The Crippled God

To walk. To slither beneath the fists of the world.

We are the Snake reborn.

In time, they reached the city’s edge, and looked out on the flat glittering wastes.

Suffering’s comfort. Like a dead mother’s embrace.

CHAPTER SIX

‘Dominant among the ancient races we can observe four: the Imass, the Jaghut, the K’Chain Che’Malle, and the Forkrul Assail. While others were present in the eldritch times, either their numbers were scant or their legacies have all but vanished from the world.

As for us humans, we were the rats in the walls and crawlspaces, those few of us that existed.

But is not domination our birthright? Are we not the likenesses of carved idols and prophets? Do these idols not serve us? Do these prophets not prophesy our dominion over all other creatures?

Perhaps you might note, with a sly wink, that the hands that carved the idols were our own; and that those blessed prophets so bold in their claims of righteous glory, each emerged from the common human press. You might note, then, that our fierce assertions cannot help but be blatantly self-serving, indeed, self-justifying.

And if you did, well, you are no friend of ours. And for you we have this dagger, this pyre, this iron tongue of torture. Retract your claims to our unexceptional selves, our gross banality of the profane.

As a species, we are displeased by notions of a mundane disconnect from destiny, and we shall hold to our deadly displeasure until we humans have crumbled to ash and dust.

For, as the Elder Races would tell you, were they around to do so, the world has its own dagger, its own iron tongue, its own pyre. And from its flames, there is nowhere to hide.’

Fragment purportedly from a translator’s note to a lost

edition of Gothos’ Folly, Genabaris, 835 Burn’s Sleep

Three days and two nights they had stood among the dead bodies. The blood and gore dried on their tattered furs, their weapons. Their only motion came from the wind plucking at strands of hair and rawhide strips.

The carrion birds, lizards and capemoths that descended upon the field of slaughter fed undisturbed, leisurely in their feasting on rotting flesh. The figures standing motionless in their midst were too desiccated for their attentions; they might as well have been the stumps of long-dead trees, wind-torn and lifeless.

The small creatures were entirely unaware of the silent howls erupting from the souls of the slayers, the unending waves of grief that battered at these withered apparitions, the horror churning beneath layers of blackened, dried blood. They could not feel the storm raging behind skin-stretched faces, in the caverns of skulls, in the shrunken pits of eye sockets.

With the sun fleeing beneath the horizon on the third night, First Sword Onos T’oolan faced southeast and, with heavy but even strides, set out, the sword in his hand dragging a path through the knotted grasses.

The others followed, an army of destitute, bereft T’lan Imass, their souls utterly destroyed.

Slayers of the innocent. Murderers of children. The stone weapons lifted and the stone weapons fell. Faces wrote knotted tales of horror. Small skulls cracked open like ostrich eggs. Spirits fled like tiny birds.

When the others left, two remained behind. Kalt Urmanal of the Orshayn T’lan Imass ignored the command of his clan, the pressure of its will. Trembling, he held himself against the sweep of that dread tide pulling so insistently into the First Sword’s shadow.

He would not bow to Onos T’oolan. And much as he yearned to fall to insensate dust, releasing for ever his tortured spirit, instead he held his place, surrounded by half-devoured corpses — eye sockets plucked clean, soft lips and cheeks stripped away by eager beaks — and grasped in both hands the crumbling madness of all that life — and death — had delivered to him.

But he knew with desolation as abject as anything he had felt before that there would be no gift of peace, not for him nor for any of the others, and that even dissolution might prove unequal to the task of cleansing his soul.

The flint sword in his hand was heavy, as if caked in mud. If only it was. His bones, hardened to stone, wrapped round him like a cage of vast, crushing weight.

As dawn rose on the fourth day, as the screams in his skull broke like sand before the wind, he lifted his head and looked across to the one other who had not yielded to the First Sword’s ineffable summons.

A Bonecaster of the Brold clan. Of the Second Ritual, the Failed Ritual. And if only it had failed. Knife Drip, such a sweet name, such a prophetic name. ‘This,’ said Kalt Urmanal, ‘is the Ritual you sought, Nom Kala. This is the escape you desired.’ He gestured with his free hand. ‘Your escape from these … children. Who would, in years to come — years they no longer have awaiting them — who would, then, have hunted down your kin. Your mate, your children. They would have killed you all without a moment’s thought. In their eyes, you were beasts. You were less than they were, and so you deserved less.’

‘The beast,’ she said, ‘that dies at the hand of a human remains innocent.’

‘While that human cannot make the same claim.’

‘Can they not?’

Kalt Urmanal tilted his head, studied the white-fur-clad woman. ‘The hunter finds justification.’

‘Need suffices.’

‘And the murderer?’

‘Need suffices.’

‘Then we are all cursed to commit endless crimes, and this is our eternal fate. And it is our gift to justify all that we do.’ But this is no gift. ‘Tell me, Nom Kala, do you feel innocent?’

‘I feel nothing.’

‘I do not believe you.’

‘I feel nothing because there is nothing left.’

‘Very well. Now I believe you, Nom Kala.’ He scanned the field of slaughter. ‘It was my thought to stand here until their very bones vanished beneath the thin soil, hid inside brush and grasses. Until nothing remained of what has happened here.’ He paused, and then said again, ‘It was my thought.’

‘You will find no penance, Kalt Urmanal.’

‘Ah. Yes, that was the word I sought. I had forgotten it.’

‘As you would.’

‘As I would.’

Neither spoke again until the sun had once more vanished, yielding the sky to the Jade Strangers and the broken moon that was rising fitfully in the northeast. Then Kalt Urmanal hefted his weapon. ‘I smell blood.’

Nom Kala stirred. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Immortal blood, not yet spilled, but … soon.’

‘Yes.’

‘In moments of murder,’ said Kalt Urmanal, ‘the world laughs.’

‘Your thoughts are harsh,’ replied Nom Kala, settling her hair-matted mace in its sling draped across her back. She collected her harpoons.

‘Are they? Nom Kala, have you ever known a world at peace? I know the answer. I have existed far longer than you, and in that time there was no peace. Ever.’

‘I have known moments of peace,’ she said, facing him. ‘It is foolish to expect more than that, Kalt Urmanal.’

‘Do you seek such a moment now?’

She hesitated and then said, ‘Perhaps.’

‘Then I shall accompany you. We shall journey to find it. That single, most precious moment.’

‘Do not cling to hope.’