Grave Sin

Grant loosed the last of the armor-piercing arrows made from the barrel of his hunting rifle, punching through the steel lamellar on a Bekhite noble’s chest.

“Knights!” he called, “With me! Form up on the elephant. Punch through and cut those shamans down!”

The Bekhites had erected ramparts and stake-filled moats around most of their camp, leaving only two avenues for their riders to sally out. They were doing everything in their capacity to mount a stubborn last stand, but the riders of the steppe were not accustomed to fighting with the goal of holding an entrenched position, and Grant had managed to turn what was on paper a sound tactical decision on his enemies’ part into a deathtrap. The same defenses that made it difficult to swarm their position from all sides and overwhelm them, also made it hard for their horsemen to sally out and force vulnerable skirmishers and foot archers into melee.

The earthworks provided some cover against the attackers’ missiles, sure, but Grant’s mounted archers alone slightly outnumbered theirs, and with the enemy penned in, his peltasts, slingers and Vetani longbowmen had the luxury of attacking from whatever range they saw fit. The longbows entirely outranged any returned volleys, and the skirmishers could decimate any riders who exposed themselves traversing their defenses, then slip away behind spearmen the Bekhites were then hard-pressed to evade through their own spikes and caltrops.

Now that they were sufficiently weakened by these traded shots, Grant brought his death blow down. In this, even the narrow egresses they had left worked against the Bekhites. Grant may have had only one war-elephant and a few dozen Vetani knights, but these forces couldn’t be matched in close quarters by anything the Bekhites had at their disposal, and they were just enough to plug one of these two holes entirely. While his wild axemen from the forest tribes plunged into the other opening and his spearmen advanced cautiously over the earthworks, he led the charge against the best of the Bekhite’s surviving troops, their well-equipped and grimly resolute tribal nobles and such shamans as they had left to them.

He clashed swords with a warrior of the khatun’s household, then rode past the man, hearing him cry out as a swinging tusk unhorsed him. A Bekhite shaman ran to intercept Grant, even as his feet twisted into digitigrade paws and he sprouted a lupine snout. Grant held up his sword, and from atop the elephant Sauhur shouted incantations until the blade glinted silvery like the moon of Grant’s homeworld. He brought it down as a claw slashed for his horse, and the beast-man snarled as blood poured from its wrist. Then he slashed upward across its open maw, and the top of its skull went tumbling into the dust.

Once the Bekhite forces in this gap broke and Grant’s army poured like the waters of the Flood into their camp, he got his first look at this tribe besides staring down their warriors in battle. Around the periphery, hastily worked into the ramparts, were midden-heaps in all cases prominently featuring gnawed human bones. A lump rose in his throat as he turned to the tents within, then a different sort of sick feeling entered him to do battle with his rage.

He didn’t recall any firebrands being hurled over the outer defenses, yet already an entire jagged row of family yurts was ablaze. A woman of skeletal proportions hobbled weakly out of one, leading two children– a boy and a girl– who looked hardly any better. Their sunken eyes looked up at him piteously as he rode by, terror filling them as they glanced from his bloodied blade to their burning home behind them.

“Gather in the open!” he called as he rode past, “The children are under my protection.”

The Tabernacle of Yog was not hard to find. The temple-tent towered over the rest, in the direct center of the camp. The open space before it held only a few frightened acolytes and exhausted warriors who had fled from the outer defenses. Grant cut through man after man much as he had first found Yuya scything grain, the world descending into a bloody haze before he found himself before the gold-weighted tent flaps. Though he hadn’t taken note of his allies as he cleaved his way here, Piran stood next to him, the oak-strong old Jalabartan panting and smeared red all over. Sauhur and the other shamans dismounted the elephant and lined up behind and alongside them, the Green shamans conjuring from the bare soil massive pavises of living wood to screen their entry to this unholy ground.

These defenses proved wholly unnecessary. In the dark, smoky space beyond, they found only the bare backs, ribs visible, of the youngest and least-trained or oldest and frailest shamans. Rather than try and fight as the rest of their order, they ignored the invaders, continuing to bow and pray before a small shrine set in the tent’s center, a box of gold set with rubies and sporting designs of skulls human and animal, wolf-men and bird-crones, and less natural or even comprehensible things. A sickly green veil, set in a man-high arch, concealed the narrow interior.

Grant held his sword out behind him, and nodded to his White shamans. Led by Sauhur, they chanted a complex, almost poetic incantation in the Antediluvian tongue, and traced markings all up and down each side of the blade and across the guard, which shone with a darkness that superceded the shadows of the tent, a fuligin that ate light and shape. A spell to kill a god, if he could but land a single, true blow.

His heart racing, Grant approached the curtain, padding quietly, Piran watching the shamans behind him as they pressed on with their rites.

With sudden violence of motion, Grant tore the curtain from its fixture, raising his sword-tip next to his face.

A gaunt figure, naked and grainy black-gray as though burned or coated in filth, pushed itself back as far as the small box would allow. Like the demoniac shaman– the wendigo, he had called it– that he and Yuya had fought on the plains, its lips and the tips of its fingers were chewed away, scabs lining bony protrusions and a morbid grin. Its beady, recessed eyes looked up at him, and tears streamed down its face.

“...Grant?”

The voice was choked, dry, didn’t sound wholly alive. And yet, he knew it.

“Sarah?”

“You came. Across time and space, beyond where the light of the sun, Earth’s sun, can reach, you found me. Four billion, seven hundred and fifty-three million, two hundred and two thousand, five hundred and twenty-three years, and I was wrong for every second of it I spent doubting you.”

“This… this can’t be happening… this has to be some trick!”

“I wish it were. It does not change what comes next. Do what you came here to do.”

“You–”

“Kill me, Grant. I need you to end this. And if you are ever asked if you would like to be as God to a world of your own, say no.”

Grant’s head swam. He still suspected some deception, but… none of this made sense. Well, one thing still did. He leveled his sword, and plunged it into the goddess Yog’s heart.

She drew breath sharply, and her head fell onto his shoulder. “Thank… you. I love you.”

Grant set the body of Sarah Young gently back in its shrine, and turned to the shamans of Yog, his blade dripping with the vivid, surreally red blood of their goddess. He approached the nearest one, but each then produced a dagger from his belt, and in unison, plunged it into his heart.

Dazed, detached from himself, Grant stumbled out of the tent, saw the same family from earlier among the ashes of the burning camp. An arrow had pierced the mother, and the children were wasting no time with the customary Bekhite funerary rites. No, he realized, the first band of warriors he had encountered had burned their fallen, only consuming the flesh of their enemies. Did their mother not merit the same respect because she wasn’t a warrior, or was this a response to desperation, something they only did because of the dire straits their losing war with the Cainites had put them in? He didn’t intend to find out. The Bekhite tribe and its practices would not live to see sunset. Whatever the case, they did it mechanically. The girl was at most thirteen, the boy ten or younger, and they had clearly helped to butcher this particular game before.

Well, it didn’t matter now, whether he broke his oath to Yuya, whether his friend found out. Earth no longer had anything to offer him, and he could feel himself becoming something unfit for Earth. He stepped toward the Bekhite children, and raised his sword.

END OF VOLUME ONE

Yuya’s and Grant’s story will continue in Volume Two