Location: Iztak, in the Rhokki Mountains
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year
Keldar’s confession — voices in old shrines, confused ones, contradictory ones — sat with me rather worse than I let him see. I already intended to march to Gwar’s Aerie and demand an accounting for the western unrest, for whatever game he imagined he was playing with the Derkka clans this time. But the business of the shrines struck me, on reflection, as an entirely separate matter — a mystery with its own shape, unconnected to the God of War’s usual crude appetites — and I found I could not, in good conscience, march anywhere at all until I understood it. I had a second, considerably more delicate deception to check on first, one I trusted far too little to leave unexamined even a day longer. And so, before I tell you what I found at Iztak, allow me a moment to remind you precisely what it is I stood to lose there — because I don’t believe the scale of it is properly appreciated unless you understand the whole of what I built, and how long I built it.
You will recall, if you’ve followed this Apocrypha back far enough, that the Drokka and the Derkka were never enemies by any accident of blood or fate — that particular hatred was mine to design, and I designed it well. Both trace their blood to Kane — Eve’s son by Lucifer, though the poor fools of that age believed him Adam’s — and to the two sons Kane carried east across the ice bridge into TerrVerde after I’d inspired him, quietly, to murder his own brother Kabel and earn himself the Mark and the immortality that came bundled with it. Drok and Derk, brothers both, settled the western lands they called Gor while their father wandered off into the wastes to sulk for eternity, as he still does to this very day. And it was Derk’s clan, in time, that enslaved Drok’s — centuries of it, a bondage I engineered and then watched unfold with no small satisfaction, since I’d had a hand in shaping both peoples toward exactly that outcome from the very start.
Here is the part I suspect even my most devoted readers forget, because it rarely serves either clan’s own telling of their history: the Nave family, back when they were still merely one clan among Drok’s enslaved people, turned traitor. They served as taskmasters over their own kin, grew rich skimming from Derk’s table, and when Ajax the Freemaker finally led Drok’s people up into the mountains to become the Drokka you know today, the Naves went with them — not out of loyalty, but because a grift abandoned halfway through is no grift at all. I gave the escaping Drokka a god of their own to steady their nerve — a “Rhokki” who never once belonged to the real, absent lumenarc whose name and face I’d simply stolen — and the Naves, ever opportunistic, made themselves his priests.
The Well itself came later, once I’d grown tired of appearing to my own flock in that ridiculous two-story loincloth of a costume and decided a disembodied voice in a convenient crack in the earth would serve every purpose the ridiculous costume had, with none of the tedium. Mamluk der Nave discovered it — or rather, I let him discover it, and was only too pleased to let him think the finding was his own cleverness rather than my design. Centuries after Mamluk, it was Mirkir who made the finest use of it I have ever witnessed from a mortal — a Wyze One rather more devout in his own fanaticism than his predecessors, and rather more useful to me for it, since a man who genuinely believes he serves the gods will do considerably more damage on their behalf than one merely collecting the tithes. It was Mirkir who found me a boy named Baldur and made him Kon-Herr through nothing but a well-timed prophecy and a power vacuum I’d engineered myself. And it was Mirkir, generations later, who delivered unto me the finest pawn I have ever had the pleasure of ruining — young Hacktor Derkillez, marked and claimed and shaped from boyhood into the balkery whose entire wretched career I orchestrated from that same dark fissure, whispering him toward glory and slaughter alike while his own tutor believed himself the one holding the reins.
What none of the Drokka ever knew, and what precious few of the Derkka ever suspected either, was that I was advising both sides of that ancient enmity at once — Baal to one clan, Rhokki to the other — while the Naves and their counterparts among the Derkka elite quietly kept a shadow cabal running beneath the whole bloody pageant, orchestrating wars and famines and glorious victories alike, so long as the right families profited from each. The commoners hated each other with real, earnest passion, generation after generation. Their betters simply got rich off the hating. It remains, I will say without a shred of false modesty, one of the finest and longest-running deceptions I have ever orchestrated, older than the very mountains that now house it, and centuries in those mountains had, in time, twisted Drok’s people into the dwarves you’d recognize today, just as my own curse upon Derk’s had shaped his into the goblins that serve me still.
I sat with all of that history for a long while, alone in my library, before I let myself consider the question I’d been rather carefully avoiding since Keldar first planted it in my mind.
Someone had gotten into my Well.
Not merely stumbled upon it, the way a mortal might stumble upon any ordinary fissure in the rock. Into it — into the very channel I had kept private and singular for five centuries, speaking in a voice close enough to my own that priests who’d devoted their lives to knowing my cadence had genuinely believed, at least for a time, that they were hearing me. That is not a trick a common spirit manages by accident. That requires either genuine skill at impersonation, or some manner of access to knowledge that ought to have died with me.
I turned over every candidate I could stomach considering. Could it be the real Rhokki himself, returned at last from whatever eternal sulk he’d wandered off into over his lost Gaia, discovering — to his considerable and entirely justified fury — that some fallen thing had spent five centuries wearing his face and his worship like a stolen coat? The thought alone was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck, if I still possessed hair, or a neck in any conventional sense. A confrontation with the genuine article, on his own ground, in his own name, was not a fight I relished even contemplating. Could it be Mindos, then — A’H’s own son, who already had some claim on Drokka affairs through poor Hef Fastuz and the Grim, and who might have any number of reasons to test whether the god his own worshippers’ rivals prayed to was quite what he claimed to be? That thought unsettled me nearly as much, for entirely different reasons. Or some other lumenarc entirely, some fallen or unfallen thing I hadn’t troubled to account for in all my centuries of careful bookkeeping?
I did, I will admit, consider Gwar for the length of a single dismissive breath, and discarded the notion almost before it had finished forming. Gwar. Subtle enough to slip past five centuries of doctrine, mimic a cadence he’d have needed real patience to study, and work his way into a channel I’d kept private since before his own arrival on this world? The idea was, on its face, faintly ridiculous. Gwar solves problems with an axe and a scowl. Whatever had gotten into my Well had done so with at least a rudimentary grasp of theology, however badly executed — more cunning, I judged, than blunt force alone could account for. I filed the God of War back under “brute nuisance” and returned my full attention to considerably more alarming possibilities.
Whoever it was, I decided, I would not go to Iztak unprepared a second time this season. I had marched to the edge of the universe once already with nothing but my own rib and my own conceit, and I had no intention of repeating that particular humiliation at the mouth of a mountain fissure. I took my true form beneath my robes, coiled and ready to unfurl at the first sign of genuine trouble. I kept Dagaal close against my palm rather than sheathed at my ribs, humming faintly, eager. I considered, and discarded, the notion of bringing the Eye along as well, on the theory that if this came to a battle of gods in a cave barely large enough to hold one god comfortably, a second artifact would do me considerably less good than a clear head and a ready blade. I do not mind confessing, at the end of a chapter that has already cost me a great deal of dignity, that I approached my own Well that evening with rather more caution than pride would ordinarily permit me to admit to.
What I found there, in the end, required no battle whatsoever, though I will grant it very nearly undid me regardless — not through danger, but through sheer, towering farce.
I had not set foot — or whatever the appropriate incorporeal term might be — in that chamber in longer than I care to number, and I had, in my long absence, entirely failed to account for a rather obvious consequence of my own negligence. A priesthood left long enough without any genuine word from its god does not simply sit quietly, awaiting instruction. It invents. And the Nave clan, given centuries of uninterrupted silence from a deity who had, by their own accounting, not spoken plainly to them since some hazy, half-mythologized age their own scribes could no longer precisely date, had used that silence rather industriously.
The chamber I remembered as spare and solemn — the great black fissure, the phosphorescent gleam, a handful of robed priests and their ancient carved likenesses of my own borrowed face — had become something closer to a costume pageant staged by men with considerably more vanity than sense. The robes alone had multiplied into a positive taxonomy of rank: I counted no fewer than six distinct styles of ceremonial collar among the priests present, each apparently denoting some subtlety of station invented well after any actual theological need for it, crowned by headdresses that had swollen, generation upon generation, into towering constructions of gilt wire and mountain-crystal that must have made simply walking upright a genuine athletic feat. Titles had proliferated to match. I heard, in the space of a few confused minutes, references to an Under-Wyze One, a Vice-Wyze One of the Eastern Vault, a Keeper of the Third Choir, and — this one I confess I had to hear repeated twice to believe — a Custodian of the Sacred Acoustics, whose entire office appeared to consist of standing near the fissure and nodding gravely at whatever sounds it happened to make.
There were, I gathered from the fragments of argument still hanging in the air when I arrived, no fewer than three competing schools of interpretation currently feuding within the priesthood itself, each claiming a subtly different reading of doctrine that happened, with a consistency I found almost admirable in its shamelessness, to justify whichever faction’s leadership currently held the richer share of pilgrim tithes. A priesthood left too long without correction, I realized, watching this whole absurd pageant unfold, does not grow more humble in its uncertainty. It grows more elaborate, more self-important, more devoted to the worship of its own accumulated ceremony than to whatever thin, half-remembered thread of actual belief had started it all. I had built a joke five centuries in the telling, and left it to run without a punchline for so long that the Naves had apparently written several dozen new ones of their own, purely to keep themselves entertained and enriched in my absence.
Into this farce had recently arrived a stranger’s clumsy false prophecies — garbled, contradictory, utterly without the ceremony my own voice had always carried — and the assembled priesthood was, at the very moment of my arrival, mid-argument over precisely what to make of it.
“—and I tell you, the pronouncement on the blood-price confirms everything the Eastern Vault has taught for six generations!” This from Corvain, Vice-Wyze One of the Eastern Vault, a stout, magnificently over-jeweled priest whose collar alone seemed to bear the weight of a small quarry. “Rhokki has always favored vigilance over complacency. Halvard’s soft doctrine of patience was always a corruption—”
“A corruption?” Halvard, Wyze One of the Third Choir, taller and thinner, his headdress swaying dangerously with the force of his outrage, rounded on his rival with the particular venom reserved for men who have shared a temple’s tithes for decades and despised each other the entire while. “It was the Third Choir’s teachings that kept the Amorosi treaty intact for fifty years, Corvain, and you’d have us believe a garbled midnight mutter unravels half a century of sound doctrine because it happens to suit the Eastern Vault’s appetite for war-taxes?”
“The Well does not exist to flatter your ledgers—”
“Nor yours—”
At the head of this whole squabbling assembly, silent through most of it, stood Malvorn der Nave — High Wyze One of Iztak, a title that had apparently come to mean, so far as I could tell from his utter failure to intervene in his own subordinates’ bickering, rather more ceremony than actual authority. He wore, I noted, the single most absurd headdress in the entire chamber, a genuinely alarming construction of gilt and crystal that must have required two attendants merely to keep upright, and he seemed considerably more occupied with the dignity of his own posture than with settling the dispute unfolding directly in front of him.
Somewhere near the back of this squabbling knot, a younger voice, considerably less certain of itself, attempted to insert some measure of sense into the proceedings. “Elders, please — until we can agree on what was actually said, arguing over what it means serves no one but—”
“The Custodian of the Sacred Acoustics has already confirmed the resonance pattern matches historical precedent,” interrupted Ossian, the reedy, self-important little man whose entire function, as best I could determine, consisted of standing nearest the fissure and nodding at it with great solemnity, “and I would remind the Under-Wyze One that resonance takes precedence over mere transcription in any dispute of this—”
“Resonance,” the young priest said, with the particular flatness of a man who has had this exact argument entirely too many times already, “is wind moving through rock, Elder Ossian. It confirms nothing beyond the shape of the stone.”
This last belonged to Praxus der Nave — Under-Wyze One, as I gathered from the general contempt with which his elders addressed him, the lowest rung of the priesthood’s considerable ladder, junior enough that no one in that chamber troubled to lower their voice in front of him or credit his opinion with more than a passing sneer. I confess I marked him even in that moment as the single voice attempting anything resembling actual thought, rather than the recitation of whatever doctrine best lined his superior’s pockets — though it did not occur to me, not yet, to wonder what his considerable lack of standing might mean for how much he actually knew.
I watched this whole spectacle unfold with something between horror and reluctant amusement — a High Wyze One too vain to govern his own subordinates, two rival factions dressed like competing peacocks and squabbling like fishwives, a Custodian whose entire theology amounted to nodding at wind, and one lowly Under-Wyze One trying, against considerable odds, to introduce a note of sanity that none of his betters had the slightest interest in hearing.
I decided the moment called for rather less patience than the scene otherwise deserved.
“SILENCE.”
The word rolled up out of that ancient fissure with a weight I had not troubled to summon in centuries, and the effect on that ridiculous, over-plumed assembly was immediate and entirely gratifying. Every priest in that chamber dropped as one — not the practiced, ceremonial genuflection I’d have expected from men so devoted to their own pageantry, but a genuine, undignified scramble, robes tangling, headdresses toppling, Malvorn himself nearly upended by the sheer weight of his own ceremonial construction as his attendants scrambled to keep it from crushing him outright. I understood, watching that chaos unfold, precisely what Keldar’s report had already half-suggested to me: not one soul in that chamber had ever actually heard a true and undeniable word from their own god before this very evening. Centuries of manufactured ceremony, and not a single one of them had ever stood in the presence of the genuine article until some clumsy stranger’s fumbling had cracked the door, and I had now, quite abruptly, kicked it fully open.
“ALL BUT THE WYZE ONE WILL LEAVE THIS CHAMBER.”
I will confess, in hindsight, that the command carried rather less precision than I intended, and the priesthood’s own bureaucratic excess turned that small imprecision into the finest comedy of the entire evening. For which Wyze One, precisely, had I meant? Malvorn, High Wyze One of Iztak? Corvain, Vice-Wyze One of the Eastern Vault? Halvard, Wyze One of the Third Choir? Every senior title-holder in that chamber seized upon the ambiguity with a speed that would have been genuinely impressive had it been directed toward anything more admirable than sheer cowardice.
“He means the High Wyze One, obviously,” Corvain said, already halfway to the door.
“He said a Wyze One, not the High Wyze One,” Halvard shot back, not breaking stride himself. “Could as easily mean any of us. Best not to presume.”
“I am certainly not remaining to find out,” Malvorn declared, with as much wounded dignity as a man fleeing his own god at considerable speed can manage, his attendants scurrying to keep his headdress from toppling as they hauled him toward the exit. “Under-Wyze One! See that the god’s business is attended to!”
And with that, every senior voice in that chamber — High, Vice, Choir, and Custodian alike — discovered a sudden and profound conviction that “the Wyze One” could not possibly refer to themselves, and fled with a speed their earlier, more dignified bickering had given no indication they possessed. I watched them go with an amusement I did not trouble to hide, since none of them were in any position to notice my private mirth over the much larger business of watching an entire priesthood’s leadership abandon their post rather than risk one uncomfortable conversation with the god they claimed, at every other hour of their lives, to serve with unwavering devotion.
I confess I could not resist a small cruelty of my own in that moment. The chamber’s single entrance was sealed by an ancient stone door, one I myself had commanded raised centuries before, ostensibly to keep out the unworthy and rather more practically to lend the whole proceedings an air of ceremony the Naves had always been happy to charge admission for. It answered, as it always had, to my own will rather than any mortal hand upon it — and I willed it, as that panicked crush of gilt and crystal came stampeding toward the exit, to begin swinging shut.
Slowly. Not so slowly as to spare them the terror of watching it close. Quickly enough, all the same, that Malvorn and Corvain and Halvard, being nearer the front of that undignified scramble, made it through the narrowing gap with rather more room to spare than I’d intended to leave them.
Praxus did not.
I want to be plain that he tried. Whatever fire of devotion or bureaucratic accident had left him kneeling at the center of that chamber, he had, in fact, scrambled for the door along with the rest of them the instant his own wits caught up to the general panic — only to find himself shoved backward by the very superiors he’d have followed, his own plain robes offering no purchase against the wall of fleeing bodies ahead of him, and the gap narrowing faster than a man his rank was ever going to be permitted to reach it. He was perhaps three strides short when the stone met its seat with a boom that shook dust from the ceiling, and I confess the sound of his own small, defeated noise upon realizing it — not quite a whimper, not quite a groan, something rather more pathetic than either — was one of the more entertaining sounds I have heard in recent memory.
He was not, as it turned out, entirely alone in his misfortune. One of Malvorn’s own attendants — a young acolyte, I gathered, whose entire function in that chamber had consisted of holding up one corner of the High Wyze One’s ludicrous headdress — had been shoved aside in his master’s own headlong flight and left on the wrong side of the closing stone along with Praxus. I watched him take in the sealed door, and the empty chamber, and the vast black mouth of the Well itself, with an expression of such complete and undiluted terror that I confess even I did not immediately grasp what he intended.
“COME,” I said. “KNEEL.”
Praxus dropped instantly, forehead to stone, the particular obedience of a man who has had considerably more practice fearing me than his companion.
The acolyte did not kneel. The acolyte, with a thin, high sound that I will not attempt to render faithfully here, turned and flung himself bodily into the Well.
I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I confess I very nearly did the same, purely from surprise. He did not hesitate at the edge. He did not pause to weigh the considerable difference between facing a god’s displeasure and facing whatever waited at the bottom of a bottomless pit. He simply ran the last few steps and threw himself into the dark as though it were the kinder of his two available fates, and vanished into that ancient fissure without so much as a final word, leaving only the fading, diminishing sound of his own scream to mark how very far down that particular piece of geology actually goes.
I confess I did not know, in that moment, whether to be offended or oddly touched. Five centuries of manufactured terror, and here, at last, was a mortal who believed in the consequences of my displeasure so completely that he chose to remove himself from the equation entirely rather than risk them. It is, I will admit, not the reaction I am accustomed to inspiring. Lucifer, I imagine, would have found it rather flattering. I found it, on balance, a waste of a perfectly serviceable acolyte, and rather more disruptive to the solemnity of the proceedings than I would have liked — though I will confess, in the spirit of complete honesty, that I felt a small private satisfaction close behind the irritation. Whatever else that fall cost the poor creature, it delivered his soul directly into my keeping regardless, the same as any other death on this world eventually does, bottomless pit or no. I harvested him without so much as breaking my own concentration on Praxus, and added him, name and terror and all, to a collection that had grown rather precious to me of late. There are considerably worse ways for a mortal to spend his final moment than in making an unwitting gift of himself to Death.
Praxus, for his part, did not so much as lift his head at the sound. Whether from discipline, or simple paralyzing terror too large to leave room for anything else, I could not say — only that he remained exactly where he’d fallen, forehead to the cold stone, while the echo of his companion’s scream faded into whatever waited below.
He did not lift his eyes from the floor. Not once, in all that followed.
Which left the two of us alone in that chamber — a god who had just, in the space of a single word, emptied a room of an entire priesthood’s worth of cowards, and the one soul unlucky enough, or perhaps simply unremarkable enough, to have been left behind to answer for all of them.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 