Kingdom of the Bones

Shedjia knelt on the cold stone, waiting for the touch of night. The western sky was burning, and the dark was coming in, creeping in to fill the empty places, whispering among the flowers of the garden in the hollow places of the palace. The air smelled sweet, and she tasted smoke and the hint of fine incense. Soon. He would be here soon.

The songs of the nightingales fell silent, and the breeze blew cold, and she knew the time was come. The sky went deep with stars, and then the darkness unfolded and he stood there amidst the glorious banks of fading flowers, under the arbor of poisoned vines. Unmoving statues of gods and kings looked down from their places as Utuzan, The Black Flame, took his place on the skin of the world and looked down at her. The Heart of Anatu pulsed with crimson light in his left hand.

Shedjia bowed low, pressing her face to the stone, and she opened her robe and let it fall, so that she was naked before him. “I have awaited you, my lord.”

“You failed me,” he said, and his voice made her tremble. “I sent you to kill a man. Not a devil, not a demigod, but a man. He escaped you, wounded my champion, and withdrew his army from my grasp. Now the king of High Ashem will be alerted, and will gather more forces to his banner. Now more blood will run when I move to take that land from those who possess it.”

“Yes, my lord,” she said. She did not raise her eyes, she did not look at him.

“You think that I will kill you now?” he said. “Is that what you believe?”

“I do not know,” she said. “I welcome it. Whatever punishment must come. I shall welcome it.”

“You will not,” he said. “If the small powers I have granted you are not enough, then I must make you greater than you have been. Rise.”

She stood, unclothed and with her eyes cast downward. On her arms were the scars of her nomadic life, and the marks that looked like painted daggers and would become real if she wished. She wondered if death was coming to her now, and she hoped it was. Shedjia had never loved anyone in her life, but she had chosen to love Utuzan. If he meant to have her life, she wanted him to take it with his own hand.

He gestured, and her robe slid upwards into his grasp, and he drew it around her shoulders. “We shall travel, you and I,” he said. “Tonight we shall cross an empty land to a darkened place that none who live have ever looked upon. I know the world has changed greatly since I was imprisoned, but there is one who will remain, for even death could not still him.”

Shedjia swallowed. “What must I do?”

Utuzan looked away, his face touched by the red glow of the moon as it crept up over the horizon. “My power was not born in Kithara. My mother was from the land of the Usun people, far in the jungles of the south, where the great river is born. There are only the remains of a once-great people there now, but there have always been those who dwelled in the ruins and studied the ancient mysteries, who sought for the great secrets of sorcery, long-forgotten.”

He turned to her. “It was there I was taught to use my powers, to call upon the legacy of my ancestors, to invoke the darkness. Now I am wakened, I feel myself diminished, and my strength recovers but slowly. I will return to the taproot of my strength, and I will seek out the one who instructed me in the dark arts. You will come with me, and do as I command.”

“I will,” she said, and he smiled.

“Go and prepare yourself,” he said. “We shall depart before the moon sets, and travel swiftly. Wrap yourself in a cloak, for the night will be cold. Go.”

o0o

Shedjia clothed herself in her armor and belted on her sword. She drew a muslin cloak over her body and a cowl over her head to cover her braided hair. She returned to the gardens where Utuzan stood as though he had not moved. When she drew close she saw his eyes were shut tightly, and he was speaking softly, shaping words she could not understand. The Heart of Anatu glowed in his hand, and she almost thought she could feel the red light on her skin.

Something moved in the darkness above, blotting out the stars, and she heard something give forth a sound like a scraping of old iron across stone. Something snapped and billowed like riverboat sails in the wind, and then she looked up and saw it coming.

Vast wings swept through the night, and she saw a cruel beak and a reptilian head as red as blood. It had a red-and-black-feathered crest and eyes that glared with hatred for all life. Wind rushed past her as it beat its terrible wings and swooped down to land in the silent garden, claws digging into the manicured soil and soft flowerbeds.

It was a carrion bird, but one more immense than any she had ever seen. She saw the red eyes like hot iron coins in the dark. It hissed and then gave another croaking cry like tearing metal. It smelled of dead flesh and broken bones long-withered in hidden funeral caverns. Shedjia wondered what monstrous forms of life such a flesh-eater could survive upon, for it was big enough to devour a man with a snap of that sickle beak.

“It would seem that some of the great ones still live,” Utuzan said. He stepped close and touched the deep black bed of feathers on the great breast. “Some of the immense and terrible things that were born at the dawn of the world but then slept in secret places until the coming of another age.

“Come,” he said. “He will carry us to where we must go. We shall both be tested, and we may not return.”

He mounted to the broad shoulders between the black wings, and Shedjia took one long moment to meet the red stare of the thing before she climbed up behind him. The death bird croaked its carrion song, and then it screamed into the night and beat the air with its massive wings, dragging itself into the sky. Shedjia clung to the hard-edged feathers and watched as the white palace dropped away beneath them, and then the city itself. They rose until the flooded Nahar was only a silver path below them, reflecting the paling moonlight, like a road leading away into unseen kingdoms.

o0o

They flew south, following the river as it wended across the grasslands of Meru. They passed over herds of wild beasts and the lions that stalked them in the dark, over villages gathered tight around the corrals for their cattle, over the narrow web of trails through the open lands. The night was blazing above them with uncounted stars, and the wind was cold.

The land below changed, and now the river divided into a host of narrow streams that split and meandered and rejoined again, forming a web as the land became jagged with hills and ridges. The grassland gave way to trees and then forest. The earth became wet and sodden, and the trees soared higher and higher over the soil, forming a canopy that hid the ground from sight.

Beyond it all soared the mountains of the darkened southern lands, towering and immutable. Their lower slopes were dark with rainforest, and so only the peaks gleamed silver where the starlight touched the snow, making them seem to float above the land. There was the bright flash of the grand falls that dropped from the heights and plunged into the forest to water the tributaries of the Nahar. In full flood, the cascade roared as they drew closer to it, as though the mountains breathed.

They flew low over the rainforest, hearing the cries and screams of the savage forms that dwelled under the shadow of the trees. This was the old land of sorcerers and shamans, and here and there a ruin or a fallen tower emerged from the fecund green, a sign from a lost age buried beneath the creepers and moss of the dark heartland.

The death bird screamed again, and the forest below fell silent as they spiraled down, dropped into the dark, and the great wings beat to slow them before the carrion eater fell to earth, claws sinking deep in the loamy soil. A mist lay over the earth, and insects cried an ancient chorus.

o0o

Utuzan set foot once more upon the dark, steaming earth of the land of his blood. His mother had come from the faded, ancient kingdoms here, and the time since that day had made the forest even more encompassing, even more dangerous. The air was filled with a miasmic fog, and he heard insects call in the night. Wasps as long as his hand flew by, and snakes and lizards crawled to make way for him. In the shadows he knew darker, fiercer things stalked. The black, saber-fanged lions of the deep jungle, and the flesh-eating apes once worshiped as gods by the ancient races of man.

“Here were the kingdoms of the Dzambe,” he said into the dark. “The most ancient kingdoms of man upon the world. The Dazan Kings, and the Lords of Membe ruled here, even as the fertile lands were swallowed up by the jungles. They were the inheritors of the legacy of the Usun – they who dwelled here before the dawn of human blood. The Usun were a race of witches, and their learning in the arts of magic was greater than any race yet born.”

He walked beneath a moss-covered arch, deadly night flowers turning to follow him as Shedjia walked in his wake. Spiders with bodies the size of skulls watched from their webs above. A serpent with a body as vast as a column crawled past them, a labyrinthine pattern on the deep red skin.

“The Usun were already dwindling when the Omira came to this land and began to conquer it. The race of giants.” Utuzan smiled. “My ancestors. I am the union of those two great bloodlines. The line of the kings of Kithara bore the blood of giants, and that I had from my father. But the blood of the Usun came to me from my mother, and that blood is far, far older.”

He walked beneath another arch, following a road whose stones were buried deep under the soil by ages of growth. He remembered the way, and he had to hope the cavern was still there. In a way he did not even doubt, but in another he was very aware of the millennia that had passed since he had been in this place. If he closed his eyes he could see it as it had been. It had been tumbling into ruin even then, stones crumbling, the jungle creeping in.

They came to a wide stair, the stone buried under loam and dead moss, vines and roots laced through and tearing the masonry apart, but it was still clear enough to ascend, and Shedjia followed him silently as he climbed. It led them toward the face of the cliff, and there before them stood a great door fixed over the mouth of a cavern. The stone was dark with age and damp, the bronze fittings black and crumbling from eons of corrosion. The handle upon the door was in the shape of two entwined serpents, still plain despite the verdigris that covered them.

“Now we shall both face our tests,” he said. “I must pass within and face once more the shade who taught me, who first awakened my power. I must hope he can do so once more.” He looked at Shedjia. “Your test is simpler, and more deadly.”

“What must I do?” she said, looking pale beneath the trees.

He gestured. “You need only open the door.”

o0o

Shedjia looked at the molded serpents that jutted from the ancient portal, and she felt afraid for no cause save that the task was too simple, and so there must be something hidden. Something unseen and dangerous. She looked up at him, his pale face immobile, and she felt again the great upsurge of devotion that had been born into her the first time she had gazed upon him. She had known, in that moment, that her fate would be tied to him.

Now he gave her a seemingly trivial task, and yet she knew by his expression that it was more than that. She bowed her head and swallowed past a dry, aching throat. Whatever was asked, even death, she would give it. She swore that to herself, as she had sworn it a hundred times in the faceless nights. She curled and flexed her fingers, and then she stepped forward.

The serpents were almost as tall as she, and she reached out and touched them, feeling the corrosion flake away beneath her fingers, the heavy, warm metal beneath. The smallest details of scale and skin had been worked into them, and they felt almost like real snakes in her grasp as she set her shoulders and pulled with all her strength.

They shifted in her hands, and she thought the doors were opening, but then the serpents themselves moved as though alive. She was not truly surprised, and it seemed only right that they move, their iron-hard muscles under her fingers, scales sliding as they lowered and coiled around her arms, around her body, and then she felt their cold mouths as they each sank fangs into her neck, one on each side.

Fire poured into her veins, and though she braced for the pain, it was more than she could hold at bay. She screamed as she never had in her life, and she felt the strength drain from her body as though it flowed out like blood. Her eyes burned, and she felt her breath go heavy and cold, locked inside her chest.

The serpents uncoiled, releasing her, and she fell to the moss-covered stone, gasping, trying to breathe through a throat that felt made of knives. She tried to move and twisted feebly on the ground, and the pain went on and on, unending, a torrent she felt would destroy her inside, hollow her like a dead tree.

The vast doors opened, swinging with slow majesty. She watched, unable to move, as they opened wide to reveal the portal beyond – the path into the cavern that led beneath the ancient cliff. A place that had been secret and sealed for three thousand years.

Utuzan bent over her, looked down into her eyes, and she wanted to cry out to him, but the pain was beyond screams now, was something too great to be given voice. It was all she could do to breathe, in and then out, slow and agonizing.

“You will travel out of yourself. Through space and time, into worlds you never imagined. It will seem as though an age of the world has passed with every breath.” He touched her face. “I know because I once lay as you do. I felt the pain as you do. It is the price for entry here, and it will change you. You may not survive it, but if you do, then you will have become more than you have been. It is not a punishment, it is a trial, and I hope that you endure it. I do hope.”

He stood and left her then, walking into the darkness, and she would have called out to him not to leave her, but she knew it would avail her nothing, even if she could have made a sound. Her blood was a river of swords, and she felt the pulse of it as her heart drove it tortuously through her veins. Her vision faded, and she looked up beyond the towering trees, and seemed to fall upward into the star-lanced night.

o0o

Utuzan left her behind, his skin prickling at the memory of that night, aeons gone, when he had lain there as she did. His mother had been with him, had built a fire and sat beside him through the long night, and though he had not been able to hear her voice or feel her hands, she had been there beside him through his trial. Shedjia would have to come through her own test alone. She would be strong enough, or she would break. He could not help or hinder her.

Before him now was the cavern he remembered, and he passed within, under the looming roof, and into shadows that had never known the sun. The air that breathed forth from the depths was scented with many things. He smelled blood and copper and ashes, death and salt and water all together. Here was a place where the world below touched the world above. Here was a place where mortal eyes might look beyond the threshold of death.

He followed the path downward he knew so well. He had lived here for a year and a day, studying secrets under the most demanding teacher he had ever had. A man now long since dead, but to such a man, death was not a barrier insurmountable.

Utuzan could see in the darkness, and as he descended the walls began to shine with a ghostly blue radiance, revealing the smooth stone painted with ancient signs and markings, shapes of men and of beasts, of giants and serpents, men as tall as trees. On the vaulted roof above were painted glowing maps of the stars as they had shone upon a vanished world, and the floor of the cavern was heaped with crumbling bones.

The remnants of death crushed underfoot as he went deeper into the cave, until he came at last to the final cavern. It was small and unadorned, only scratches on the walls to mark passing ages, and at the center was a black pool that reflected no light. He looked at the black waters and felt uneasy, for here was the doorway between life and death, and though he knew the secrets of many things, still Utuzan was mortal, and still feared the cold hand of death.

He stood silent, and then he lifted the glowing stone in his hand and called out a name. It was a name in a secret language no man had spoken in aeons, and it was a poisoned speech. Even to utter it was to invite the fierce venom of it into the body, and to all who heard it. Utuzan had long ago been tested by the venom of the guardian serpents, and so he felt the burning of the word, but it could not harm him.

The black water rippled, and there was a low moaning that echoed through the dark caverns, shaking the bones heaped upon the floor. Utuzan watched as the waters moved and coiled, and then a shade rose from the deeps, insubstantial, as though it were made from black smoke. Like a wraith it towered above him, featureless save for a pair of glowing blue eyes.

“So long it has been,” spoke the shade. “I have almost forgotten your face, and your name, and yet even now, after long ages, I know you. Utuzan, the ill-favored prince.”

Utuzan tasted the envenomed words on the air, and he answered in the same ancient tongue. “You have not grown more kind in the ages since I was your student. Well do I remember your lessons, and I learned them all. Now I come to you again.”

The shade made a bitter sound. “And what could you offer me now? It was your mother who interceded in the ancient days. She saw to it you were educated in all the deep secrets and the dark magics. Now she is gone, and you have but one thing to give which I would take from you.”

“I need your wisdom, ancient one,” Utuzan said. “Tell me your price.”

“All,” the shadow said, and reared up until it was a vast darkness that stretched from wall to wall, eyes like shards of blue fire. It reached down a smoking hand and fastened insubstantial talons on Utuzan, and he felt a coldness driven down inside him like a dagger made of ice.

He cried out and fell back, clawing at the hand that was not a hand, feeling his strength beginning to ebb. The shadow’s eyes blazed down at him, and he felt the endless hunger and fury of his old master, now twisted by thousands of years beyond the surface of death. At last, the endless darkness and silence had driven even a ghost into madness.

“I will pour myself into your living body.” The envenomed words seared against his skin. “I will walk again beneath the endless stars, and you shall be left here to drift in the hollow dark. I will take your life and feast upon it until I am filled, and then I shall devour all else I wish. I will eat the light and life of kingdom upon kingdom, and none exist who may stand against me.”

Utuzan thrust the red Heart of Anatu up between them, and the light from it blazed and forced the wraith back. He gasped for breath and spoke a bitter invocation that shook the chamber and echoed like a shout of thunder.

The great shadow laughed then, rising up larger than before. “You think to use your spells on me? I taught you all you know of the deep mysteries. I told you of the ten thousand names of the dead. I wrote the signs for the defense against the Outsiders so you might memorize them. From my lips you first heard the chants of war and pain and the chaining of the elements. You cannot use magic to contend with me.”

Utuzan shook himself, feeling weakness creep in the corners of his mind like spiders. “Nor can you,” he said, his voice heavy with poisoned words. “You are a hollow shell, empty of power. You would feed on the world to fill your dead veins with light, and yet you cannot call upon the powers you once commanded. Your power is fled.”

“The dead will answer when I call!” the shadow roared. “I know the names of the fallen gods and the commands to summon forth those who wait outside the fire of the world. I will speak and they will obey me, I will have armies of the night, and none shall stop me!”

It bent upon him, fingers stretched forth into claws, enveloping him in cold darkness. Utuzan spoke another ancient word, but this was a word of life, and green vines raced up the crumbling walls before they were destroyed in an instant. The sudden flow of bright power caused the shade to recoil, and Utuzan drew his black sword and thrust it screaming into the heart of the enervating shadow.

o0o

Shedjia woke, feeling as though she had not moved for a thousand years. Indeed, it seemed she had lived a hundred lives, seen worlds born and die. She moved, feeling pain in her body, as though every joint and skein were scarred and filled with broken glass. The sky was still dark, though it was beginning to pale, and she felt the dawn would come soon, though this place would never be truly free of the night.

Utuzan stood over her, a shadow against the forest. His eyes were hollow and he seemed weary, his face lined as though by pain or sorrow. When he saw her move, he smiled for the first time she had ever seen. “You have passed through,” he said. “Now you are on the far side of pain, the far shore of fear. Now you are with me.”

She rose, shaking and feeling as though she had overcome a fever. “Did you gain what you came for?” she said, her voice dry and weak.

“In one way,” he said. “I learned that my time is dead and gone, and I must find my strength in this new one.” He touched the hilt of his sword, his fingers flinching back as though it stung him. “I have gained a new weapon, and yet it may be too terrible to wield.” He shook his head. “Come, we will return to Shendim before the sun rises. I am weary, as are you.” He held out his hand, and Shedjia trembled as she took it in her own.