1
The stories of this age begin and end with monsters, and mine is no exception.
His skin was grey, mottled as if he’d rotted from within. Mail had rusted away entirely in some places, exposed beneath the patterned breacan of a clan that had died centuries ago. Perhaps he’d been a husband once, a father. Maybe he’d been a farmer and worked the land, tilling dark earth, scything wheat. He was none of those things anymore. Whoever the corpse-man had been all those years past, he had lingered in this place of blood-red sky and broken nature, caught between life and death, observing the tedium of centuries, purposeless and lost. Half-living, half-dead, he became all dead as I put my boot against his wheezing chest and wrenched my glaive clear. It gave a slight hiss as the old iron escaped bloated flesh, a wheeze of lost essence. The creature’s stare remained locked onto me, wraith-like eyes lit from within. Its shade began to flutter free. One fewer deathless monstrosity haunted the Fault now, but we were not done. It was far from over.
Around me, the battle continued.
Metal on metal. The hideous, life-hating cries of the half-dead. The sound of feet against the stones as more of them forced their way up from their dark dreams beneath the mud. Around the courtyard, the half-dead warriors of another time engaged in battle, and we smote them down again for it.
‘Up top!’ Esher shouted. On the courtyard battlements more of them scuttled, one dragging a leg that ended in a stump. The half-dead emerged from cracks in the black stone walls and forced their way into the blood-sky’s light from trapdoors that had long since rusted shut. They emerged loping from cavernous archways in the outbuildings. They forced their way from compacted earth, unnatural, twisted things who had lost all desires but those that seeped into them from the rancid earth. Kill. Devour. War.
They made war on me now. A creature that might once have been a mother, a scribe, a sailor, charged across the courtyard with a great, rusted axe held high. There was only hatred in the inner lights that glowed within her half-rotten face. I cut the axe from its path, twisted the glaive’s haft in my grip and hacked the blade through her neck. She teetered, head half-severed, and a second strike put her down.
This was life for us—for me, Esher and Sanvaunt—in the Fault. Just another day cutting a path through the detritus of long-ago defeats.
One of the half-dead that would have been indistinguishable from a clan warrior skipped forward one step, two, and hurled its spear. It was a clumsy throw, his arm stiff. Esher brought down one of her curved swords, striking the spear from the air before it reached me. The half-dead hissed, unused throat trying to flex and curse. They’d slept here a long time. We’d woken them. Or something that didn’t want to be disturbed had, anyway.
‘Nice catch,’ I said. Another of the half-dead warriors ambled towards me, stooped as if its back had set into a rigid arch during centuries of sleep, but the rusted, curved swords it held before it were serrated with jagged teeth. I readied my glaive, a five-foot pole with a thick, reaping blade at the killing end, over my head and dared it to come on. The decayed, joyless monster was manic with hate, and it swept its weapons towards me in clumsy, half-blind arcs. Bent over and slashing like mad, it was easy prey. I slid back from its erratic assault and made a great parting cut downwards. It died for the last time. After seven hundred years of banishment from the world, perhaps it would be a relief. Its ghost erupted, greenish white, thin and insubstantial, as if time had watered it down.
‘They keep on coming,’ Sanvaunt grunted. He’d dealt with five of them. Esher cut the arm from another, kicked it back against the wall and ended its hissing decisively. She flourished her twin blades, crouched and ready for the next.
‘Too damn many,’ she said. ‘We need to move.’
Overhead, the sky rumbled, the thunder turning into a shuddering, high-pitched shriek of rage. The land hated us here, but it was the sky that voiced its ire.
‘Then let’s move,’ I said. ‘Into Gaskeiden. This has to be it.’ When in doubt, head towards the yawning, gargoyle-adorned archway leading into the darkness. The keep reared up above us, a lightless block of history against the blood-bruise red of the sky.
Something thumped against the back of my cuirass and fell away. Another spear. It was definitely time to go. There had to be twenty or more of them now, and by the distant shrieks and trills, more on the way. You’d think that these warriors, cut off from the true world for more than seven hundred years, might have wanted more than to cut us apart, but empathy seemed to be a finite resource. Perhaps we’re only born with so much of it, and age and defeat gradually siphon it away until there’s nothing left but malice.
Sanvaunt and Esher led. They cut a path through the half-decayed, age-bent creatures between us and the keep’s main entrance as I warded the rear. I took another one down as we retreated forward into the keep. How many was that now? I’d stopped counting months ago.
‘Doors,’ Sanvaunt barked. As I backed up, he and Esher took hold of the half-arch doors and put shoulders to them, driving forward against centuries of accrued dirt. The half-dead’s approach faltered as they formed a semicircle around the doorway. I levelled my glaive towards them, but their advance had ended. Jaws hung open, poisonous breath steaming beneath the crimson sky, glowing eyes watching. Lurking. I stepped through and the doors drew closed with a dull boom. Those twisted enemies, the outer walls and the cracked sky beyond were shut away, leaving us panting and alone in the quiet of a time-lost hall. Esher heaved at a beam on an axle and it slammed down into brackets. Locking them out. Locking us in.
We listened.
‘They’re gathering,’ I said.
‘But they stopped,’ Sanvaunt said. ‘For now.’
‘Makes you wonder what’s in here that they’re reluctant to follow,’ Esher said. ‘They didn’t come from in here. Just about the only place they didn’t.’
‘It shouldn’t surprise us anymore,’ Sanvaunt said. He ran a rag along the edge of his longsword, wiping away thick, congealed black slime. ‘There’s always something worse around the corner.’
‘Always something worse,’ I agreed. ‘But we made it.’
‘Getting out might not be so much fun,’ Esher said. ‘We got through by taking them by surprise.’
‘One thing at a time, I guess,’ I said. ‘But let’s move fast. They’re hungry. The hate keeps on building. They’ll find enough of it eventually.’
The snarls, half-word curses and breathy hissing of the half-dead lay, for the moment, beyond a solid door. I looked around the hall we’d made it into. Small glass globes lined the walls, filled with chips of the blue mineral cadanum, which somehow knew we were there and gave off its waxy blue-white light. We figured this place had been a border fortress once, somewhere far from Harranir judging by the unfamiliar architecture. The columns were square and decorated with zigzagging geometric shapes. Like everything in the Fault, time had eaten away at anything that had once spoken of grandeur. A dead hall, a corpse castle lying in the midst of an endless, red-skied swamp.
‘Anybody get hurt?’ Sanvaunt asked. His hair, grown long over six months of fear and endless threat, was tied back from his face. He’d grown leaner, cheekbones like cut-marble bricks. It was his eyes that worried me the most. He’d hardened on the outside, but that wasn’t the only place the Fault was affecting him. Esher shook her head.
‘I think I took a spear in the back,’ I said. ‘Check me?’
Esher ran practiced fingers over my armour.
‘Didn’t penetrate, thank the Light Above. You’re good.’
‘The Light Above didn’t bring us here,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think she sees into this cursed place either.’
‘Might as well thank her anyway,’ Esher said. ‘You never know who’s watching.’
‘Where now?’ Sanvaunt asked.
‘Where do we always go?’ I said. ‘Forward.’
‘Technically sometimes we go back even when we’re going forward,’ Esher said. There were few smiles to be had in the Fault, and that was one of the least funny of its aspects, but eventually you have to smile about things that will otherwise drive you mad. ‘And sometimes we seem to go sideways. The only thing we never do is get any nearer to the City of Spires.’
‘True enough,’ I said. I rested my glaive against my shoulder. ‘But onward anyway.’
The city was ever out of our reach. It had to be the key, had to hold some kind of answer to the nightmare world we’d found ourselves trapped in. Little made sense in our cursed prison. There was nothing you’d want to eat in the Fault, no clean water, but we didn’t need to eat, or drink here. There was no hunger, no thirst. We sweated, but didn’t need to replenish water. We exhausted ourselves, but time recharged us, as if the land wished us to return to our former state. It had not taken long to realise that we didn’t need food or water to exist here, that our bodies simply kept on going regardless. For a time we’d wondered if we’d died, if this was the Afterworld, but things could still die here. What passed for weather followed no routines, no regular patterns that we could tell. The land was a ruin. Echoes of bygone days littered the endless marsh, but the city stood tall. If there was a way out, that’s where we’d find it. That’s where we’d find the prison that bound the Queen of Feathers.
Through everything that had happened to me, from the very first, she’d been there, haunting, watching, saying the maddening things that passed for her advice. Sometimes she’d been helpful, at others I’d thought she was leading me by her own unknown agenda. The little information we’d dragged from the creatures of this place told us that she was there, in that unreachable city. Maybe she was as much a prisoner as we were, but if anyone might know a way we could attempt to break free and return to our own world, it had to be her.
We’d thought of Gaskeiden as a border fortress, because it was squat and square and that seemed in line with military design, but that had only been an assumption. As we headed deeper into its vaults, it became apparent that Gaskeiden had been a temple. The trio of Cainags who’d sent us this way had been muddled, time having eaten away their memories as it had their hunger, and their wails were tired things, dried up through centuries of neglect. That was the story of the Fault, told in broken stone, fallen idols, decayed castles and ruined things that crawled through the murk.
Six months of wandering, of searching, of trying to find a way to the City of Spires that always lay on the horizon but never in the same place twice, had taught us a great deal about the things that had been banished here. Some of them were familiar, like the half-dead, but we’d long ago agreed that if some of these monstrosities had come from our world, history must have forgotten them. The Cainags had appeared like three sisters, though they faded to nothing below the knee, but through our brief conversation I’d figured they’d been just one person once—one of the Faded, or a demon of the Night Below, or some combination of the two—but endless, unmoving time, the toxic magic that infused this whole place, or maybe just their own despair at their endless, joyless existence, had caused parts of them to grow weak and thin, and there had been three of them, whispering and breathlessly trying to summon their lethal scream as though they were one. They’d not been keen to give us the information we needed, but we’d asked them hard, and eventually the three mouths had given us the route to Gaskeiden, and told us who lay beneath it. There was something down here, something old and powerful, and it was the powerful ones that still remembered, and could still give us answers.
The spirits and half-dead we’d interrogated called her the Dryad, but the Cainags had known her true name. She’d been called Hazel, once, or the universe had marked her so. An unassuming name for what I assumed was likely to be something fairly grotesque.
This was our life, now. We figured it had been six months, though there was no way to tell. Esher, Sanvaunt and I had ridden a moon horse right through the veil between our world and this place—the Fault. Numerous histories agreed that when the once-mighty Riven Queen was defeated by the great hero Maldouen at the battle of Solemn Hill, her enemy had activated the five great Crowns across the world and sent all the evil she’d summoned here, into the Fault. Sometimes history gets things right, but there were things here our world had never known. Or at least for our ancestors’ sake, I hoped that was so. We trudged through swampland, day after day, seeking answers. Seeking a way home.
The bloody moon horse had ditched us here and vanished. They said never to ride one, beautiful as they were. That had proved true as well.
We made our way through dead halls, the hollow sounds cast by our clanking footfalls bringing more life to this place than it had seen in generations. The Faded avoided these places. The half-dead had been people once, but they’d been dead before they were banished here. We were giving them second deaths. The Faded were different. For all the passage of centuries, they’d retained their wits and their power, and we avoided them when we could.
At times we found evidence that one of the more powerful, one like the Remnant Sul, had visited. Footprints last a long time when there’s nothing else to disturb them. But we were yet to see one of their lords. Where the half-dead were pitiful things, half-sentient, maddened by their long confinement, we all knew that the Faded Lords were things to be feared. But there were none here now. What lay here was very possibly worse. None of us could move stealthily through those halls. The armour we wore had been scavenged from another of these decayed sites, months back now, as we tracked time. It had a bronze-coloured cast to it, engraved and spell woven, harder than any bronze had a right to be, but it still clicked and clacked as we made our way through halls of dead memory.
‘Ward room,’ Sanvaunt said as the light globes lit a large chamber ahead. ‘Has to be.’ Esher nodded. I nodded too.
The walls were lined with carved figures, reliefs cut into the black stone. They showed people, some human, others less so, all dressed in a way that told us that they were not from our time. The carvings had been old even before the Faded were banished here by the hero Maldouen, eight centuries past. They’d been our enemies since time began, and this bitter place was their defeat, a plane of containment that lay between the world of the living and the demon realm of the Night Below. In the centre of the room, a vast table was dust-coated, but old colours showed through, maroon and white ivory inlaid against the stone. This had been a grand place once. The creatures that crawled through its bastions and beneath its buttresses were shadowed, withered remnants of the once-proud creatures who’d walked its halls. Seven hundred years and more of starvation and pain will do that even to those once thought fair.
Back down the corridor, something threw itself bodily against the door. A series of hisses and grunts sounded, muffled, beyond.
‘Their fear didn’t last long,’ Sanvaunt said. ‘Go on, Raine. It’s you who needs to find the Dryad. It’s your question needs asking here.’
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ I said.
‘Sanvaunt and I can hold the doorway,’ Esher said. ‘Besides. We’re the better fighters, and you’re the better ghost caller. Only thing that makes sense.’
There was no ego to what Esher said. They were both better than I was. You get over things like that fast when your lives depend on it daily. Mostly get over it. I didn’t like that it gave Esher and Sanvaunt something to share, something that I didn’t have with them. They’d been in each other’s lives far longer than I had, but before—back when such things mattered—I’d been bonded to them separately. Esher had been my best friend, the kind of friend I’d never hoped to have. Sanvaunt and I had never been friends, he’d been ranked above me, but there had always been a hot ember waiting to catch. Maybe I’d felt that with Esher too, and just hadn’t seen what was right in front of me. Now there was something new growing between them, a thing I’d cast away, denied, stamped on. It shouldn’t have mattered, here in this nowhere land, but too often the ember rose to burn me.
‘All right,’ I said. But I looked to Sanvaunt. ‘Try to save your strength. Don’t go fire-beast if you don’t have to. We might need that strength soon.’ Sanvaunt gave me a curt nod.
‘Go.’
I headed on past the decadent table, where forgotten silver goblets sat tarnished with age and draped with cobwebs, deeper into the temple. The statues watched my passage with unseeing eyes. This was not a place like any other. Nowhere in the Fault was. Each step I took seemed to smudge the floor, as if I were something altogether alien, not of this plane. Which I wasn’t, I supposed.
I could hear the half-dead scratching and banging at the door as I reached the head of a stair. I glanced back over my shoulder at my friends, my beautiful, hardened, warrior friends. Esher gave me a smile and mouthed Go at me, and all I could do was nod and descend into the dark. I had seldom been alone since we’d found ourselves here, six months of battle, fear, and growing despair turning us harder and leaner. Taking away our fear of the strange and unusual, reforging us, scarring us, binding us together.
When we awoke here beneath the Fault’s cracked red sky we’d thought we’d been through the worst. I’d killed hundreds at the foot of Redwinter’s slopes. I’d been run through the chest with a sword. We’d fought Sul, the Faded Lord, we’d betrayed the Draoihn. We hadn’t known that we’d only been at the beginning.
Egg-sized cadanum lights lit my path as I descended rough steps. The ceiling dripped. Everything was marsh here and little of the world seemed dry. But as I descended, quick steps carrying me further below, I smelled a different kind of wetness. It was cleaner somehow. Down and down, and I had no idea how many steps I’d descended. But she would be down here. The Cainags could not have lied to us. The creatures of the Fault were twisted and ruined, but they had rules. Laws that had to be obeyed. Some of them had come to fear us.
As I reached the base of the stair, an underground lake stretched before me, an impossible, artificial cavern whose ceiling reached up into darkness. My armour-capped footfalls cried out across the space in diminishing, rattling echoes. I couldn’t see the far side, but then, the cadanum light wasn’t offering me much. Just enough to make out an island across the water, and on that island, an ancient tree. The island was man-made too—or at least something had made it, with cut-stone blocks and a little jetty reaching out towards me, eighty, ninety feet out across the still black water.
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