The Last Star at Dawn

Book 0: The Lightbringer Trilogy

by Oliver Johnson

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

In the final volume of this epic fantasy, good is pitted against evil when the worshipers of the God of Light battle the servants of Eternal Night for the future of Thrull.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

He wakes me, the young scribe who I can no longer see. I have slept away the afternoon and it is evening. I was far away, dreaming of the lands that stretch away below this tower; the lands I travelled through in my youth.

But now I am awake, I become the Abbot of Forgeholm once more. I rise from my chair. There, through my gummed eyes, I see an orange glow: the sun is setting over the Fire Mountains. I raise my palms to it and give the scribe the evening’s blessing: May our lord Reh find Galadrian’s golden thread in the night’s labyrinth. May his sun barge fly across the heavens: may its rays shine on you, friend Kereb.

My mind is not on the words. Dreams of the past still haunt me. Tonight Kereb and I will finish the final chapters. Time has come full circle – in my end is my beginning: this story began in this tower. Now it will end here too.

I was twelve when I first came here, carried half-dead from the temple below to these heights where everything beneath, the monastery and its people and the mountain and the passes, seem miniatures of another world, far removed. For many years my only companions were this worm-eaten desk, these dusty alembics and retorts, this narrow cot and the three books that my master Manichee gave me before he died.

They stand propped on the mantel over the fire-blackened hearth, catching the light of the setting sun – in that exact same place where I placed them when my time came to leave.

All those lands that I visited in my youth are described in one of the books: Thrulland, Surrenland, the Nations of the Night, Ossia, Attar and the Land of the Lost City, Iskiard.

But my travelling days are over – it is the other two books that draw me to them. They have remained unopened since the day I returned forty years ago, though every evening I take them down and touch their covers – as I do now.

The first book is dedicated to my god: Reh, Lord of Flame and the Reborn Sun. The Book of Light. I hold it close to my eyes: its tarnished silver edgings and the lapis lazuli set into the four corners of the ancient leather cover catch the beams of the falling sun and blaze with a blue-white light: the colour of magic. Every evening I hold it like this – I do it not from devotion to my god but knowing every evening that she used to do this: silently praying, holding the book up to the westering sun.

Now I pick up the smallest of the three of the books. I feel its leatherbound boards; I remember its colour: that of the soot-blackened mantel on which it has lain all these years. My fingers tingle, as if I held a living, breathing thing. From within I feel a barely discernible pulse: it is the pulse of magic, my friend.

All my craft lies in it: no thicker than a thumb; no longer than a hand, its leather worn and warped by fire and water and the hands of a hundred adepts that lived before me, Manichee the last. His words of farewell echo: ‘Learn it well. For in it is every form of pyromancy known to the Flame. With it you will summon fire even from wind and ice, and bring lightning from the heavens.’ Oh master, I did so, and smote our enemies.

I replace the books. Kereb is silent. He is anxious to get on with the evening’s business – the dictation of my history of the Wars of the Flame and the Worm. He has no reason to love me. I do not pay his way, or have a rich living in my gift. It is the High Priest in far-off Perricod who has sent him here, has ordered him to share my exile, when once he expected greater things. Together we endure our sentence. Mine is for life, his perhaps will end when our work, this history, is finished.

And tonight it will be, if Reh and my memory allow.

So Kereb sits with pen and ink, ready, maintaining the charade of diligence when he and I know we might spare him the pains of his labour. Do they think I am deaf as well as blind? Do I not hear after each night’s dictation the horse’s hooves clattering in the cobbled yard, the shouts of the rider, the heavy gates groaning open? And in the silence of the night the sound of the hooves echoing back up the pass, off each crag, over each hairpin. I follow the rider in my mind’s eye: five days and nights, all the way to Perricod, post after post, until he stands at the gateway of the temple.

Only the High Priest knows what happens to my words. Perhaps he reads them, a rueful smile upon his face, as he sees only the ranting of a heretic and a fornicator. Perhaps that is what I am. But also I am a heretic and fornicator who tells the truth: a truth too dangerous for him.

And yet, tonight I will begin as I do every evening: I will speak to the shadows. Pretend that someone else but the High Priest will read these words; tomorrow, or the next day, or in a thousand years …

I take a deep breath. There is a particular smell in the air: it is that time when the flowers that grow up the side of the tower begin to close; their scent drifts away like a faint memory.

The sunbeams have gone. I remember how a mellow violet hue sits upon the mountains on evenings like this and how the lizards bask on the warm rocks that hold the last of the afternoon’s heat. The heather will come in a month or two. Heather! We never dreamed of such a thing in the cold years of my boyhood. The flowers even of that most hardy plant would not bud in the year-long cold, the absence of the sun.

Below I hear voices and laughter in the refectory. I can picture the scene. A yellow light blazes from the kitchen windows and doors, like golden fire. The acolytes are sweating over the pots. Over the clatter I hear a verse of a bawdy country song. Once more they have been at the cider that the farmers bring up from the orchards on the plains far below.

But the laughter doesn’t displease me. I have made an oath: let the laughter continue. Never again will the fear and the beatings return to Forgeholm. Though I am Abbot, I am a man as well.

It is now properly night: all the world is covered in shadows, just like it was forty years ago, when the darkness covered the sun and the earth even during the day.

Until she came and relit the sun. The day returned and once more Reh showed his face to her, the Lightbringer.

In my early years when I first lived in this tower, Reh’s return would have meant everything to me, everything that I lived or cared for; for was I not a priest of the Flame and the Reborn Sun? But listen, scribe: now I am old; gone are the certainties. If only I could return to the sweet and certain prejudices of youth, not flinching at anything – even the blood sacrifices and burnings – whatever was prescribed in that self-same book, the Book of Light that sits upon that mantel; for in those certainties is the only happiness.

But now I have no certainties – apart from what lives in my heart. Believe me, Kereb, I have seen the original of the Book of Light – it is dust; I have met the ghost of Marizian the Mage, he who wrote it – he wanders not in paradise but in the damned region of Shades. And as for Reh? I have travelled through the heart of the sun and found the sun that burns in my heart. That is all that matters: the light within. Let it burn for the transitory moment that we have on this earth – let it burn in the fleeting laughter of those novices in the kitchen below, in the brief colours of a wildflower, the fugitive cry of a bird in the sky: for all that burns within eventually consumes itself, and dies.

But now I need that fire again, however dimmed. The darkness of the mind, in which the thoughts of old age are entombed, grows deeper as the night, the time of Iss, draws on. Old evils stir like ghosts in my memory, just out of sight.

Though the war is won and Iss’s cities and temples razed, the enemy is never dead, but merely sleeps. Where there are underground places – vaults and catacombs, even the grave itself – he waits, like a coiled serpent, the Worm that eats its own tail until time is no more. O children of Reh, be wakeful.

Now, Kereb, let us begin.

My name? You know it by now if my words are known. And if they are not, then my name is dead along with my words. But I will speak it one last time. It is Urthred of Ravenspur, Priest of Flame.

Once I had a face that no man or woman could look upon. Yet with it I found love. Now I, like the sun, have turned full circle: now I have an old man’s face, a face that the young despise, and once more I am alone. In my beginning was my end. Sunrise and sunset; light and dark: the world has turned through them again and again. Yet the greater darkness has been averted and only one remains for me, the darkness of the end.

Before it comes, I will speak, though I speak only to shadows.

Let this tale, the last of Thalassa, begin …

Thrull. The fourth day of winter. Mist comes as night falls.

The demon, Nekron, is a hundred yards long, carried by a thousand feet, a horned skull head, his skin a million dully glittering obsidian scales. He slides between the houses, his body slithering from side to side, toppling gable ends and supporting walls. He leaves a glistening track behind. Now each height and depth bears the silver trail of his passing so that in the moonlight penetrating the mist, the granite-cliffed city looks as if silver thread has been wound round and round its sides.

The demon’s time on earth is short. Already, steer-sized slabs of viscous skin slough off, the great maw gapes and sinks to the ground, scraping slowly along it, bone and teeth breaking away.

The demon climbs: up to the temple square, his thousand legs more and more sluggish, ranks of them collapsing under his weight. But at last he is upon the summit of that cursed city. In a rage his tail thrashes into the bases of the two temple pyramids of Iss and Reh, toppling walls, fracturing their bases. The pyramids crumble, masonry breaks off their side and falls over the cliffs, toppling slowly down on to the houses of the Lower Town in a dusty avalanche.

Nekron dissolves into a vast lake of his own green acid; the bubbling liquid burns downwards, searing through the stones of the temple square, scorching a vast crater in the summit, percolating down into the catacombs below, burning holes through the many levels of the underworld, even to the Silver River a mile beneath.

Below one of the ruined crags, a human hand pokes out of the rubble; the skin a mottled blue and chalk white, the edge of the cloak sleeve visible: purple and brown. The colours of the god of darkness – Iss. The man’s soul is with his master. A leatherbound book has fallen from his dead hand. The Holy Book of Iss: the Book of Worms. And on the open page, this is written: On the fourth day of winter Thrull will be destroyed.

The cold wind blows over the marshes. The pages of the book start to turn, over and over, nearly faster than the eye can see: a date, a sigil, a drawing, a kaleidoscope of wormy lines are momentarily glimpsed. Then it comes to rest on the very last page, where the vellum is yellowed and the lines of ink are smudged and faint, but where this prophecy is still legible.

In the year after the coming of Nekron – Iss’s enemy and Reh’s hope, the Lightbringer, will pass into the land of Shades and there she will die, and the light of the sun will die with her. Lord Iss will come from the stars and establish a kingdom upon this earth. And all shall praise him, the Dark Prince who shall reign forever in the eternal darkness.

The winter passes. No spring or summer come. The earth is frozen, the sun hidden. The time of darkness is beginning.

All through the winter the blizzards howled in from the Fire Mountains. Many leagues to the south of Thrull stood Perricod, ancient capital of Surrenland, in the great horseshoe loop of the River Donzel, its towers and grey battlements rising above a wasteland of snow. It was a city once dedicated to Reh, but now its ruler, Lord Sain, was dead and its walls stood unguarded to any who might brave the winter wasteland to come to it.

This evening, three months after the destruction of Thrull, the shortest day of the year was ending prematurely. Just after noon the sky had darkened and the starving wolf packs that roamed outside the city walls started to howl.

Inside the city only one inn remained open of all the dozens that had once done a brisk trade with farmers, soldiers and merchants. It was called the Gryphon’s Head, a ramshackle hostelry hard by the northern gates. This evening there was no throng in its common room and the fire within had burned low, giving light but no heat. There was no food save horsemeat nor wine save the vinegary lees of the vintage before the great freeze.

The few remaining guests whispered to one another, falling silent every time a blast of wind rattled the door. The afternoon grew darker and darker. The guests had much to discuss. Vampires were already abroad in the city and rumour had it that an army of the Undead was marching from Tiré Gand, and that this very night they would arrive and the thousand-year rule of Reh in Perricod would finally be at an end.

The city was lost anyway: plague and famine had come to it months before. Worse, the bitterness of the winter and the absence of the sun could only mean one thing. Surely this was the beginning of the final night of man, when the sun disappeared for ever and Lord Iss returned to earth?

The patrons of the inn shook their heads gloomily, but there was a certain expedience in their gathering here. Even though they were not enthusiasts of the Dark God and his doctrines, they went under his protection: the outside of the inn’s door was chalked with the symbol of the Worm, the serpent consuming its own tail, signalling that all those gathered gave themselves to Iss’s guardianship.

Outside, huddled figures scurried down the streets in the premature darkness, leaping over the frozen races of the open sewers, avoiding passing under the eaves of houses where spear-shaped icicles hung ready to fall, skirting the piles of the dead, their stiff limbs pointing from the carrion heaps at every street corner like the stiff boughs of trees.

A tramp of feet, and presently a column of men dressed in the dark god’s purple and brown robes appeared. The acolytes of the Worm. Fierce-looking, sallow-complexioned, shaven-headed thugs, their faces covered with boils from lack of sleep and poor nutrition. Each was armed with a thick stave three inches across, four feet long, a serpent head carved upon its end. At their belts they carried pouches filled with soot. They drove the few malingering townsfolk from their path with blows and snarls.

They passed the inn, and plunged into the jumbled labyrinth of streets, seeking the houses of the unconverted that had no serpent symbol, striking each unmarked door with the staves, the sound putting those therein in mind of the six hammer strokes of doom predicted in the holy books: the hammer strokes that would announce the end of the world.

And after the noise of the staves died away, the acolytes cried out to those in the houses to hear the words of the dark scripture: how the sun would not rise again after this night.

And many of the people who heard their words, who in better times, when the temple of Reh had been strong, had warmed their hands at the execution pyres of such heretics, looked out of their mullioned windows at the sky as dark as a coal scuttle and believed that, indeed, the evening of that endless night had come. Meekly they donned their darkest clothes and left their houses, heads bowed low in shame, to follow the procession of shaven-headed acolytes through the city to the temple of Iss.

But those who refused to open their doors or shouted curses back were singled out for a worse fate. The acolytes reached into their pouches and pressed their soot-covered palms on to the doors, leaving a mark – the Black Hand. Later, when the night was darkest, the Undead would come, as they came every evening, digging through the cellars of the marked houses, or climbing through the windows, taking all those they could find.

Now as darkness settled the wolf packs closed in, as they did at every dusk, surrounding the northern gates, not daring to enter the city, for the scent of their enemy, man, was still thick in the air, but knowing their time would come soon. Their howling was as high and persistent as the noise of the keening wind.

But then they fell silent. The wind died too. A sudden mist appeared in the streets. The acolytes froze, their heads cocked to one side, listening.

At first the only sound was the hissing of snow particles gently blowing down the frozen streets. Then came the sound of a horse’s hooves on the metalled road that led to the north over the frozen fields.

Gradually the rider emerged from the gloom of the evening. He was mounted on a grey gelding. He rode into the northern gatehouse of the city: there were no guards left to challenge him. The horse’s shoes rang off the cobbles and echoed as he passed through the archway and into the grey streets of Perricod.

The patrons of the Gryphon’s Head gathered curiously at the windows and stared at him as he rode by. He was the first man who had been down the northern road in months. But there was no sign he had spurred his horse through the wolf packs, or that he was now unduly concerned by the growing dark or the savage cries of the acolytes echoing about the streets. He rode easily, rolling gently on the swaying back of his mount, a born horseman. He had no saddle or harness but rode bareback, as if horse and rider were one whole, not needing the usual accoutrements of control to find one equal understanding. He rested one hand on the horse’s withers, the only gesture towards balance or mastery. He was covered from head to foot in a cloak of grey wolf fur, rimed with ice and hoar frost from the driving blizzard. The cloak spread down to the hindquarters of the horse and over its flanks. On its hood the head of a wolf stood with jaws agape baring yellow teeth and eyes that gleamed with malignant life.

Under the wolf’s-head cape the rider’s eyes were nearly as fierce of those of the dead animal. He rode down the street in the direction the acolytes had gone and was soon swallowed by the shadows of the houses which leant over horse and rider, the sound of the hooves muffled in the snow drifts.

For several months horse and rider had wandered the wilderness south of the Fire Mountains. The rider’s name was Fazad Falarn. He was only thirteen and a half. A noble by birth, from the age of five he had been a slave. But now only a faint vestige of boyhood and none of slavery remained on him. His face was burned nut brown by the cutting wind. A hard intelligence played around his eyes; the skin surrounding them seemed prematurely lined. There was no vulnerability in his look.

He rode on slowly through the streets, paying no heed to the buildings that overarched his way, not stopping to inspect the inns or shops, which were boarded shut in any case. The long months of travel had taught him that a man must always seem to know where he is going in a strange city, even if he doesn’t.

The horse carried him into the southern part of the town. Then the gelding snorted, great puffs of vapour billowing from his nostrils, and whinnied quietly. Fazad sensed it too: danger ahead. A now familiar smell of burning. Then he saw four or five figures fleeing a house. Through its mullioned windows and diamond-shaped panes he saw a ruddy orange glow. A fire, raging; he felt the blast of its heat. Looters.

Another lawless town. He had seen many.

He rode on, not looking back. Then the crowded streets of the old town fell away, and he saw through the murk of snow and dusk an open place in front of him. Trees like black skeletons lurched out of the mist. He was in a park. This must be the area he was looking for: the nobles’ quarter. Snow cloaked everything, but he sensed he was in a broad avenue leading to the southern walls, where the meander of the encircling river formed a great bend. The horse’s hooves sounded on broad paving stones. This was the way to Lord Sain’s palace. His long journey was nearly over.

A sudden gap in the snow fall and now he saw it, half a mile in front, standing on a small knoll, its wide roofs slightly upturned in tiled waves, pagodas on its three eaves tops, its worked-stone walls and wooden doors and window frames blackened by fire.

He uttered a word, and the horse came to a halt. The rider stared at the ruins for several moments, then sighed and wearily nudged his mount forward again.

Now he concentrated on either side of the avenue. Here there were lesser mansions, giving off a desolate, long-abandoned air. As he passed by them he heard the ghosts of children cry with laughter, the gentle calls of their dead mothers, the shouts of spirit men. The dead spoke and he heard: he was no stranger to them, had been with them all his life.

The darkness was now almost absolute though it was but late afternoon. He searched for signs of life in the dark houses: a light, or a plume of smoke from a chimney. Nothing.

But dark figures lurked outside the deep gateways of the abandoned mansions. Their purple and brown robes were almost indistinguishable from the shadows. The servants of Iss were here already. His eyes fixed on the snow and ancient lichen frontages over their heads, the carved coats of arms of the nobility could still be discerned on the architraves of the gate’s facades. But he saw no lights, no possible welcome in the dead windows of the mansions. Every now and again he would murmur to the horse and it would slow. On each occasion his master stared hard at the faded heraldic designs in the near dark. Then each time, with a slight click of his tongue, and no other command, the horse set off again.

Eventually he came to a gloomy mansion, in the lee of the fire-gutted palace of Lord Sain. Dark poplars reached up to the darkening sky from its park. Its entrance was shadowed by a grey stone cornice supported by tapering pillars. He squinted again and saw carved on the stone architrave the sign of a sun and a bushel of corn. He murmured and the horse came to a halt, and he dismounted stiffly and stared at the iron-studded wooden door, barely visible in the shadows under the overhanging porch. There was a black handprint on one of the panels.

One of the Iss acolytes had been observing his halting approach down the avenue from some ruins across the street. His name was Tarant – a sallow-faced, hollow-eyed young man. He had travelled to Perricod from his home city, Tiré Gand in Ossia. At first the rider had been too far away in the dusk to make out any details, but the cloak and the ghostly whiteness of the horse had given both a sinister appearance and he had quailed at approaching them.

But he was desperate. Three nights already on the freezing streets, and not one soul converted and brought to the dark halls of Iss! His master, a gruff fellow from the Mother Temple in Tiré Gand, had no patience with those who did not pull their weight. Tonight he had been told to bring in a convert or he would be sent back to Tiré Gand, through the wolf-inhabited wasteland: not an attractive prospect.

As the rider dismounted, Tarant now saw that, under the voluminous cloak, this new arrival was no more than a strip; a weakling perhaps. Tarant mustered his courage and stepped out into the street and approached him, a dog-eared copy of the Book of Worms under one arm.

‘Sir …’ he began but got no further as Fazad whipped round at the sound of his voice. His face under the wolf cape was revealed in the faint gloom. A nervous, triumphant smile twitched on Tarant’s face. The rider was but a boy: easy meat. He took another step forward but then locked eyes with the child and stopped. Strangely the boy’s brown eyes were hard and empty of fear; lupine, as if indeed he had been lent kinship with the wolves by the cloak he wore.

The acolyte swallowed hard, seeking for words. A child was but a child after all, could be brought round by persuasion. He took yet another step nearer. ‘That’s a fine horse for one so young,’ he said, making to pet the gelding’s mane. The horse’s nostrils twitched and suddenly he reared, threatening the acolyte with his hooves.

The Ossian backed away. ‘Whoa,’ he said, trying to shield his body with the massive tome in his arms. Fazad held up his hand – the horse instantly calmed, his front legs returning to the ground.

The boy’s eyes never left the acolyte’s. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. His voice was high, but only with youth, not fear.

‘Just to talk,’ the acolyte replied, his eyes nervously darting from rider to horse and back again. He remembered his mentor’s words: there were no easy converts; even babes in arms might at first resist the doctrines of Iss, but they would eventually come to recognise the Lord of Darkness. ‘Master, you see how things stand,’ he began as persuasively as he could, waving generally at the settling darkness and the frozen street. ‘It is nearly night, the sun may not return on the morrow. You must think of your soul – what will happen to it in the Prince’s dark midnight.’

The boy stared at him, no emotion in his dark eyes. ‘Be sure of this: the sun will rise again,’ he said flatly. ‘Now leave me alone.’

The acolyte, seeing the horse was quiet, stepped forward, grasping the sleeve of the boy’s fur cloak. ‘Come,’ he whispered, ‘my friends are waiting, in the cellar of the house yonder.’ He leaned closer, so the boy could smell his breath, a strange mixture of cloves and camphor. ‘One bite, then eternal life will be yours!’

The boy’s lips twisted in anger at the touch, but before he could reply, one of the massive wooden doors of the gate at his back swung open with a bang. Boy and acolyte both turned quickly to see who had opened it. A large man stood in the entranceway. He was clad in a simple faded brown woollen tunic, his trunk-like legs exposed despite the cold, his bulk silhouetted by a glowing lamp set on the floor behind him. One of the sleeves of his tunic was bunched up to the shoulder joint, showing he had lost the arm some time in the past. He held a stout axe in his one hand, its edge glinting in sharp contrast to the blueing of the rest of its blade.

His dark eyes were fixed firmly on the acolyte: there was no mistaking the menace in them. Tarant began to back away.

‘I’ve told you what would happen if you came again,’ the man said in a bass growl, his eyes falling on the black hand symbol on the door.

The acolyte had continued to retreat and was way out in the street again. He clearly felt himself a safe distance from the one-armed man, for now he risked replying: ‘Your door is marked, seneschal. The Risen Dead will be with you this night or the next …’

The man snarled and took another step into the street, the axe upraised. The acolyte’s next words evaporated on his lips and he took to his heels, fleeing into the twilight.

Fazad’s rescuer took one or two steps after the acolyte, then stopped, glaring down the road until the man had disappeared in the gloom. He was breathing heavily, his massive chest rising and falling.

After a few moments he seemed to remember the boy’s presence and turned to him.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. The boy merely nodded, staring at the axe. The man followed the direction of his gaze, then laughed gruffly. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I mean you no harm, only those vermin out there.’ He narrowed his eyes when he saw how young Fazad was. ‘It’s late to be out. What is your business here?’

‘I am seeking Gurn, seneschal of the Iremage family.’

‘Then you have found he whom you seek; Gurn is my name. And now you know mine, what is yours?’

‘I … I am Fazad.’

‘Fazad?’ Gurn repeated, his dark brow creasing, as if trying to remember where he had heard that name before.

For the first time, the boy averted his gaze, as if unsure of how he should say what had to be said next; as if it had been too long since he had last spoken anything, and the words, so often rehearsed in his mind, would not come out.

‘Well, boy,’ Gurn prompted.

Fazad swallowed, mustering courage, then turned back to the seneschal. ‘Is it true that your lord, Artan Iremage, swore an oath with Count Falarn of Thrull, to eternally protect each other’s honour and blood, even in death?’

The giant’s ruddy face instantly lost colour and his dark brows knotted; he was suddenly suspicious. ‘You speak strange words of introduction, lad. But it’s true: such an oath was indeed made on the walls of Thrull before the great battle.’

‘And is Lord Artan still alive?’

Gurn shook his head. Now it was his turn to swallow hard. ‘No, he is dead: I alone of all the hearth servants returned to this house.’

The boy regarded him solemnly. ‘Then you are the last man alive who can fulfil Artan’s pledge.’

Gurn’s frown deepened. ‘Tell me: who are you, how do you know of this oath?’

The boy straightened. ‘I am Fazad, the son of Count Falarn. Sold into slavery after the battle of Thrull, now I am free once more.’

‘You have escaped? From where?’

‘From that self-same place of which you spoke – Thrull.’

‘Thrull? But it is three hundred leagues away.’

Fazad looked away, down the long avenue back into the centre of the city and beyond, to the frozen countryside, in the direction of the Fire Mountains and Thrull beyond them. ‘Aye – three hundred leagues,’ he replied. ‘And you ask yourself: how could I, but a boy, survive the cold, the snows, the wolves? And sometimes I ask myself the same question.?