The Ingenious by Darius Hinks

Author:Darius Hinks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Angry Robot
Published: 2019-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

16

As the city grew, demons came to feed, boiling in the wake of the riverboats, invading Athanor’s sewers like the serpent of sin, rising into agonized throats to become tongues, eager to announce their rule. But when the clouds broke they screamed, outraged and confused, confronted by an Eden with no God.

She waited for them by the front doors of the Alembeck Temple. It was dusk, and the crowds were thinning out, leaving the narrow, sheer-sided street to the rats and the shadows. The temple doors had been boarded up for decades and the warped frame was ripe with the smell of urine, but Isten stood proudly on the top step, arms folded, legs apart, as the Exiles trudged towards her through the dusty gloom. Gombus was there, she saw with relief, the gaunt mahogany of his face reminding her of another world. With his high, sharp cheekbones and long, hooked nose, he was the epitome of a Rukoner but he was horribly wasted. His shoulders knifed up through his robes like shards of wood and he was leaning on Puthnok for support. The darkness turned Puthnok’s spectacles into black, featureless circles, but Isten could imagine her solemn, humourless eyes staring through the lenses at her, cold and disapproving. Lorinc was there too, loitering at the rear of the group next to Colcrow and his crowd of golden-haired teenagers. Her surprise grew as more Exiles gathered at the foot of the steps, faces she hadn’t seen for years in some cases, looking up at her with a mixture of suspicion and fascination. Now that she had a steady supply of cinnabar from Alzen, Isten was wonderfully calm and clear-sighted. The shadows were rolling and tumbling around her countrymen, but she had the delirium under control. She held up a bottle of wine and smiled.

“My name is Donkey,” she said, taking a swig. “And I can do this.”

She walked down the steps and handed the bottle over and the Exiles passed it round, enacting a ritual none of them knew the origins of.

A few passers-by stopped to gawp at the strange scene so Isten went back up the steps and waved for the others to follow.

They looked puzzled as she approached the huge, rotten doors of the temple. The route up onto the roof was round the back of the building.

Isten shoved the doors. They fell open, revealing a candlelit interior none of them had ever seen before. Isten waved again and stepped inside.

The Exiles hesitated at the threshold as they saw rows of men waiting in the antechamber – large, bare-chested warriors with fierce, scarified faces. They were heavily muscled and carrying brutal, two-handed axes. The warriors’ bodies were deformed by what looked like huge tumours or growths. It was only upon closer inspection that the lumps were recognizable as shrivelled, smoked human heads, sewn into the warriors’ flesh as grisly battle trophies. The shrunken heads had stitched-up eyes, but it was still possible to see the agony of their final moments, their disembodied faces howling, silently, from the warriors’ chests and arms.

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