David Farland - Beyond the Gate

“So the Inhuman can send its messages?”

“Yes,” Maggie said.

“Can it control me?”

“It’s more primitive than a Guide,” Maggie said, referring to personal intelligences that were designed to enslave their wearers. “It’s not large enough to carry the machinery needed to take total control of your central nervous system. I believe it simply carries a message to you. The Word.”

“What if I resist it?”

Maggie considered. “It may punish you. The nanoware sends circuitry, strings of neural web, into your brain. It might activate pain and pleasure centers-cause fear, send hallucinations. But if Tallea is right, people can resist it. If you resist it enough, I suspect that the circuitry may just fry certain nerve sites, activating them over and over until they burn out. Once that happens-there’s probably nothing more that it can do.”

She tried to make it sound easy, as if freedom were only a thought away, but Gallen knew that it would be much tougher than that. He could resist it, but if neurons were getting fried, then he’d have some brain damage as an aftereffect. But it was better to die for his friends than to live for the Inhuman.

“I have to see if I can fight it,” Gallen said. “I have to test it. I’ve had my mantle knocked off in battle before. I can’t let myself get in a position where I’m fighting on two fronts at once.”

“I know,” Maggie said, and she threw the dead Word into the brush, turned to look up in his face. She kissed him slowly, and the reflected firelight flickered on her face. He breathed deeply, relishing the clean scent of her hair, the faintest hint of perfume.

“I’ll ask my mantle to shut down its signal block for two minutes,” Gallen said, silently willing the mantle to stop. His ears went numb, as if all the sound in the world-the song of the katydids, the rush of the wind, the bark of a distant fox in the darkness-all disappeared. Then his legs buckled from under him, and Gallen tumbled to the ground, looking out, struggling to hear the sound of his own heartbeat, and he could not move, could not speak. He was vaguely aware of Maggie grabbing him, trying to lift him up, hold him in her arms.

And then the visions started, and Gallen remembered.…

He was in a beautiful village in Babel growing up in a home that was a work of art, a mansion formed of stone and wood. As a child he would watch the cornices of his bedroom, which were sculpted by hand, and he would imagine that the animals and people carved there would speak to him of their lives in wood. And he remembered his ancient grandmother, draped in robes of purple silk with black lace, the black feathers woven into the white mass of her hair. She was greatly venerated for the cloth she wove and dyed, but he loved her for her sweet voice as she sang him to sleep, and he loved her even more for the attentiveness with which she listened to the tales he would tell from the lives of the wooden creatures carved on the cornices of his room. Once, his grandmother had told his father, “He will be great among the Makers, for with him, the art is not something that he sees, it is something that he lives.”

He remembered the green fields of his childhood, where the yellow cows on his father’s farm drank from elaborately decorated brass containers shaped like moons and suns and stars and boats all set out on the green pastures.

He learned in time that his people were called “the Makers,” and in his village, creating things of beauty was the goal of every person. They did not seek to own beauty or horde it-only to create it. And not only were the things of their hands beautiful, but the thoughts of their hearts, the lives that they lived, also were shaped and molded into beautiful forms.

And so Gallen remembered that from the youngest age he desired to do nothing but shape stone, to release the people and animals and gods hidden under stone-whether he was carving walnut-shaped tubs from marble or forming statues of giant whales that seemed to be leaping out of lawns. As a child, he would seek the hills where cliff faces were exposed, and there he would chisel and smooth the granite, creating wondrous scenes of gods from his private pantheon, battling their demons.

By the age of twelve, he was given his name and his rank-Koti, a master craftsman. He was one of the youngest ever to become a master, and small, brown-skinned Makers from all across Babel came to study at his feet, learn his techniques.

By the time he was forty, sixteen thousand students he had, and great was their work-greater than that of any Makers who had ever lived.

At the Tower of Serat his pupils worked for seventeen years to carve scenes from the tales of the life of the hairy prophet Janek, and tell of his ascent into heaven on the back of a flaming swan from that very pinnacle. Though the tower was six hundred feet tall, the Makers worked every inch of the stone, until it became one of the great wonders of Babel, so that millions of people undertook pilgrimages’ to gaze upon Janek at the top of the tower, his long beard whipping in the tempest as he straddled the back of the giant flaming swan.

When he finished, Koti took his pupils to the edge of Andou, where the river Marn flowed in from the Whitefish Mountains. There a great sea of rounded boulders had lain for millions of years, deposited by glaciers.

Koti’s students worked diligently among the boulders for twenty years, carving each of them into great images from their tradition, showing the War of the Gods that would someday come, when Goddess Peace would finally put down the Dark Spirit of Strife, when Fertility with her many orifices overcame the sexless Barrenness, when all the ten thousand gods of virtue ascended to their rightful domain.

The place was renamed Valley of the Gods, and one could walk through it for weeks staring at marvel after marvel.

And Koti did not only create great works in stone, he married a wise woman who had a talent for shaping lives. They loved one another passionately, and well Gallen remembered the countless times they wrestled as one while making love in their garden bed, under the evening stars at their summer home. His sweet wife Aya gave birth to eleven talented children, so that together Koti and Aya became a great patriarch and matriarch, admired by all.

After sixty-two years, Koti’s body grew frail even though he was still young, for he had worn it out in the service of his art and of his family and of his people.

By then, Koti’s fame had grown so great that his own people built him a throne and begged him to slough off his mortal body so that he could reveal himself as a god, for the works that he had designed for his apprentices were not only apparently without number, they were also without equal.

But Koti convinced the crowds to stifle their acclaim, and he prepared for death.

And so it was that the Makers gathered fifty thousand men and women, and they bore Koti’s ravaged body upon a pallet carved of sandalwood, and they sailed with a thousand ships across the sea, as he lay dying.

Together they marched to the City of Life, where the great columns of crystal memory rose high and haughty and gray against the white mountains on the skyline.

His people came arrayed in their finest garments of scarlet, and they swung golden censers of incense before his pallet, filling the sky with sweet-smelling smoke of green. The drummers and flutists played before him, and women danced with bells on their feet and tambourines in their hands, their voices rising in haunting music.

At the City of Life, he had his memories recorded and gave the humans samples of his skin, and fifty thousand people wept upon the stairways to the Hall of Life and petitioned the human lords to prepare a new body for the greatest of Makers.