Auric Gods

Prologue

The city glowered. Gaudy lights leered from its ugly silhouette. It seethed. He could feel its jagged countenance boring into his back.

Ezrik was going to die. He had known it ever since he and his sister had boarded the skimmer-craft bound for the ocean rigs.

He and Mythla were twins. Though not identical they did share certain traits, both in kin and kind. Their bond went beyond mere patrimony. So when Ezrik shivered, his thin, pale fingers clutching at his heavy robe, Mythla trembled too. Dark hair rippled beneath her hood. Her grip was firm. She had always been the stronger of the two, her gifts more profound.

‘Hold on, brother,’ she whispered, her words carried away by the wind.

Mythla tugged up the collar of her cloak, trying to ward off the scything cold. Gusts cut across the disused rigging platform like knives of ice, deep enough to find bone. Frost sheathed the mainland, and the banks of looming cloud overhead presaged a heavy snow. Ezrik loved the snow. It had a slow sort of melancholy that appealed to him. But it wasn’t the cold that chilled his sister, or set his teeth to chattering. Ezrik knew their fear came from another place.

From the deep.

Black and fathomless, made darker by the lack of a moon, the sea churned that night. Grey light shone onto the water from humming lumen arrays set around the edge of the rigging platform. It was shaped like a letter ‘C’ with the lamps aimed into the space, which was partially delineated by the sturdy metal decking. Each lamp was directed downwards, their grainy beams converging to a point where four lengths of chain hauled on something concealed beneath the ocean. It was rising steadily.

Four cranes, industrial-grade, heaved at their drowned burden. Ezrik winced as each ugly link of iron fed through the crane pulleys. Hot pins pierced his brain meat, sending small convulsions through his thin frame. Mythla tensed, her skeleton suddenly taut and rigid. A tiny yelp of pain escaped her lips.

Ezrik had never known Mythla to betray weakness before.

‘Sister…’ he tried to say, but she wasn’t listening. She couldn’t.

Fire raced through Ezrik’s marrow. He no longer felt the cold. He could barely hear the sea. A darkening intruded at the edge of his vision that put him in mind of the black water, as if it had somehow spilled onto his eyes and was slowly swallowing his sight.

It took considerable effort but he glanced at their minders, standing either side of them. He wanted to see if they felt it too. Ever since he was a boy, Ezrik had been good with details. Enhanced perception was a part of his gift. He turned that gift on the man and the woman standing close enough for him to touch. Tough, athletic, they had long storm coats that failed to hide the bonded carapace they wore beneath. Nor did their attire smother the side holsters belted at their hips and the heavy-gauge pistols sat snugly within. Both had Militarum haircuts, close-shaved, and a faded Guard tattoo on the left temple. A much newer mark was etched below the right eye – a solitary candle with a lit flame.

Most interesting of all were their collars. Though ostensibly of dull, grey plasteel, a closer examination revealed circuitry and a tiny diode, almost invisible in the foul conditions, winking… Green-green-green.

An activation rune, Ezrik realised.

He considered trying to reach into the machine, extinguish the rune and see what happened next. He wondered about escape. But then his attention went back to his sister and he knew it was impossible.

Mythla stood less than a foot away. She might as well have been on another continent. Her eyes had turned completely white. Her splayed fingers quivered, as if touched by an electrical current. She shook, slightly at first but with increasing violence.

Mythla took the strain for him. His older sister was trying to bear the pain alone.

They had been careful. They had hidden for years, successfully, swallowed amongst the masses. Hidden from the witch-takers and the Black Ships. But he had found them. The wanderer. He said it was providence. He said it was His will. Ezrik believed that ‘His will’ had nothing to do with it, that instead the slumlord to whom they owed their rent and for whom he and his sister had performed certain ‘favours’ over the years had betrayed them.

Ezrik reflected on this poor turn of circumstances as Mythla’s skin shrivelled and started to flake, the very essence of her degrading before his eyes. A sudden desire overcame him to tell her what she meant to him, that he loved her, although they had never been close by any conventional assessment. They had bickered, the presence of one an irritant to the other. A side effect of the gift. But they had stayed together, driven by the fear that gripped all outcasts, of being alone with no one to externalise their inner misery upon.

Such was their antipathy that it had been several years since Ezrik and Mythla had touched. To touch meant to share thoughts, to share pain, but as the chain links clacked upwards Ezrik reached out and held Mythla’s hand.

White heat flowed, her thoughts subsumed by it. Nothing else remained but the fire. Mythla had been cored out so that the only thing left in her skull was a piece of slowly burning meat. Ezrik smelled it. His sister. Burning.

The chain clacked again, thunderous inside the tortured confines of Ezrik’s head.

He looked down, drawn by the sound, a presaging death knell. Fear rushed up in an icy flood as the edge of a dark metal casket breached the surface of the waves. Old, old laughter echoed in his mind. Inhuman, bestial. Ezrik cried out at a sudden hammer blow, though no one had touched him. One of his ribs broke. Then another. Spikes of agony pierced his hand, the one clinging to Mythla’s. An immolating statue stood in her place, a ferocious human candle with flesh for wax. Ezrik held on as her fingers broke apart in the heat until, at last, unsupported by his sister, his knees buckled and he fell. Mythla fell too, what was left of her, collapsing into a pillar of ash.

The chains clacked on, the metal casket dangling heavily in mid-air, turning slightly in the wind.

Ezrik lay on his side, the taste of his own blood heady on his tongue, in his nose. His inner ear felt wet and he knew he bled from there too.

Now he was really shaking, and though terror resonated through his body like a shock wave, he couldn’t tear his sight away from that casket. Every detail spoke to him. The heavily aged metal, the warding sigils carved into its sides worn almost to nothing, the faint Inquisitorial seal…

Through his final agonies, Ezrik became aware of a figure that had crouched down next to him.

‘Well done… well done,’ said a voice.

Calm, cultured, foreign.

Ezrik hadn’t realised he was here. The wanderer.

The chain clacked.

Smooth, faintly perfumed fingers cradled Ezrik’s chin. His eyes bulged. His teeth clenched. The carotid artery in his neck stuck out, as taut and thick as a hawser. Ezrik trembled, rage boiling inside as he breathed in his sister’s ash.

A tanned face looked down at him.

Every detail rushed by in a blur of fading cognition.

Strong cheekbones; straight, unblemished teeth; skin tightened by repeated rejuvenat treatments.

Fair hair, cut short.

A muscled neck met broad shoulders under robes, under flak armour.

Rings on every finger, shaped like little golden candles with frozen flames.

A tattoo inscribed above the bridge of the nose, the letter ‘I’ within an eye.

Such belief Ezrik saw in those silver-grey eyes. Such conviction!

The collar around the wanderer’s neck winked… Green-green-green.

Ezrik wanted to touch it, to snuff out that light and let whatever lurked in the metal casket have its way. But all he could do was die and he quailed in that moment of revelation, realising why they had been brought here.

His captors needed proof.

‘Do not yield to despair,’ said the wanderer as Ezrik’s mind slowly boiled away to smoke. The burning he smelled was his own, but the wanderer smiled in spite of the horror of human immolation. ‘Your suffering serves a great purpose.’ He wiped away a trickle of blood from his nose as the snow began to fall.