TWENTY

ENEMY

Neythan awoke before a wide and silent coastline; the ocean, as calm as a pond, glowing from beneath its waters as though its depths had somehow swallowed the sun. For a while he just stared at it, entranced by the strange and preternatural hue, the luminous tint of the water, the seemingly immeasurable breadth of the coast, gleaming beneath the darker yet cloudless firmament above like an unending vat of molten lava. From here, the shoreline was only just in view, obscured by the craggy edge of a chalkstone cliff overlooking the seabed far below. He scanned the beach, gazing at the eerily even line between the sand and water, as smooth and straight as if a builder had set it, and running almost perfectly parallel to the sunless grey expanse overhead. Maybe ten or fifteen miles out from the shore, the beginnings of a peninsula rode the horizon to his right, shimmering atop the still shining waters like some kind of mirage as it curved in from a hidden bay too small and distant to be seen.

“Beautiful, isn’t it.”

Neythan flinched, startled by the sudden voice. But when he tried to turn in search of its owner he realised he couldn’t move.

“Not for everyone though, of course,” the voice continued smoothly – masculine, feminine, Neythan wasn’t sure. He was too busy trying not to panic, fighting down the terror of the abrupt paralysis that seemed to have overcome his limbs, shoulders and neck. He tried to focus on the shore to calm his breathing – the way the strange luminous sea was just sitting there, waveless and immobile, like an unending breadth of sunnily glowing ice – but he couldn’t. He kept blinking, his eyes smarting from the warm salty air as it wafted in on a silent breeze from the still neon horizon. “It’s the reversal, more than anything, that disturbs people,” the voice was saying. “The light coming from beneath, instead of above. It takes some getting used to for most. But I’ve always liked it this way; I suppose you could say I’ve never been one for convention.”

“What is this place?” Neythan managed, and tried to move again – an arm, his fingers, anything – but to no avail. Only his lips and eyes seemed able to move.

“You don’t like it? I thought it a view you might appreciate, breaker of laws and covenants that you are. Think of it as a place between places. Like steam, or vapour: neither water nor air, neither here nor there, just somewhere in between.”

As strange and arresting as the sea was the sky above it – grey and grim and yet mostly clear. Neythan could see a few thin scuds of cloud passing low along the horizon, grazing the peninsula like far away ships in the otherwise featureless, gaping void. Neythan could feel his breath faltering, jumping in his chest as he tried to comprehend the view.

“You don’t understand,” the voice said. “Of course, you don’t. Forgive me. I am not always the best teacher, and I did not expect to be explaining it to you. You have been here before, after all.”

“I have?”

“Yes, Neythan. You have.”

The use of his name jolted him, interrupting his attempts to calm himself and gain control. He glanced again at the glowing sea beneath, trying to manage his breathing, but there was nothing about these alien surroundings that was in any way familiar. “I have never been here before,” he answered. “I don’t even know where here is.”

“Where, yes… always the question isn’t it. Although I often wonder if those who ask know what they mean, and if they don’t, how they expect to learn an answer. Is ‘where’ a place, for example, or perhaps just a state of mind, or even a time? And can this ‘where’ even be a thing anyone other than the questioner himself has been to, or ever could go to? How to confer a man’s history onto another, after all; have him see and feel all that the other has, and do so with the same mind, so that their ‘where,’ when they come to it, might be one and the same?”

Neythan blinked, confused. He was starting to feel ill, and his mind, somehow being lulled by the strange fluorescent waters and dim bruised sky, was beginning to feel foggy, his thoughts squirming frustratingly from his grasp like scummy bait fish. “This is some kind of dream,” he said, speaking more to himself than the voice at his shoulder. “This is happening within my own mind.”

“Or mine. Or perhaps even some other’s. Does it really matter? The point is, how can you expect to tell. Consider the ant, Neythan. Do you suppose it knows what land it is in? What city?”

But Neythan was barely listening now. He could feel the panic beginning to rise within him as he glanced at his wrists. There were no bindings there, nothing physically holding him in place, and yet his limbs, deadened by some inexplicable apathy he just couldn’t shift, simply wouldn’t move.

“Exactly,” the voice said, taking his silence as assent. “Of course it doesn’t. It is only an ant. It will have its own understanding, limited though it may be, of ‘where’ it is. But we could never call that understanding the truth, could we?”

“I don’t know,” Neythan said. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course, you don’t,” the voice seemed almost melancholic, disappointed even. “You’re just a man, after all. Truth, to you, is as a continent to an ant. So, tell me, Neythan, how should a man speak to an ant of where that little creature is? How should I speak to you of it?”

Neythan had no answer. He could feel the bizarre ethereal world around him, or perhaps even his perception of it, beginning to bend, filling with a sudden and puzzling menace. And now it seemed as though the horizon, endless as it was, was somehow widening further, stretching out into an endless abyss and leaning toward him like the closing maw of some immeasurable and malevolent throat.

“What do you want with me?” Neythan managed. “Who are you?”

“Ah, but I have had so many names, Neythan. And for centuries after you are buried and gone, I will have many more. But these things are far from simple to explain, at least between you and I, and they are not as important as you might think.”

“You’re going to kill me?”

The voice laughed. “You think I’d go to all this trouble for that?”

“Then why can’t I move? Why am I here?”

“To correct an error, help you see more clearly, to find your path.”

“My path?”

“You wish to oppose me, prevent what is coming. But only because you have been misinformed. Deceived.”

“So, it is you… You are the one the Watcher spoke of, the darkness that comes. You are to destroy the world.”

“Please. Nothing so grand as that. Change it perhaps, yes. But for the better.”

“By destroying lives.”

“Perhaps. Why not? Did not your precious Brotherhood abide by this same reasoning? Sometimes lives must be taken, but for a purpose, a greater good. You have killed by this same law yourself, Neythan. We are alike, you and I.”

“No. We are not.”

“No? Why not?”

Neythan recalled the ghostly shadowy figure that had snatched him from the bedchamber he’d been standing in mere moments ago, and then the blind elder who’d attacked him back in Ilysia weeks before. Even now he could feel the nearness of her, her blade in his hand, pinning him to the temple floor as she bore down on him like some grisly avatar of the undead. “You… you are evil.”

“Evil?” The voice almost spat the word. Neythan could hear the chilly amused derision smoking off its tone. “You believe there is such a thing?”

“I’ve seen such a thing. I know there is.”

“Really? And were the soldiers you killed in Qadesh evil, when you were pursuing Arianna through the city on the night of the Sharíf’s wedding? They were merely men doing their duty, nobly following the orders given to them to protect the people and the city they serve. Or how about the boy you murdered when rescuing the Súnamite, Filani, from her captors? Little more than a child, barely older than you are now. And what of the men in Godswell all those moons ago when you discovered your murdered friend, Yannick? Were they evil too, for coming upon you in a room filled with blood, and Yannick on the chair with his throat open? But then perhaps you will speak of how you refrained from killing them, leaving one with a cracked skull and the other to lose his arm. They are both beggars now, you know. Just a slower kind of death.”

“No… That was different. It wasn’t like that. You’re twisting things.”

“Am I? Or have you? Do you think you are the first, Neythan? Do you imagine yourself to be special? The hero of some kind of story or song? And should that make you a judge, able to decide between right and wrong, good and bad, pure and evil; all so you can render sentence with your sword? I told you, we are alike, you and I. But you will refuse to see it. You will refuse to see the truth, as all your kind do. You will choose instead to think your cause greater than others, to imagine you possess the right to live above the very law you have set for all else, all so you can call others evil and worthy of death and in so doing think yourself, the bringer of it, to be some kind of saviour – a hero in a story… No, Neythan. These are childish thoughts. You are not the first. You are not special. You are telling yourself the same tale every ruler and warmonger has told from the beginning of time until now, and yet you do not see it. Just as Sharíf Karel did not see it…”

The voice sighed and paused. Out on the sea the beginnings of the first waves seemed to be showing – slow and shallow, and as gentle as the voice which eventually resumed.

“In many ways, you remind me of him, you know,” it said. “You remind me of the things he too once told himself when he began this precious Sovereignty you men so adore: a story in his thoughts that allowed him to do terrible things, just like you. I helped him, you see. Karel. Helped him to conquer the lands he overcame, taught him to find the resources that would enable him to do so, until, when he decided I’d shown him enough, he betrayed me. Stole from me what was rightfully mine.”

“You? You helped Karel to his conquests?”

“And his sons… Oh, you are surprised? Perhaps you thought it was the virtue of their cause that allowed them to succeed?” Another wry derisive laugh. “No, Neythan. It was me.

“How do you suppose the great Karel, and then his sons, overcame the armies of so many lands greater than their own? How was little Sumeria able to colonise the vast territories of Eram, Calapaar, Hardeny and Harán? By might, hmm? So strong and courageous were they? Or it was by numbers perhaps; when Calapaar alone had more men at their disposal than almost all the other four lands combined… No, Neythan. I will tell you the truth, as the Watcher has failed to. That Karel became king of kings was by the hand of a smith. Yes, a mere smith. Not so glorious a notion, I know. They will write no songs of a lowly smith. Tell no tales of him. And yet he it was who learned how to cast steel. A metal stronger than any other of the time, and that remains so to this day. Harder than bronze, able to be set in a longer blade. Before then a sword was barely more than a dagger, and a bad one at that. By this smith’s hand, Karel invented a better blade, and then forged them by the thousands and had the armour of his men shaped from the same metal, claiming an advantage his enemies did not possess and were never able to overcome. Karel had fewer men, but better means, and by those means he took possession of more territory than any other man has before or since. All because of a clever metalworker…

“Understanding, you see, Neythan. Knowledge. Ingenuity. The mind to imagine a thing, create what is yet to be. This is the skill that rules the world. Not might, nor strength, nor numbers. Understanding. And it is this skill that was given to men. Yes, given. You were not born with it. You were taught – by those wise and ancient enough to know the ways and secrets of this world better than your kind ever could. It was us – sons of light – who were your guides, Neythan. Or at least those of us who were willing to condescend to you mere sons of dust. Yet, did we know your thanks for our benevolence? Did our showing you the secrets of the earth, its precious stones and metals, secure your gratitude? No. Only your greed. And then your betrayal. You betrayed your gods. You stole from us. And now the time has come to repay what is owed.”

The waters were stirring now, surging and lapping at the shoreline as waves began to gather and break, as though spurred by the voice’s words. Neythan stared at them as they washed across the coast, swelling and curling to life like harbingers of an approaching storm. “So, you are going to destroy the world for vengeance,” Neythan said, to the sea, to the voice.

“Destroy? Is that what the Watcher told you? No, Neythan, I told you already. I do not seek to destroy the world. I seek to change it, to cleanse it. You merely stand in the way of progress. As your father did.”

“My father? What do you know of my father?”

Another laugh. “A great deal more than you it seems. They have been lying to you, Neythan.”

“Who?”

“Everyone. The Brotherhood. Filani. Nyomi. You do not know the truth of your own blood, yet seek to meddle in things beyond what you understand. But I am not unreasonable, Neythan. I know you did not choose the Shedaím as your forebears did. You were too young, and now you suffer for their sins. But I am a fair soul. That is why I brought you here, to offer you the choice that was never granted you as a child. The choice to leave all this behind, go your way, leave off from your pursuit of Elias. If you take this choice, I shall let you be. I will even protect you. What will befall others will not come near you. You will live old and grey, and your children after you, exempt from all that is to come.

“But should you spurn this offer, generous as it is, and refuse my hand by continuing to pursue this course, then I will take everything and everyone you care about from you, piece by piece, one by one, and you will know, this time, that their fates came to them of your own accord, by your hand. You will know, this time, that you are to blame. And then, of course, you will die, a victim of the shadow we have given to you.

“And so you see the choice, this time, is yours, Neythan. You can choose to live, and I will free you from Irsespedon this very moment.”

“Irsespedon?”

“Ah, of course, you cannot see him, can you? I often forget the limitations of your kind, but then I suppose that is what makes him so effective an enemy, especially to men. After all, what adversary is there greater than a thought, or a feeling, a thing unseen? Give a man a foe and he will fight. Men are born for war. But how can a man overcome an enemy if that enemy lies within himself? He who has slain a thousand is undone by the disease of his own body. But even the one strong enough to withstand the sickness of his body cannot overcome the disease that abides his mind, that corrodes his very sha. There are no bulwarks you can set against that, Neythan. Your blade and all your great skill will not help you. It is a battle no man can ever win – no hope of victory, no means of triumph, and no relief. A war that can only be lost, or, should one find the strength to do so, endured. A slow death, Neythan, just like those men at Godswell. It shall be a fitting end should you choose your course and refuse what I offer… You’ve felt it already, haven’t you? The shadow of Irses. The shadow on your soul. A torment that plagues you even here. Look, see for yourself. He is all over you. See your true enemy.”

Neythan felt the tightness around his neck abruptly loosen, his muscles unclenching to release his head and shoulders and allow him to look around. He turned first toward the voice to find its owner but there was no one there, just the endless bluff running parallel to the shoreline and the glowing sea. So he looked down, hoping for a way to free himself from the seat he’d been frozen to – and then saw it.

His gut turned cold as he looked on in horror and bafflement at the thing consuming his body. He was almost entirely covered by it: a thick, wet, black mucus, swallowing him from toes to navel, and moving, he realised; breathing even, as it clamped along the length of him in a boneless slimy gunk, sucking and gnawing at his flesh as if to embalm him from the outside in. And then he saw its eyes – still, baleful orbs, staring up into his. With the ensuing shift of perspective he was able to make sense of the creature’s body: the warped python-like jaws, grotesquely distended to accommodate Neythan’s thighs and lower torso, and the weird fleshy tendrils that extended from them like tongues, merging into small fungal stems to syringe his flesh, burrowing and bubbling and wriggling within his skin like hungry maggots. And then there were maggots, squirming and writhing on the open sores of the creature’s dark, membranous head, and along its outstretched tongues, its body, and Neythan’s body too, wriggling and crawling and tunnelling into his skin as though racing toward some hidden home within him. And Neythan couldn’t stop them, couldn’t move, could only sit there buried in the creature’s ever tightening grip as its cold black eyes stared up at him, corroding and sucking as he tried to recoil. Tried to scream. Was screaming. Howling to the dull slate sky as its few stars began to slowly grow and then smear and bleed their light, trailing bright hot streaks in their wake like incandescent tears–

“Neythan? Neythan, wake up.”

Neythan blinked. He was back in the inn’s bedchamber, Caleb sitting on the bed to one side whilst Arianna, now awake and standing in front of him, held and shook him by the shoulders.

“Neythan?”

“Ari…”

“Gods, Neythan…” She exhaled and stepped back. “This thing that is happening with you… You were babbling again, just like you did back in that shrine in Súnam.”

“Wait,” Caleb said, “you mean he’s done this before?”

“Are you alright, Neythan?” Arianna asked.

Neythan gazed around the room – the plain walls, the frayed worn bedmats and dusty wooden floor – as his hands worked frantically, patting his body down and slapping at the ghost of the creature he’d seen consuming him.

“Neythan?”

He looked up at her again. Scared, he could see. She was as scared as he was, watching him tremble and breathe. “I’m alright,” he said. “I’m alright.”

But the way he kept looking around the room, to the walls, the window, as if expecting the whole thing to shatter or move, wouldn’t allow her to believe it. She came forward and took hold of his chin, turning his head toward her, his gaze to hers. “Neythan, what is it? Tell me.”

But Neythan shrugged her off, his hands still working, but more calmly now, as though smoothing out the folds of his garments after having sat for too long. “I’m fine,” he repeated, then stepped toward the window to look out through the muslin covering its narrow sill, and breathed, just breathed – “I’m fine.” – and then continued to stare out at the night, the fingers of his wounded hand twitching as he leaned on the window’s ledge and watched the empty moonlit streets.