Blood and Sand Trilogy Box Set Read online

  3

  Vekal trod the halls of the undying. The corridors looked like catacombs, if such places could be so vast as to encompass more space than the largest hall. The ceiling was so high that the Sin Eater could swear that he heard the cries of birds far off in the distant eyries. The pillars so wide that they could be the roots of mountains.

  And no sand, and no dust…

  The Sin Eater smirked to himself, bending down to trace a finger across the perfectly smooth marble floor. No sand. That was how he knew that he was dead.

  “There is a tale of why there is so much sand in the world. Do you know it, Vekal?” said a voice, and behind him he turned to see that there was an impossibly tall figure striding towards him. The figure dwarfed him, and was long, thin, and elongated like the Tower of Records itself. It wore dark materials, similar to the sort of habit that he wore; thin and wispy—the sort of materials that they wrapped the dead in.

  “That the world used to be solid, and whole, like a garden,” Vekal replied to the figure. He couldn’t see its head, it was so high, but he could see the dull shape of something in the dimness beyond.

  “And then what happened, Vekal?” said the creature, as it walked past him, deeper into the catacombs of the dead. The shade of the Accursed followed it, scampering on legs that seemed infinitesimally small all of a sudden.

  “Well, some say the rivers of time burst their banks, and flooded the garden of the world. They washed the world into a thousand pieces, and broke a hole into the realms of the underworld, where the unborn spirits wait. They are hungry for life, and so started to follow the path that the river took, arriving into the world to find it a beautiful place.”

  “But that does not explain sand, does it, little Vekal?” said the figure, slowing its step as it seemed to arrive at wherever its destination was.

  “The unborn spirits were too hungry, you see. They had no practice at being human yet, or animals. They ate up the world, they dug at it, they tore at its greenness and ate its fruits until there was nothing left.”

  Vekal took a breath, before realizing that here, in this place, he didn’t have to. “So the gods decided that they had to do something. They redirected the river of time to flow through the garden of the world, washing the unborn spirits back into the underworld below. And so that as soon as they crawl out, every unborn spirit must battle against the flow of time until they finally are washed away. If they lead a truly guiltless life, if they respect the garden, then they may be light enough of spirit to swim the river to its source—to the heavens.”

  “And the sand, Vekal!” the figure said once more, a note of urgency in its voice.

  “The sand comes from the garden of the world, of course. The river of time eats away at the world. It grinds it all down, it dilutes it with every passing night and day. The world is broken down and made smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Unless the garden is healed, or unless enough of the unborn can make it to heaven to plead their case with the gods, the world will eventually be eaten away into nothing by time. The sand is the garden,” Vekal said at last, wondering why that thought was making him so sad. Nothing made him sad now. The world was so far away that nothing made him feel anything much anymore.

  “The sand, Vekal. The sand of the world holds a lesson,” said the figure above, suddenly leaning down. “It is the world ground down, just as every soul must be ground down if it is to become light enough to ascend to heaven. In that you got the story wrong. The river of time only carries those souls back to the underworld that are too stubborn to break down. Do you understand me? That hold onto who they were, and their petty fears and hates.”

  “I—I don’t understand,” Vekal said to the large dark head that was approaching through the layers of cloud above.

  “Of course you don’t. Not yet, Vekal. Not yet. If I let you go now, then you will go back to the underworld and come back to play this part again. Just as you have a thousand times before. You are a Sin Eater, Vekal, and that means that you can lighten others’ journey. Make their souls lighter. Grind them down. Go back, little Vekal. You are not refined enough yet for this test.”

  With a gentle breath, the shape moved forward and Vekal was suddenly engulfed by the light across its face. It had the mask of a silvered gull where its face should be, and there was a perfect diamond cascade of tears from one eye.

  Iliya, the goddess of mourning, blew little Vekal back into the world.

  4

  “Is it dead?” asked a voice, and the figure lying in a pool of blood on the floor, to be fair, knew only one way of answering.

  “Yes,” Vekal croaked, remembering.

  You are the dead. The Unliving. You do not belong to the world but to those that live beyond it. You are made of this world, but are not owned by it…

  The old litany of the Morshanti ran through Vekal’s head. It was the same litany that he had been told when he had first walked into the Tower of Records, aged seven, and the same litany that he had been made to repeat along with the other novices every day since, some twenty-something years.

  “It is alive!” said the croaking growl of a voice, and Vekal felt the burn of a lantern approach him as the talking man drew closer. The voice appeared to be surprised at the possibility that the figure lying there could even summon the ability to talk, and the Sin Eater groaned with the thought of just how wounded he must look. He felt like camel dung. No, he corrected himself, he felt like dried-out camel dung, left to disintegrate in the desert until all that could remain would be dust. As ever, the words of the Litany of the Sin Eaters came back to him, and he repeated them to himself, hoping that they would bring just a little reassurance.

  “I will cast no shadow, for the dead have nothing to hide. My feet will leave no tracks in the sand, for there is no way back. Death shall come for me and I will welcome it, because I know its halls…” Vekal’s voice cracked on the last syllables.

  “What the…” the first voice said, and it was joined by another in disgust, this time a woman’s voice.

  “It’s their creed, sire. The Litany of the Sin Eaters. They think that it protects them from the pains of dying a mortal death, and that, if they say it enough times, the gods will hear them when it comes time to be reborn.”

  The woman who said this was small and wiry, totally unlike her partner that she was talking to. She wore the sand and tan colored robes and veils of the desert, but her hair was braided into thick, unkempt strands like tentacles. She was older than the hulking warrior beside her, with her tanned skin telling of the many years spent in the deserts. Her name was Aisa Desai, and she was born in the city of Tir itself.

  “Then at least we have the right one,” said Dal Grehb, the War Chief of the Menaali army. He was more than twice the size of Aisa, with shoulders like an oxen’s and a face as craggy and square as the weather-worn boulders found in the desert. He still wore his armored plates that he had worn during his siege and invasion of the city, and Vekal could see the dried patches of blood encrusted on them where he had cut down his fellow countrymen.

  The same city folk who would sell me out in a heartbeat, Vekal thought, looking at the room around him. He was in a room that he had only ever been in a few times. Not enough to know it well, but enough to know that the very fact that he was here, and the intruders were as well, meant a very bad thing for the city.

  This was the top tower room of the Tower of Records. Entirely without windows, it was encased in black and white tiles, with curving pillars forming the ridges of the walls, gliding upwards to the peak of the roof beyond. The floor underneath the injured Sin Eater’s body was marbled, and covered in the strange inscriptions that only the most senior of the Elders and Record Keepers could understand. Vekal knew that if the enemy was here, in this most sacred and holiest of spaces in the entire city, then it would mean that Tir must have fallen. He groaned.

  But I am dead, I am dead, I am dead. None of this matters, he tried to tell himself, but he knew that he was lying. A
ll of this mattered, and his body hurt a lot more than it would if he were no longer alive.

  “So you’re awake, then,” growled the hulking War Chief. “Do you know who I am? Do you know what I am, thing?”

  Vekal licked his lips and looked at the ceiling, not saying anything. What should he do? As a Sin Eater, he was bound to answering the needs of the people, and yet what people were there inside of his beloved Tir’an’fal anymore? Had they all been killed? Had this man killed them all, just to get inside this room?

  “I told you that it is just a creature. Little more than the devils that it consorts with,” said Aisa.

  “Shut up, woman!” the War Chief snapped, and a look of fury crossed her face, mingling with fear. “I know that you came from this god-accursed city. I know that you helped me get to this place, but I do not need to hear your superstitious rubbish any longer! I will give you what you desire, Aisa. You may keep the Tower and all it contains, but give me the Sin Eater. That is all that I demand.”

  The braided woman made a sound of disgust, but shrugged as if it were no business of hers.

  The small part of Vekal’s mind that wasn’t in pain and near death tried to figure out what was happening. The woman must be a renegade or an outcast? Come back here with an army of Menaali at her back to right some past or imagined slight against her? The Sin Eater had not only been trained in the arts suitable for his profession, he was also trained in the arts of listening and deduction.

  “Every word, every gesture is a clue to the soul….” He found himself repeating the old lesson croakily. “Watch, listen, and understand the ways that your death will come to you.”

  The braided woman hissed at him. “Make it stop!” She pointed a finger at Vekal, accusingly.

  “Enough!” The War Chief raised his tone, and his bulk from the simple metal chair, the only one that sat in the room. His frame dominated the entire room, causing Aisa to shrink back to one of the monochrome walls. But his target was not the traitor, it was Vekal.

  “I am Dal Grehb, War Chief of the Menaali. Leader of the Scorpions, Killer of Hengist and Bran, and the victor of the Iron Pass. You will have heard of me, even out here in this god forsaken rock of a city.”

  Vekal didn’t say anything. He had heard of Dal Grehb, of course. Even out here on the edge of the desert he had heard of the fearsome War Chief of the Menaali, the one who had taken them from little more than a blood thirsty tribe of hill-fighters to an organized army, conquering all of the land around the Sand Seas.

  And now this great, great man is here. Why? Vekal thought.

  “Well? Answer me!” Dal Grehb spat, prodding the Sin Eater with one metal-shod foot.

  Pain shot up Vekal’s legs, through his hips to his back, there to mix with another wave of agony lodged in his spine. But still, Vekal forced the words past his lips. “Even the great Dal Grehb is still a dead man inside,” he croaked.

  All men were dead men. All men were waiting to be borne down by the River of Time to the Underworld, or, if they were light enough, to be carried up to the heavens.

  It seemed that Dal Grehb didn’t quite see it the same way. The next prod with the boot wasn’t even a prod—it was a strong kick. Vekal cried out in agony.

  “At least you have heard of me now,” Dal Grehb sneered. “You know who I am, you must know how I treat those who oppose me. You know what I will do to this city, and to all of the people here, if you refuse me.”

  They will all return to the Underworld, to be reborn again, Vekal thought, but this time didn’t say it. Despite what the Elders of the Tower were always telling him, he still had found that reminding people of their inevitable resurrection and rebirth didn’t seem to calm their mood. In fact, it seemed to make them all the angrier.

  “So here is what you are going to do, Sin Eater. When I first heard of your sick cult, I thought it a fanciful lie. There can’t really be people out there who do that, can there? Who vouch themselves between the gods and man? But it wasn’t until I met the Seer, Aisa Desai, here, that I found out that you really existed! What a shame, for your sake at least, that you didn’t remain mythical, Sin Eater.” The War Chief chuckled.

  “The Seer told us the secret ways through the desert,” the War Chief continued. “The straight paths through the endless shifting seas, and the ways to avoid the searing heat. She brought us here, to the home of the people, she said, that could help us. The people of the most ancient city in the world. The city of Tir, and their caste of holy priests called the Sin Eaters.”

  Aisa hissed again. “Not holy! Accursed!” she said at the side of the chair, to be silenced by one of the War Chief’s heaviest of looks.

  Once more, Vekal sought the reassuring words of his creed. “Only the dead can grant life, for the living can only give themselves away.”

  “What?” Dal Grehb frowned, trying to work it out. “Riddles and prophecies, that is precisely what she said that I should expect. But she also told me some of what you were capable. Is it not true that you can eat another’s sin? Make it vanish and disappear, and leave the person pure?”

  Vekal nodded. He thought that he knew what was about to come next, that the War Chief was going to ask him to absolve him of his sins so that he would feel a little freer the next time he slaughtered a whole city.

  As if sensing this, the War Chief grunted in amusement, shaking his head either at Vekal’s audacity or his stupidity. “Well then. That is precisely what I will wish you to do. You will remove the stains of sin from a person who is destined for the Underworld, so that they might be free to ascend to the heavens. Can you do that, Sin Eater?”

  “It is what we do.” Vekal nodded again, and licked his cracked lips. “But please, before we begin…” Vekal knew that this was going to take a long time if the War Chief wanted to go over every sin that he had committed. Maybe I’ll die before we finish. That might even be a relief.

  “Yes? What?” Dal Grehb said urgently. “Anything. Anything at all.”

  “Water,” Vekal croaked, and the War Chief clapped his hands for the older woman to fetch the pail of water that stood by the side of the door. She didn’t look happy to fetch for a creature that she thought to obviously be so accursed and evil. She even managed to spill half of the water on Vekal’s face before allowing him to take the pitcher for himself.

  The Sin Eater was too busy drinking to notice Dal Grehb signal to someone out of sight, and the door opened and closed silently. When he heard shuffling feet on the floor, he turned his pained head, not knowing what he expected to see.

  “Come. It is fine. Come closer,” Dal Grehb was saying, cooing and ahhing as if he were speaking to a child.

  Which is exactly what he is doing! Vekal saw, with horror, that there was a child shuffling towards them. It was wrapped in heavy veils, so many that Vekal knew that the underneath of it must be boiling out here on the edge of the desert. It was a shapeless form apart from dirty boots on the feet, caked with dust and cracked by the sun.

  “I told you it won’t help her,” Aisa Desai interrupted, staying away from the shuffling mummy-like creature as it took another step forward, and another. “Let me try my ways first…”

  “Silence, harpy!” Dal Grehb roared, shocking both Vekal at his feet and the shuffling figure, who started to shake in her oversized and dirty boots. “Shhh, my little Marria, come here. Come here to Papa,” he was saying, over and over again.

  Vekal was looking from the small figure, to the War Chief, to Aisa, and back to the girl. Don’t they know that I am no faith healer? The Accursed can only absolve sins—we cannot cure diseases!

  But Dal Grehb had carefully maneuvered his daughter in front of Vekal, mindful to only guide her with gentle taps on the thick robes, and not linger. Whatever illness she had must be contagious, Vekal thought, as Dal Grehb swept aside the veils to reveal the face of a horribly deformed little girl, barely older than eleven or twelve.

  “Papa!” she cried out through skin that was traced with black line
s, and had odd, almost bony growths growing from its forehead and cheeks. Her nose was little more than a hole in the middle of her face.

  Vekal gasped. He had never seen an illness as bad as this—no disease, no ailment, and no accident that he had encountered in the city had ever come close to this. He was about to ask just what was wrong with her, until he saw how she hung her head, staring at the floor in apparent shame.

  She is terrified. Death might even come to her as a gift, when it does. Vekal saw even her own father flinch when she sniffed and tried not to cry in front of him. He saw how much of an outcast that she must feel like, even to her own father, and amongst her own people.

  This explains why the Menaali would march all the way through the desert, probably losing many hundreds of soldiers on their journey to a dry, mausoleum city like Tir. He knew that there were no riches here. No casks of jewels, no legendary weapons, no great trade routes passed near.

  He did it for a father’s love of his daughter.

  “We don’t know what she has, but our priests told me that an evil got into her, not an illness.” Dal Grehb spoke with a thick voice. “So I killed them. All,” he said without rancor or remorse. In fact, he said it as if it were the only thing in this whole sorry mess that he was actually proud of. “We tried every healer in the Plains, but they could not cure her. So, I had their families slaughtered. And then we consulted the Seers, and of all of them, the only one who gave me an answer was a renegade Seer from far off Tir. Aisa Desai told me that the Sin Eaters would be able to remove any ill from the girl, and so, I brought her here. To you. The last Sin Eater.”

  “The last?” Vekal opened and closed his mouth. “But there were others. Others more experienced than I.”

  “There were,” Dal Grehb said with lowered brows, as if recalling a terrible fact.

  My brothers and sisters! Vekal thought with alarm.

  But the girl—Marria—sniffed once again, her face looking awfully painful. The Sin Eater looked beyond her to where Aisa was standing, shrouded in her own doubt. She had a calculating look on her face. Did she believe that I could heal this child? Or had she only been wanting to get the Menaali army here, to destroy the city? Vekal looked at her as if she were mad, but she would not meet his gaze.