GOD KILLERS

A Short Novel

I thought it was about time I serialized my first published novel on here. ‘God Killers’ was an extremely well-received book, selling around 6,000 copies and going back for a second printing. It was born out of an idea I had conceived when I was around 12 years old - a jewel called the ‘Wayfarer’s gem’ that contained corrupting powers - but it grew massively from the first concept into something far more epic and unpredictable.

There was once a cold and empty place.

Lonely civilisations lived beneath blind stars.

Stranded sailors died on desolate rocks, their ships

splintered upon the hostile shores of faraway lands.

The Weeping God loved Its children, despairing

that they did not know one another, living alone

as they did in such emptiness.

So it spun for them a great web, casting it out over

the stars, so that It’s children would never

again know loneliness.

And we, the children, have walked those gossamer

trails that bind the stars, and we are not afraid,

for we know we are not alone.

And we know we are loved.

The Weeping God has forged for us a way home.

A bridge across the darkness.

Sailors need never die alone on cruel shores again.

He has bound us all in the infinite web that they who

know of it have come to call:

“KIAZMUS!”

Anon. 1700BC.

BOOK ONE

MACHIVARIUS POINT

PROLOGUE

Brec, self-lashed to a half empty wine barrel, watched as ragged golden sails pitched, dipped out of view once more, and were finally gone altogether.

The sea was brutal. He hated the chill and wet of it. One long campaign had taken him across the endless peat bogs of Kos Moor and Dunn Fell, themselves rutted like earthen oceans. There perpetual rainfall had challenged the mercenary’s sanity, but the sea’s waters were far crueller than rain could ever be.

He felt he should be at home upon the sea - in some obscure way it reached out to him. Yet it engendered a troubling sense of loss, so he granted it only hatred.

That night was spent in churning isolated darkness. Distant calls from other survivors occasionally punctuated the monotony. In time they waned, became ghostly delusional echoes, and eventually ceased altogether.

Now the sun bobbed at the zenith of its low winter arc, suggesting warmth, but offering up none. The abrasive hemp lashing of the inadequate raft chaffed swollen white fingers. His body dangled obsolete beneath the waves, the moronic rhythm of which - peak after trough after peak - lulled Brec into a stupor.

His mind lurched, drunk on fractured memories.

A tribe of Mercenaries called the Umbriani chanced upon the Village at the foot of Wealdenhead Tor. Breeden, a chaotic huddle along the banks of the river Florth, had been a yolk to Brec, though it was all he had ever known. The Wulf-shanked mercenary Chieftain noticed Brec’s stature, the steady gaze of his cool green eyes. He gruffly compelled the boy to undertake a succession of tasks - completed with a belligerent ease. An understanding was reached with his parents. Wine was consumed. Tears shed.

The following morning the Umbriani were back on the march, their numbers swollen by one. Brec watched sunlight strike the summit of Wealdenhead Tor, bathing it in flame as he left.

Clinging to his makeshift raft, he could not recall having thought about his parents a moment beyond that day.

Gingerly he opened salt-stung eyes, blinking against the light, but there remained nothing but sea and sky. No lonely jutting spur of a rock, or loom of distant islands. Not even the sharp coasting outline, the fluting caw of a Ghull.

The cold seemed to burn now, engulfing him in waves of feverish heat that suggested other memories.

Back in the Suusa Desert. Back in that breath robbing swelter.

Back in the Patthylyon campaign, fighting for his life.

Cut off from the bulk of the Umbriani, he had bulwarked himself and his men in a fissure of scorched earth. For five fraught days they kept the red-eyed Maasoom at bay, but were, themselves, trapped. A thick, craggy wall was painstakingly erected, rough steps hewn, and on the sixth day they broke free of the defile and rejoined the relieved mercenaries – finally shifting the balance to their advantage.

That evening they gorged themselves on triple rations, accompanied by the severed heads of two hundred braves mounted on an arc of wooden staves.

Brec could no longer distinguish day from night.

Vaguely he hoped a Trillon, or some other oceanic predator, might take him - honour him with one last battle. The kind of heroic ideal for death he had been raised to approve of.

It would have been an ill-made match.

The thuggish slap, the monotonous swell and retreat of waves, continued to lull and confuse his senses. The inescapable cold awoke another memory in which he shuddered, half buried under dank, snow-beaten bracken.

The Umbriani had been decimated.

Brec, a handful of others – the remnants of three hundred - had escaped into the largely uncharted gloom of the Tollos Forest. There a huge Kaddn had chanced upon his hiding place. It had reared, startled, falling on him like a landslide, its serrated tusks gouging chunks out of him, its four red eyes wide, wild.

It took him months to recover his strength - he remained terrifyingly scarred - but he had crafted a fine cloak out of that Kaddn’s thick white-furred hide, and for many years it contributed greatly to his legend.

(He imagined the bedraggled thing now, spiralling down into unknowable depths - a belated resting-place. The waterlogged skin had threatened to drag him with it, but he had managed to cut it free.

No other man would claim it as a trophy at least, and he contented himself with that.)

Time had seen his reputation grow, precede him – he almost smiled at the recollection. He had become a famed mercenary, sometime bodyguard, and, if work was scarce, assassin. He balked at the thought of this last, preferring open notoriety - the fearful appraisals the Kaddn-skin mantle drew - to fugitive deeds.

It was also true that in near global travels Brec had seldom looked far for a soft bed, a willing fuck. His large cock (though not the legend it was purported to be) and surprising tenderness perpetuated an entirely different fame. Yet such trysts had been little more than sport, or relief. He felt nothing for the women who writhed in his rugged embrace, vainly hoping to add his name to their own, his legend to their meagre histories. There was a gap within him - he knew it, but not why - and though he couldn’t remember it, he knew that the gap bore a name.

Darkness subsided, giving way to a throbbing golden-red beyond his eyelids.

Brec, half-open mouth invaded by swirling tumultuous brine, groped his way urgently toward wakefulness. Supporting himself upon shaky elbows, he hauled in a long, shuddering breath. Puked, violently, in the shallow seawater, numb fingers curling in sand.

And yet - land!

He cut himself free of the barrel, made his way up the beach on unsteady legs he felt did not belong to him.

The sky was cloudless. Only a faint bite in the wind suggested winter. He was, he supposed, on one of the many volcanic islands that huddled conspiratorially a days sailing west of Corthallia. The nearest dry land beyond these was in Hulffennland, where they had been bound, a month’s journey northward. He would build a raft - there was plenty of vine and wood - and head back to the Isthmus of Corthallia. It should take no more than three days, he calculated.

By that evening he had located a source of fresh water and butchered a fat and fearless Plattofowl he found foraging in scrub. He built a small fire and was soon dining on the tough, rich meat of the flightless bird. The stars glittered above and upon the tranquil mirror of the sea, and the greasy carcass of the Plattofowl filled the air with a sweet oily scent.

The following morning he awoke feeling much more akin to his usual self. It was in sitting up, opening his eyes, that he discovered how wrong that initial perception had been:

Where once the sea swelled, there now stretched an ocean of ochre sand. Behind him the landscape had also inexplicably altered. The verdant undergrowth, giant Galmeetha Palms of the previous day had been transplanted with a wall - more impressive in scale than any other he had born witness to. But most troubling of all - to his mind at least – was his new nakedness. He was weapon-less.

Brec had always been decisive, capable of making the most of unusual, or unexpected situations. Unable to rationalise his disconcerting circumstances, he chose to accept them. He walked alongside the featureless construction in the cool of its ominous shadow, waiting for reason to makes itself clear. Either he had stumbled there delirious in the night, or he still dangled from a barrel, close to death in the open sea.

Day wore on. Soon a too-high and exacting sun beat unmercifully down upon his broad umber shoulders. He could take that. His skin had almost turned to leather over many years of stoic service and often self-induced hardship. Nevertheless, by midday the magnitude of his situation was unsettling him, as there had been no window, door, or opening of any kind within the inscrutable expanse of the wall. Bitterly he surmised that had he somehow walked there during the night then it must have been from the other direction – half a day’s walk had not returned him to the sea after all. At best, he could hope to be back at the sea’s edge by nightfall. At worst, the dawn should see him there. With this in mind, and armed with his dogged resolve, Brec turned around and retraced his route with scarcely a break in pace.

There had been cause for wonder in his life, Brec recalled, tracing the immense curve into the shimmering distance with his eyes. He had once hunted alongside the dusky-skinned Ostrider-men who had two toes on each foot and ran like the Patthylyon-wind. They had laughed as he tried to keep pace with his huge, unwieldy frame. But they had also grown to respect him when, at the end of each day, he arrived - often hours later - having tracked them through the heat and dust.

Another occasion he had discovered a fellow Umbriani warrior; an Ottwhan outcast named Farro, half dead in the Kythruu Forest having been brutalised by some unknown assailant. Brec stood vigil by Farro’s side that night, waiting for his Manna to ascend into the Ottwhan After-Where. Yet in the morning he watched, awed, as Farro threw back his cloak and stood, whole again in his bloodied rags.

Two nights later he witnessed another spectacle: Awoken by howls, Brec discovered that Farro had grown a whole shin-length in height. His nails had blackened, thickened and curved into claws, and he turned his bright, sorrowful eyes on Brec, bayed like a wounded Hund, and bounded off into the pitch weave of the night forest.

But the wall was something else entirely.

All through the cool night he marched, and yet, in the broad morning shadow of the wall, he found himself still no closer to either sea or sign of life.

Then the last wonder Brec would ever witness occurred:

Fatigued, he had sought to rest himself against the wall to consider his predicament, and in doing so discovered there was nothing substantial there. He simply fell through it, landing not on sand, but on soft, deep grass peppered with a bright efflorescence of tiny meadow flora. He could not help but laugh, as for some reason he had not once thought to touch the wall in his long night’s journey - a subtle etherwork, no doubt!

Reaching into the hide satchel at his hip, he found his gilt butterwine horn and removed the finely crafted gold and leather bung. He raised the vessel up to his parched lips and, grateful, took a deep slug of the smooth liquor. He closed his eyes, savouring rich tannins, berry and pepper flavours exploding across an expert palate. He felt amazing. Opening his eyes again he glanced down, smiling as he replaced the ornate lid of the drinking horn. It was with a shock that he realised his hands were not his own.

Casting the vessel aside Brec sprang quickly to his feet, gawping at the utterly alien, hauntingly familiar clothing he found himself wearing. It was not only the garments that were strange to him; it was his whole self; body and mind. He took out the small oval mirror, which he somehow knew was nestling amongst other trinkets in the hip satchel, and gazed into it. It was a relief that at least the face that looked back, though less broad, was recognizably his own. The same cold green eyes still blazed beneath a strong, straight brow. But the wild golden mane was gone, shorn to the skin, little more than a shadow. The nose swept unbroken and equine, and he wore a short, sculpted chin-beard and fine silver loops through both ears. Most striking of all was the thin scar that crossed his forehead in a diagonal line, cutting through his left brow, reversing back on itself to slice through his lips, finally terminating right of his chin. He touched it gently, wondering how he had received such a wound. Why he could not remember it.

He was glad to discover a long slender blade sheathed in an elegant scabbard at his left hip. The tough black leather jerkin and leggings were of exceptional quality, and his right arm was sheathed in remarkably crafted silver plate armour that appeared to mimic the working of his muscles and danced with glowing cyan slithers - alchemical flares from precious inlaid minerals.

“Shit,” he whispered. “I forgot. Again.”