A Clatter of Chains Read online

  A CLATTER OF CHAINS: THE WAKING WORLDS BOOK 1

  The Waking Worlds

  - BOOK I -

  A CLATTER OF CHAINS

  by A. van Wyck

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my wife, Lindie, for getting me this far. I know it wasn’t easy. You’re a better hero than I ever could have written.

  To my mother, Annie, who believed even when I didn’t, thank you.

  And to my poor proof readers, who suffered through selflessly. Thanks to Thys, Kevin, Sanet and Mia.

  ALSO BY ANDRÉ VAN WYCK

  The Waking Worlds Series

  A Clatter of Chains

  The Patchwork Prince Series

  Stumbling Stoned

  visit:

  ---www.andrevanwyck.com---

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ALSO BY ANDRÉ VAN WYCK

  PART I

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 – THE CHASE

  CHAPTER 2 – MAHARKOO

  CHAPTER 3 – ECLIPSE

  CHAPTER 4 – NEW DAY

  CHAPTER 5 – SPRING

  CHAPTER 6 – ONE JOURNEY ENDS

  PART II

  CHAPTER 7 – PEBBLES

  CHAPTER 8 – HAWKS AND GEESE

  CHAPTER 9 – A DARK RIPPLE

  CHAPTER 10 – A DAY OFF

  CHAPTER 11 – CAMOUFLAGE

  PART III

  CHAPTER 12 – A NEW DIRECTION

  CHAPTER 13 – OUT OF SIGHT

  CHAPTER 14 – BLUE OR GREEN

  CHAPTER 15 – UNMASKED

  CHAPTER 16 – DEEP

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 17 – UNBOUND

  CHAPTER 18 – RESCUE

  CHAPTER 19 – AN END TO DREAMING

  EPILOGUE

  – END OF BOOK 1 –

  PART I

  PROLOGUE

  The final days of the Age of Magic

  The day of the Fall

  The Iron Ocean, Some Hundred Nautical Leagues off the coast of Thell

  On this day, the smooth bulk of the handrail at his back brought him no solace. The gentle cant of the deck beneath his feet failed to soothe. From beneath the brim of his admiral’s hat, he monitored the commotion amidships. Although commotion might be too strong a word for a circle of priests with their hooded heads together. They were doing nothing more bothersome than occasionally getting under the feet of his crew.

  His father had been a sea captain all his life as well (though, admittedly, not of anything as grand as Helia’s Pride). The man had doled out broken bones and sound wisdom with equal unexpectedness and equanimity.

  ‘Ye don’t never want’er turn yer back on the ocean,’ had been one of the old bastard’s prize cautions. It had always been delivered with a thick-jointed finger tapping at a vein-burst nose.

  Right now, he happily gave the waves his back in favor of keeping a weather eye on the assembled priests. He had forty three years on the salt, thirty of those in the navy. And he had altogether three wars, nineteen major engagements, two score minor ones and one testicle under his belt. He knew a squall brewing when he saw one. He could feel it in his ball.

  How things had changed in just a dozen years. If you had told him then that the navy – the entire damned military might of the empire – would one day rest in the palm of the Priesthood, he’d have laughed in your face. The priesthood used to be a non-entity at court, something taken out and dusted off for special occasion.

  It had begun small, as such things do. The mad rantings of street corner prophets – proponents of unpopular gods – were repeated with sedate surety from atop the pulpits of Helia’s own temples. Overnight, the end of the world went from being a minor annoyance (bought off with a few loose coppers and a kick) to a divine promise. One that brooked no interpretation or negotiation.

  The citizenry had turned first, as sheep were wont to do. Quiet faith had turned into loud fervor, had turned into deathly silent fanaticism. Within a year, all other beliefs and faiths were anathema. The old gods were banished, their erstwhile followers praying desperately to a new god to be allowed to stay. The merchants went over next. They had been completely unprepared to deal with a workforce unwilling to work for unbelievers. And where the money went, went the nobility. Of course, some had been wealthy, stubborn or stupid enough to stand on principle. But Principle didn’t check one’s sheets for serpents, didn’t ensure one’s saddle straps were secure, didn’t ensure no poisons happened into one’s dinner. Faithful servants did – depending on where one’s faith lay. Principle had been outmatched. Even the stupid had learned to pay lip service to the new regime.

  By the end of it, the steps to the throne lay liberally greased with blood and gold. And the first act of the new emperor, delivered in a voice that sounded disconcertingly like that of the High Priest, had been to declare the empire a theocracy.

  From there, to this.

  Disgusted, he let his gaze wander from the priests, lest one chanced to meet his scorn. He took in the seemingly endless sails to port, starboard and aft. A hundred and nine of the finest, largest, most brutally efficient warships and transports ever to wet a keel. Products of a forced labor drive that had spared no child nor grandmother, no cripple nor master artisan. He remembered standing in Dolan Bay, watching the pale ribs of these leviathans climb skyward, teeming with workers. A vision of decomposition in reverse.

  Forced conscription had never been so high. Especially following the Priesthood’s radical reversal of their long held opposition to women in the military. After all, what matter being able to bear children if there were no world to bring them into?

  The end of the world.

  Perdition, they called it. The priests had made the oldest scriptures – that told of the dark places – come to life. They’d populated the minds of the citizenry with every manner of nightmare conceivable and had then pointed their collective finger: Thell. A desolate continent. Mostly uninhabited. Largely uninhabitable. There, the priests had said, would the dark places tear open and spew forth the end to everything. And only there and only then could it be stopped and only Helia’s chosen could stop it.

  He felt bile rise in his throat as he took in the waterlines of the surrounding ships. They rode high in the ocean. The vast majority of Helia’s chosen had been left, dead, on Thell. Fodder for the monsters who now called it home. Denizens of the dark places. That much, at least, the priests had gotten right.

  Following their rout, the deck had briefly served as a triage. Though the stains had been scoured clean, the scent of blood and worse still lingered on the planks. He repressed a shiver at the memory. He’d seen men with limbs hacked off before. Once he’d even seen a man flensed by a kraken. But he’d never seen men ripped in two. He’d never seen soldiers with bites (actual bites, showing crazed tooth marks) missing from their steel armor. He hoped never again to see men bloating black from alien venom or melting alive from the touch of some pestilence.

  An army defeated was a terrible thing, a broken thing. An unpredictable thing. Despair had many flavors. Anger, resentment and an undirected impulse to hurt something were but a few. He swore he could see it in the lackluster sheen of the fleet’s hulls. He felt it in the halfhearted billow of the myriad sails and in the dilapidated drape of the pennants atop their masts.

  But if Helia’s chosen had fared badly, Helia’s choosers had fared worse. Shortly after their flight from Thell, the priests (all of them) had become… Distressed was not a large enough word. Their maladies had not presented in identical fashion. Some had come aboard, gibbering like mad men. They’d pulled handfuls of their hair from the roots, clawed bloody furrows in their faces and dug at their own eyes. Some few had gone berserk and attacked the sailors and soldiers aboard. In their madness they’d
forsaken their patented battle magicks in favor of tooth and nail. Those had had to be put down. Still others seemed to have simply… stopped. This morning he’d crouched by a priest who’d withdrawn so far into himself he wouldn’t rise, wouldn’t eat. All the man seemed to do was rock back and forth incessantly, muttering a litany: gone... gone... gone… He’d caught one of the crew holding a candle to the unresponsive priest’s toes and had clubbed the man to the deck.

  The priesthood’s failure was the worst kind of betrayal. They had shoved themselves down the throat of the empire to become its iron backbone. And now that backbone was proving rusted and rotten. For the soldiers seeing it, it was like losing the war (still fresh enough to crust beneath their fingernails) all over again. Reminding them that it had been a holy war. That they’d failed more than their comrades and their country. They’d failed their god. And if the first defeat had damned them, the second had dashed all hope of salvation. He would not be surprised to start getting reports of soldiers tearing at their hair or clawing at their faces next. Damned priests. What did these new histrionics profit them? It wasn’t as if the end of the world was going to spare anyone. Might as well die with some damned dignity.

  His eyes and his unease returned to the cluster of priests on his deck.

  Yes, not all the priests had suffered the same malady. Some, very few, had become harder. In the same way a bow, left out in the sun, became too hard to flex without breaking. Warped. You could see it in their deliberate movements and haggard expressions. They were no longer as they had been but what they were now was anyone’s guess. The fact that they alone seemed to move with any kind of purpose set his teeth on edge. Looking at them, he became aware of his thumb skimming again across the pommel of his sword.

  A humorless clomping on the deck announced the arrival of his second. He could never remember the woman’s name. She was of the new generation, too young to have known the old gods or the old empire. Since Thell, she was pale as a ghost and sported deep purple bruises beneath her eyes. She contorted through a salute.

  “Any sign of the rearguard, Lieutenant?” he asked hopefully. The Lady’s Tears had been the last ship to leave Thell and her fate was unknown. And her cargo was precious, although that was known only to a very few.

  “No, sir,” the young women backtracked. “It’s… well, it’s, um… I’m sorry to report, sir, that…”

  More bad news.

  “Spit it out, Lieutenant.”

  The woman stilled to gather herself, took a deep breath.

  “It’s Chaplain Moorstone, sir…”

  He felt a dull ache in his chest.

  “I saw him come out on deck a few moments ago. Saw he was carrying something – thought he was getting better if he was braving the sunshine. But he put a ballast stone, big as an ale keg, down on the rail and climbed up after it. Then I saw the rope around his ankle…”

  He was having a hard time breathing. Moorstone had been the battlefield chaplain for the first legion. A more solid man you could not hope to meet. He’d had a seaman’s knowing of the stars, a barkeep’s belly-laugh and a mason’s rough hands. Those hands could bring a merciful end to a fallen friend or a grievous one to a foe. As priests went, Moorstone had been alright. They’d developed a respectful friendship during their voyage to Thell. That Moorstone, of all people, would ride a ballast stone into the deep...

  “We are ready.”

  He had to throttle the grief that wanted to lash out at this interruption. He had not noticed one of the priests approach. Their little conclave, he saw, was making its ominous way to the prow en masse. He gave his attention back to their spokesman. A painfully thin man, he could have been the twin to the lieutenant in both pallor and poise.

  “What was that you said… father?” he added after a deliberate pause. He chose to ignore the sharp look from his second. He did not have as tight a rein on his temper as was prudent. Priests were due, if not the kind of respect you owed your emperor, then the kind of respect demanded by large carnivores or tropical storms. Immolation by priest was the leading cause of death among unbelievers. The immolator’s judgment was never questioned – true belief was an absolute shield against the purifying flame.

  If you believed that.

  “We are ready,” the priest repeated

  “For?” he questioned, it becoming painfully obvious his expectant look was wasted on the priest.

  “We are ready to leave,” the priest expounded, after an undue amount of cogitation.

  He caught the irrational flash of hope that crossed his second’s face at the priest’s words. His disgust deepened.

  “That will be all, lieutenant,” he dismissed her rather brusquely.

  Her feet dragged as she left them. At least she didn’t steal furtive glances over her shoulder at the priest. She couldn’t help she’d been brought up to believe the priests’ words fell straight from Helia’s own lips. She was conditioned to blind obedience. He wasn’t. And unless this priest changed tact posthaste, he’d impart said knowledge rather concussively – and immolation be damned. Death at sea might be preferable, he considered, versus beheading when he brought news of his failure to his emperor.

  “Leave?” he questioned. “We’re months away from the nearest landmass, not counting Thell. And if you want to go back to that demons’ nest, priest, you have a long swim ahead of you.”

  “We must all away,” the priest insisted, paying the blasphemous discourtesy no heed, “as many as we can take. You must bring the other vessels in closer, otherwise risk leaving them behind.”

  The grinding of his teeth was suddenly loud in his ears. It was not enough that their wrongheadedness brutalized an entire country of their own people. Just so they could make war – spectacularly failed, useless war. Mere days after their defeat and here they were, doing it all over again. On his ship. Instead of waking up to their own incompetence, they insisted on dragging everyone else into their delusion. They just couldn’t bloody well help themselves. They were so used to issuing orders, they couldn’t stop, even when they’d run out of semi-sensible orders to give.

  He was going to get immolated after all.

  In a knee-jerk benediction to the powers of self-preservation, he dragged his gaze upward and away. The priest’s intensely vacant stare was not helping his temper. He cast his silent plea for patience into the sky… and froze.

  These were uncharted waters, true, watched over at night by a host of alien constellations. But he would certainly have noticed a daytime star!

  And yet, there it was. A pinprick of light. A pupil of glaring malevolence that blistered from the sky. He felt it as a physical weight, threatening to paralyze him. It was as if some inimical god had turned its maddened eye on him. Now that he’d noticed, he could not believe he had not felt it sooner. The call for the ship’s cartographer hung suspended in his throat.

  Was it his imagination, or was the star moving?

  “We do not have much time.”

  Dragging his gaze away with an effort, he found the priest’s dead eyes on the sky. The haggard man was taking in the new arrival without surprise.

  In that interminable moment, where questions fought to be first from his mouth, the other priests arrived. Two of their number, between them, guide a third by the elbows. As you would a blind man. Indeed, the third man’s eyes were milky with cataracts and underscored by the thick red bars of Radiance. The tattoo attested to a century of service.

  The venerable ancient was bent double with age, his steps shuffling and uncertain. But what had stolen the admiral’s words was the expression on the ancient’s face. The man wore a gentle smile of supreme benevolence. The drawn miens of his fellows were jarring enough, in contrast, to give alarm.

  That alarm deepened as the guides began disrobing the ancient, threading unresisting arms through wide sleeves.

  “Wha…?” he began. And then the robe fell to the deck.

  The ancient’s naked body had been freshly branded. Holy script
curved in curlicues on every bit of exposed skin in mad profusion. They beaded with watery pink blood, like sweat.

  “What,” the admiral managed, “have you done?” It came out a stunned whisper.

  “Only what was necessary,” the priest beside him tolled. “Only what was commanded.”

  He was not aware of having moved, but suddenly his hand was tangled in the priest’s voluminous collar and they were nose to nose.

  “What have you done?!”

  His bellow quietened all motion on the deck as hands stilled to watch in disbelief. Would the purifying flame ignite inside of him, he wondered, or outside? Which would be worse? Some said it was the echo of the fire one could see burning in the priests’ eyes...

  He looked – really looked – into the priest’s eyes and his hand sprang open.

  Gone… gone…

  “The other vessels, please,” the priest reminded him, eyes on the sky as if nothing had happened. “Quickly.”

  At that moment the hand of a god slapped down on the surface of the ocean with a lightning crack. The sea fell away from beneath the Pride’s keel. For a moment, he was sickeningly weightless. Geysers spouted over the sides as if fleeing a suddenly alien ocean. Then the deck hit him four-square in the back. He had just a fleeting impression – because it was moving that fast – of the pupil, grown to an iris. It beat (briefly) down on him like a noonday sun–

  And then it was past, crying a single, fiery tear in its wake. He rolled to his stomach, saw the tear disappear over the taffrail toward Thell.

  The sounds of chaos started to penetrate the ringing in his ears.

  “Man overboard!” he bellowed as he pushed to his feet. “Full stop! Lines out!”

  “It is too late for them.”

  He whirled on the priest. The man had stood firm as though he had barnacles for feet. He was only half-aware that he’d drawn his sword. He had no idea who or what he intended to fight. Over the priest’s shoulder, holy light had begun to bathe the prow. The venerable ancient, surrounded by his fellows, shone with its blessing. As he watched, the knotted back straightened and arms rose in supplication. The branded script came to life, molten gold scrawling from the seams beneath. Stunned, he watched as the ancient slowly rose off the deck, the center of a golden halo.