A Prayer of Dusk and Fury Read online

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  MONOLITH- CAPITAL OF VASSONIA

  The iron doors slammed behind the king. The echo reverberated around the lonely halls.

  He stood unmoving. His mask impassive as a statue.

  His shoulders sagged and a sigh issued from the slit of a mouth. All the regal bearing left him and he withered like an old man.

  Which he was. The mask had upheld the illusion for decades. The essence of Sorrow he was fed kept him alive. But Oligan’s reign had been long and full of woe. He felt the years often. But what could he do? He had given up his honour and his people for a shot at immortality as a puppet king. There was no turning back now. No way out. He had allowed the agents of the Sorrow into his court and kept their council. He had forged the great lie and the population had bought what he was selling. And the monsters that would destroy the world were the only hope at bringing his family back to life. For anyone else it was an impossible choice. For Oligan Rathratta it was no choice at all.

  He would burn the kingdom and everyone in it to save his wife and daughters. To see their true faces one more time.

  He walked across the room with shuffling steps. His white silk robes trailing across polished black and white flagstones.

  His retreat was a high cavernous chamber, its corners lost to the gloom. Thick pillars rose from the floor and vanished into the darkness. Silk drapes that drifted in the breeze.

  Bronze braziers burned about the hall, crackling coals. Little floating motes of ash drifted everywhere like burnt snowflakes. The air reeked thick and incensed. But it was there to mask another stench. A terrible corruption that permeated the hall, as if some great beast had died there and been left to rot.

  The foul secret of the high temple masked with perfume.

  It was the highest point in the palace apart from the royal observatory. It was almost at the summit of the King's Needle. A tall tower that stood as a symbol of authority in the centre of Monolith. Although called the needle it was anything but narrow. Its base was wide enough to hold a banquet of a thousand revellers. And although it tapered to the summit, even at its upper reaches it was an immense structure. It cast a shadow over the entire city and operated like a titanic sundial throughout the day.

  The city and the palace had been built around the needle over a thousand years ago, on the edge of white cliffs in a sheltered bay. The legend was that the tower had been built by an alliance of gods and man, as a watchtower against the Sorrow. From there the city had grown into the bustling, reeking monstrosity it was today. The city of Monolith had always served as the seat of power in the western corner of the world, and the home of House Rathratta for four hundred years.

  A dwindling house now near extinct. Oligan Rathratta was the only member who still walked and breathed. But he would see it renewed, with the help of the Sorrow. His bloodline was all that mattered.

  The city of Monolith was roughly shaped like a star, with high white walls coated with lichen. It sat like a great fat spider at the edge of the sea. Bloated and predatory, the web of its influence stretched out in all directions for five hundred miles.

  It was a major trading port and shipbuilding hub. The site of several important religious centres. It was the home of the royal naval academy where bluecoat officers were trained in seamanship. The elite blackguard was garrisoned there to protect the king and enforce his law. The Witchfinder’s Hall was within the city walls close to the Needle. Monolith was the centre of military, commercial and religious power across half a continent. From the Bay of Greycrest where it sat in the west to the Mountains of Tears in the near east. An ancient watchtower against the threat of the Sorrow.

  The irony of that, thought Oligan. Now it serves as a place for the ancient enemy to hide, and grow and plot. A watchtower built to keep vigil against the return of the Sorrow now contained the parasite within. A great bulbous tapeworm that fed upon the health of the kingdom. High in the needle was a creature that was hungry for the world.

  The Green King, the Witchfinders called it. A primordial intelligence that had slumbered for a thousand years. Oligan had never seen its true form through the mists of the reliquary where it was kept. But Merrick Clay had once told him that it used to be a great general in the ranks of the Sorrow.

  The Green King. Oligan was uncomfortable with the name. There was only room for one monarch in Vassonia. Oligan was unsure what the entity was king of nowadays. They fed it severed Magus Hearts and the Witchfinders worshipped it as a god. As far as he was concerned its main purpose was to keep his family alive in their stasis. Apart from that he would be happy if it slept forever.

  Oligan walked across to a set of thick ironbound doors that stood ajar.

  A thin column of daylight spilled in to create blade of life in the sepulchre of the hall. These doors were most often closed, bolted shut with an immense lock. To keep the secrets of the high temple hidden from the city. A white curtain billowed in the breeze, and Oligan stood there in the crack of light. Peering out across the city far below.

  The spires and temples spread out before him and the stench rose to meet him. The canals and marketplaces bustled with trade. The military barracks and training halls rang with the clash of swords. Filled with blackguards to enforce his peace. These were the times King Oligan relished, these few quiet moments in the cool of the temple. With nothing but the crackle of the coals and the little motes of ash that danced about before his eyes.

  Soon the world would change forever, he had been told by Merrick Clay. A new order would rule and shape the destiny of Vassonia then the seas around it, and finally every land in the world. What difference does it really make who is in charge, he wondered? He would still be the figurehead of the realm.

  He would have his family around him. His queen and two beautiful daughters. Nothing would change for those of royal line. His family and his bloodline were all that mattered to Oligan now.

  As he gazed out across the city, the panic rose in him that he had never learned to control. The feeling of being entombed, buried alive within the death-mask he was forced to wear. His palms were sweating as he reached up and unbuckled the straps at the back of his head. The weight of the mask dropped from his face to land on the mosaic floor. The knell rang like a dull bell.

  One eye was milky and bulbous, something belonging to a deep sea fish. The flesh of the jaw was burned away on one side. One side of his nose was melted and dragged across the face, the other side untouched. His skin was like layers of candle wax, carved and furrowed with sharp knives. However, the other side of his face was as regal as a man's had ever looked. He had a piercing blue eye beneath sculpted black brow. His cheek had a high angular ridge and his strong defiant jaw conveyed nobility.

  In his youth there had been portraits and statues to Oligan in squares and halls across the kingdom. He had in his youth been the epitome of a sporting prince. Taking part in tournaments and holding great banquets in honour of the gods. And what had that given him? A wife and daughters struck down in their prime. A ruined face and an ungrateful kingdom.

  It was not the gods of the temples in the city below that had stepped forward to save him and his family. They were silent as always. It was the old, forbidden gods that had offered the hand of friendship.

  And Oligan had taken it.

  A thin high voice came from behind the king, echoing in the dark hall.

  "You are thinking of your family, Oligan."

  The king turned and the spidery outline of Merrick Clay stood in the shadows. His thin hair hung lank about his shoulders, and his sickly face glowed in the dark.

  "My family is all I think of. All I work and strive for all these years, old friend. Blood is all that matters in the end.”
r />   The Witchfinder stepped forward from the gloom. He moved around Oligan like a predator looking for weak spots and came to rest at his shoulder. Long bony fingers rested upon Oligan's neck and made him shiver. He was hardly ever touched by any living soul, especially close to his scars, but that was not why he shivered. The Witchfinder's fingers were as cold and clammy as a squid. In a seductive whisper he spoke into the king's ear.

  "And soon you will all be together again, sitting around the table, sharing food and wine in this tower, and you will look out as a family on a world made new."

  Oligan suppressed his shudders but did not turn to face Merrick. He continued to gaze out across the city from the narrow crack between the doors. He listened to the seagulls that flitted and cawed around the tower. He watched the pale grey sea of the harbour, and took in the odour of all the life in the city below. Behind him he could only smell incense and death.

  "Or on a ruin of a world."

  Merrick came closer to the king's ear, and Oligan could smell the decay of his teeth.

  "Every world is built on the ruins of the last, and that new world is always built for the purposes of the empire that holds dominion. I don't have to tell you this, as a king, do I Oligan? How many years have we worked together, you and I? We are both servants with a part to play."

  Oligan could expose himself to the daylight no longer. He brushed off Merrick's clammy hand and turned from the balcony.

  "And what am I to be? King of corpses and empty halls?"

  Merrick Clay regarded him for a long moment, his watery green eyes calculating. Finally he turned and closed the great doors with a strength that belied his thin frame.

  "How you whine, Oligan. Your choice was always simple. Your only way to protect your kingdom and its inhabitants is to help the Sorrow take over in as bloodless a coup as possible. We assume positions in every aspect of governance and power. So when the transition comes, the people barely notice. The only other option is full scale war. We still see the results of the last one in the landscape around us. Is that really what you want? To have half your population die in a war they will eventually lose anyway?”

  Oligan turned to the Witchfinder.

  “And then? If I continue helping, what then for the world? Your gods are like leeches, Merrick. How long before they drain every last drop of magic from the earth and there are no more resources left? How long can a bloodless animal survive?”

  Merrick Clay’s mouth twisted into a bitter line.

  “You will continue to sit on the throne, Oligan, with your family around you. What more can you ask? You need to remember what the Green King has done for you! No healer in Monolith could rouse your family, no wizard from the east cured them. It was me, Oligan Rathratta. It was me through the power of the Sorrow. Did your silent gods above answer your prayers? No, it was me who heard you weeping nightly in your chambers. Me who told of the way to save them. Me who pulled them back from the brink of death. Because you know in your heart that there is only one true power in the world, one true wielder of magic. And it is the Green King we both protect in this tower.”

  Oligan craned his neck forward, pointing to his disfigurement. The light from a nearby brazier caught it, making the grey scar tissue reflect orange and red. It made him look like a demon of the underworld.

  "I have done everything that was asked of me. I have hunted and purged the Old Races. I have sacrificed every human I could find born with the Magus Heart within. I have fed your hungry god with enough magic to conquer a hundred worlds. I have waged a secret war on my own people and my own kingdom. You think I have not sacrificed? Look at me! I have barely left the Needle in decades; I am a ruin, a monster. My wife and children should see me like this?”

  Merrick glided over to the king, extended a hand almost to his face, like a lover, but did not touch.

  "You are a monster, Oligan, but not because of your poisoned face. You are the worst kind of villain Oligan Rathratta, one who thinks himself a fallen hero. You are perfect for us, a noble corrupted champion of the Sorrow."

  Motes of ash drifted about Merrick’s head. He clasped his black gloved hands together like a pious monk.

  “I have scoured this country for decades, your Majesty. Purifying every corner of the land of resistance and the blight of magic. I too have sacrificed my health and vitality, to ensure that the Green King is well fed and has the strength to keep your family alive. But a threat to us has woken in the quiet corners of the land. A few, born with a blessing that could pose a problem to us.”

  Oligan raised a leathery brow over his blue eye.

  “I thought that there was almost no human baby born with the Magus anymore? I thought you had hunted them to extinction.”

  Merrick Clay gave an ingratiating smile and dipped his head.

  “So did I. This was an unforeseen development. This particular blessing is called Angall’s Whisper. Seemingly innocuous, little more than a cinder of breath to those who have it. But there is a superstition amongst the Sorrow. A belief that it can channel the power of the god of illumination and justice. That it can be used as a powerful weapon against us.”

  Oligan shook his head and sighed. Kings never liked to hear about superstitions. Prophecies regarding royalty rarely had happy endings. So he dismissed most of them. He spread his hands wide.

  “I don’t think there has been a single recorded miracle or a prayer to Angall answered for years, Merrick. He is an absent god. Where was he during the Dimming of the Light? When your Witchfinders and my Blackguards butchered the few remaining paladins and destroyed their temple? Did he answer with a thunderbolt or a choir of winged avengers? No. His temple echoed with the screams of the dying and the prayers of its disciples. Nothing more.”

  Merrick Clay glanced behind him, towards a large set of iron doors. He spoke softly as if something were eavesdropping.

  “The light of Angall burns the Sorrow, like the venom of a Manticore burned you, Oligan. Such warped people cannot be left to roam the world. Their magic is stronger than they know. More powerful than the sorcery pooled within the Magus Heart of most living things. With different…properties.”

  Oligan held his scarred hands over a brazier, feeling it heat his ruined flesh.

  “What do you mean, Merrick? What could it do that the ten thousand Magus Hearts you have torn from people’s bodies has not done?”

  Merrick shrugged.

  “I can only go by rumour, myth and legend, of course. But it is possible that if we fed such a Magus to our sleeping god, it might be enough to finally wake him. And thus wake your family.”

  Oligan stopped and turned. He had almost given up hope that he would feel the warmth of his wife’s skin again.

  “You believe this? It is written somewhere?”

  Merrick nodded.

  “It is. So as much as this blessing is a threat to us, it could also be the key to us winning this war before it has even truly begun.”

  The king’s ruined jaw tightened.

  “Then you must hunt them down. Wherever they are.”

  Oligan did not want to know the ins and outs of the process. The Green King was always hungry, and his wife and little ones needed their medicine. This new blessing he had heard Merrick speak of though, it worried him. It was the first time he had seen a glint of fear in the Witchfinder's eyes.

  "It could really be a threat? A minor blessing given to children and peasants? What could resist what is coming?"

  Merrick poked the brazier with an iron and cast his fingers through the cinders that floated around their heads.

  "There are different kinds of light, Oligan. The gentle warmth of a spring morning as the sunlight bathes your face, the twinkling of stars, or the soft light of a candle. Then there is another light, a burning, searing light that burns and ravages with extreme violence. That is the kind this blessing threatens us with. All of us, including your sleeping family.”

  Oligan winced and the skin of his scarred face cracked and groaned
like weathered leather.

  "I will do anything to keep them safe."

  Merrick brightened and squeezed Oligan's shoulder like an old friend.

  "Then come, through to the sanctum. See your wife and children, and stand before our god. Remind yourself why you strive so hard for us, and why the heavy burden of a crown is worth it in the end."

  Oligan nodded. He straightened his white robes and filled his heart with the delusion of power. Then he followed Merrick Clay towards another set of ironbound double doors.

  Merrick cast his hands apart and they began to grind open. Only strong magic could break the seal on those doors once they were shut. They walked into a vast round chamber filled with shadow. In its centre was a machination that would break the mind of most men in its eldritch complexity. No matter how many times King Oligan gazed upon the vault, it always terrified him. How many years had his miners toiled for Slowiron to forge the housing? Slowiron was the world's greatest conductor or sorcerous energies.

  Oligan had drafted master craftsmen in from far and wide. Warping the metal into the ornate supports that held the glass vat within. Not one of those craftsmen had lived to tell of their achievement.

  The green light from the tank permeated the hall. The mist inside writhed like thunderclouds. The light cast shimmering reflections on the wall. As if Oligan had been transported to a cave deep under the waves. The walls were peppered with droplets of moisture and a pungent steam hung in the air.

  The vat was the shape of a glass egg, taller than ten men and broader than fifteen. It had a network of grey metal enveloping it in rings and panels. Allowing the mist filled glass beneath to show in spirals and geometric shapes. The fog inside looked dirty, with particles of filth hitting the glass as it churned within the maelstrom.

  Many pipes emanated from it. Like the trailing tendrils of some ancient jellyfish. They ran across the floor and up the walls. Distilling into smaller glass chambers and vats. Occasionally, bubbles cascaded up into these smaller glass chambers. As some unknown alchemy erupted inside.