Empire of the Saviours (Chronicles of/Cosmic Warlord 1) (30 page)

The woman frowned and stood on tiptoe to peer at the wound. ‘I … er … It seems to be healing well enough. But the rock blight, dear one, it must be affecting your movement and speed of thought, no? You are slow, yes?’

‘I’m no slower than anyone else, I don’t think,’ Freda rumbled after some serious thought. ‘I am looking for Jan. Have you seen him? Did he come here? I want to find Jan for Norfred. Norfred is Jan’s father.’

The woman listened carefully and nodded her understanding. ‘I see. Jan, is it? I don’t recall a Jan, but there are many that come through here and don’t spend more than a week or two. They are given some basic training with swords, pila, javelins and the like, and are then usually sent out east. They say that no amount of training can compare to the real thing, you see. I suppose they’re right, but it breaks my heart to see so many of our young people going out to face those awful barbarians. Oh, and then there are some I don’t even get to see, for they are sent straight to the Great Temple. Good-looking is he, this Jan? If so, chances are that he’ll have been lucky enough to be selected to serve in the Great Temple itself.’

Good-looking? Freda couldn’t really answer because she hadn’t seen Jan. Besides, she didn’t know how to judge such things. Had Norfred been good-looking? She didn’t know. He’d been kind, but that had to be different because it was a different word. What she did know was that she herself was ugly. Everyone said so. ‘He isn’t like me,’ Freda mumbled.

The woman nodded. ‘Look, why don’t you go and ask the Selecting Officer? He’ll know if this Jan has gone east or south. They keep records, you see, in case anyone goes missing when they shouldn’t. It’s important to know how many leave here and how many arrive somewhere, so that no one can run off without people knowing, you see. And they record names, what a body looks like and places of origin so that a person’s easier to find if they do run off. Come on, I’ll take you to the Selecting Officer if you like.’

Freda hung back.

‘Come on then. Don’t be scared. No one will hurt you when you’re under my care. Don’t worry, the men jump when I tell them to. I’ve treated nearly all of them at one time or another, when they’ve been seeing the painted women in the town and picked up some infection or other. The things I could tell you! Every now and then, one of them comes to me with hands a-wringing and crying that they’ve got some woman with child and that they need some brew to stop the child ever being born. These Heroes aren’t allowed families on any account, you see, and the punishment for disobedience terrifies them witless. They’ve all heard of the men that’s been gelded. Nothing to laugh at, eh?’ she chortled. ‘The smart ones, of course, come to me before they visit the painted women in the town. I give them a brew to make sure they never get a child on some woman in the first place. If they want to keep getting their brew, then they stay on the right side of me, you see, if they’re smart, as I’ve already said. So come along, Freda.’

For once, Freda was glad she had a stony face so that the heat and crimson embarrassment she felt at the woman’s words wouldn’t shame her. She hadn’t understood everything, but she’d understood enough to know that the woman had spoken of intimate things that went on between a man and woman when nobody else was around or when everyone knew not to notice or talk about what was happening. People weren’t meant to talk about such things! They were forbidden, wrong somehow.

The woman took Freda gently by the hand and led her out into the dark place.

Saint Goza drooled in anticipation. Saliva dribbled from the corners of his generous mouth, around his wide chin and down onto his straining tunic. It had been a long while since his personal cook had been able to buy a newborn, and the taste and exquisite experience simply could not compare. The flesh and magical potency of older children, even children just a few weeks older, was tragically bland by comparison and only served to increase his all-consuming desire for a newborn.

For the unfathomable magic of the mother and the near-miraculous energies of creation still clung to a babe several hours after its birth. Such power consumed the Saint as much as he consumed such power. It was beyond intoxication, beyond the high of the strongest narcotic, beyond insatiable appetite, beyond religious ecstasy: simply
beyond
. It was now essential to his being and definition. It was his every waking and sleeping thought, fantasy and motivation to act. He only moved if it was to feed or to bring him closer to his desired source of physical, emotional and spiritual food.

He consumed such volumes and was now so large that he could only move through the use of the magic he absorbed from the People he owned, bred and dined upon. He was proud of his size, though, for the bigger he was, the more he could consume at a single sitting, the closer he could get to satisfying his ever-demanding hunger and the greater his power to realise eventually the goal of the eternal, unending feast. He would consume this world and its Geas. He would gorge himself on the cosmos. He would …

His mighty nostrils twitched.
Ah, the meat was roasting now and close to done
. He preferred it rare, of course, although he tended to get stomach trouble when it was too bloody. The sauce the cook was preparing was intriguing too – shallots, a splash of red wine, wine from the east if his olfactory powers weren’t mistaken, and something else. It was a game Goza and the cook liked to play: seeing if the Saint could identify every ingredient. If the Saint failed to guess correctly, the cook could make any request he desired of his liege lord. However, if the Saint did guess correctly, the cook would decant a mug of blood from his puny arm and offer it to the Saint to wash his meal down with. In the thirty years or so that the cook had been with Goza, the Saint had never once been wrong. Yet today’s sauce was more of a challenge than he’d had in a while.

The Saint was about to tuck his outsized napkin under his chin when something else caught his attention.
What was this? Oh, not now!
The timing was dreadful. It would simply have to wait – otherwise, the meat would become overdone or cold while he attended to this irritating matter.

Yet the matter intruded and he knew that if he did not deal with it first he would not be able to enjoy his meal fully. Cursing vilely, he threw the napkin down with one hand and thumped the table with the other, cracking the wood. He snorted to herald his intention to speak. The Saint’s revolting manservant – a creature so thin and covered in cankers, he wasn’t worth eating – hurried inside the tent to wait on his liege lord’s wisdom and command.

‘Yes, holy one? Should I fetch buckets to catch your divine excrement?’

The Saint grunted as he summoned the power to draw enough breath to say, ‘No, you overeager lickspittle! Sell it, do you, my effluence? Or do you dine on it yourself, hoping to gain whatever meagre energies might still remain within it?’ Goza wheezed with suspicion. ‘Is that it? You hope to become as powerful as your master? You think to challenge me and become the Saint of this region?’ He drew on more of his power to unleash a gargantuan roar: ‘Well?’

The manservant grovelled low, his fright causing several of his cankers to start oozing pus at the same moment. ‘Holy one, I see to it that your largesse is freely shared with the faithful hereabouts. The local farmers joyfully spread your benevolence on their fields, for it increases the yield of their crops tenfold. Truly, it is a miracle that sees all the People rejoice and declare they only live by your grace.’

‘You are smooth-tongued,’ Goza responded accusingly. In his mind’s eye he’d seen the man do as he claimed, but he still did not believe him. Goza did not trust any who might one day be his lunch. ‘Indeed, it is probably the only worthwhile part of you. I would have it boiled and served with quails eggs if I did not need you for tedious day-to-day details. Tell the cook that he should slow the cooking by half a clock. If the roasting meat dries out too much, tell him, I’ll have his skin peeled off and his body immersed in pickling fluid.’

‘At once, holy one,’ the manservant replied as he hurried out.

With a burp and fart that extinguished a few candles, Goza heaved himself onto his wide split feet and pounded his way out of the tent, lifting his bright war hammer as he went. The weapon was far too large and heavy for any ordinary man, but it had become small in his hands of late. Perhaps it was time to have a new one forged. After all, sufficient sun-metal had been pulled from the ground recently to allow him a new weapon without the Saviours having to suffer any fall-off in their normal supply.

Cooking pots on the campfires of his personal guard rattled and jumped as he paced up to his Captain. ‘Bring the cage!’ he blew at him and turned away without waiting for a reply. The Saint started to make for the fortified walls just beyond his camp.

A stray dog whined and rolled onto its back submissively as the Saint passed it. He would have grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and bitten its head off by way of a light repast to keep him going, but the thing looked emaciated and was probably riddled with burrowing worms. Goza had had an infestation of worms in his back once and it had itched terribly. On another occasion he’d even lost weight, which had been truly worrying.

Even though there was very little sun in evidence in the white sky, sweat had already begun to lather his magnificent physique. The exertion required to keep such a formidable bulk moving could have easily toppled these moss-covered walls, no matter how long the Old Fort was said to have stood. The People had no true idea of strength and eternity, no genuine understanding of how lucky they were to have him among them and watching over them. After all, how could they? They were little more than another type of burrowing worm really. They made him itch.

He powered onto the training ground inside the walls, and several hundred new recruits and Heroes abased themselves before him. He moved to the centre of the wide space and came to a stop. The soldiers would continue to lie on their faces until he instructed them otherwise. He settled in to wait, knowing it wouldn’t be long. He started to daydream about the meal waiting for him. Just what was that other ingredient in the sauce? Its smell reminded him of a particularly red and toxic berry found only along the shore of a hidden lake in the far north. Surely the cook didn’t have the inspiration and wherewithal to procure an item so rare, did he? Goza smiled. Perhaps he did, at that, given he’d been told money was no object and he might use the holy one’s name as necessary.

The Saint dribbled freely as he thought of the dressing for the meat. He was now so long-lived and of such a size that he did not need to fear any sort of poison. If anything, the hallucinatory effects of poisons brought whole new dimensions that were beyond the physical to his gourmand delights. They gifted him with visions and vistas far beyond this world of anaemic worms. They transported him beyond the tawdry limits of this world and its thin range of tastes and flavours. They spread his will across the reaches of the cosmos, where he would feed on new and greater energies and begin to expand, until even the furthest corners of existence were his.

He blinked slowly and stepped out of the puddle that had formed around his feet. She was coming. Being led by the hand. Bandages over her sensitive eyes, the only part of her that was at all soft. Perhaps when he peeled off that hard shell, though, he would find moist and tender flesh below, as with a crab or lobster, and hopefully as tasty.

‘Oh my! The holy one is here,’ the woman exclaimed with equal surprise and excitement and threw herself to the ground.

Freda gazed through her bandages at the shadowy figure blocking out half the sky-cave. She was confronted by something as big as the rock god, but it was all wobbling rolls of flesh instead of chiselled granite. Was the figure a god of the soft people, then? Should she bow to it, even if just to be polite? It must at least be an Overlord, and that meant she would be in trouble for escaping from the mine. She couldn’t help feeling guilty.

The huge hammer of sun-metal that the god – or Overlord – held was painful to look upon and she had to shield her eyes with one of her hands. It was like the orb that sometimes shone high in the sky-cave. Had the god or Overlord of the soft people dragged it down from on high so that he could use it as a weapon against her? Now she felt afraid.

‘I am very angry with you!’ the giant roared, his voice making the walls around them and her stony skin ring painfully.

Instinctively, she hunkered closer to the ground. ‘Don’t be angry! Don’t send me back to the mine and Gang-leader Darus!’ she begged.

‘Silence!’ he bellowed, the sound threatening to crack her open. ‘You have not been given leave to speak in the presence of holy Saint Goza. You are young and ignorant, for you have not yet been Drawn, but I cannot forgive your other crimes. I sheltered you in the mine, allowing you life, and this is how you repay me. You not only defy your Gang-leader, but also your Overseer! Then you escape the mine and sow division among a squad of Heroes. Worst of all, however, you pull me from my breakfast to deal with you. I might well suffer indigestion later because of this inconvenience. Is there no end to your wilful blasphemy? You even presume to tell me how I should not punish you. Tell me then: how should you be sanctioned?’

‘I cannot return to the mine. I will not! There is something I must do for Norfred.’

‘Incredible. Would you now defy
me
? Would you topple
me
, as if I were something less glorious than the very mountains?’ the Saint asked in outraged disbelief. ‘Would you then defy the blessed Saviours, those who have given life and protection to all the People including yourself? Topple the Empire, would you? You are ungrateful and undeserving of the Saviours’ gifts then. Your utter self-obsession has warped and twisted your mind as much as your body. You are truly corrupted by the Chaos both without and within. There can be no salvation for one such as you, for there is no longer anything left of what you may once have been. There is only one sentence I can pass – your existence is forfeit. Our judgement and justice will swallow you up and break you down until you are nothing more than a stinking slurry to be fed to the pigs or spread on the fields.’