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the 33rd Jaghut War 298,665 years before Burn’s Sleep
Though she could not see it, she knew that just the other side of the ridge, the land slumped down to the sea. The plain itself was marked by regular humps, and the Bonecaster paused to study them. The mounds were arrayed in concentric circles, and at the centre was a larger dome – all covered in a mantle of lava and ash. The rotted tooth of a ruined tower rose from the plain’s edge, at the base of the first line of hills. Those hills, as she had noted the first time she had visited this place, were themselves far too evenly spaced to be natural.
The Bonecaster lifted her head. The mingled scents were unmistakable, one ancient and dead, the other … less so.
‘Who dwelt here? Who else was in the habit of building in stone?’ She fell silent for a long moment, then swung her attention back to the ruin. ‘This tower is the final proof, for it is naught else but Jaghut, and such a structure would not be raised this close to an inimical warren. No, the gate is Omtose Phellack. It must be so.’
‘A renegade Bonecaster has taken the children.’ ‘South?’ ‘To Morn.’ The Clan Leader’s brows knitted. ‘The renegade would save this woman’s children. The renegade believes the Rent to be Omtose Phellack.’ Pran Chole watched the blood leave Cannig Tol’s face. ‘Go to Morn, Bonecaster,’ the Clan Leader whispered. ‘We are not cruel. Go now.’ Pran Chole bowed. The Tellann warren engulfed
‘I am not sure, but we shall have to do something about it, sooner or later. I suspect we have plenty of time. The creature must now free itself of its tomb, and that has been thoroughly warded. More, there is the T’ol Ara’d’s mantle of stone still clothing the barrow.’ After a moment, he added. ‘But time we shall have.’
119,736 years before Burn’s Sleep (three years after the Fall of the Crippled God)
The Fall had shattered a continent. Forests had burned, the firestorms lighting the horizons in every direction,
through it all could be heard the screams of a god. Pain gave birth to rage. Rage, to poison, an infection sparing no-one. Scattered survivors remained, reduced to savagery, wandering a landscape pocked with huge craters now filled with murky, lifeless water, the sky churning endlessly above them. Kinship had been dismembered, love had proved a burden too costly to carry. They ate what they could, often each other, and scanned the ravaged world around them with rapacious intent.
In the distance, ragged bands eyed the figure as he strode, step by step, across what was left of the continent that would one day be called Korelri.
Beyond the suffering he absorbed, K’rul would have willingly embraced their broken souls, yet he had fed – was feeding – on the blood spilled onto this land, and the truth was this: the power born of that would be needed. In K’rul’s wake, men and women killed men, killed women, killed children. Dark slaughter was the river the Elder God rode. Elder Gods embodied a host of harsh unpleasantries.
They had, after all, been desperate. Desperate enough to part the fabric of chaos, to open a way into an alien, remote realm; to then lure a curious god of that realm closer, ever closer to the trap they had prepared. The summoners sought power.
seen the unearthly maggots that crawled forth from that rotting, endlessly pulsing meat and broken bone. Had seen what those maggots flowered into. Even now, as he reached the battered shoreline of Jacuruku, the ancient sister continent to Korelri, they wheeled above him on their broad, black wings. Sensing the power within him, they were hungry for its taste.
The nascent cities were wreathed in the smoke of forges, pyres, the red glow of humanity’s dawn. The First Empire had risen, on a continent half a world away from where K’rul now walked.
But it had not been alone for long. Here, on Jacuruku, in the shadow of long-dead K’Chain Che’Malle ruins, another empire had emerged. Brutal, a devourer of souls, its ruler was a warrior without equal.
He could sense a fourth presence as well, a savage, ancient beast following his spoor. A beast of the earth, of winter’s frozen breath, a beast with white fur bloodied, wounded almost unto death by the Fall. A beast with but one surviving eye to look upon the destroyed land that had once been its home – long before the empire’s rise. Trailing, but coming no closer.
The Kallorian Empire had spread to every shoreline of Jacuruku, yet K’rul saw no-one as he took his first steps inland. Lifeless wastes stretched on all sides. The air was grey with ash and dust, the skies overhead churning like lead in a smith’s cauldron.
All is … dead.’ Incinerated. The heat remains deep beneath the beds of ash. Ash … and bone.
The Circle brought down a foreign god. Aye, the effort went … awry, thus sparing me the task of killing the fools with my own hand. And the Fallen One? Well, he’ll not recover for some time, and even then, do you truly imagine he will accede to anyone’s bidding?
‘You’ve come to liberate my people from my tyrannical rule. Alas, I am not one to relinquish such things.
Kallor Eiderann Tes’thesula, shall know mortal life unending. Mortal, in the ravages of age, in the pain of wounds and the anguish of despair. In dreams brought to ruin. In love withered.
‘Kallor Eiderann Tes’thesula, you shall never ascend.’
‘Kallor Eiderann Tes’thesula, each time you rise, you shall then fall. All that you achieve shall turn to dust in your hands. As you have wilfully done here, so it shall be in turn visited upon all that you do.’
K’rul, you shall fade from the world, you shall be forgotten.
Draconus, what you create shall be turned upon you.
And as for you, woman, unhuman hands shall tear your body into pieces, upon a field of battle, yet you shall know no respite – thus, my ...
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The effort left K’rul broken, bearing wounds he knew he would carry for all his existence. More, he could already feel the twilight of his worship, the blight of Kallor’s curse. To his surprise, the loss pained him less than he would have imagined.
The power invested within the sword possesses a … a finality.’ ‘Then,’ K’rul whispered after a moment’s consideration, ‘you must make alterations in the final shaping.’ ‘So it seems. I shall need to think long on this.’
When my destruction comes, it will be through betrayal and naught else. There can be no precaution against such a thing, lest my life become its own nightmare of suspicion and mistrust. To this, I shall not surrender. Until that moment, I shall continue to play the mortal game.’ ‘Careful, then,’ K’rul murmured, ‘whom you choose to fight for.’ ‘Find a companion,’ Draconus advised. ‘A worthy one.’
And the price had been paid. Willingly. Three lives and one, each destroyed. For the one, the beginning of eternal hatred. For the three, a fair exchange.
the beast watched the three figures part ways. Riven with pain, white fur stained and dripping blood, the gouged pit of its lost eye glittering wet, it held its hulking mass on trembling legs. It longed for death, but death would not come. It longed for vengeance, but those who had wounded it were dead. There but remained the man seated on the throne, who had laid waste to the beast’s home. Time enough would come for the settling of that score.
Or perhaps she had fled, in pain and terror, to the warren that had given fire to her spirit.
The beast elected to follow none of them. They were young entities as far as he and his mate were concerned, and the warren she might have fled to was, in comparison to those of the Elder Gods, ancient. The
The bridge’s Gadrobi limestone blocks lay scattered, scorched and broken in the bank’s churned mud, as if a god’s hand had swept down to shatter the stone span in a single, petty gesture of contempt. And that, Gruntle suspected, was but a half-step from the truth.
but any conjuring with the power to lay waste to an entire countryside would have reached Darujhistan. And, since the city was not a smouldering heap – or no more than was usual after a city-wide celebration – clearly nothing did.
The man’s arms were enormous, too long and too muscled for the rest of his scrawny frame. His weapon of choice was a two-handed sword, purchased from a weaponsmith in Deadman’s Story. As far as those apish arms were concerned, it might be made of bamboo. Harllo’s shock of pale blond hair rode his pate like a tangled bundle of fishing thread. Strangers laughed upon seeing him for the first time, but Harllo used the flat of a blade to stifle that response. Succinctly.
The carriage was massive, a house perched on high, spoked wheels.
Ornate carvings crowded the strangely arched frame, tiny painted figures capering and climbing with leering expressions. The driver’s perch was canopied in sun-faded canvas.
Four...
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A mangy cat lying on the buckboard watched Reese and Gruntle approach. ‘That your cat?’ the captain asked. Reese squinted at it, then sighed. ‘Aye, sir. Her name’s Squirrel.’
Expensive, ankle-length cloak of black leather, high riding boots of the same over grey leggings, and, beneath a loose silk shirt – also black – the glint of fine blackened chain armour.
The master’s face was pale, shaped much like a triangle, an impression further accented by a neatly trimmed beard. His hair, slick with oil, was swept back from his high brow. His eyes were flat grey – as colourless as the rest of him – and upon meeting them Gruntle felt a surge of visceral alarm.
‘Fire,’ Bauchelain noted as they walked on, ‘is essential for the health of these prairie grasses. As is the passage of bhederin, the hooves in their hundreds of thousands compacting the thin soil.
They rounded a battered hillside and came to the edge of a fresh crater.
Gruntle judged the crater to be forty paces across and four or five arm-lengths in depth.
A man sat nearby on the edge of the rim, also dressed in black leather, his bald pate the colour of bleached parchment. He rose silently, for all his considerabl...
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his broad, round face, his eyes buried in puffed flesh and wide full-lipped mouth set slightly downturned at the corners, a face both childlike and ineffably monstrous – sent ripples of fear through Gruntle.
barrow once stood here. Within it was chained a Jaghut Tyrant.’
he glanced over to see Emancipor Reese, sitting atop the carriage, one hand stroking the ragged cat in his lap. Mange? Gruntle considered. Probably not.
The wolf circled, massive muscles rippling beneath the dull white fur. Head low and turned inward. Lone eye fixed on the prone human. The fierce concentration was efficacious, holding the object of its attention in a state that was timeless – an accidental consequence of the powers the wolf had absorbed within this warren.
