2018-01-08
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When they were finished, however, there was a short hiss of noxious air which, for the Ebong, must have passed for enthusiastic clapping.
“You can go. Warn you, though, not much call for mimes round here.”
“And the rents are steep,” added his colleague.
“Ask me, you’d be better off striking for the lowlands,” said a third. “Besides, you want to watch out you don’t hear the Call.”
His colleagues turned their black helmet heads on him at that and the mercenary slunk away, or as much as an Ebong could ever be said to slink. The three mimes thanked the guards humbly, and rode through the open gate and across the bridge and into the city…
And Gorel could hear it, now. And he realised he had been hearing it for some time, all through their approach to the city, though it was clearer now.
A sort of faint crystal peal…
A little sound of summoning, just at the edge of hearing.
9.
Once they were inside, the talismans began to lose their power. The three would-be robbers found a ramshackle inn that stood on an ait in the confluence of two of the smaller canals. There they checked their weapons while Mauser outlined the plan.
How and when Gorel had met Mauser was a long and not entirely interesting story. It was during that unfortunate episode with the Demon-Priests of Kraag. Needless to say, both of them had barely escaped with their lives, and Mauser still had a neat little scar to show for it. Where he came from, Gorel was never entirely sure. He was a rare white-face, of a race of barbarians who lived high in the snow-peaked mountains of the Beyaz. Gorel trusted him—as much as he could be said to trust anyone. Devlin he didn’t trust at all, but then the man’s untrustworthiness was a sort of assurance in itself.
The city was…strange.
It was clean and prosperous and ordered, a little haven of peace in a violent world.
He had had a chance to examine the corpses in the canals as they wended their slow way to the inn.
There were the bodies of many races in the water. Human and Avian and Merlangai, Ebong and numerous others. Who could tell where they had come from, or how long they had been lying there, submerged, perfectly preserved in the cold water that flowed from the Sacred Pool?
Even as he watched, he’d see a new body arrive from up-stream, fed into the system of canals, until it found a place and there remained, suspended. And always, at the edge of hearing, there was that faint peal of a bell, a sort of muted laughter, an invitation…
And as he watched, he saw a woman stop in the middle of her shopping, and drop her bags, and stand, transfixed. Her child stood beside her, a little girl. A beatific smile filled the woman’s face, then she began to walk away, leaving behind both her shopping and her child. The little girl began to run after her mother, but the woman paid her no mind, and a shopkeeper and a flower seller with a kindly face held the girl from following, and tried, awkwardly, to comfort her.
The mother went away.
—
The plan was simple.
There was only one god in Waterfalling.
The God of the Waterfall had many small temples scattered throughout the city, and one main one. The Grand Temple occupied the entirety of an island high up-stream. The path to the Drop passed close to it as it led farther up until it reached the plateau.
It was not heavily guarded, for who would dare disturb the temple of the god in its own domain?
“The ikon is inside the temple,” Mauser said. “It is a small, blue, amorphous shape faintly resembling a human figure. It is made of Ice VII. Some say it holds the soul of the god within it. Others that it is merely an artistic representation. We are going to go on the first assumption. The job’s to get in and get the ikon. The ultimate target’s—”
“Assassination,” Devlin said, and leered.
Gorel stared at the two of them. Devlin’s ugly grin and Mauser’s grim determination.
“Assassination?”
“Come on, Gorel. It’s not like it would be the first god you’ve killed. In fact, you’re almost uniquely qualified.”
“Is that why I’m here?”
“Would you rather be somewhere else? Are we keeping you from some urgent appointment?”
Gorel lit a cigar and stared at the two of them. He began to wonder just who the mysterious Apocrita merchant who’d first hired him was, and just how, exactly, Mauser had then found Gorel…
But Mauser was right. A job was a job and, besides, Gorel had his own purpose in being there. So he just nodded, affably enough, and said, “I’m going to look around. You two try to stay out of trouble.”
“I think the trouble part’s going to come later,” Mauser said, and Devlin sucked on his wet, green teeth noisily and leered at Gorel. He left them there, checking and cleaning the weapons.
10.
Of course he’d known about the God of the Waterfall.
11.
Gorel was no fool. And the fame of Waterfalling had spread far and wide…
Now he followed the Path of Ascension. Initially the road was paved, as he followed city thoroughfares and traversed small bridges. People stared after him but said nothing. He saw the temple then, a large, imposing complex of beautiful white stone. He skirted the temple and soon reached the first incline and there the city stopped and the Path proper began.
It was cut into the very rock, and it rose steeply, at a sharp incline. Small pebbles rolled underfoot. The climb was slow and hard but there were places to stop and rest along the way, small alcoves cut into the rock. Gorel did not hurry. He enjoyed the climb, the cooler air up there, and when he turned he could look down on Waterfalling and far beyond, across the plains and to the deadlands where, far away, loomed the Black Tor.
He thought of Kettle, then. There wasn’t a day gone past when he didn’t think about Kettle.
As he climbed he saw almost no people. One he passed, and he realised with some surprise it was the woman he had seen earlier. She was resting in one of the alcoves, with that same happy, vacant look on her face. She didn’t seem to see him, and he walked on, discomfited.
The call…no.
The Call.
He could hear it more clearly now. And as the Path wound its way up, and up, and up, he could hear the thunder of the waterfall, and feel the spray of its roar on his face, and his eyes were dazzled by an explosion of rainbows; Come, come! said the Call but it was faint, still; it was not meant for him but for another. Gorel of Goliris traversed the Path of Ascension until he reached, at last, the Plateau of Tarsh, where the Nirian river flows until it reaches the escarpment.
He saw it all, now. He stood in that place called the Drop. The river moved almost sluggishly as it neared the edge. A series of rocks slowed down the flow of water, and it tumbled over the edge almost reluctantly. When it did, it became a great thundering waterfall. Way down below, he could see the mist rising out of the impact of the water into the Sacred Pool.
He stood there for a long time.
When the woman at last reached the Drop she seemed as beatific as before. Though her journey must have been physically exhausting for her, nevertheless there was no change in her demeanour. For a long moment she merely stood there, smiling that vacant, enigmatic smile. She seemed indifferent to or unaware of Gorel’s presence. Then she took one step, and another, until Gorel felt compelled to shout a warning: for she was headed straight for the sheer drop beyond which was the fall. But the woman ignored him as though he weren’t there, and when he went to stop her she shrugged him away, not angrily but the way one would shrug off a mild irritant.
Come … Come!
For one moment the Call was so clear that it overwhelmed Gorel’s senses. Too late, he saw the woman step to the edge of the rocks. Then she took one step more—and, just like that, she was gone.
He crawled to the edge and peered over. He saw her fall. She fell without grace through the air until the waterfall claimed her, the water engulfing her unto itself, then she was gone from sight.
Gorel of Goliris remained at the Drop for a long while more, and his thoughts were troubled. He was not idle, though. When he was done, he wended his way down the Path and returned to the inn, where his two companions waited. It was night, by then. The stars shone down cold and indifferent, and the air was filled with the stench of the Black Kiss. He realised he had not needed a hit since they got to the city. It was all about them, as natural and as plentiful as water.
And he realised they were all, here, as much in slavery to the Kiss as he was.
When the city began, when the first jumper jumped, that no one knew. The city grew, and the god with it. The city prospered, and the god with it. They fed on each other.
And now someone wanted the god dead.
When he had returned, Mauser and Devlin were ready. There was no need for speech. All three men were armed.
They stepped out lightly; and only a fleeting egret saw them pass into the night.
12.
Later, when he was running, with Devlin lying on the canal bank with half his brains blown out and Mauser on his hands and knees trying to crawl away from the Speakers-to-Water as they closed in on him, there was no one to see him then, too. The good people of Waterfalling knew when to close their doors and when to draw the blinds on their windows, and the whole city lay silent and slumbering in the moonlight.
The job was botched from the very beginning. The very air of the city had whispered that this was all folly.
Nevertheless, they went in.
Over the bridge, into the temple complex.
Where the waft of incense and the chanting of priests could be heard…
Where ducks and geese congregated in the canals where the dead men lay.
Deep into the temple, searching for the inner sanctum…
A novice surprised them, innocently watering lilies, and Mauser shot her, the blast echoing loudly over the islet…
Devlin shot two further novices as they emerged, blinking off sleep, to see what was happening…
The blue ikon was there just as Mauser said it would be.
A small and amorphous representation of a vaguely human shape that could have been a waterfall.
The three men made for the idol…
The Speakers-to-Water emerged then. The priests of the God of the Waterfall. Dressed in flowing white robes, with water flowers in their hair. Their eyes were vacant and they moved in perfect unison. In their hands they held swords of ice.
Their lips moved as one. They said: “You shall not steal.”
“Screw that,” Devlin said, and he began firing. Blades of ice moved in perfect harmony, deflecting shots. Devlin screamed in rage and snatched the shotgun from his back and fired, once, twice, until he hit one of the Speakers in the guts. The Speaker collapsed to the ground, but his lips still moved, and with his fellow Speakers he said, “You shall not steal!”
Gorel and Mauser spread out, and it was then that he saw the corpses. They emerged out of the water, out of the dank canal. One at first, and then another, and another. Humans, Ebong, two Merlangai, an Avian shivering water off her feathers. The perfectly preserved bodies in the water. Now their eyes opened and a single force animated them, and they reached into the canal and pulled out blade-sharp staffs of ice. They advanced on the three men.
“You bring swords?” Devlin screamed. “What good are damn swords against guns?”
Gorel fired. He fired cleanly, methodically, without emotion. It was a scientific sort of extermination, a matter of numbers, not blood. The creatures in the water must have been living once, but they lived no longer, and the corpses were only that. He shot not to kill but to destroy, inflicting damage on skulls and knee-caps and finger bones, shooting to disable, if possible to annihilate. He was good at what he did. He had to be, to have survived this long. Perhaps he wasn’t the best —the World was filled with the stories of legendary gun masters such as Sixgun Smel of the Upper Kidron, or Yi-Sheng the Unbeatable, who killed the sea serpent, Og, or the wizard, Der Fliegenmelker, who collected the heads of his enemies and whose mound of skulls was said to be taller than a mountain by the time of his disappearance—but these were just that, legends, stories told around the camp-fire in hushed voices. They were of some distant past, and Gorel was of the present. As far as he was concerned, he was the best, and would remain so until someone finally managed to shoot him down, if they ever did. He wouldn’t have given them odds.
The men kept pulling more guns out of the bags they’d brought with them. But more and more of the bodies came, and their swords of ice flashed cold in the moonlight, and Devlin cried out when one just missed slicing off his arm, and Gorel was pushed back, back as they came, and Mauser fired with a calm intensity on his face, like a card-player calculating the odds of his hand.
There was so very little blood. The things that climbed out of the water had been in there too long, Gorel thought. What ran in their veins, if it ran at all, was a sort of amethyst liquid, and as it left their bodies it congealed and tried to slither back into the canal.
“We can’t hold them forever!” Mauser shouted. All the while the Speakers-to-Water were chanting, their lips moving in unison, the canal dwellers between them and the three shooters.
“Cover me!” Gorel shouted, then he was running, bodies blasted on either side of him as Devlin and Mauser fired. Gorel slid in the purple ichor and his forward momentum pushed him along, until he bounced off an Ebong and was through. He came right up to the Speakers in one fluid motion and with his two guns drawn. For a moment he looked into their eyes. What he saw in them it was hard to say.
He pulled both triggers.
—
With the fall of the Speakers the onslaught abruptly ceased. The preserved corpses did not fall but remained standing, motionless and eerie in the moonlight. The three men looked at one another, their ears still ringing with the sound of gun-shots.
Then they moved as one: racing for the prize, their enemies forgotten.
—
Gorel got to it first. He snatched the blue idol a moment before Mauser.
When he turned, Devlin had his guns pointed at the two of them and he was grinning his ugly grin. “It’s about time we settled this,” Devlin said.
Mauser fired but Devlin was quicker and Mauser was thrown back, hurt. The other shot missed Gorel. He had moved behind Mauser and the shot meant for him missed. Devlin’s smile dissipated and Gorel’s smile bloomed and he fired.
Devlin’s body fell back and he lay on the bank of the canal, his skull blown to pieces and his brain leaking slowly into the water.
Gorel was briefly pleased at a job finally brought to conclusion.
“Gorel…” Mauser said. He was still alive. The shot had opened an ugly wound in his stomach and he was trying to hold his intestines in. “Help me…”
Gorel held up the ikon. He said, “How do you destroy it?”
“I don’t…know. He said…”
“Who bought you off, Mauser? Who hired you?”
“Does it…matter…”
“It does to me.”
“It was him! It was that mage from the Black Tor! The one who brought down Falang-Et and killed Tharat…He said you…”
Cold fury rose in Gorel. “Kettle?” he said. “Kettle sent you?”
“Gorel, please…”
The Speakers-to-Water Gorel had shot rose up from the ground then. They looked at Gorel with broken eyes. And all the corpses that had risen from the water turned, as one, and focused their attention on the two men, the one living and the one dying.
Then the Speakers spoke.
They said: “ Gorel of Goliris. ”
Mauser said: “Help me!”
The preserved corpses advanced one step, then another.
“We know you, Gorel of Goliris. Come, now. Come! ”
“Help me! Gorel, Please!”
Gorel ran.
—
He ran without destination in mind, yet the destination had always been there, waiting for him. He was not followed. Few saw him pass. And yet his feet led him inexorably upwards, and the voice in his head grew stronger and stronger until it was like a raging storm, and it said, Come to me…come!
It knew his name. In his hand, the blue idol was still. Gorel’s feet would not obey him. He felt a calmness descend on him then, and his face assumed a beatific aspect. He came to the Path of Ascendance and began to climb it.
It has been many centuries since I had last encountered a man of Goliris… the voice said.
“You know of Goliris?”
His lips moved, but whether sound emerged or not was immaterial. It was night. He was alone on the Path. Behind him, Devlin lay dead, Mauser dying. Another botched job in a long line of such. None of it mattered to Gorel.
Many have heard of, yet none had seen, Goliris… said the voice in his head. You seek it, still?
“Always.”
Yet now you must come to rest, Gorel. Let go of desire, of need. I will be all that you require.
“No!” his lips protested. His legs obeyed the orders of the god. “Tell me. Tell me how to find my home.”
Sooner or later, all things must come to an end, Gorel of Goliris. All empires pass.
“Including yours?”
But the god was not amused by the retort.
Gorel climbed, and climbed, and climbed. The physical effort of the rise meant nothing to him, for now he truly was under the Black Kiss, and every fibre of his being was bliss, and he was happy; as happy as a man could ever be.
Yet still he resisted. Yet still he fought the insidious Black Kiss of the god. And still: his feet led him on, step by inexorable step.
Until he found himself once more standing at the Drop.
The waterfall thundered nearby. Rainbows of moonlight sparkled in the rising cloud of spray.
Come to me, Gorel of Goliris, said the god. Come!
There was no resisting the Call.
And yet he dallied. And it was good, he thought, that he had prepared himself for this eventuality. And he busied himself with the things that he had left there, at the Drop, earlier, for just such an eventuality. And the voice of the god grew mistrustful in his head and it said, What are you doing?
But Gorel did not answer. And the Call of the god grew stronger and more insistent, until there was no resisting it further.
For one fleeting moment, Gorel thought of all the countless lives that had come here before him, had worn the rock smooth with the passage of their feet. Then he, too, took those last few, finite steps, to the edge; and fell to his doom.
13.
What did you do? said the god.
14.
The first impact was the worst. He hit the roaring mass of water on his way down and all his protective clothing couldn’t stop him from feeling the impact. Then the ropes tied to his harness pulled, and he shot upwards then back down and impacted again: but then the bouncing slowed, until he could at last control his descent.
What did you do! roared the god.
The water fell and fell and tried to push him down, down, down into the Sacred Pool, and the rocks beat at him, but Gorel welcomed the pain and used it to his advantage. The Kiss no longer held him. The god’s Call was never meant to last beyond the final Drop, and now it had no more power to hold Gorel in thrall. Slowly, slowly, he released more rope, hoping it would hold, and he lowered himself down the cliff.
“Tell me,” Gorel demanded. “Tell me what you know of Goliris.”
Then join me. Become a part of me! And you will know all that I know.
“No.”
Please, the god said. Please.
How long he journeyed this way he didn’t know. The bottom was a blur far down below. The cliff rose impossibly high overhead. At last he found it. He hit empty air and flailed, then he was through the screen of water and inside a hollow cave, hidden behind the water. He took off the harness and fell to the dry stone floor.
He lay there for some time, breathing heavily.
You have come to kill me! the voice accused. It sounded frightened, now.
“Tell me what I want to know.”
It was a natural cave in the rock, Gorel saw. Once, millennia ago, it had been explored, and the skeletons of humans and Ebong still remained in recesses in the wall.
Then, it had become a temple, of a sort. An altar sat against the far wall, and on it was a crude stone figure. Something living hid in the dark behind it, a creature like a ferret or a water rat. Baleful eyes glared at Gorel from the shadows but he paid them no mind. He held the blue ikon in his hand.
“Tell me,” he said.
I could only show you.
His mind flickered then. It went through countless rapid lives: he saw an Ebong mercenary arrive at the cliffs and look down, curiously, for the first time; an Avian flying overhead, who plunged down towards the water with a glad cry; an expedition of vanished Zul, searching for a weapon, who had come upon the place and fell victim to the Call; water-dwelling Merlangai who swam down the Nirian, a hunting party, until, too late, they too became a part of the god…
He saw the crude village underneath grow and prosper, become a town, then at last a city. The dead resided in the water, their eyes forever open. He saw people drawn from all over to this city, where the Kiss lay like an enchantment over the streets and houses. It was a small price to pay, for happiness, he thought. From time to time some would hear the Call, and climb the Path until they were one with their god. It was a small price to pay.
Do you see? Join me! said the god.
“Show me Goliris.”
Then he saw it. A small figure trudging in from the deadlands, a sorcerer of Goliris, and Gorel knew him, then: it was one of his father’s servants, a minor war-mage with the fleet—just another face in the corridors of the palace, a man who might have once smiled politely at the boy, this future king.
He came, and he dwelled in the city for some time, then he heard the Call and heeded it.
And Gorel saw deep into his heart, for the man was with the god now, and he saw the hatred and the loathing deep within the man’s mind, and he saw that the hatred and loathing were directed inwards, at the traitor’s own self. He saw then the sorcerers of Goliris gathered in a dark room, saw them plot the downfall of the royal family. He saw himself, the boy, taken while his father was murdered, saw his mother cry, but soundlessly, and he saw the empty throne, and cobwebs, and bleached skulls.
“How will I find it again?” he said, demanded, of this ghost.
And only the faint echo came back— You never will …
A great fury took hold of Gorel of Goliris then, and for a time he knew not where he was. Gradually he came back to awareness, and the god’s voice, weak, panicked, demanded, over and over, What did you do? What did you do?
Gorel sat there in the cave, cross-legged, and looked out at the waterfall. But the water, strangely, seemed to grow less fierce. Its flow was easing. The screen of water slowly parted, and the god’s voice cried, What did you do? You are killing me!
But Gorel had done nothing.
Beside him, the small, blue ikon was slowly melting.
The waterfall was dying.
As less and less water fell, Gorel could now look out from the cave, into clear air. At last it was all over and he went to the edge and looked down, and saw the pool, no longer sacred, and the corpses below lying still in the water. He looked up, then, and saw no water, falling.
Behind him, behind the altar, the mindless creature that might have been a ferret or a water rat growled, but Gorel paid it no mind. He sat, cross-legged, on the floor and lit a cigar, and he waited.
15.
The small, delicate shape fluttered in the air before coming to rest inside the cave. It leaned against one wall and crossed its arms and cocked its head and looked at Gorel of Goliris.
“Kettle,” Gorel said.
“Gorel.”
“It was you? You set it up, from the beginning. It was so convenient, how that trader found me, how Mauser just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
“I would have asked you, but you would have turned me down.”
“You lied to me. From the very start, you always lie. ”
A look of pain crossed the Avian’s face. “Gorel, I…”
“You’d tell me you love me?”
“You know how I feel.”
“And yet you’d use me.”
“Isn’t that what love is?”
The Lord of the Black Tor looked at Gorel of Goliris and Gorel of Goliris looked away, so that Kettle would not see his tears.
“What was it all for?”
“I needed a distraction. Something to focus the God of the Waterfall’s attention on. Something crude and obvious, and effective.”
“You used me as bait. ”
“Yes.”
“And all the meanwhile you—”
“My engineers had done their work. We dammed the Nirian. My army dug a new channel for the river.”
“And starved the waterfall.”
“Yes.”
“Clever.”
Kettle shrugged.
“Why?” Gorel said.
“Why?”
“Yes.”
Kettle looked at Gorel of Goliris and his eyes were filled with pain.
“There’s a war coming,” he said. “And an enemy against which even I am helpless. I have been trying to consolidate territories, to prepare…Gorel, I need you. I need you by my side. Help me. Come back with me.”
“Never.”
“Will I ever be able to apologise enough? I love you.”
Gorel did not reply.
After a time, the small and delicate figure of the mage flew away. After a time longer, Gorel put on the harness, pulled on the ropes, and began the long, slow climb down the side of the cliff, and back towards the ground.
16.
The Dark Mage’s army came into the city of Waterfalling at sunrise. They came quietly and with purpose and they were not opposed. The city’s residents looked at them with numb surprise, as though waking from a long and pleasant dream that was now, inexplicably, over. Gorel of Goliris was stopped only once, on his way out of the city. But the people who held him must have received orders from high up, for they let him go, and he rode away from there, to continue his search for vanished Goliris.
High above the city, at the place that was once called the Drop, the Lord of the Black Tor looked down on his conquest, but his attention was elsewhere:
Far away, figures moved, numerous beyond count. They marched like shadows but they were not shadows. They marched in rows. They marched upon the World.
He saw them conquer cities, he saw them burn down temples, bring down gods, for gods and sorcery meant nothing to these soulless things. What they were, he didn’t know. They moved like automata. They were a wizardry of a sort he’d never known. Something ancient, and deadly, and newly awakened.
They came from the desert. They brought with them the smell of burnt cardamoms.
And as they moved, they spoke.
It was a roar, a cry of triumph, and despair.
A single word.
—
Goliris.
⬩ ⬩ ⬩
Cecelia Holland is one of the world’s most highly acclaimed and respected historical novelists, ranked by many alongside other giants in that field such as Mary Renault and Larry McMurtry. Over the span of her thirty-year career, she’s written more than thirty historical novels, including The Firedrake, Rakóssy, Two Ravens, Ghost on the Steppe, The Death of Attila, Hammer for Princes, The King’s Road, Pillar of the Sky, The Lords of Vaumartin, Pacific Street, The Sea Beggars, The Earl, The Kings in Winter, The Belt of Gold, and more than a dozen others. She also wrote the well-known science-fiction novel Floating Worlds, which was nominated for a Locus Award in 1975, and of late has been working on a series of fantasy novels, including The Soul Thief, The Witches’ Kitchen, The Serpent Dreamer, Varanger, The King’s Witch, The High City, Kings of the North, and The Secret Eleanor. Her most recent novel is Dragon Heart.
Here a shipwrecked voyager finds himself in a situation dangerous enough that he might have been better off taking his chances with the raging sea—but a situation in which he must remain if he has any chance to satisfy the thirst for vengeance burning in his heart.
