The beast, ruled by its illogical and depthless hunger, spread its great wings with aching crackles of ragged sinew. The blood of the slain servitors was saturated with chemicals, tasting grey upon the tongue and failing to hold the creature’s interest. Hunger was pulling at the threads of the creature’s form.
Far from satisfied, it ached to devour stronger souls and fresher blood than that of these false, reforged humans. Driven by murder-lust and blood-need, the daemon born of the first murder turned its array of inhuman perceptions towards a dead city that had, in recent years, been claimed by new invaders.
Sometimes it mattered very much from whence the blood flowed.
Two
The boy who would be king / A false god’s name / The Impossible City
The boy who would be king held his father’s skull in his hands. He turned it slowly, running his fingertips across the contours of skinless bone. A thumb, still browned with field dirt, traced across the blunt ivory pegs of the gap-toothed death smile.
He lifted his eyes to the stone shelf where the other skulls sat in silent vigil. They stared into the hut’s gloomy confines, their eyes replaced by smooth stones, their faces restored with the crude artistry of clay. It was the boy’s place to remake his father’s face in the same way, sculpting the familiar features with wet mud and slow swipes of a flint knife, then letting the skull bake dry in the high sun.
The boy thought he might use sea shells for the eyes, if he could barter with the coastal traders for two that were smooth enough. He would do this soon. Such things were tradition.
First he needed answers.
He turned the skull once more, circling his thumb around the ragged hole broken into the bone. He didn’t need to close his eyes and meditate to know the truth. He didn’t need to pray for his father’s spirit to tell him what happened. He simply touched the hole in his father’s head, and at once he knew. He saw the fall of the bronze knife from behind; he saw his father fall into the mud; he saw everything that had happened leading to this moment in time.
The boy who would be king rose from the floor of his family’s hut and walked out into the settlement, his father’s skull clutched in one hand.
Mud-brick huts lined both sides of the river. The wheat-fields to the east were a patchwork sea of dark gold beneath the eye of the setting sun. The village was never truly quiet, even after the day’s work was done. Families talked and laughed and fought. Dogs barked for attention and whined for food. The wind set the scrubland trees to singing, with the hiss of leaves and the creak of branches forming their eternal song.
A ragged dog growled as the boy passed, yet fled yelping when he gave it no more than a glance. A carrion bird, hunchbacked and evil of eye, cried out above the village. A pack of other ragged children moved aside when he drew near, their ball game fading away and their eyes lowering.
His barefooted walk took him unerringly to the home of his father’s brother. The man, darkened and hardened by his years in the fields, was sat outside the mud-brick hut, threading beads onto a string for his youngest daughter.
The boy’s uncle uttered the sound that meant the boy’s name. In response to this greeting, the boy held up his father’s skull.
Many centuries after these events, citizens of even civilised and advanced cultures would often misunderstand exactly what a myocardial infarction was. The savage, constricting pain in the chest was due to blood no longer flowing cleanly through the heart’s passages, causing harm to the myocardium tissue of the heart itself. Put simply, the core of a human being runs dry, trying to function with no oxygenated lubricant.
This happened to the boy’s uncle when he set eyes upon the skull of his murdered brother.
The boy who would be king watched with neither remorse nor any particular hostility. He looked on as his uncle slid from his crouch onto the mud, clutching at his treacherous chest. He watched as his uncle’s sun-darkened features pinched closed, ugly and tight in supreme agony as the older man shook with the onset of convulsions. He saw the necklace slip from his uncle’s grip, the necklace that was being made for his young cousin, and would now never be finished.
Others came running. They shouted. They cried. They made the noises of language that spoke of panic and sorrow in a proto-Indo-Europan tongue that would come to be known as an early precursor to the Hyttite dialect.
The boy walked away, heading back towards his family’s hut. On the way, he turned to the figure – the giant – clad in gold who walked nearby. Nordafrik war-clan tattoos curled on the towering warrior’s face, curling from his temples to follow the curves of his cheekbones. The serpentine ink-curves, white against his dark flesh, ended upon his chin just beneath his mouth.
‘Hello, Ra,’ the boy said in a tongue that wouldn’t be spoken on this world for many thousands of years. The language was called High Gothic by those who would come to speak it.
The golden warrior, Ra, went to one knee, dazed at the sight of a Terra that hadn’t existed for millennia, a clean and fertile place still untouched by war. This world wasn’t really Terra at all; it was still Earth.
With the giant kneeling and the boy standing before him, it was far easier to meet each other’s eyes.
‘My Emperor,’ said the Custodian.
The boy rested a hand on the giant’s chestplate, the fingers dark against the royal eagle. The boy’s farm-worked palm, already rough despite his youth, ran along one golden wing. His expression was reflective, if not entirely serene. He didn’t smile. The man that this boy would become never smiled either.
‘You have never shown me this memory before,’ Ra said.
The boy stared at him. ‘No, I have not. This is where it all began, Ra. Here, on the banks of the Sakarya River.’ The boy turned his old eyes to the river itself. ‘So much water. So much life. If I have been disappointed by the galaxy’s wonders, it is only because we were fortunate enough to grow in such a cradle. There was so much to learn, Ra. So much to know. It pleases me for you to see what it once was.’
Ra couldn’t help but smile at the boy’s distracted, contemplative tone. He had heard it many times before, in another man’s voice, as familiar to him as his own.
‘I’m honoured to see it, sire.’
The boy looked at him, through him, and finally lifted his hand from the eagle sigil upon the Custodian’s breastplate. ‘I sense you have suffered a grave defeat. I cannot reach Kadai or Jasac.’
‘Kadai is three days dead, my king. Jasac fell two weeks before him. I am the last tribune.’
The boy stared, unblinking. Ra noted the suggestion of a wince; the boy flinched at some unknowable pain.
‘Sire?’ the Custodian pressed.
‘The forces unleashed in the wake of Magnus’ misjudgement grow stronger. First a trickle, then a tide. Now, a storm’s wind, unremitting, unceasing.’
‘You will hold them back, sire.’
‘My loyal Custodian.’ The boy wheezed, soft and slow, his throat giving a tuberculosis rattle. For a moment his eyes unfocused. Blood ran from his nose, lining the curve of his lips.
‘Sire? Are you wounded?’
The boy’s eyes cleared. He wiped the blood away on the back of his dirty hand. ‘No. I sense a new presence within the aetheric pressure. Something old. So very old. Drawing nearer.’
Ra waited for an explanation, but the boy didn’t elaborate. ‘You must do something for me, Ra.’
‘Anything, my king.’
‘You must take word to Jenetia Krole. Tell her…’ The boy hesitated, taking a breath. ‘Tell her it is time to enact the Unspoken Sanction.’