Brilliant, bold and thrilling, The Thousand Eyes by A. K. Larkwood is the epic fantasy sequel to The Unspoken Name.
Could you sacrifice your dreams to escape a nightmare?
Csorwe, Shuthmili and Tal survey abandoned Echentyr worlds to make a living. The empire’s ruins seem harmless but fascinating. Yet disaster strikes when they stumble upon ancient magic during a routine expedition. This revives a warrior who’d slept for an age, reigniting a conflict thousands of years old. And the soldier binds Csorwe to her cause.
Shuthmili is desperate to protect the woman she loves. However, as events escalate, she’s torn. Can she help Csorwe by clinging to her own humanity or by embracing her eldritch powers?
Tal heads home, but his peace is shattered when a magical catastrophe hits his city. The wizard Sethennai is missing and Tal can’t face seeking his former lover to ask for help. So, he flees – but there’s no escaping the future. For throughout the Echo Maze’s linked worlds, fragments of an undead goddess are waking. Soon all must choose a side.
IN ANCIENT DAYS, all this world was veiled by a green wood. Now tree trunks scatter the land like bones and dead cities fall to ruin beneath a dull unseeing sky.
Someday even they will be gone. But dust is not the only thing that lingers here. Along a certain mountain ridge, the stumps of forgotten beacons trace a path for ships to follow, up to the belly of a volcanic crater which rests among the mountains like a kettle among coals. Resting in that crater is the last bright thing that remains in this world, a shining mineral eye among the debris: the great tiled dome of an Echentyri hatchery complex.
The serpent conquerors built this place long ago, to incubate their successors. Now, amid the desolation of their empire, the hatchery tiles still gleam, scattering the sun’s glare into a thousand dancing points.
The hatchery is still and quiet but not altogether empty. The past sleeps soundly in these halls, and may yet wake.
* * *
The first person to set eyes upon the hatchery in three thousand years was one Qanwa Shuthmili, sitting in the cockpit of a little hired ship as it soared above the ridge.
The corpse of a world should have been a sad and terrible thing to see, but Shuthmili clung to the rail of the cutter and laughed in triumph. Her unbraided hair streamed behind her like a black pennant, and she bared her teeth against the wind as if she might take a bite of it.
She hugged her knees in triumph and turned to Csorwe, beside her in the pilot’s seat.
“There!” she said. “My goodness, it’s really all still there, the dome and everything, the whole complex!”
“You’ve got a whole complex,” said Tal, who had his feet propped up on the back of Csorwe’s seat despite her regular objections. Even he sounded pleased, and so he should, because their business depended on success, and even if you didn’t care about ancient history, the fact that the hatchery complex really was here meant they were probably going to get paid.
Csorwe took them in, landing the cutter with a bump. The crater was every bit as deserted as it seemed, a shallow bowl of dull stone sheltering the complex. The hatchery was even bigger than it had looked from the air, a cathedral of white marble and blue tile. The blue dome looked more like the sky than the actual sky overhead, which was a streaky yellow-grey.
The people of lost Echentyr had been giant serpents, and their buildings were all on a scale to match. The arch in the wall of the complex was fifty feet high. Beyond its cool shadow, sunlight pooled in a courtyard just as enormous.
“Even the Survey Office didn’t know this place existed,” said Shuthmili. “We might be the first people to walk here since the fall of Echentyr.”
“That never gets old for you, does it?” said Csorwe with affection, as she shouldered her backpack.
“I can’t believe nobody’s looted this place,” said Tal, running his fingertips over the tiled wall. The tiles were a brilliant sea-blue, minutely patterned with a design of interlocking spirals. “Even these would sell,” he added, tapping one. “People would love it. Do up your dining room with some genuine snake rubbish.”
Tal was Csorwe’s oldest friend and oldest enemy. Next to each other they made a perfect contrast: Csorwe was only just taller than Shuthmili, square and compact; Tal was a tall, stringy Tlaanthothei with twitchy petal-shaped ears.
“We aren’t looters, we’re surveyors,” said Shuthmili. She had shed a lot of scruples, but some of them really stuck. “We sell maps.”
“To looters,” said Tal. “It’s not our fault looting is all we know.”
“It’s not—they’re scholars—oh, put a lid on it, Talasseres,” she said, seeing that Tal was grinning at her. “It’s not my fault you have a lack of transferrable skills.”
She consoled herself that the ruined Echentyri colony worlds were famously sparse pickings for looters anyway: acres of dust and damage, with usually nothing to show for it but a few clay cylinders and a scattering of serpent bones.
“People don’t like stealing from Echentyri worlds, anyway,” said Csorwe, flicking Tal in the shoulder as she passed him. “You heard them back on Cricket Station. We’re courting a horrible snake curse just visiting here.”
“Don’t let the professor hear you,” said Tal.
“I am fairly certain Professor Tvelujan would think a horrible snake curse was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her,” said Shuthmili.
“Speak of the devil,” muttered Tal, as Professor Tvelujan’s minuscule cutter landed beside theirs. The engine puttered out, engulfed by the immense, encompassing silence of the dead world.
Tvelujan was their client, an elderly historian from a university in distant Tarasen. She wore a hat with a translucent veil to shield her bone-white hair and skin from the sun. As she approached them, she walked with the slow swimming gait of one enchanted, and the veil billowed behind her like the mantle of a jellyfish.
“All right, Professor? Need a hand?” said Csorwe, who generally treated Tvelujan with the patient, resigned cheerfulness one might use on a fragile relative.
“No assistance needed,” said Tvelujan, in her small quiet voice. It was odd for a client to want to join them—their job was to chart the place and squash any obvious threats, to make way for the researchers who would follow—but Tvelujan’s devotion to her subject came before all else. “The most wonderful. An intact hatchery. Never have I imagined it.” Her Tarasene accent became more marked when she was emotional, though she still spoke in little more than a whisper.
Shuthmili checked through her notebooks, while Tal and Csorwe counted off their provisions. They always carried more than they needed, since there was nothing growing and no running water in the dead world.
Tvelujan, meanwhile, had her own rituals to conduct. Before they entered the hatchery proper, she knelt on the stones of the courtyard and poured out an offering of scented oil, murmuring prayers in the sibilant language of Echentyr.
Shuthmili knew the serpent language well enough to understand most of it: Blessed Lady Iriskavaal, forgive us our boldness, we come to you as supplicants.
“Wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to suck up to our old friend the snake goddess,” muttered Tal.
They were all somewhat superstitious about saying the name of Iriskavaal out loud. By now they had visited countless Echentyri relic worlds. They had even found their way back to the homeworld, where the dry bones of innumerable serpents lay curled in dust. They had searched in the dead city, in the Royal Library and the ancient palaces. All the same, you never forgot who had ruled in these places, and who had laid them waste.
Three thousand years ago, the serpent goddess had destroyed her own territories in vengeance for a grand betrayal, and died. It was her curse which had blighted this world and dozens of others.
For most of her life, Shuthmili had believed that was the whole story. Iriskavaal was an extinct goddess. Her throne had been shattered, and she had faded from history along with the whole empire of Echentyr.
Two years ago, all three of them had learned better. Iriskavaal had cheated death, and taken a mortal vessel. Belthandros Sethennai still ruled over his city, far from here. As far as they had heard, he was still perfectly contented playing at being Chancellor of Tlaanthothe. If any of the Tlaanthothei had figured out what he really was, nobody was talking about it.
Shuthmili put it out of her mind. In every way that mattered, he had no part in their lives now. It had been two years since the others had left his employment. The past—Csorwe’s and Tal’s lives as Belthandros’ sword-hands, Shuthmili’s service to the Church of Qarsazh—felt less real day by day.
Tvelujan finished her prayers and drifted on across the courtyard to the door of the main hatchery building. It was circular, almost as big as a maze-gate, and composed of many interlocking metal plates, shining like a second sun. It was almost hard to look at directly, not that that stopped Tvelujan, who gazed up at it with dizzy reverence in her large grey eyes.
Shuthmili rolled up her sleeves. She could almost see the power that flowed within the door, the great sigils and countersigils which formed its mechanism. She had taught herself to read the Echentyri language as well as almost anyone, but their magic was still alien, always more of a challenge than it needed to be. Working on their devices made her feel like an ant exploring the interior of a clock. The trouble was that there were no Echentyri mages left—except Sethennai, maybe, and she could hardly ask him.
She retrieved her gauntlets from inside her jacket and pulled them on, reflecting, not for the first time, that they fit her better than ever. Csorwe had taken the gauntlets from Belthandros Sethennai, as a layer of protection to shield her from magic’s corrosive effects. When she had first put them on, they had been too big, uncomfortably reminiscent of the man who made them. Now, two years later, they were a second skin.
She positioned herself opposite the door, too careful to actually touch the surface. It was never the obvious trap that got you, after all. By now they had encountered enough doors which belched fire or seeped poison that it would be tremendously embarrassing to be caught out in front of Tal.
She closed her eyes and let her perception sink into the mechanism of the door. She floated through it, watching how one part of the great lock fit with the next.
People are like locks, her aunt had used to say. But locks were also like people. Sometimes they just needed a little coaxing.
As she rummaged around looking for the control sigil, she felt the familiar creeping shadow, and her goddess spoke to her.
THERE YOU ARE, SHUTHMILI, said the lady Zinandour. Her voice was as soft and intrusive as someone lightly touching the back of Shuthmili’s head.
Not now, said Shuthmili, swallowing her unease, I’m busy. Now was not the time. This was going to be a good day. There was a moment of reluctance, then Shuthmili gathered her focus and Zinandour’s presence dispersed like petals on the wind.
There was the sigil she’d been looking for, the axle holding the rest together. She erased it, and the echoes of its dissolution rippled out through the rest of the mechanism. The door opened as sweetly as if it were welcoming them inside, without even a wisp of smoke.
“All good?” said Csorwe, unable to hide the faint shadow of concern. Csorwe knew the risks of magic almost as well as Shuthmili did herself. Channelling the power of a divinity damaged the mortal mind and body in infinite small ways—usually minor, but occasionally not—and Shuthmili’s goddess was not a gentle one.
“I think I’ll live,” said Shuthmili. “And it worked, didn’t it?”
The metal plates of the door had slid away into the frame, revealing an immense chamber beyond. Much of it was occupied by a tiled pool the size of a small lake, now dry, with raw pitted stone at the bottom. The apex of the dome overhead had been glass-paned once, and now it was a lattice open to the sky, casting a fishnet shadow across the empty pool. Colonnades ran along the edges of the chamber, with more corridors branching off from them. It all reminded Shuthmili a little of a bathhouse.
“Extraordinary,” breathed Tvelujan, clasping her pale hands in front of her. “Never was there another empire like it. Not even your people.”
Shuthmili slightly resented this—she was no part of Qarsazh’s imperial ambitions these days—but it would have been unkind to squash Tvelujan in her state of rapture.
The four of them approached the edge of the pool. Tvelujan moved slowly, as though this was a sacred place. Tal slouched along behind them, although Shuthmili knew him well enough by now to recognise that all that indifference was to cover up the fact he was watching their backs. Tal had run into Csorwe and Shuthmili the year before last, when all three of them were on Cricket Station looking for work. The decision to go into business together had been an idea born of one too many algae beers in the canteen, and Shuthmili was amazed that the partnership had held together as well as it did.
“A hot spring, here,” said Tvelujan, gesturing at the bottom of the pool. “To keep eggs warm. Before rank allocation.”
Csorwe raised an eyebrow.
“The Echentyri sorted their eggs by caste and rank before they hatched. They would have loved it back in Qarsazh,” said Shuthmili, feeling she should apologise either for Echentyr or for her homeland. How would it have been, to hatch from an egg and have your whole destiny unroll before you, written out before you ever opened your eyes? Actually, Shuthmili thought she could imagine it very well.
“Very efficient system,” said Tvelujan softly. “Never were their warriors matched in all the Maze of Echoes. In seven days only, the Lady of the Thousand Eyes subdued Oshaar. Some things in this world you have to respect.”
Csorwe, clearly marked as Oshaaru by her grey skin and her tusks, rolled her eyes.
“I thought that was a myth,” said Tal, all innocence. “I mean, how would a big snake even hold a sword? Makes you think.”
Tvelujan did not deign to answer, but Csorwe grinned behind her back. It was one of the continued marvels of Shuthmili’s life that Csorwe and Tal got along all right these days, at least when they were out on a job. When they got back to the apartment, it would be right back to whether it was Tal’s turn to wash the dishes and whether Csorwe had been poaching from Tal’s liquor cabinet, but when they were working, a fragile ceasefire held.
They left the main chamber and began charting the smaller corridors. The place was a labyrinth, coiled in on itself. The sunlight lay like bolts of white silk across the tiles, and a soft breeze blew in through open windows. Tvelujan was in her element, drifting from one inscription to another and occasionally murmuring about old Echentyri victories.
Most of the furniture and equipment in the hatchery had long ago turned to dust, and what was left didn’t mean much: metal and ceramic vessels, inscribed tablets and cylinders which would take several days to decipher. Shuthmili glanced over them, trying to figure out which might be worth translating. Later on, Tvelujan’s team would return to gather up any that looked promising, but Shuthmili suspected they would just be accounts and inventories.
The only unexpected thing was the decoration. Most of the Echentyri ruins Shuthmili had seen were covered with friezes, ancient triumphs and ceremonies in fresco or bas-relief. The hatchery was no different, except in its subject matter. Instead of serpent queens and heroes, the walls of the hatchery were blazoned with curious hybrids: women with the heads or tails of snakes, crowned snakes with five-fingered hands grasping weapons. Which answered Tal’s question, but raised several in its place.
“Have you seen anything like this before? Do you know who they are?” said Shuthmili to Tvelujan. It struck her as odd, eerie even. Back in the day, the Echentyri had not really believed in other worlds or foreign peoples—there were only Echentyri worlds which had not yet been conquered and vassals awaiting subjugation. Most of the friezes depicted the serpents’ two-legged vassals as tiny stick figures, anonymous background swarms at work on the latest royal mausoleum. The halfway creatures in the friezes would surely have been a strange blasphemy—and yet some of them wore the mantles and garlands of Echentyri nobility.
Tvelujan frowned. “The Thousand Eyes, perhaps.”
“You mean—er, Iriskavaal?” said Shuthmili, not wanting to wound Tvelujan’s religious sensibilities but unsure how else to put it. She had always assumed Iriskavaal’s title was just a reference to the way she was always sculpted, with eyes running down her body like gems.
“No,” said Tvelujan, brushing her fingertips over one of the friezes, “though they were named for her, I believe. The splendid honour guard of the Lady of the Thousand Eyes. But this is strange, to show them like this. Yes, certainly it is curious.”
“You know what else is strange?” said Tal, kicking at a heap of potsherds in a way that made Shuthmili’s archaeological training cry out for justice. “The weird lack of skeletons in here. Normally you can’t move for old snake bones.”
“Maybe this place was out of commission,” said Csorwe.
“We’re pretty far from Echentyr and the central worlds,” said Shuthmili, putting aside the friezes for the moment. “The curse spread outwards from the capitol world. If they had some warning here, they could have evacuated.”
She could imagine the scene. Hundreds of Echentyri rushing for their ships, trying to outrun the end of their world. Surely they would have made sure the eggs were loaded first. And how would it have felt, to know that their goddess had turned on them? She almost preferred to think they had been vaporised without realising it.
At the end of one corridor, they found a small staircase descending, which was unusual, both because the Echentyri had favoured smooth inclines and because it was so narrow that the three of them had to go in single file. The corridor at the bottom was similarly small, and lined with small doors.
“What is this, some kind of maintenance duct?” said Csorwe.
“Ah…” said Shuthmili. “No. I don’t think so.” She peered round the nearest door, confirming her suspicions. The room beyond was long and low-ceilinged, windowless, with walls of bare stone. Most of the furniture had collapsed, but they could make out the rough outline of what was probably a line of cots.
“The servants’ quarters,” said Tvelujan, with undiminished excitement. “Many hatchlings. Many servants.”
Not much light filtered down from above, so it was hard to see detail, but there were curled shadows on some of the cots.