Paul Kemp - The Godborn

Mindful of the Oracle’s words, he donned his padded shirt and mail, his breastplate, slung his shield over his back, strapped his weapon belt with its ordinary sword around his hips, and headed out.

As was his habit, he would commune with Amaunator at highsun, walk the vale, and see his mother’s grave before he took the pilgrims back out into the dark.

Rain fell in straight lines from the dark Sembian sky, beating the whipgrass into a flat, twisted mat. The sky cleared its throat with thunder. The stink of decay suffused the air, as if the entire world were slowly decomposing.

“Quickly!” Zeeahd said, his voice as coarse as a blade drawn over a whetstone. “Quickly! It will come soon, Sayeed.”

Sayeed swallowed, nodded, and kept pace with his brother’s hurried, shambling steps. He would have offered Zeeahd a reassuring touch, an arm to steady him, but Sayeed disliked the way his brother’s flesh squirmed under his hand.

They walked-walked because horses would bear neither of them-under a bleak sky and over sodden, spongy earth. They moved cross country because Sembian soldiers and wagon trains had become too common on the roads.

Sayeed’s rain-soaked cloak hung from his shoulders like a hundredweight, like the burden of the fourteen decades he’d lived.

Beside him Zeeahd sagged under the weight of his own burdens. He wheezed above the hiss of the rain, and the hump of his back was more pronounced than usual. Zeeahd’s wet robes hugged his form, and their grip hinted at the shape of the warped body beneath, the flesh polluted by the wild magic of the Spellplague.

Around them thronged the pack of mongrel cats his brother had summoned when they crossed into Sembia’s shadow-shrouded borders.

“Feral cats?” Sayeed had asked.

“Feral, yes,” his brother had answered, staring at the creatures with his glassy eyes. “But not cats.”

Sayeed counted thirteen of the felines, although the numbers seemed to change slightly from time to time. They held their tails low and the rain pressed their mangy fur to their bodies, showing with each stride the workings of bones and muscles. Their heads looked overlarge on their thin necks, their legs disproportionately long. They seemed composed entirely of black eyes, thick sinew, and sharp teeth.

Dark clouds stretched across the sky, blotting out the sun. It was midday but was as dark as dusk in winter. Sayeed and Zeeahd had been walking through perpetual night for many tendays, avoiding airborne Shadovar patrols and Sembian foot soldiers as they traced a winding path across the ruined Sembian countryside. Rumors spoke of pitched battles in the Dalelands, as Sembia moved against its northern neighbors.

Sayeed and Zeeahd wanted nothing of war. They had come in search of the Abbey of the Rose and its oracle.

“What if this abbey and its oracle are just myth? Then what do we do? Both could be stories the Sembians tell themselves to preserve hope.”

“No,” Zeeahd said, shaking his head emphatically. “They exist.”

“How do you know?”

Zeeahd stopped and turned on him. “Because they must! Because he told me! Because this,” he gestured helplessly at his body. “This must end! It must!”

Sayeed knew who Zeeahd meant by “he”-Mephistopheles, the archdevil who ruled Cania, the eighth layer of Hell. Merely thinking the archfiend’s name caused Sayeed to hear sinister whispers in the falling rain. He took a moment to drink from his waterskin: a habit, nothing more, the ghost of a human need. Sayeed did not need to drink, or eat, or sleep, not anymore, not since he had been changed. If the Spellplague had fouled his brother’s body, it had perfected Sayeed’s, although the price of perfection had been to make him as much automaton as man.

“Why are you slowing to drink?” Zeeahd called. “I said we must hurry!”

Zeeahd’s agitation conjured coughs from his ruined lungs, thick and wet with phlegm. The cats mewled and crowded close to him, their feral, knowing eyes watching with terrible intensity. Between hacks, Zeeahd tried to shoo the animals away with his boot, and Sayeed tried to ignore the unnatural way his brother’s leg flopped at the hip as he kicked at the cats. The coughing fit ended without a purge and the disappointed cats wandered back into their orbits, tails sagging with disappointment.

“The cats disgust me,” Sayeed said.

“Not cats, and they’re a gift,” Zeeahd mumbled, as he wiped his mouth with a hand partially covered in scales. His dark eyes stared out at Sayeed from the deep, shadowed pits of their sockets. His hatchet-shaped faced was dotted with pockmarks, the result of a childhood illness.

Sayeed looked past his brother, across the plains, and his mind moved to old memories. “I can’t picture our mother’s face. Can you? She had long brown hair, I think.”

Zeeahd drank of his own waterskin, swished and spit. The cats pounced on it, saw it was naught but water, and left off.

“It was black,” Zeeahd said.

“I used to dream of her, back when I slept.”

“You’ll sleep again, Sayeed. And dream. When we find the Oracle, we’ll make him tell us-”

His voice cracked and broke into a cough. Sayeed moved to help but Zeeahd waved him off with a hand, and one cough followed another into a wracking, wet fit.

Once more the cats crowded close, mewling, circling, jostling for position as Zeeahd fought the poison the Spellplague had put in him. He hunched over in the rain, coughing, warring with the foulness of his innards.

Sayeed could only watch, disgusted. He looked away and tried to remember his mother, the exercise helping distract him from the shifting swells and lumps that bulged under his brother’s robes, the mucous-filled gasps, the wet heaves.

Sayeed could not recall his mother’s eyes, or even her name. His memory was fading. It was as if he were someone new every day, someone he hated more and more. He remembered with clarity only one day from the distant past, one moment that connected who he was now to who he had been before the Spellplague-the moment Abelar Corrinthal’s men had chopped off his right thumb with a hatchet.

He remembered screaming, remembered the knight who’d cut off the digit apologizing for the mutilation.

Zeeahd’s coughing intensified, turned into a prolonged heave, and the sound pulled Sayeed back into the present. The cats meowed with excitement, circling, tails raised, eyes gleaming as Zeeahd gagged. And finally the felines received what they wished.

Zeeahd’s abdomen visibly roiled under his robes and he vomited forth a long, thick rope of stinking black sputum. The grass it struck smoked, curled, and browned. The cats pounced on the mucous, hissing and clawing at one another, a fierce caterwaul, each lapping at the mucous.

Zeeahd cursed and wiped his mouth.

“Thrice-damned cats,” Sayeed said, stomping a boot on the ground near the felines, splashing them with mud. The cats arched, hissed, and bared their fangs but did not back away from their meal. Sayeed had never seen them eat anything other than the black result of his brother’s expulsions.

“They’re not cats, but damned, indeed,” Zeeahd said. He cleared his throat again and the cats, having devoured the first string of mucous, turned to him, hoping for another meal. When none was forthcoming, they sat on their haunches and licked their paws and chops.

Zeeahd lowered his hood, threw his head back to put his face to the rain. He ran a hand over his thin, black hair. With skin pulled taut to reveal sunken eyes and cavernous cheeks, he looked skeletal, the living dead.

“The purgings only slow the advance of the curse,” Zeeahd said. “I need someone soon, Sayeed. A vessel. Otherwise the curse will run its course.”