The Heretic Kings

FIFTEEN

At the top of Undi’s pyramid was another building whose sides curved inwards towards its roof. The Gosa shifter took the imp inside, and then in a series of bounds it leapt up a narrow line of steps. They were on the roof of the structure, a square platform perhaps three fathoms to a side. There the imp was gently lowered to its feet, and the were-ape left. A grating of stone, and the opening in the platform closed behind it.

Bardolin looked up with the imp’s eyes to see the encircling pitch-night of the crater walls, and above them a roundel of stars turning in the endless gyre of heaven. There were so many of them that they cast a faint, cold light down on the city. Many of them were recognizable-it was possible to glimpse Coranada’s Scythe-but they seemed to be in the wrong positions. Even as Bardolin watched, a streak of silver lightninged across the welkin, a star dying in a last flare of beauty.

“Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?” a voice said, and the imp jumped. Instinctively it looked for somewhere to hide, but the stone platform was stark and bare, and there was nothing beyond its edge but a long fall to the pyramid steps below.

Bardolin gripped the will of the creature in his own, steadied it, held it fast.

There was a man on the platform. He had come out of nowhere and stood with the starlight playing across his features. He seemed amused.

“An attractive little familiar. We in Undi do not use them any more. They are a weakness as well as an asset. Are they still as hard to cast through as I remember?”

Bardolin’s voice issued out of the imp’s mouth. The creature’s eyes went dull as he dominated it completely.

“Hard enough, but we get by. Might I ask your name?”

The man bowed. “I am Aruan of Undi, formerly of Garmidalan in Astarac. You are Bardolin of Carreirida.”

“Have we met before?”

“In a way. But here-let me spare your trembling familiar. Take my hand.”

He extended one large, blunt-fingered hand to the imp. The creature took it and Aruan straightened, pulling. But the imp did not come with him. Instead a shimmering penumbra slid out of its tiny body as though he had dragged from it its soul. He was holding on to Bardolin’s own hand, and Bardolin stood there on the platform, astonished, glimmering in the starlight like a phantom.

“What did you do?” he asked Aruan. The imp was blinking and rubbing its eyes.

“A simulacrum, nothing more. But it renders communication a little easier. You need not fear; your essence, or the bulk of it, is with your sleeping body down in the city.”

Bardolin’s shining image felt itself with trembling hands. “This is magic indeed.”

“It is not so difficult, and it makes things more. . civilized.”

Bardolin folded his imaginary arms. “Why am I here?”

“Can’t you answer that yourself? You are a creature of free will, as are all God’s creations.”

“You know what I mean. What is it you want of me?”

The man named Aruan turned away, paced to the edge of the platform and stared out over the city of Undi. He was tall, and dressed in voluminous, archaic robes that a noble might have worn in the days of the Fimbrian Hegemony. He was bald but for a fringe of raven hair about the base of his skull, for all the world like a monk’s tonsure. He had a beaked nose and deep-set eyes under bristling, fantastic brows, high, jutting cheekbones strangely at odds with the rest of his rather aristocratic face, as if someone had melded the features of a Kolchuk tribesman and a Perigrainian Landgrave. Hauteur and savagery, Bardolin noted them both.

“This is how I once looked,” Aruan said. “Were you to see my true form now you might be repelled. I am old, Bardolin. I remember the days of empire, the Religious Wars. I have known men whose fathers spoke with the Blessed Saint. I have seen centuries of the world come and go.”

“No man is immortal,” Bardolin said, fascinated and apprehensive at the same time. “Not even the most powerful mage.”

Aruan turned away from the dark city, smiling. “True, too true. But there are ways and means of staving off death’s debt collectors. You ask what it is I want of you, and I am wandering around the answer. Let me explain something.

“In all the years I have been here, we have seen many ships arrive from the Old World-more than you could ever have imagined. Most of them carried cargoes of gold-hungry vultures who simply wanted to claim this, the Zantu-Country, and rape it. They were adventurers, would-be conquerors, sometimes zealots filled with missionary zeal. They died. But sometimes they were refugees, come fleeing the pyres of Normannia and the purges of the Inceptines. These people, for the most part, we welcomed. But we have never encountered an Old-worlder with your. . potential.”

“I don’t understand,” Bardolin said. “I am a common enough brand of mage.”

“Technically, perhaps you are. But you possess a duality which no other mage who has come here from across the ocean has possessed, a duality which is the very key to our own thaumaturgical hierarchy here in the west.”

Bardolin shook his head. “Your answers only provide the spur to further questions.”

“Never mind. It will become plain enough in the time to come.”

“I want you to tell me about this place-how you got here, how this began. What is happening.”

Aruan laughed, a guffaw which made him sound like a hearty ruffian. “You want our history then, the centuries of it, laid before you like a woven tapestry for your eyes to drink in?”

“I want explanations.”

“Oh-so little you think you are asking, eh? Explanations. Well, the night is fine. Give me your hand again, Brother Mage.”

“A phantom hand.”

“It will suffice. See? I can grasp it as though it were flesh and blood. In the other I will take your imp; it would not do to leave him alone here.”

Something happened which Bardolin, for all his expertise in the field of Dweomer, could not quite catalogue. The platform disappeared, and they were thousands of feet up in the air and still rising. The air was cooler here, and a breeze ruffled Aruan’s hair.

I can feel the breeze; I, a simulacrum, Bardolin thought with a start of fear. And then he realized that it was the imp’s sensations he was feeling. Had to be. A simulacrum could not be given physical sensation.

Or could it? He could feel Aruan’s hand in his own, warm and strong. Was that the sensation of the imp or himself?

They stopped rising. Bardolin could look down like a god. The moon had risen and was a bitten apple of silver which lit up the Western Ocean. The vault above Bardolin’s head, strangely, did not feel any closer. The stars were clearer, but as far away as ever.

The incredible vastness of the world, night-dark and moon-silver, was staggering. The sky was a bright vault which spun endlessly above the sleeping earth, the Western Ocean a tissue of wrinkled silver strewn with the gossamer moonlight. And the Western Continent was a huge, bulking darkness in which only a few scattered lights burned. Bardolin could see the watchfires of Fort Abeleius on the coast, the tiny pricks of light that were the stern and masthead lanterns on the Osprey offshore, and inland red glows like scattered gleeds from an old fire.

“Restless forces of the world, at play amid the earth’s foundations,” Aruan said, sounding as though he were quoting something. “Volcanoes, Bardolin. This country is old and torn and troubled. It stirs uneasily in its sleep.”

“The craters,” Bardolin said.

“Yes. There was a great civilization here once, fully as sophisticated as that which exists upon Normannia. But the forces which create and destroy our world awoke here. They annihilated the works of the ancients, and created Undabane, the Holy Mountain, and a score of lesser cones. The Undwa-Zantu died in a welter of flame and ash, and the survivors of the cataclysm reverted to barbarism.”

“The dark, tall people who inhabit your city.”

“Yes. When first I came upon them, in the year of the Saint one hundred and nine, they were savages and only legends and ruins remained of the noble culture they had once possessed. They called themselves Zantu, which in their tongue signifies the Remnant, and their ancestors they called Undwa-Zantu, the Elder Remnant. Their mages-for they had been a mighty folk of magic-had degenerated into tribal shamans, but they preserved much that was worth knowing. They were a unique people, that elder race, possessed of singular gifts.”

But Bardolin was gaping. “You’ve been here. . how long? Four and a half centuries?”

Aruan grinned. “In the Old World I was a mage at the court of King Fontinac the Third of Astarac. I sailed into the west in a leaky little caravel called the Godspeed, whose captain was named Pinarro Albayero, may God rest his unhappy soul.”

“But how-?”

“I told you: the shamans of the Zantu preserved some of the lore of their ancestors, theurgy of a potency to make what we called Dweomer in the Old World look like the pranks of a child. There is power in this country, Bardolin; you will have noticed it yourself. The mountains of fire spewed out raw theurgy as well as molten rock in their eruptions. And Undabane is the fountainhead, the source. The place is virtually alive. And the power can be tapped. It is why I am still here, when my poor frame should be dust and dry bone long since.”

Bardolin could not speak. His mind was busy taking in the enormity of what Aruan was saying.

“I came here fleeing the purges of the High Pontiff Willardius-may he rot in a Ramusian hell for ever. With some of my comrades, I took ship with a desperate man, Albayero of Abrusio. He was nothing more or less than a common pirate, and he needed to quit the shore of Normannia as badly as we did.” Aruan paused for a moment, and his eyes became vacant, as if looking back on that awful expanse of centuries, all gone to ash now.

“Every century or so,” he went on, “there is a convulsion in the Faith of the Ramusians, and they must renew their beliefs. They do so with a festival of slaughter. And always their victims are the same.

“We fled one such bloodbath, my colleagues and I. Most of the Thaumaturgists’ Guilds of Garmidalan and Cartigella became fugitives, for as I am sure you know, brother, the more prominent you are in our order, the less chance you have of being overlooked when the Ravens are wetting their beaks.

“So we took ship, some score of us with our families, those who had them, in the cranky little vessel of Pinarro Albayero.

“Albayero had intended to make landfall in the Brenn Isles, but a northerly hit us, taking us down to North Cape in the Hebrionese. We rounded the point with the help of the weather-workers amongst us, but not even they could help us make up our lost northing. The storms we rode would brook no interference, even from the master-mages amongst us. So we rode them out in our little ship, the weather-workers having to labour merely to keep us afloat. We were driven into the limitless wilderness of the Western Ocean, and there we despaired, thinking that we would topple off the edge of the world and plummet through the gaps between the stars.

“But we did not. We had hoped to find an uninhabited island among the archipelago of the Brenn Isles-for there were still such things, back in the second century-but now we had no idea where we might be cast ashore. The winds were too strong. It seemed almost as though God Himself had set His face against us, and was bent on driving us off the face of His creation.

“I know better now. God was at hand, watching over us, guiding our ship on the one true road to our salvation. We made landfall seventy-eight days after rounding North Cape, ninety-four after our departure from Cartigella.

“We landed on a continent which was utterly alien to anything we had experienced before. A place which was to become our home.”

Aruan paused, chin sunk on breast. Bardolin could imagine the amazement, the joy and the fear which those first exiles must have felt upon walking up the blazing beach to see the impenetrable dark of the jungle beyond. For them there had never been any question of turning back.

“Half of us were dead within six months,” Aruan went on, his voice flat, mechanical. “Albayero abandoned us, weighed anchor one night and was across the horizon before we had realized he was gone. He sold his knowledge to the nobility of Astarac, I afterwards found, enabling others to attempt the voyage in times of desperation. A good thing, as it turned out, for it meant that once or twice in the long, long years and decades and centuries following we had injections of new blood.

“We tamed the Zantu with feats of sorcery, and they came to serve and worship us. We lifted them out of savagery, made them into the more refined people you see today. But it was a long time before we truly appreciated their wisdom and learned to leave behind the prejudices of our Ramusian upbringing. We cleared Undi, which was an overgrown ruin lost in the belly of Undabane, and made it our capital. We made a life, a kingdom of sorts if you like, here in the wilderness. And we were not persecuted. You will never smell a pyre’s stink in this country, Bardolin.”

“But you did something, didn’t you? I have seen man-beasts here, monstrosities of Dweomer and warped flesh.”

“Experiments,” Aruan retorted quickly. “The new power we discovered had to be explored and contained. A new set of rules had to be written. Before they were, there were some regrettable. . accidents. Some of us went too far, it is true.”

“And this no longer goes on?”

“Not if I do not wish it,” Aruan said without looking at him.

Bardolin frowned. “A society glued together by the Dweomer. Part of me rejoices, but part of me recoils also. There is such scope for abuse, for-”

“For evil. Yes, I know. We have had our internal struggles over the years, our petty civil wars, if I can dignify them with that title. Why else do you think that out of all the founders of our country I alone remain?”

“Because you are the strongest,” Bardolin said.

Aruan laughed his full, boisterous laugh again. “True enough! Yes, I was strongest. But I was also wisest, I think. I had a vision which the others lacked.”

“And what do you see with this vision of yours? What is it you want out of the world?”

Aruan turned and looked Bardolin in the eye, the moonlight crannying his features, kindling the liquid sheen of his eyes. Something strange there, something at once odd and familiar.

“I want to see your people and mine take their rightful place in the world, Bardolin. I want the Dweomer-folk to rise up and cast away their fears, their habits of servitude. I want them to claim their birthright.”

“Not all the Dweomer-folk are men of education and power,” Bardolin said warily. “Would you have the herbalists and hedge-witches, the cantrimers and crazed soothsayers have their say in some kind of sorcerous hegemony? Is that your aim, Aruan?”

“Listen to me for a moment, Bardolin. Listen to me without that dogged conservatism which marks you. Is the social order which permeates Normannia so fine and noble that it is worth saving? Is it just? Of course not!”

“Would the social order which you would erect in its place be any more just or fair?” Bardolin asked. “You would substitute one tyranny for another.”

“I would liberate an abused people, and remove the cancer of the religious orders from our lives.”

“For someone who has spent the centuries here in the wilderness you seem tolerably well informed,” Bardolin told him.

“I have my sources, as every mage must. I keep a watch on the Old World, Bardolin; I always have. It is the home of my birth and childhood and young manhood. I have not given up on it yet.”

“Are all your agents in Normannia shifters, then?”

“Ah, I wondered when we would get to that. Yes, Ortelius was one of mine, a valuable man.”

“What was his mission?”

“To make you turn back, nothing more.”

“Our ship carried the Dweomer-folk whom you would like to redeem; they were fleeing persecution, and yet you would have sent them back to the waiting pyres.”

“Your ship also carried an official representative of the Hebrian crown, and a contingent of soldiers,” Aruan said dryly. “They I could do without.”

“And the other vessel, which ran aground and was wrecked on these very shores? Did you have a hand in that?”

“No, upon mine honour, Bardolin. They were simply unlucky. It was not part of my plan to massacre whole ship’s companies. I thought that if I made the carrack, the ship with the leaders aboard, turn back the lesser vessel would follow.”

“Am I then to thank you for your humanity, your restraint, when the beast you ordered aboard was responsible for the foul deaths of my shipmates?” Bardolin was angry now, but Aruan answered him calmly.

“The exigencies of the situation allowed no other recourse-and besides, Ortelius was outside my control. I regret unnecessary death as much as the next man, but I had to safeguard what we have built here.”

“In that case, Aruan, you will have to make sure that none of the members of this current expedition ever leave this continent alive, won’t you?”

There was a small silence.

“Circumstances have changed.”

“In what way?”

“Perhaps we are no longer so concerned with secrecy. Perhaps other things occupy our minds.”

“And who are we? Creatures such as your were-ape Gosa? Why must you always choose shifters as your minions? Are there no decent, proper mages left to you here in the west?”

“Why Bardolin, you sound almost indignant. You surprise me, you of all people.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you earlier.”

“You’ve told me nothing, nothing of importance. What have you been doing here for all these centuries? Playing God to the primitives, indulging in petty power plays amongst yourselves?”

Aruan came close to the sparkling phantom that was Bardolin’s presence.

“Let me show you what we have been doing over these lost years, Brother Mage, what tricks we have been learning out here in the western wilderness.”

There was a change, as swift as breath misting a cold pane of glass. Aruan had disappeared, and in his place there loomed the hulking figure of a full-blooded shifter, a werewolf with lemon-bright eyes and a long muzzle glimmering with fangs. Bardolin’s imp whimpered and hid behind his master’s translucent simulacrum.

“It’s not possible,” Bardolin whispered.

“Did I not tell you, Bardolin, that we had found new and powerful wisdom among the inhabitants of this continent?” Aruan’s voice said, the beast’s muzzle contorting around the words, dripping ropes of saliva which glistened in the moonlight.

“It’s an illusion,” Bardolin said.

“Touch the illusion then, Brother Illusion.”

Of course-Bardolin at this moment was no more than an apparition himself, a copy of his true self, conjured up by the incredible power of this man, this beast before him.

“I am no simulacrum, I assure you,” Aruan’s voice said.

“It is impossible. Sufferers of the black disease cannot learn any of the other six disciplines. It is against the very nature of things. Shifters cannot also be mages.”

The Aruan shifter drew close. “They can here. We all are, friend Bardolin. We all partake of the beast in this country; and now so do you.”

Something in Bardolin quailed before the werewolf’s calm certainty.

“Not I.”

“But you do. You have looked into the very heart and mind of a shifter at the moment of its transformation. More, you have loved one of our kind. I can read this in you as though it were inked across the parchment of your very soul.” The beast laughed horribly.

“Griella.”

“Yes-that was the name. The memory of that moment is burned within you. There is a part of you, deep in the black spaces of your heart, which would gladly have joined her in her suffering, could she but have loved you in return. .

“Your imp is a poor sort of buffer against probing, Bardolin. Where you yourself might hold out against me, he is a free conduit to the heart of your fears and emotions. You are a book lying open to be read any time I have a desire to read.”

“You monster!” Bardolin snarled, but fear was edging an icicle of dread into his flesh.

The werewolf came closer until the heat and stink of it were all around him and the great head blotted out the stars. They stood on the pyramid once more: Bardolin’s image could feel the stone of it under its soles.

“Do you know how we make shifters in this country, Bardolin?”

“Tell me,” Bardolin croaked. Unable to help himself, he retreated a step.

“For a person to be infected with the black disease, he must do two things. Firstly, he, or she, must have physical relations with a full-blooded shape-shifter. Secondly, he or she must eat a portion of that shifter’s kill. It’s that simple. We have not yet divined why certain people become certain beasts-that is a complex field which would reward more study. A question of personal style, perhaps. But the basic process is well known to us. We are a race of shape-shifters, Bardolin, and now you are one of us as you once secretly wished to be.”

“No,” Bardolin whispered, aghast. He remembered a kind of lovemaking, a sweating half-dreamt battle in the night. And he remembered Kersik offering him the rib of meat to bite into. “Oh, lord God, no!”

He felt a grip on his shoulder as he stood there with his hands covering his face, and Aruan the man was back again, the beast gone. His face was both kindly and triumphant.

“You belong to us, my friend. We are brothers in truth, bound together by the Dweomer and by the malady which lurks in our very flesh.”

“To hell with you!” Bardolin cried. “My soul is my own.”

“Not any more,” Aruan said implacably. “You are mine, as much a creature in my keeping as Gosa or Kersik are. You will do my bidding even when you are unaware that the will which rules you is not your own. I have hundreds like you across the entire reach of the Old World. But you are special, Bardolin. You are a man who might in a former time have been a friend. For that reason I will leave you be for a while. Think on this at our parting: the race whose blood runs in you and me, in the veins of the herbalists and the hedge-witches and the petty cantrimers-it came from here, in the west. We are an ancient people, the oldest race in the world, and yet for centuries we have bled and died to satisfy the prejudices of lesser men. That will change. We will meet again, you and I, and when we do you will know me as your lord, and as your friend.”

The wraith that was Bardolin began to fade. The imp screamed thinly and tried to run towards the spectre of its vanishing master, but Aruan caught it in his arms. It writhed there pitiably, but could not get free.

“You have no further need of your familiar, Brother Mage. He is a weakness you can do without, and I have already mapped the road from his mind to yours. Say goodbye.”

With a flick of his powerful arms, Aruan wrenched round the imp’s head on its slim neck. There was a sharp crack, and the little creature flopped lifelessly.

Bardolin shrieked in grief and agony, and it seemed to him as though the jungle night dissolved in a sun-brightness, a scalding holocaust which seared the interstices of his mind and soul. The world funnelled past him like a plummeting star, and he saw the city, the mountain, the black jungle of the Western Continent swoop away as though he were riding the molten halo of a blasted cannonball into the sky.

His shriek became the tail of the comet he had become. He fell to earth again, a raging meteor intent on burying itself at the heart of the world.

And struck, passing through a terrible burning and light into utter darkness.