The Forging of the Shadows

by Oliver Johnson

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

It is a time of great darkness, when the sun is in danger of being forever extinguished, and mankind has been divided into two warring factions: the worshipers of the God of Light and the servants of Eternal Night. Now three unsuspecting travelers are called by prophecy to face a legion of the undead and the powers of the Dark Lord in the faint hope of reclaiming the world for the light.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

A mountain pass – the peaks above it were old, sloop-shouldered and bald, without a scrap of vegetation. Ancient screes clung to the sides of the mountains beneath fractured buttresses. The path, distinguished only by piles of stones built into cairns, threaded its way through the lunar waste of rock towards a looming peak. Overhead a red gibbous sun, its bottom half lost in the mists of the mauve-blue sky, hung in the heavens. The light was the red light of dusk, though it was only midafternoon.

In common with many of the high lonely places, there was a particular quality to the silence here, a silence so intense and all-enveloping that it seemed to take on substance and form, seemed to become the mountains and the sky, to fill both with a barely audible hum. The slightest sound seemed trebly magnified: an eagle was gliding on the thermals, its single cry defining and deepening the humming silence even further.

Then more movement and sound challenged the silence of the rocks. Lower down, the path switchbacked through the boulders, clawing its way to the top of the pass. A rock slipped from its old resting place, rattled down the slope, before settling for another millennium of rest. Then, like a small bent beetle with an oversized shell, a man appeared from that direction, dragging a hand cart behind him. The cart was as big as he was, seemingly having a mind of its own, jumping and bucking on the uneven surface.

The man moved slowly, with a pronounced limp. His bald head was liver spotted, as old, it seemed, as the lichen-stained rocks of the pass. He was singing, breathlessly and tunelessly: an old man’s voice, reedy and high. The song only had four lines, which he repeated over and over, in time with his feeble footsteps.

‘White as white the hairs of your head,

Your eyes they flame as fire.

O lord of light, of love, of life,

Protect me in this hour.’

He stopped, his face tilted to the red sun, his teeth clenched in pain, as if suddenly aware of the terrifying silence of the place, of how feeble his voice was against it. The silence quickly filled the small place where his song had been. Quickly the old man started off again, a small trickle of sweat on his brow.

The old man’s name was Zacharias. By next summer he would have lived his sixtieth year, but that sixtieth birthday seemed as far away to him as the distant peak towards which he travelled so painfully and slowly. He had been walking for eight hours and was by now quite far into the Fire Mountains. He had left behind the desolate levels of the marshes at midday, five hours out from the city, since when his progress had all been uphill, steeper and steeper as the switchbacks cut into the mountainside. As he’d ascended, the hand cart had dragged more and more on his weary arms. Now his consciousness was subsumed by the struggle with the cart and with the fiery ache of his limbs. Only the hymn was good, fitting in with his trance like state and the all-consuming necessity of putting one foot in front of the other.

He had not expected to survive these last eight hours. That he had done so seemed nothing short of a miracle bestowed on him by the deity to which he sang: Reh, Lord of Light, the Sun, God of Flame and the fiery Cohorts of the Second Coming. As long as the sun shone, however weakly, on the dying earth, he had a chance of life. He stared at his feet; each footstep nearer his destination before nightfall was a small triumph of the will, a small reason for joy. By sunset, with Reh’s blessing, he might still be alive. By a miracle, he might even be at the top of the pass that led over Superstition Mountain.

Then a clatter of falling rocks above him told him that his blessings had run out. His voice trailed off and he looked up from the path. He had reached a narrow gully between two rocks precariously hanging on to the side of the mountain: a perfect ambush spot. The gap was occupied by two men. One was immense, almost giant in stature, the other small and slight. Both were unshaven, their hair tied up in rags, their legs bare, their sleeves rolled up exposing whipcord arms that looked to be made of wood rather than flesh. The larger one carried a sword, hefting it idly in his hand as if it were a wand rather than solid metal weighing several pounds. The giant’s hand hardly wavered each time he tossed and caught it. The smaller man made do with a curved knife and a dangerous smile; he seemed to be the leader.

Zacharias took in the weapons; armament enough to deal with one defenceless old man. He let the handles of the cart fall to the ground with a sigh, the hymn forgotten. His wife Saman, whose remains he dragged behind him in the cart, had believed in Reh. He had only really been singing the hymn in deference to her memory. Now it was irrelevant. No god could save him now.

The larger of the two men climbed slowly down the path. He was nearly seven foot in height, his skin bone white, his hair flame red. There were many such as him in the lands of the old Empire: crossbred descendants of those who had built Thrull, the city that Zacharias had just come from. No doubt both of the bandits had lived there once, but had fled when their world had ended seven years ago. Zacharias’s nose wrinkled as he came closer; the giant’s acrid scent was beyond farmyard. The man ignored Zacharias and leant over the cart, pushing a thick finger contemptuously through the assortment of rags and bundles at the bottom of it. He found the chest almost instantly. His eyes settled on its large brass lock then sought Zacharias’s. The old man noticed they were flat and dull; the light of intellect extinguished.

‘What’s in here?’ he said, pointing. The voice sounded like rocks being rolled together.

Zacharias looked up the mountainside: the snow-capped peak of Superstition Mountain glimmered in the purple sky. He thought of the life he was about to lose, but he had no regrets; he had done what he had had to do.

The smaller man had joined his friend: ‘Deaf as well as stupid?’ he asked, shoving Zacharias back into the side of the cart. The old man rebounded off it and fell to his knees, rubbing his shoulder where it had hit the cart handle. The pain didn’t matter, he thought, he would soon be dead. Dead, and his bones carried by the sacred eagles up to the Sun where Reh would hold them in his fiery hands until the last day of the world. And, if Saman his wife had been right, he would see her again there, in the white light of Paradise. And then they would be together until the end of time.

The big man was lifting the chest out of the cart, with the bemused expression of a child who had discovered a toy puzzle. Zacharias felt a stab of mental anguish. The chest contained his dead wife’s ashes: he’d thought to scatter them somewhere up here in the mountains. The wind would have done the rest, carrying them up to heaven. Also in the chest was the casket with the lock of her hair. Would the robbers trample it into the dust, burying it? Would the birds of Reh ever find each black gossamer strand of it? Zacharias thought of Saman at the Last Day, resurrected without the beautiful flowing locks which had been her pride and joy. His heart spasmed with grief.

‘Leave it,’ he begged, struggling to his feet.

The small one effortlessly blocked his attempts to grab back the chest with one hand. ‘Today’s our day, Birbran, this old usurer has brought us his gold,’ he said, yellow incisors bared in a smile. He took a step closer so Zacharias could smell the spirits on his breath. ‘How much is in there, stick bones? A hundred gold? Two hundred?’ His eyes flicked down to the old man’s breast. Zacharias followed the line of his sight. His cloak had fallen open when he’d staggered back against the cart, revealing a rusted key tied to a hemp cord resting on his undershirt.

‘So, what’s this?’ The man reached forward and grabbed the cord. He snapped it off Zacharias’s neck with a savage yank. The old man fell to the ground, choking and nursing the raw mark left on his neck. The robber studied the key, then nodded at Birbran. The giant lifted the chest from the cart and balanced it precariously on the top of the tumblehome. The smaller man thrust the key into the brass lock. The giant stared in dumb fascination as his friend jiggled with it, seeking the catch.

Zacharias struggled to his knees, his frail body racked by a coughing fit. He raised his hand feebly to try to stop them but was rewarded by a savage kick from the smaller man that knocked him back into the wheel of the cart. There was nothing he could do: unable to watch, he looked away at the distant peaks.

It was then he saw the figure. It was standing between the boulders above him, where the robbers had been, the body silhouetted by the sun, the face in deep shadow. A tall, lanky figure. Orange and red robes fluttered in the chilly breeze. The colours of a priest of Reh. Zacharias had a moment to notice that there was something strange about the man’s face and hands, then the stranger stepped from the shadows of the boulders into one of the red beams of light from the afternoon sun.

Zacharias gasped and scrambled backwards, knocking into the little man’s knees. The bandit swung round on him, his eyes blazing with fury.

‘Damn you, you …’ His words were choked off. He too stared at the figure on the path above them.

‘What is that?’ he managed to hiss. Birbran turned, confused by the sudden fear in his partner’s voice. When he, too, saw the man he let out an animal grunt of surprise.

Zacharias had already had a heartbeat to take in the vision which had appeared out of the sun. A face out of nightmares, of sick dreams, beggaring even the mummers’ costumes of two-nosed hags and one-eyed freaks. A face, though human, only so in rough approximation and nothing more.

A demon of the God of Flame was come; the face a crisscrossed mass of scar tissue and fiery whirls of black, red and yellow flesh, the nose a hollow slit, from which a fire-blackened flesh-coloured tunnel plunged down towards the throat, the teeth exposed in a lipless rictus to which shreds of flesh still clung, white gleams of bone shining at the jaw. The eye sockets were blind hollows that seemed to suck in the light.

Zacharias grabbed the side of the cart and levered himself up into a half-standing position, but there he stopped, frozen. Behind him the two robbers had taken a step back. The precariously balanced chest tumbled to the ground with a crash.

A silent moment passed. Then the vision, having taken in the scene with one sweep of the voids of its eyes, stepped forward, full into a beam of stronger sunlight. It was then Zacharias saw that the face was only a mask. But what a mask! A craftsman had laboured for a long time to carve the face from wood, to paint each detail with such care, so that every small scar in that livid beating mass of flesh seemed to shriek out in pain.

Time was frozen, the only sound the cry of the eagle further up the mountainside.

The smaller of the two robbers recovered his wits first: ‘It’s only a mask,’ he whispered, needlessly, since the priest was so close he must hear every word. ‘Take him, Birbran!’ His voice lacked conviction.

The giant was making his own judgements. His small eyes took in the priest. The man’s mask would only come up to his chest, but even Birbran could sense the animal menace that seemed to radiate out from behind it. He’d heard of such men, wild sorcerers, fugitives like himself, who exercised their power without prejudice or mercy. But seven years of hard struggle in the barren mountains – seven years of eating desert coyote and wild birds’ eggs, of living hard between the rare slave caravans – had made him desperate. Desperate enough to kill the priest and the old man for whatever was in the chest.

His fleshy features contorted into a sneer of disgust as he forced himself to look at the mask again. He took a step forward, the old iron of his sword a reassuring weight, though dwarfed in his fist. The priest and he were now thirty feet apart, but Birbran got no further. The priest’s hands had been hanging loosely by his side, but at Birbran’s forward step they flew up, palms outward. Birbran had a moment to notice that the man wore strange gloves, leather gauntlets with metal protruding from their fingers, but even as he did so the air before the gloves began to warp and shimmer, as if an oven door had suddenly been opened. The mountain air had been cool on the giant’s limbs a moment before, but suddenly he felt an intense, scalding heat on his sword arm. He glanced down: the red arm hairs were curling and blackening, and his skin began to pucker and blister. He smelled the acrid stink of singeing flesh at the same moment as the pain registered and he let out a bellow of agony. The sword fell from his hand. He staggered back, then turned and ran down the path as fast as his lumbering frame could take him.

His friend stared at the giant’s retreating form, then back to the priest. The man’s gloves were now pointed at him. It was enough: he took off after the giant. His foot slipped on some loose shale and he fell. He scrambled back to his feet and bounded away down the mountainside as fast as he could go. The bandits had soon dwindled to small specks leaping down the distant scree slopes. The sound of falling rocks disturbed by their flying feet echoed up the pass for a minute or so then faded away.

Zacharias had not moved, but had remained pinned to the side of the cart during the bandits’ flight. Now his eyes switched back to the priest. The black sockets of the mask seemed to gather him into their voids. There was no respite: one source of his death had simply been replaced by another. The few gold he owned would be enough; the priest would kill him. He wondered how it would be done – the man carried no weapons. With a spell, or with his bare hands? The priest hadn’t moved – his masked head was tilted slightly as he examined the gloves, turning them one way then another, as if the power that had been unleashed from them had surprised him in some way. Zacharias’s eyes also fixed on the gloves. They were made of a hardened leather, with small sharpened metal claws at their ends. It was easy imagining them rending and gouging, like talons. Thin metal ridges ran from the tips back towards the wrist where they disappeared under the folds of the orange and red robes. The ridges bunched into metallic knuckles at the joints like an outer skeleton to the hand. Zacharias watched the metal rods contracting, drawing the fingers up into an even more claw-like shape. Then the priest stepped towards him.

Now it’s coming, Zacharias thought, closing his eyes, and offering up a silent prayer to Reh.

He heard pebbles rattling on the path as the priest approached.

Then nothing, save the repeated cry of the eagle and the faint keening of the wind through the rocks.

Zacharias cracked his eyes open again. The priest now stood next to him – his breath coming heavy through the nose slit of the mask, the threatening claws of the gloves delicately adjusting one of the thin leather straps that held the mask to his face. The man’s face was slightly averted, taking in the view down the mountain. A section of his neck between the collar of his cloak and the mask was exposed. It was a mass of white scar tissue and livid weals.

Zacharias looked away, a dark suspicion sending a shudder through him.

Though death was so near, his eyes inadvertently followed the priest’s line of sight, back towards the city that he had promised himself he would never look at again.

The great bowl of the plain unfolded beneath them, cupped by the mountain ranges that ringed it. Below them, the road zigzagged down the mountainside, disappearing over a ridge, to reappear far below on the flat expanse of the marsh as a thin white line which disappeared arrow straight into the heart of the dull haze which hung over the vastness of the plain.

‘Is it far to the city?’ the priest asked flatly. His voice was hollow, impersonal beneath the wood and lacquer of the mask. As he spoke he turned, revealing the full horror of the mask again. Zacharias could not help but stare. He sensed eye movement in the dark sockets.

‘The city?’ he repeated, confused.

‘Is there more than one on the plains?’ There was an edge of irritation in the voice. Zacharias shook his head rapidly.

‘No,’ he said, recovering his wits and pointing. ‘See, over yonder, that’s Thrull.’

The priest leaned forward, following the line of Zacharias’s trembling finger. It was possible to see, just where the road disappeared into the mist at the centre of the plain, the dim outline of a granite knoll rearing out of the table-like flatness all around it. Even at this distance it was possible to make out the vague outlines of buildings clinging to the knoll’s summit and sides.

The priest gave a grunt of satisfaction and took a step forward down the path towards the far-off speck.

The words escaped Zacharias’s mouth before he could stop them.

‘You’re not going there, are you?’

The priest stopped short and turned. The dark eye pits of the mask looked the old man up and down. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he asked hollowly.

The old man hesitated, regretting his words. But the priest had saved, then spared, his life: he must warn him.

‘No one wants to go to Thrull … It’s a bad place,’ he said, somewhat lamely.

The priest snorted in amusement. ‘What place isn’t bad? The whole Empire has gone to rack and ruin.’

Zacharias shook his head vigorously in denial: ‘No, Thrull is worse … far worse.’

‘In what way?’

Zacharias swallowed hard, struggling for words: ‘If there were a place where the dead are more happy than the living, that place would be Thrull,’ he managed finally.

The priest had taken a step closer to Zacharias. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered.

As he stepped closer, the fear returned, but Zacharias tried to control the tremor he felt beginning in his voice.

He took a deep breath. ‘Seven years ago, there was a great battle on the plain. The priests of Iss won it …’

But before he could get into his stride, the priest had held up his clawed hand, silencing him. ‘All this I know – speak of more recent events.’

Having been tongue-tied for so long, Zacharias’s words now came in a torrent. ‘So you know who rules there now? What he has brought to Thrull?’ The priest’s continued silence was further encouragement. ‘Then the rest is easy to imagine. At day you may pass freely, but at night you must lock yourself into your house. Even there you are not safe …’ He hesitated, gulping down the bile in his throat. ‘They got my wife, took her one night, I found her on the doorstep in the morning. Pale as snow. I helped her in, but she just looked at me with those black-rimmed eyes. Then I saw them, the bite marks in her neck, her flesh hectic from the fever. Her eyes full of hate and pain, as if she was about to scratch and claw at me any moment …’ His voice broke, remembering. ‘I lashed her down on the bed. Then went to get the priest, one of your own, that was, a priest of the Flame. He told me there was only one thing that could be done. I waited outside while …’ Zacharias twisted away, leaving the rest unsaid, his heart like ice. He blinked away his tears before continuing. ‘Her ashes are in the chest; her hair too. She had beautiful hair …’ He bowed his head.

‘Go on,’ said the priest quietly.

‘What more is there to say? Every night of every year, locked in our houses, the vampires howling and swearing outside, running their nails over the wood of the door, or the shutters. Each door, each window, each chimney piece blocked against them, and still they took us, when we were least expecting them. If in the day you chanced to step into a shadow, there they would be, hundreds of them, waiting for you to step from the sun.’

‘Then why did you stay so long?’

The old man glanced round at the barren mountains: ‘There was nowhere else, except across the marshes and the mountains, and crossing them is death.’

‘Yet you are doing it.’

Zacharias shook his head: ‘I am old: I expect to die. Those younger than me still have hope; they cling to it, praying that sanity will return.’ He looked away at the city on the plains. ‘It never will; Thrull is a city of the dead. That is why I’m travelling, priest. And with Reh’s blessing, I will make Superstition Mountain by dark.’

The priest looked up at the mountain peaks, nodding slowly. ‘Aye, you may get there, with the god’s blessing. But be careful: between here and Surrenland there are many enemies.’

The old man smiled: ‘Where you go, you will find even more, but thanks.’

‘Then go in peace,’ the priest said, turning back to the path.

‘You’re still going?’

The priest looked back for the last time. ‘I have to.’

The old man shook his head: ‘Every day more and more of your fellow priests are rounded up; they will kill you if you go there.’

The priest laughed, a savage, hollow sound: Old man, that is exactly the reason why I must go: to correct the balance.’ He turned and strode off down the mountain, his sandals kicking up small clouds of dust from the path.

Zacharias watched him, relief and pity contending within him. The lanky figure grew smaller and smaller until it seemed but an orange and red ant labouring on the side of the mountain far below. Then it reached the ridge over which the path disappeared and the green brooding plains seemed to swallow it like a toad sucking up a brightly hued insect.

Zacharias shook his head. Today had been a day of miracles. He had lived for eight hours longer than he could have dreamed. Once he got the chest back on the cart, he might live a few hours more. By evening he might be at the pass beneath Superstition Mountain. He was that much nearer a place of safety.

Unlike the priest, he thought, as he hefted the chest onto the cart. He looked back over the plains. Already they seemed to be darkening, taking on a late afternoon hue. Already the feeble beams of the sun had ceased to warm the earth, and the air was cold.

‘The Flame go with you,’ he whispered, then lifted the handles of his cart from the ground and resumed his painful hobble towards freedom.

It took the priest most of the three hours before sunset to reach the city. In all that time he had stopped only once, briefly, on the causeway across the marshes. The road was deserted and he had leisure to inspect the city before him. From the mountains, the granite cliffs of Thrull had seemed an insignificant speck in the middle of the brooding plains. Now they towered over his head, a thousand feet tall. Massive curtain walls, built from the same granite as the cliffs, obscured the lower part of the city, but higher up roofs clustered thickly together on the precipitous slopes.

At the very top of the granite mountain, silhouetted against the washed-out sky of late afternoon, he could see the black towers of the inner citadel and the tops of the pyramids of the twin temples of the city. From that dedicated to Reh, God of Light, a thick plume of smoke from the sacrificial fire soared into the air. From that of Iss, God of Worms and Death, there was nothing.

Light and Death: eternal opposites. Once the two factions had been able to live together peacefully. But since the sun had begun to die, all had changed. Brother had fallen on brother; persecution, war and butchery had followed all over the Empire. But no place worse than here, in Thrull. Seven years to the day which had sent fifty thousand to their deaths, including his master, Manichee.

Then he did what he’d been avoiding doing up to that moment: he turned his gaze from the city to a small hillock fifty yards to his left in the marshes. Even in the inconsequential light of late afternoon, the mound glowed white against the dun green of the swamp. Already mosses and lichen covered half its fifty-foot height, but even at this distance it was clear what it was made of: course upon course of human skulls, the heads of those killed in the battle of Thrull, now picked clean of flesh. Lord Faran would not let anyone entering Thrull forget the events of that fateful day seven years before. Yet though fifty thousand had died, the priest had known only one of them: Manichee.

It was said that Manichee’s head had been placed right at the top of the pyramid. The priest craned his head back, but the summit of the mound was too far away for him to distinguish anything there. At this distance, all the ivory grins seemed the same: votive offerings to Iss, God of Death.

He bowed his masked head rapidly then set off with his brisk, loping stride down the causeway, pulling the hood of his cloak over his head as he did so. But as he approached closer to the city, the dead of the battle were once more thrust into his consciousness. A hundred yards from the city gate the surface of the causeway, packed earth to this point, became encrusted with white rocks. They appeared to be pieces of chalk; but the priest knew better. The bones of the dead had been scattered over the last stretch before the gate. Seven years’ traffic had pulverised them into dust and small pieces yet the priest could see humeri and femora bristling from both sides of the causeway like porcupine spines.

He lengthened his stride, his feet crunching down on the white fragments. At last he reached the bridge spanning the stagnant moat that ringed the outer walls. Across its stretch of moss-covered stone he could see the massive weather-stained gateway that was the only entrance to the city. He pulled his hood low over his mask. Priests of Reh still came here to visit their temple, but all were under suspicion. He stepped forward again, the sound of his sandals echoing off the looming walls in front. The cavernous gateway reared up in front of him, and he could see guards wearing the purple and brown surcoats of Iss’s legions stationed in its shadows. They stirred slightly when they saw the colour of his cloak. One detached himself from the others, and came slowly forward, his halberd held by his side. His face was sallow and unshaven. He peered curiously at the priest’s cowled face in the dying light.

‘Who are you, stranger?’ he asked, trying to get a better angle on the priest’s face.

‘One who follows Reh,’ came the reply.

‘That I can see: but what is your business here?’

‘To visit my temple: I was told that Lord Faran still permits this.’

‘He does,’ the guard sneered, ‘though there are not many of your kind who avail themselves of it.’

‘Then I may pass?’

‘Not before I get a look at your face – my guard captain likes to know who comes and goes here.’

‘I wear a mask,’ the priest replied, ‘as all our order do when we’re abroad.’

The guard took a threatening step forward; the halberd now slightly raised. ‘Mask or not, I will see your face,’ he growled.

The priest had retreated a foot, and held up one of his gloved hands. The guard’s eyes went from the metal talons back to the man’s hooded head, but before he could utter another word the priest spoke again. ‘Very well – look at my face, though I warn you, you will not like what you see.’ He inched aside a corner of the hood at his chin, allowing the guard a partial glimpse of his mask.

The guard’s face wrinkled in distaste. ‘Gods! What is that?’ he spat.

‘It’s what I wear,’ the priest replied simply. ‘Now may I pass?’

‘Pass all you like,’ the guard replied, turning his head away in disgust. ‘And keep that thing to yourself, in Iss’s name!’

The priest waited for no second invitation and brushed past, hurrying through the postern gate. The other guards seemed not to have noticed the interchange between the two men and continued warming themselves around a brazier, oblivious of everything apart from the dank chill of the afternoon and the swiftly fading light. He pressed on into the streets of the Lower Town. The houses were gutted, ivy-hung ruins. Their blackened rafters, poking up into sky, stood witness to the fire which had swept through them seven years before. Deep shadows hung in the cold air in the twisting alleyways that threaded their way up to the beetling crags. Here the streets were deserted. Remembering Zacharias’s warning, the priest hurried upwards, his sandalled feet slipping on the slick cobblestones. As he climbed his eyes darted through the eye slits of the mask, scouring the gloom of the buildings on either side. Empty porticoes, empty windows, their lights without a surviving pane, caved-in roofs, fire-blackened walls, where weeds grew in the sickly alley sun.

Ahead, a figure scurried into a house where there were still doors and barred windows. As the priest passed bolts were drawn and chains attached. His feeling of isolation, acute from a month’s solitary journeying in the Fire Mountains, grew even more intense, as if he were the pariah who stalked these streets and terrorised the inhabitants. A ghost city; as he climbed further, even the sight of the fugitive of a moment before would have been welcome. Twenty minutes into his climb he stopped to regain his breath on a terrace overlooking the plains. The great globe of the sun, a huge flat purple oval, hung above the mountain peaks to the west. Its rays cast no warmth and his breath came in a thick stream through the nose piece of the mask. A shudder ran through him and he pressed on quickly.

His mind raced with fear and excitement. Th