A Prayer of Freaks and Sinners Read online

  1

  King Oligan Rathratta kept his eyes on the sharp cutlery within his family's reach.

  At the dinner table sat three ghosts who felt alive, one living man who felt dead. Every time he looked at them. When dinner guests are ghosts, the future is never discussed. The dead reminisce past glories. Their milky eyes haze over. They speak of marriage days. Of remembered sunsets and the taste of fresh fish. Ask them about the future and their brows knit. The future is not a term they comprehend. Let the dead settle in their illusions. Asking the dead about the future is a recipe for violence.

  Oligan gazed across the banquet table at his family. He glanced up and saw sweat dripping from the servant's brows as they poured wine for his wife. One of them had shaking hands as he tipped the jug. A droplet of wine spilled on the table. Oligan's wife tipped her head like a bird and stared at it. The servant backed off, his head bowed low. Apologizing all the way. Loyal but not stupid. They knew they served ghosts. They knew bad omens.

  His wife stared at the droplet of wine. She didn't blink. Her eyes shone the green of suffocating algae. Oligan hated when the light caught them. They used to be blue as forget-me-nots.

  When Oligan spoke he could not disguise the quaver in his voice. He didn't sound like a king.

  "I had that wine brought in from the south. The Old Tuchany. You remember it, my love?"

  Cassandra looked up. There but not there. Oligan thought his wife and children always seemed to be involved in an ongoing conversation he could not hear. Cassandra's putrid eyes dilated in recognition. Her voice flat and vague.

  "It's delicious, my sweet husband. What a wonderful meal you have made. We are so proud of you. Me and the girls."

  His two daughters turned their heads and gave a blank smile. Their skin still smooth as forty years ago. Their curls blond and limbs slender. Yet they looked like wizened old crones shrunk to the size of children. Like his wife, they never blinked.

  The smaller one, Aspen, spoke. Her voice sounded older than her true age.

  "We are proud of you father. For treating us so well. And for waking us up with your love."

  King Oligan Rathratta had never been gladder of his mask.

  His family could not see his horrified expression.

  Funny, he thought. After long years where wanted to tear it off. To kneel before their dormant bodies with his face exposed. Talking with them as if awake. Their forms floating in crystal coffins filled with unholy water. Nourished by a sleeping deity. Garments drifting around them like wings as the Sorrow's green venom saturated their skin.

  For years the mask protected him as he sat on the throne. Its polished surface deflected the inquisitive eyes of courtiers. An impassive sculpted living god that looked down upon the remnants of an old empire. It hid the butchered face lurking beneath.

  A face dissolved by Manticore venom years ago. Just droplets on the breeze from an infant terror. Enough to turn a man with revered statues into a shameful monster. During the purges he had cleansed the lands of magic. Forty, maybe fifty years ago.

  His pride had got the better of him. He had led the charge at the last stand against those man-eaters. He had lost his heroic looks. But his crusade succeeded. No more of the Old Races left in the world. Well, a few stragglers perhaps. But precious few aberrations with the Magus Heart glowing above their liver. No more dreaded Manticores. No more human sorcerers either. No shaman or oracles. No Knights of the Blaze. All killed all excised. Their ripped-out Magus Hearts given as a sacrifice to his sleeping god, The Green King.

  No longer sleeping. Like my wife and two little girls. But not awake, not truly.

  They sat staring at the meal in front of them. Oblivious to the roast meat and fruit pudding. Their wine glasses full to the brim.

  The mask always suffocated him. As he sat before his court he had felt it growing smaller. Constricting his skull and making his eyes bulge from their sockets. He felt hairline cracks across his exposed cheekbones. A delicate vase repaired. But the cracks still showed.

  Every night he retired to his chambers high in the tower. His fingers would claw at the mask. Fumbling with the leather straps that secured it. As it clanged to the floor each night he threw his head back. Letting the cool air from the balcony dry rancid sweat. Sores and infection stung as the dry leather of his skin cracked in lopsided expression.

  All day he hid from his kingdom beneath that gleaming perfection. The nightly relief he felt exposing his broken truth to the air overwhelming. For years the highlight of his tortured days.

  Now that same mask protected him. His impostor family could not see the horror and grief that marred his burnt face.

  He knew he had been used. Manipulated. Lied to. Too late now to ever back out. He had made a secret deal with demons. Sacrificed his throne and kingdom to heal his loved ones.

  Now he wished he could put them back in the liquid-filled glass coffins they had floated inside for so long. Drown them once and for all. Drown his little girls and his wife!

  The madness will take me long before one of them kills me, he thought.

  He sat at the table with three abominations. Two the faces of children but the expressions of shriveled old women. The other a face free of kindness. Their skin pale and green. Like bodies fished from a lake. The eyes staring at him as old as mountains. As devoid of love. The clammy skin stretched over the woman's face a poor disguise. A disguise that tortured him every moment he saw it.

  Almost the face of his wife.

  Stolen and stripped off. And preserved it seemed. Pickled in suffering for decades. But close enough. Close enough for him to feel the horror.

  He felt like a ghost too. Unable to face the terror of this family future. Finding himself lost in nostalgia.

  Her smile the catalyst that ignited each dawn. Fingers brushed his skin as he dozed. Her perfume lingered in rooms like a memory of summer. Roses and cinnamon. They used to drink wine on the balcony of their tower. Gazing out over the city. Watching ships drift into the harbour bringing spices and silks. Sipping wine and watching sweet orange sunsets. Her jeweled feet up on his lap. He would stroke her shapely ankle as she wiggled her toes. So long ago. When hope and life lived in the world.

  Those memories. The ones that helped him through all the lonely years. The craving to rekindle them that chipped away at his conscience and morality. Those memories once his treasures. Now acid in his brain. Every time he looked up and saw the stolen forms sitting at the dining table.

  Oligan felt the panic rise. Suffocating, he wanted to rip the mask off. No escape for him. A king in name only. Trapped in a high tower with his long dead family. He wanted to stand and run for the doors. Flee down the long winding staircase. Run out into the city and hide.

  Instead he swallowed his fear and spoke to his wife. He raised a glass of wine in trembling fingers.

  "Seeing the three of you wake up, all I hoped for. All I lived for during those years. I would kneel in front of you girls, on your birthdays. I would lay presents at the foot of the chambers where you slept."

  Aspen and Elena both turned their heads at once. They gave him dead smiles. Elena gestured to her eyes with cadaverous hands.

  "We slept, father, with our eyes wide open. We would see you. Inside we laughed as you put mollies and games in front of us. We wanted to play. But we weren't allowed to wake up."

  Oligan felt his heart burn. His little girl. One of the daughters he had yearned for. Preserved forever as a child. He should have been happy. No harm would ever come to her. No mortal death or sickness. He would never have to see her married of to some wretched foreign noble. Or watch his child get her first grey hairs. A ten year old girl, innocent and safe. Now the ve
ssel for a force that had scarred most of the world. Had almost robbed it of life. Oligan felt thrilled and sickened and guilty and relieved. For a moment he thought of running for the high window and leaping to his death to the city far below. Smashing through the stained glass.

  "I missed you both so much. What stopped you waking up, poppet?"

  Elena gave a childish shrug.

  "God stopped us. Not allowed to wake up until we healed."

  Oligan stared at his two daughters. He noticed the spiderweb of black veins just beneath their skin.

  "And you are healed now, little poppets?"

  Both little girls nodded to each other with a smile.

  "We are perfected."

  Oligan's dry brow creased. What an odd thing, he thought, for a child to say. If this had been a child.

  Oligan's stomach churned. He could not face the meal either. So the four of them sat at table with plates of steaming untouched food. The servants stood by the archways.

  Oligan could take the silence no longer and blurted out to his wife.

  "Cassandra, the wine, the Old Tuchany! On our anniversary each year I would open a bottle. Take off this mask. Sit cross legged at your feet. Having a picnic. I would pour two glasses. Put one before you. And I would drink the other. I would drink the bottle dry! Often, my personal servant would find me asleep at your feet. Dreaming of you in a drunken stupor. How foolish I must have looked. A broken king drunk on the cold stone floor."

  He gave a nervous laugh that reverberated behind his mask.

  Cassandra stared at the table for a long moment. She did not even seem to be breathing. Then a dark tongue licked her lips and she looked at her husband. Oligan tried to stop his hands shaking.

  "Your personal servant. You mean Merrick Clay?"

  Oligan nodded, a little confused.

  "Yes, that right. Merrick Clay. By my side from the beginning. I could have achieved none of this without him. My priest, my right hand man and advisor. But darling, how can you know Merrick?"

  Cassandra ran a cold finger around the rim of her full wine glass. A light ringing filled the air.

  "Not the only one who visited us while we slept, Oligan. Merrick would often come in and speak with us alone. He kept us company through many a long year. As the bubbles rose around us. But darling, we knew him before we fell ill."

  Oligan tried to piece together the memories. Am I mistaken? I am sure Merrick came to me only after they closed their eyes.

  "You did?"

  Cassandra nodded. She seemed lost in a sweet reverie.

  "He came to us as a travelling physician. Kind and eloquent. He told us how you worried for us."

  Elena turned to her father.

  "Uncle Merrick gave us the medicine to help us sleep, father."

  Oligan's blood stopped flowing. He licked his ruined lips. For a long moment the words would not form. When he spoke he just a whispered.

  "He did what?"

  Aspen nodded to her sister. Having a conversation with their minds.

  "He gave us magic juice and we fell into a dream. He introduced us to The Kind Man."

  Oligan stood from the table. He felt dizzy and had to put his hands out to steady himself. He knocked his wine glass over and it spilled onto the floor. A servant hurried in with a cloth to clean it.

  "Are you saying that Merrick poisoned you?"

  Aspen laughed.

  "It's not poison if it makes you better, Dada."

  Cassandra fixed Oligan's gaze with her unblinking eyes.

  "Where is Merrick Clay now? We would be glad of his council."

  Oligan slumped down into his chair. His head reeled.

  Merrick Clay had been missing for weeks. He had journeyed far south with his hatchetmen. To Dashai. Rumour there that a girl had been found with a blessing from the god Angall. A blessing Merrick had warned Oligan could be disastrous for their plans.

  None of them had returned.

  Oligan felt a rage build that he struggled to contain. It couldn't be true, he thought. Merrick Clay, the very man who had devised the plan to heal his family made them sick!

  The wretched Witchfinder better not return, thought Oligan. No matter how powerful he is with the Magus, Oligan promised he would find a way to slip a knife into him. The king took a few ragged angry breaths. Then he forced his voice calm.

  "He is missing. We presume dead. He undertook an important task and he never returned. But you need not worry. Your father and king is with you now. I am all the council you need."

  His two daughters became very grave and recited together.

  "We need to be obedient to the Kind Man first, Dada. We are all part of his family now. You are too."

  Oligan's eyes flicked to the darkened alcoves of the dining hall. His daughters called the Green King that had sustained them with its sorcery The Kind Man.

  He was not certain how they saw him. How they interpreted his physical existence. Certainly not as an ancient and amorphous entity in a vast reliquary full of mist. Not as a tentacled and impossible monster from the beginning of time. They described him as if he presented himself to them as a person. Something benign and nurturing.

  "You see him?"

  The girls nodded.

  "He's always telling us things. He comes to see us in our dreams while we sleep."

  Oligan could take this no longer. He stared at the carving knife on the table. Willed his hand to pick it up. To slash his own throat in front of his family.

  Cassandra paid no attention to spilled wine or her husband's panic. Lost in some other memory. Her voice dreamy.

  "Like young saplings, Oligan. Fragile, delicate shoots. During all our years asleep, our roots drank up the nourishing water he provided for us. Nectar, Oligan. Slow, meticulous. But each year, the water in our bodies replaced by his water. The red blood in our veins replaced by his blood. Now we are part of something grand and beautiful."

  Cassandra dug a knife into her fingertip and held it up.

  A rivulet of green blood trickled out.

  Oligan could not imagine the effect years spent in those transparent sarcophagi had on his family. Their entire beings saturated with the otherworldly essence of the Sorrow.

  Oligan had only been given a single droplet, once a week. It had been enough to keep him alive all these years. Slowed down his natural aging. Despite his ruined form, Oligan had never been sick a single day in fifty years. Unsure if anything left in the world could kill him. He had thought it a blessing at first. Now he knew, a curse.

  A puppet king for all eternity.

  He knew he should have died on the battlefield years ago. He prayed for death each night since.

  Manticore venom, the single most virulent poison known to man. Only a few drops had touched him during the purges. To his knowledge the only living thing that had ever survived. All down to his weekly dose of ancient essence gifted to him by the reliquary. Administered by Merrick Clay and his brotherhood of vicissitude.

  He took a deep breath and asked the thing all his instincts warned him against.

  "And what of the future?"

  The three female entities turned to him at once. Wordless and blank.

  Aspen's little blonde brows furrowed.

  "What do you mean father?"

  Oligan felt his throat constrict. He had played his part in protecting the ancient creature. A greater demon in the army that mankind had named the Sorrow.

  He had used most of the world's slowiron to build it a protective cage for its misty reliquary. He had fed it the glowing Magus Hearts ripped from a thousand magical beings. Both Old Race and human. He had kept it alive and nourished because it kept his family alive and nourished. A simple trade. He had sold his soul and his kingdom.

  He knew what the Sorrow was. He knew the old myths, what it had done to the world so long ago. But after all this time Oligan realized he didn't know what happened now.

  All this time feeding an ancient hibernating entity and he had never been privy t
o the details of what would happen when it awoke. He had relied on Merrick Clay and the silent brothers of vicissitude for that. Oligan was lost.

  "I mean did the Kind Man ever tell you what comes next? I have spent years purging our lands of what's left of the Old Races. I hunted every conjured aberration and rogue creature that displayed any kind of sorcery. Innate or learned. I disbanded the priestly order of knights that turned against us. Because the Green Ki...The Kind Man taught me to fear magic in all its unpredictable forms. And I believed it, all the warnings and council. But I am without council now. I thought that it may have communicated with you in your dream time. I want to know what happens next."

  Cassandra looked at him. Struggling to find words.

  She picked up her glass of wine and brought it to her nose. As if the aroma alone would jog some connection to her human life.

  "Was the council ever bad, Oligan? Were you not right to fear magic in all its primitive forms? Just look what it did to you, my love. The pain and suffering it caused you."

  Oligan felt the deadened nerves in his face sizzle into life. The old pain came back as more than just a memory. He gritted his teeth. Cassandra smiled at him as if she sensed his pain.

  "Magic is the preserve of the gods. Of the old, deep gods. It is nourishment and sustenance. And it is wasted on the living."

  Oligan reached up and ran his fingers down the metal mask. He shivered.

  "I...I cleared a path. My long task. I knew what I did, I can have no pretense at ignorance or conscience. The only thing that stopped the Sorrow last time. Magic left to us by the gods, and hidden in the bloodlines of old races. This time the plan was different. To remove that threat from the outset, from the inside. Before any overt war began. I knew I sold my Kingship and my lands when I struck this bargain. But I did that for you, Cassandra. Happy to watch the world burn just to see you and the girls again."

  Cassandra fixed him with cold, deep sea eyes.

  "Then you must be happy Oligan. For we are with you again. All together as a family."

  Oligan knew that no matter how well the mask covered his face, she could see his eyes. The wavering fear. He raised a wine glass to her and the girls. He cleared his tight throat.