so inundated with death that even the great sigh of the earth was nothing.

‘How did you find this place, Wisest?’

Grandfather’s voice brought Gariath back to his senses, his attentions to the heavy object dangling from his belt. He reached down, plucked it from the leather straps that held it there, and held it up.

Grandfather looked up into empty eye sockets beneath a bone brow.

‘I asked the skull,’ Gariath replied.

‘You went back to find it.’

‘I needed to know what you wouldn’t tell me. The skull knew.’

‘The dead know.’ Grandfather stared out over the pond. ‘I had hoped you wouldn’t have ears for their voices.’

‘It didn’t say much,’ Gariath said. ‘I could only hear fragments of words, like it was talking in its sleep. It knew where the Elder was.’

‘All dead things know where the Elder is.’ Grandfather sighed and made a gesture to the pond. ‘It speaks because it can’t remember that it should be asleep. Do what is right, Wisest.’

Gariath nodded, kneeling beside the pond to let the skull fall from his hands into the water. In its empty eyes, he saw a kind of relief, the same kind that followed an important thing remembered after having been forgotten for so long.

Or maybe I’m just seeing things.

It did not simply vanish into the water. Instead, it remained stark white against the blue as it fell, still vivid in his eyes no matter how much it shrank. The sunlight caught the water’s surface, turned the blue into a pristine crystal through which he could see the muddy bottom and the stark white that painted it.

He stared into the water.

Five hundred skulls stared back.

‘This was a pit when I brought them here,’ Grandfather said. ‘When it was all over, when I was the last one alive … I dug the earth open and lay them within. It rained – a long time it rained – and this pond formed.’ He nodded. ‘Rivers and rocks. The Rhegashould lie in water.’

The sunlight was chased away by clouds. The water masked itself with blue again. Gariath continued to stare.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘Same way everything died on this island,’ Grandfather replied. ‘In the great war.’

‘Between Aeons and mortals? I thought the humans fought that.’

‘They did. Would it surprise you, Wisest, that we fought alongside them? In those days, we fought along many creatures that you would call weak.’

‘It does not surprise me. The Rhegashould have been there to lead, to inspire, to show them what courage is.’

‘And you know courage, Wisest?’

‘I know what the Rhegaare.’

‘So did I, back then. So did we all. We thought ourselves full of courage … That was reason enough to fight.’

‘To hear the humans tell it, the Aeons threatened all mortals.’

‘They did,’ Grandfather said. ‘But the Rhegawere made of stronger things than crude flesh and bone. No matter what the humans tried to tell us, we were apart from their little wars. If we died, we returned to the earth and came back. Let the humans be concerned with heaven.’

‘Then why did we fight?’

‘We had our reasons. Perhaps life was too good for too long. Perhaps we needed to remember what pain and death were. I don’t know. I’ve thought of a thousand reasons and none of them matter. In the end, we are still dead.

‘But we fought, all the same, and in that day, we became a people obsessed with death. When the first Rhegadied and did not come back, we turned our thoughts to killing. If we did not kill, we died. If we did not die, we killed. Over and over until we were the red peak upon a mountain of corpses.’

‘And you died in battle with the rest?’

‘No,’ Grandfather said. ‘I should have, though. When the children of Ulbecetonth marched against the humans and the earth rattled under their feet, I marched alongside everyone. I climbed their great legs. I shamed the humans and their stupid metal toys by splitting their thoughts open.’ His eyes narrowed, jaw clenched. ‘I leapt into their minds. I tore them apart until I could taste their thoughts on my tongue.’

Gariath recalled the great ravine, the greater skeleton that lay within it, and the massive hole split open in its skull. He recalled how Grandfather had crawled into that hole and vanished, as he seemed to vanish now, growing fainter with every breath.

Suddenly, he sprang into full, bitter view with a deep, unpleasant laugh.

‘And still, I am obsessed with death.’

‘How did you die, Grandfather?’

The ancestor’s body quivered and grew hazy with the force of his sigh.

‘When I crawled out of that skull, when I stopped hearing the screaming, I looked and saw I was the only one left,’ he said. ‘The dead were everywhere: the demons, the humans, but I was the only one concerned for the Rhega, the only one concerned for the dead. The mortals had moved on, pushing Ulbecetonth back to her gate. I was left alone.

‘So, I cut the earth open around the Elder and I dragged their bodies back, finding every piece.’ He paused, glancing into the water. ‘Almost every piece, at least. But the Rhegacame back … not born again, as they should have been, but as I am now. They still wanted to fight, they wondered where their families were, they had so many reasons and they were all so tired …

‘And so, one by one, I bade them to sleep. Then I watched them sleep. I watched for so long I forgot the need for food, for water … and when I came back, there was no one left to bid me to sleep.’

He turned and stared hard into Gariath’s eyes.

‘When you are gone, who will bid you, Wisest?’

Gariath met his concern with a scowl.

‘You think I’ll die?’

‘We all die.’

‘I haven’t yet.’

‘You haven’t tried hard enough.’

The dragonman offered the ancestor nothing more than a snort in reply, his hot breath causing the spectral form to ripple like the water at their feet. Gariath returned his stare to the water. Through the obscuring azure, he could feel their gazes. In the earth, he could smell their final moments.

But in the air, he couldn’t hear their voices, not even the whispering sleep-talk of the skull. They all rested soundly now; staring, dead, utterly silent.

‘What is it you feel, Wisest?’ Grandfather asked. ‘Hatred for the humans for drawing us into this war? A need for vengeance against the demons?’

‘You can’t read my thoughts, Grandfather?’

‘I have been inside your heart,’ the spirit replied coldly. ‘It’s not a place I want to go back to in the best of times.’

‘Take your best guess, then.’

After a long, careful stare, the ancestor obliged him. His prediction was manifested in his great, heaving sigh. The accuracy of it was reflected in Gariath’s unapologetic grunt of confirmation.

‘What is it you plan to do, then?’

‘The skulls are silent. Their scent is nothing but death,’ Gariath said, folding his arms over his chest. ‘This earth is dead. It has nothing to tell me.’

‘The earth is dead, yes, but those that walk upon it still live.’

‘I agree,’ Gariath replied.

Grandfather’s eye ridges furrowed, a contemplative look rippling upon his face.

‘That is why I am going to find the Shen.’

And when the ripples settled, there was fury plain upon the spirit’s face.

‘The Shen?’ Grandfather snarled. ‘The Shen are a people just as obsessed as we were … as youare.’

‘Good company to keep, then.’

‘No, you moron! The Shen are what dragged us into the war!’

‘But you said-’

‘I said we had a thousand reasons, and noneof them mattered. The Shen were the original one, and they matter least of all.’ Upon Gariath’s confused look, he sighed and raised a hand. ‘Shen, Owauku, Gonwa … all descend from a single ancestor, born to serve Ulbecetonth. In them, we saw people who could not hear the rivers or smell the rocks. We were moved to sympathy. We gave our lives for them.’

‘And they pay it back. I have seen them. They are brave; they are strong.’

‘They are dead. They just don’t know it yet.’ Grandfather’s lips peeled back, his teeth stark and prominent despite the haziness of his form. ‘We killed for them. We died for them. And what have they done? They continue to kill! They continue to die!’

‘For what they believe in.’

‘What dothey believe in, Wisest?’

‘They are Shen.’

‘That is not a reason to live-’

‘And I am Rhega!’ Gariath roared over the ancestor, baring teeth larger, sharper and far more substantial. ‘I remember what that means. No Rhegawas meant to live alone.’

‘Then don’t!’ Grandfather said. ‘There may still be more out there, somewhere. Go with the humans. Even if you never find another Rhega, you will never be alone!’

Gariath’s expression went cold, the rage settling behind his eyes in a cold, seething poison, a poison he all but spat upon the ancestor.

‘This is what it’s been about, isn’t it?’ he hissed. ‘This is why you told me to find Lenk. This is why you did not lead me here, why you tried to keep me from coming here. You would have me run into the arms of humans, like a fat, weeping lamb.’

‘I would have you live, Wisest,’ Grandfather snapped back. ‘I would have you find more Rhegaif you could. If you couldn’t, I would have you die and have no need to come back. Amongst the Shen, you cannot do that.’

‘Amongst the Shen, I can learn more. Do you know what it was like to hear the word Rhegainstead of “dragonman”? Do you know what it is to smell things besides greed and hate and fear?’

‘I know their scent, pup. Do you?’

‘That’s not important.’

‘It is. You know what’s important; you just won’t admit to it. You know that the humans are important. You know that without them, you would have died long ago. After your sons-’

‘ Never, Grandfather.’ Gariath’s voice was cold, his claw trembling as he levelled it at the spirit. ‘Not even you.’ Waiting a moment, challenging the ancestor to speak and hearing nothing, he snorted. ‘I kept myself alive. The fire inside me burned too bright to be contained by death.’

‘Fires burn themselves out. The humans gave you purpose, gave you direction.’

‘Stupidity.’

‘Then why did you try to kill the shict when you knew she was going to kill the silver-haired one? Why did you go to save the two females you claimed to hate?’

‘To kill, to fight’

‘To what end? Because you knewthat if they died, you would, too. In some ugly part of you, Wisest, you know it. Follow the humans. Live, Wisest. The Shen can give you nothing.’

He paused for a moment before turning and stalking away.

‘They can give me answers.’

‘They cannot,’ Grandfather called after him.

‘We’ll find out. I am going to find the Shen, Grandfather. If I return, I will tell you what I’ve learned.’

‘You won’t return, Wisest,’ the spirit shrieked. ‘Wisest!’

He did not turn around.

‘Gariath!’

He did not stop.

‘ LOOK AT ME, PUP!’

He paused.

He turned.

A fist met him.

Grandfather’s roar was as strong as his blow. Gariath felt his jaw rattle against the knuckles, felt it course through his entire body. The silence was gone now. In the wake of Grandfather’s enraged howl, the wind blew and shook the trees, the water churned and hissed in approval. Four hundred and ninety-nine voices found a brief, soundless voice.

Gariath could hear them, but only barely. Grandfather’s roar drowned out all sound. Grandfather’s fists knocked loose his senses as they hammered blow after blow into his skull, as if the spirit hoped some great truth was slathered upon his knuckles and would drive itself into Gariath’s brain.

But Gariath’s skull was hard. His horns were harder.

Grandfather learned this.

Through the rain of fists, Gariath burst through, a cloud of red mist bursting from his mouth to herald his howl as he drove his head forward and against the spirit’s. It connected solidly, sending the ancestor reeling. He followed swiftly, going low to tackle the spirit about the middle.

Claws raked his flesh; he ignored them. Fists hammered his skull; he disregarded them. More than one foot found itself lodged in a deeply uncomfortable place; he tried his best to ignore that, too, as he hoisted Grandfather into the air and brought him down low.

And hard.

Gariath was panting. Grandfather didn’t need to breathe. The spirit continued to lash with a vigour and hatred better suited to someone young. Or to a Rhega, Gariath thought, feeling a faint urge to grin. But his admiration lived only as long as it took for him to recognise the disparities between them. Gariath was bleeding flesh and rattled bones. Grandfather was rivers and rocks. The ending of this fight was clear to Gariath.

And his heart ached to finish it.

‘You’re tired, Grandfather,’ he said.

And the spirit’s eyes went wide. He did not stop fighting; the ferocity behind his blows only increased, his roar took on a new savage desperation.

‘No, Gariath,’ he snarled. ‘I am not tired. I will fight you so long as I have to. I can’t let you throw everything away. I can’t let you end up like-’

‘Go to sleep, Grandfather.’

Blood leaked from a split in his brow, weeping into his eyes. He shut them tight.

When he opened them, nothing remained on the earth beneath him but spatters of his own blood.

He clambered to his feet. His body did not cry out in agony. Rather, his muscles sighed and his flesh complained. Cries were for proud battles, wounds that had earned the right to scream out. This was not such a battle.

He carried his bleeding and battered body away to recover. He wasn’t sure where the Shen came from, but he was certain he would have to be strong to reach it. The Shen were strong, after all. They were Shen.

And he was Rhega.

So were those who lay in the lake behind him. Their cries were quiet now, though. That brief spark of life that had surged through them had died, and the world had died with it. The wind was still. The earth was quiet. The waters were calm.

Silence settled over the clearing once again, as though it had never left. Gariath tried to listen to it, his distaste for it gone. It was preferable, he thought, for if he stopped long enough, if he let his ear-frills adjust to the silence, he could hear a single, solitary voice, not yet dead, far from alive.

It drew in a quiet breath. There was no breeze for its quiet sigh to be lost on.

He tried to ignore it.

There was ice.

Everywhere in the cavern, Lenk stared back at himself, his face distorted by the crystalline rime that coated the cavern walls, the dim light seeping through holes in the ceiling reflected upon its surface. At the mouth, it was mirrorlike, and he met his own worried gaze a dozen times over a dozen glances. With each step deeper, the rime solidified, became cloudy and thick.

His face became distorted in it: elongated, flattened, crushed, reduced to a pink blob, shattered into a dozen jagged creases. And through each mutation, each abomination, his eyes remained unbroken, unaltered, unblinking as they stared back at him.

As he continued down into the cavern, the ice became thicker, cloudier. He shivered. It was not the callous, emotionless cold that chilled him. Rather, the ice was heavier with more than just water, cloudier with more than just white.

Hatred.

It radiated off the cavern walls, a cold heavy with anger, crueller than any chill had a right to be, seeping through his flesh, into his bones and clawing at him with hoary fingernails from the marrow out. He felt it now, but while it was painful, it was not new. He had known this cold before. He had felt this hatred before.

‘This can’t be right,’ he whispered, fearful of raising his voice that the ice might hear him. It was why he kept himself from screaming. ‘There can’t be ice in this part of the world.’

‘ There is.’

‘It can’t be natural.’

‘ You forsook the ability to deny the unnatural long, long ago.’

He said nothing, staring deeper into the cavern’s rimed gullet. The light did not diminish, but it changed, shifting from the dying light of a golden sun to the dim azure glow of … something else entirely. He stared down it. He did not want to do more than that.

‘ Go,’ the voice responded to his hesitation.

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘ Going back is not an option.’

‘It could be,’ Lenk said.

‘ They betrayed you.’

‘It’s hardly the first time. I remember once, Kataria was eating something she said was rabbit meat and offered me some. It turned out to be skunk meat. She laughed, of course, but it’s hard to feel bad when someone eats a skunk for the sole purpose of trying to trick you into eating it, too.’

‘ Stop it.’

‘What?’

‘ Stop trying to justify it. Stop trying to excuse it. Stop denying what is apparent.’

‘What’s that?’

‘ And stop pretending you don’t know. I speak from inside you. We both know that they have always thought less of you.’

‘That’s not entirely true.’

‘ You brought them together. You gave them purpose, gave them meaning. You never asked for any of them. They came toyou.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘ They used you. You brought them salvation. You brought them hope. You brought them reason. The moment they had those, the moment you required aid, they abandoned you. They betrayed you. They betrayedus. That cannot happen. Not again.’

‘Not again? What do you mean?’

‘ Go into the cave.’

‘I don’t know if-’

‘ GO.’

The command came from mind and body alike, a surge of blood coursing into his legs of a volition beyond his own. In resisting it, he was sent to his knees, then to his hands as his body rebelled against him, torn between his will and another.

‘ Resist now. I know you must, because I know you. You will always resist, at first. This is your strength. When you come to accept it, when you embrace us, we will be that much stronger for it.’

He had no response, for he had no voice. His throat swelled up, was sealed as if by a hand of ice that gripped his neck and squeezed tightly. He gasped in breath, the cold cutting his lungs like knives. He felt his body go numb, so numb that he didn’t even feel it when his face crashed against the cavern’s floor.

It was not a darkness that overtook him, so much as a different kind of light. He did not fall, but he could feel himself struggling to hold on. He shut his eyes tight. He went deaf to the world.

Senses returned to him, after some time.

Not his senses, though.

Through ears not his own, he heard them: a dozen voices, rasping with frost, cold with hatred. They came drifting across his ears on icy breezes, whispering in words that he had heard before, in the stream and outside the cavern.

‘ … unnatural. The whole lot of them. Look at their eyes. They look at you and all they see is an obstacle. They’d kill you, given half a chance. Who cares if we’re on the same side? Which god do they fight for? Not ours, I can tell you …’

‘ … this tome they’re writing. What of it? The blasphemies in it, the sacrilege. They would aid and abet the Aeons even as they march with us against the Traitors of Heaven. Whose side are they on? Can’t trust them, can’t trust them at all …’

‘ … see what they did to the priest? All he was did was dedicate the battle to the Gods. And they killed him. They didn’t just kill him. They did to him what they did to the demons back on the beach. There’s nothing right about dying that way …’

‘ … not my fault. We have our orders. They had their orders. They chose to forsake them. They were going to turn on us, sooner or later. They look down on us. They hate us. They hate the Gods! They had to die. Not my fault I had to do it …’

He rose, groggily. His legs were beneath him, he was certain, but he could not feel them. He was breathing, he was certain, but he couldn’t taste the air on his tongue. He lurched forward, uncertain of where he was going, but certain he had to get there. His stride was weak, clumsy. He staggered, reached out for balance and laid a palm upon the ice.

Hatred coursed through him.

A voice spoke inside his heart.

‘ They’re going to betray you.’

He reeled from the sheer anger that coursed into him like a venom. The ice clung to his palm greedily, unwilling to let him go. He pulled away, leaving traces of skin on it. He was in pain, but he could not feel it.

He continued, swaying down the hall. He brushed against the wall.

‘ It is in their nature. They are weak. Cattle.’

Agony; he was sure he should feel that. There was no time to dwell on it, no time to feel pain. Pain was fear, fear was doubt, doubt made strong wills falter and turn back. There was no turning back.

Another staggering step. Another brush against the ice.

‘ Man’s destiny is his own to weave, not the dominion of Gods. They would seek to enslave mortals all over again, through churches instead of chains.’

More pain. More ice.

‘ The tome was written in case the House was wrong, in case we needed to destroy the Gods as well as the demons. It was written to help mankind. They cower before it, call it blasphemy.’

A light at the end of the cavern appeared: no welcoming, guiding gold, but something harsh, something seething, something terrifyingly blue. He continued towards it and the voice did not stop, whispering to him as the cavern grew narrower, as the ice closed in around him.

‘ We’ll show them. We’ll teach them. We can live on our own, without gods or demons. They will all burn. Mortalkind will remain.’

A wall of ice rose up before him, clear and pristine. A figure dwelled within it, a man cloaked in shadow.

‘ We have our duty. We have our commands. Darior gave us this gift that we may free mortals. We were made for greater things than heaven.’

His features were sharp and angular and harsh. His hair was white and flowing. His eyes were shut. His lips were shut.

‘ They are going to kill you. They are going to betray you. It is their nature. To let you live is to deny their comforting shackles. To let the tome survive is to acknowledge that they might be wrong.’

A dozen arrows were embedded in his flesh. A dozen knife hilts jutted from his body. A dozen bodies wearing battered armour and stained cloaks were frozen in the ice with him.

‘ Darior made us that we might serve a greater purpose. It is our nature to cleanse, to purify, to kill. Demons, gods, heretics, liars, murderers … any that would seek to enslave mankind. But it is their nature to doubt, to fear, to hate. They will hate you. They will betray you.’

Lenk felt his arm rise of its own volition.

‘ You cannot let them deny you this purpose. You cannot let them destroy you. You cannot fail. You cannot disobey Darior. You cannot abandon your duty.’

Lenk felt his hand fall upon the ice.

‘ You cannot let them stop you.’

Lenk felt the man’s eyes open. Lenk stared into a vast, pupilless blue void.

‘ Kill them or they will kill you.’

And then, Lenk felt himself scream.