Chapter 35
Spitting up water, Javed coughed himself back to consciousness. Clothing soaked and body brutalized, the Keeper of Names found himself lying on a narrow shelf of rock, somewhere deep beneath the ground. The sun was obscured by a vast waterfall above, so very little light made it down this far. The air was filled with mist as torrents of water fell down the chasm around him. He was in part of the river…or what had been the river but was now an emptied basin.
How am I alive?
“You live because I’m not done with you yet.”
With bleary eyes he saw the shape of Mother Dawn perched on the ledge next to him, her form perfectly still. While he had been tossed about by the river, his shirt had been caught by one of her many hands, and she’d held him safe in her four arms as the Martaban had drained around them.
“I was told you died,” he croaked.
“I am dead, so heed my ghost, Javed.”
This wasn’t the terrifying giant who’d condemned him in the desert, but something small and unimposing and still. Her skin was not eye-scalding silver but rather a covering of soft green moss, which made her dangerous lines seem far gentler than before. Slowly he realized that this was no mighty avatar he was talking to, but merely a humble statue that had been submerged beneath the river for an unknown amount of time. Probably thrown into the river by Inquisitors long ago to dispose of it, where it had come to rest on this shelf.
Groaning, he tried to sit up, but everything hurt far too much for that. The last thing he could remember was trying to kill himself before Omand could tear the truth from his mind. He’d been surrounded by demons, cutting himself against their abrasive skin as water had choked him and smothered all thought. He had thrashed against the pain, but then gone still and drifted through the darkness. In that final moment he had known peace.
“How am I not done? How was I not eaten by demons? I gave my life to protect the Voice! Was that not enough for the gods?”
The stone lips didn’t move, but Javed could still hear the gods’ loyal servant clear as the fateful day he’d met her. “You survive because, to the demons, you were naught but debris. They had a million living beings above to exercise their hate against. As for the gods, they were satisfied by your labors. You did well. Your purpose to them had been fulfilled. You helped the Voice to accept what she needed to do. The gods would be content if you died here, just as they were content when Omand murdered me. We were both humble servants who had fulfilled our part in their great calculation. At last, the gods have had their revenge. Now that their eternal foe has been defeated and will never be able to rise again, the gods truly don’t care what happens to any of you next.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look down.”
Javed peered over the side of the ledge.
Hundreds of yards of riverbed had collapsed into a hole. It was a maze of boulders with rapids in-between. The river was falling on them, but the Martaban flowed so swiftly that already this newly revealed underground world was filling up. There must have been gigantic empty spaces below, which were now flooded. Soon this chasm would be refilled entirely, and the river above would be reunited, but for now it was a great underground lake, and the water was steadily rising.
Upon the top of that lake floated bodies. Hundreds upon hundreds of demon bodies.
“Behold, a slaughter incomprehensible,” Mother Dawn said. “Upon these bones will be built a new age.”
“Are they all dead, then?”
“Those that came against us? Yes. To the very last demon, slain. As for the rest of the world, not even I can guess what is still out there lurking, but the Martaban will carry many of these plague-ridden bodies out to the sea. The gods’ revenge is most thorough.”
Much had happened while he had been unconscious. “How did the gods smite them?”
“This is a death toll far greater than could be inflicted by sword, rod, or even the mighty flaming arrows drawn from Upagraha or the quivers of her long-lost sisters. These demons were struck down by a devouring sickness. A most virulent plague, a thousand years in the making.”
“The gods cursed them.” Javed spat over the edge. “Good.”
“Sadly for the gods, this particular curse was not ready in time to use it to save themselves. Some of the gods fashioned this plague to send against the demons during their great war, but demons are hardy, and their bodies complex, so what they had was insufficient, and the demons were immune.”
Javed, being a master of poisons, knew how such things worked. “If a poison proves ineffective against a specific target, you change the alchemist’s recipe and try again.”
“Were it so easy. Demons are not beings of flesh and blood and spirit. They are not like us. They are constructions, like the most difficult of spells, complex patterns brought to life, designed to adapt, survive, and kill. But some of the gods were clever. Knowing their plague would not affect humans, the gods hid it in the blood of their chosen warrior Ramrowan. With each child the plague changed, taking on a slightly different form. This way the gods would not have one alchemist experimenting, but rather millions unwitting. This secret plague was passed down through the generations. Whenever the blood grew thin, the Keepers thickened it. Choosing mother and father, in endless combinations, this inheritance went down through the generations, for the wisest gods had peered into the future and their calculations had shown that eventually, inevitably, there would rise a strain that even the hardiest demons could not withstand.”
All this time he had thought the Keepers’ purposes had been altruistic. “The book…the genealogy. It was for this?”
“Every Keeper of Names did his sacred duty to safeguard the bloodline of Ramrowan, to shepherd the casteless. You did. As did Keta did before you and Ratul before him. And Chandradatt, and Bull of Vahin, and Kashi, and a hundred others before them, wandering the land, recording the names, guiding the line, all toward this great day.”
It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but the bodies seemed as packed atop the water as tightly as the lily pads covering a Gujaran swamp. “I…I didn’t know. I thought what the Keepers did was to build, not to destroy.”
“Oh, Javed, you can’t have one without the other.”
He was quiet for a long time as he watched the corpses bob atop the water. They seemed twisted and distorted, half dissolved, with bones showing. The gods’ wrath was tremendous. “Then it is over?”
“This particular war is over. The Age of Law is over. Now begins the next, but what it shall be is not yet determined. We shall see what man can accomplish freed from the shackles of hell. Do demons still live? Out there somewhere, maybe. There are other continents beyond my sight. In fact, there are whole other worlds which are out of man’s reach for now. But this one, you can still do something about the fate of.”
“But you said the gods don’t care anymore.”
“That is unfair of me.” Mother Dawn sighed. “It is more that they could only predict so far, and then things grow beyond even their ability to influence. Why concern themselves over something they had no control over? However, I still care. As did Ramrowan, which is why he left a buried city full of hidden treasure for the people of his workshop to guide them into the future. I could never see as well or as far as my old masters could see, but I know that of the forces which remain capable of seizing this age, each of them is flawed somehow. Yet there is one among you who would rule over this world with a terrible cruelty.”
Mother Dawn spoke of Omand. “The Night Father.”
“Should he triumph, man will have traded demons of the sea for a devil of the land. The Age of Law would become the Age of Slaves, to be toyed with for his eternal amusement.”
“He was far too strong a wizard for me to defeat even when I had both hands, and that was before he turned into whatever evil thing he is now. What do you expect me to do, Mother Dawn?”
“I expect you to do your sacred duty, Keeper.”
Confused, he turned back to the ancient statue, and this time he saw clearly that it was just a pile of green-covered rocks, that was only vaguely in the shape of a woman. He had been saved by his clothing getting caught on a random stone. The ghost was gone.
How was he supposed to do his duty down in this hole? Had he not done enough?
As the water continued to fall and the lake of the dead continued to rise, Javed noticed something else below. One of the giant demons floated on its back, and lying atop its chest as if the vast corpse was a raft…was a man.
A man with a black-steel sword.
Far below, Ashok Vadal stirred, somehow still alive.
The Keeper of Names’ sacred duty is to safeguard the bloodline of Ramrowan and shepherd the casteless.
That casteless in particular would do.