The Pilgrims

1

The Arch Mage and four Strategists stand grim-faced and silent in the dark hall, watching. The most powerful men in the world, they are here, in the vast castle’s innermost chambers, reduced to spectators. It is an ugly feeling. Vous, their Friend and Lord, stands on a small balcony with his back to them. Light shines from his rigid body in thin, shifting beams, which run over the walls like small searchlights, and over the watchers’ skin with a touch that is icy cold.

The balcony is carved from blood-red stone and Vous’s hands, tensely gripping its rail, look white as bone. Below him is a deep square room once used for lecturing apprentice magicians, though it is now for all intents and purposes a pit. In it a few hundred people crowd and jostle, peering up, trying to stay on their feet in the press of bodies. They are packed in tight. The stuffy ozone-scented air here is rife with strange magic, so most of them hardly remember being marched in by guards from the castle gates, where they’d trekked from starving cities to seek work. They were fed, ordered to bathe, then brought naked to this room where it was too dark to see the person next to them. The lights playing about the room’s walls did nothing to relieve the darkness, and looked as though they shimmered on the surface of water, rather than on slabs of polished tile.

Now these lights fall on the people below, and a strange feeling comes over them, as though their being here, their jostling and shoving and trying to stay upright, are thrusts and heaves in a slightly sickening, yet potently sexual act between them and their Lord. Minutes ago, the door they had come through clanged noisily and inescapably shut.

It’s a surprise, of course, to find Vous himself here above them, a figure almost of myth, seeming to have stepped out from the history books. Many gaze up at him with awe. Here is a being they are instructed to swear to, to pray to, as though he is a god. Some of them have heard old men in taverns curse his name with hot, angry tears, seldom daring to explain their grievances aloud. And now, well within a stone’s throw, there he stands: someone who changed the world with the very same bone-white hands now resting on the balcony rail. With the very same voice soon to speak to them.

Though it’s dark, Vous himself is well lit, his silk gown exposing one flank from hip to shoulder, his young-looking face frozen in glaring intensity. So slight and slender he seems to the Strategists standing behind his glowing body; but his short stature is totally warped now in the eyes of those below. They can see no higher than his balcony, for the chamber’s tall ceiling is concealed in the gloom; but an occasional beam of light, sweeping high on the tile walls, hints at hidden shapes up there.

This ‘speech’ has the Arch Mage curious, the Strategists uneasy. They have acquiesced, of course; even though, while he is their Lord, Vous is not so much obeyed these days as handled. The Arch Mage alone does not look at him — he cannot. The many wards and charms about Vous’s neck and on his fingers reduce him to a painful red blur in the Arch Mage’s sight. Vous insists on wearing them, fearful of a magical attack which has never, in reality, been contemplated. But the Arch Mage can see the light playing about the hall, and feel its cold touch. He knows Vous is not a user of magic; he is rather a force of magic. Nor is he any longer wholly human, though he still looks it. It is a century’s progress on display. When he will actually become a Great Spirit, no one knows. Years, another century, or days? Or — and the Arch Mage’s heart quickens — this very hour?

‘Friend and Lord,’ Vous murmurs at last, seemingly to himself. ‘Their Friend and Lord. I am their Friend and Lord.’ His eyes clench shut. Some below are surprised to see tears run down his face. ‘You have come,’ he says to them, and says no more for nine long minutes. From above, the jostling hundreds are little more than the gleam of their eyes peering up.

At last Vous continues: ‘You have come. You are here, as I willed. I, who brought you here, with but a few muttered instructions. You are here.’

Someone beneath coughs.

‘You will think, perhaps, that you have angered me somehow.’ Tears still flow down his cheeks, and his voice chokes up. ‘You will perhaps think … it is some quirk of the Project, some mistake. But you should know the truth. I do this to you … knowingly. I do this to you with foreknowledge. I do this to you with, even this passing second, the power in my hand, easily, to stop it being done. And choosing, instead, to do it. Further, I do this to you, gaining no pleasure, but also with no real purpose, with nothing at all accomplished from the … the deed. The deed to be done. To you.’

A murmur ripples through the room like a breeze, then others say, ‘Shh, shh,’ and the breeze is gone.

Their Friend and Lord’s body shakes with grief and he clutches the rail like someone about to collapse. ‘When I was a younger man,’ he says, ‘I had dreams filled with beautiful things, beautiful places. I had meant, one day, to capture this beauty, freeze it in time, so it could not die, so it lived forever against the natural pull of rot. Before that could be done, I had to wade through much pain, blood, war and murder, of which a sea still lies before me. And now, though I need not venture sideways, or backwards, or even pause in the drowning depths … and though jewels and flowers are at last in reach like flotsam on the waves … I still look onwards, bravely, towards that time of which I dreamed. Yet here, in this moment, I choose to craft something else. Something that is not beauty.’

More tears stream down his face and fall on those directly below the balcony, catching light which makes them look like gleaming gems. Above Vous’s head a shape in the darkness moves, and another anxious murmur sweeps through those below. Their Friend and Lord raises a hand for quiet, and receives it. He begins to sing: ‘Last sight, last sight. Last sound, last sound. My face, my voice. My face, my voice. Shadow, Shadow. You are, Shadow.’

A scream erupts and is chorused by all those below as light suddenly blooms upwards and reveals the shapes on the ceiling. Malformed beastly faces are lined all across it: large, rust-coloured and reptilian, wide jaws open, with long sharp teeth. They seem at first little more than horrid decorations, sculptures perhaps or painted statues, too hideous to be real. Then the wide, flat eyes all open at once, and the mouths all gnash with a furious sound of clashing teeth: clack, clicketyclack, clickety-clack …

Though he sings quietly, Vous’s voice can somehow still be heard through all this, and through the panicking screams. ‘Shadow, Shadow. Watch me, Shadow. Shadow, Shadow …’

One of the heads suddenly descends on a long, rubbery stretch of flesh, falling clumsily amongst the group. Whether it is a machine or actually alive is hard to tell. Its jaws slam shut. It pulls quickly back up to the ceiling with the others. A spray of blood flies in an arc from the lump dropping out of its mindlessly snapping jaws.

Closer to the balcony, another of the snapping heads descends and bites, and the crowd tries to push away. Another drops heavily from the ceiling’s middle. Then two at the sides fall at once. Steadily as thrown punches, the lethal jaws fall into the cringing, screaming mob; arms, heads, sometimes whole torsos drop from the retracting mouths and fall back into it. There is an impotent push for the door. Soon they are all wet with showering blood, slipping and stumbling over each other for a few more seconds of life.

The Arch Mage alone can see with clarity the strange ripples spiralling and building in the room from all the death in these unstable magic airs. It is not structured enough to be a practised, deliberately created spell, as such, and that is truly alarming, for there yet seems a deliberate intent in the patterns at work. He also senses the direction towards which these ripples are already being drawn: back behind the castle, to the long high valley near the entry point to Otherworld. What this may imply fills him with terror, but he keeps it well cloaked and his voice calm. ‘Some measure of instability is a good thing, don’t forget,’ he says quietly. ‘It means the Project is succeeding.’ The Strategists do not reply.

It goes on for a long time. Vous sings, and weeps.