THE SHRINE ON THE MOOR

Four ruins had definitely been human habitations. Their front walls contained doorways and windows, though these were black, empty holes above the ferns, gorse and purple-headed grass that engulfed their thresholds and ledges. The gables on their end walls still, vaguely, formed triangles. One cottage even kept part of its roof, though most of the mouldering thatch had caved in. Elsewhere, he noticed a chimney-column that poked up on its own like an accusing finger, chastising the sky for releasing the elements that’d destroyed its surrounding walls and roof. So, at least five cottages had stood here. The bottom stones of other walls rose out of the vegetation, one section as high as his knees, but he couldn’t tell if these had formed additional dwellings, or animal-sheds, or pens.

Life remained, though not the human sort. Several sheep foraged on the ground beyond the ruins, heads flanked by coiling horns, fleeces hanging matted and heavy. They’d be slow with so much wool on them. If he could catch one and kill it, he’d have meat to feed on for days… But he was too feeble. He’d be even slower than they were. And if he managed to grasp one of their fleeces, he wouldn’t have the strength to wrestle the beast down.

He ambled about the deserted, tumbledown settlement, his pace slowing further, his legs threatening to buckle. It occurred to him he might be finished. He might die here.

At the end of the cottage with the partial roof, he discovered a stone pedestal. Half-a-dozen steps climbed to a flat, square surface where two stone slabs stood upright, along two of the edges, meeting at a corner. In the ferns and grass beside it lay two similar slabs. This must have been a shrine. Once the four slabs had formed a box-like shelter on the pedestal, open on the side looking over the steps, displaying a deity inside.

Wondering what’d happened to the deity, he struggled up the steps and found some pieces of black stone on the pedestal’s top, under the still-standing slabs. One piece was fixed in the centre and shaped like a pair of feet—the bottom of a humanoid figure. A few of the other pieces looked like parts of a body and he started assembling them above the feet. But exhaustion befuddled him. It became increasingly difficult to fit the pieces together. He managed to build the legs, then the lower torso and arms…

Nearby, a voice said, ‘There… put that piece there…’

The figure acquired a chest, then shoulders and complete arms. As it was reconstituted, the voice became clearer. ‘That piece is the neck and jaw… That’s the middle section of the head…’

Only when all the pieces were in place and the figure was restored did he think it strange he’d heard a voice. He turned and looked back the way he’d come—down the vast, windswept ramp of moorland to the flatness of the bog. Beyond that, the eastern horizon was hazy with smoke. All the time he’d walked, he’d had a gnawing suspicion that he was being followed. That someone was on his trail, always behind him but never close enough to be seen…

But if a pursuer existed, it was surely a man. And the voice, he was certain, had been a woman’s.

He returned his attention to the shrine. The body and face of the rebuilt deity were smooth and blank, so devoid of features he couldn’t tell if it was meant to be male or female.

Unlike in the east, smoke didn’t stain the sky above him. That area of it was choked with clouds. Just then, a shaft of sunlight poked between them and the black figure gleamed in the sudden brightness. The man croaked, ‘Well, I hope you’re a god of good fortune. I need good fortune, now I…’

He realised he couldn’t remember where he’d come from, where he was heading or what he intended to do when he got there.

‘I…’

Or indeed, remember who he was. His name and memories had left him, leaving him as anonymous as the figure in the shrine.

His head spun, and he keeled over. His upper half crashed down amid the vegetation on the ground while his legs ended up lying against the steps with his feet pointing towards the shrine’s inhabitant. He moved no more.

 

‘Stay still,’ urged a voice, the one he’d heard earlier. ‘Just rest.’

He opened his eyes, discovered a young woman kneeling beside him and twisted his head to get a better look at her. He saw her clothes, a long woollen gown and woollen tunic, and an arm with a delicate hand reaching down to caress his face. But more of the sun had emerged and its rays made a glowing nimbus of her hair. In the midst of the glow, her face was indiscernible.

When he spoke, it was as if the words came straight from his thoughts. They didn’t have to pass through his parched tongue. ‘I can’t rest. I can’t lie here. I’ll die.’

‘No. It’s better you rest.’

Her voice was beguiling, as was the touch of her hand against his brow. He was tempted to obey. To stop resisting, close his eyes, succumb… Yet he rallied and tried to stay awake. Searching for something to focus on, he remembered the ruins around them and demanded, ‘What happened to this settlement?’

The woman was silent for a time, then said, ‘Lord Palchak decided to end it.’

‘Who’s Lord Palchak?’

‘He owned these moors. Perhaps still does, for I’ve lost track of time and have no idea if he’s alive or dead. He tolerated our presence here… Until the day he sent men to remove us.’

‘You were evicted?’

‘We were killed.’

‘All of you?’

‘Yes, all. I know for sure because I was the last to die.’

He considered her words. ‘You’re a ghost.’

‘I don’t see myself that way. I’m more of a servant now.’

‘To whom?’

‘To our god. The one whose realm you’ve repaired the link to.’

‘And where is this god?’

‘He approaches.’

Hitherto, she’d spoken softly. But she pronounced that last word so fearfully it startled him and he sat up. The woman wasn’t next to him anymore. On the side where she’d been, he saw only the shells of the cottages, then the ground that the sheep had grazed on—and a single sheep, moving his way. The animal looked immense, the size of a wagon, and its fleece was so long the dragging ends of its wool joggled the bracken-fronds and gorse-branches around it. The horns sprouting from its head seemed as coarse and heavy as rock, and its eyes were stone-like too, in that they had the same gleaming blackness as the figure in the shrine.

A moment after sighting that apparition, he found himself on his back amid the vegetation below the shrine. His legs slanted upwards as they rested on its steps. Groaning with effort, he managed to remove his legs from the steps and lift himself into a sitting position. The monstrous sheep had vanished, as the woman had. The day was less bright. Clouds smothered the sun again and, besides, its trajectory was taking it close to the western horizon.

At the steps’ top, the small, black figure still stood on the pedestal. He was surprised it remained intact, that its pieces hadn’t fallen apart again. Perhaps the black stone was really a type of metal, one with magnetic properties...

Though he supposed he’d had a mad dream, he looked around as if the woman had been real and he was searching for her. The only new thing he observed in the evening light was along the eastern horizon. Formerly a haze of smoke, the horizon now showed the sources of that smoke—a necklace of fierce, orange-red lights. Cataclysmic fires were burning many miles away, in the lands beyond these moors and beyond the bog he’d struggled out of.

While he watched them burn, things revived in his memory. These included his name.

‘Shathsprey,’ he muttered. ‘I’m Drayak Shathsprey.’

Then, while he peered towards the horizon, he saw somebody—not the woman but a man, whose form seemed suddenly to coalesce out of the burning glow. However, the man wasn’t faraway like the fires. He was advancing up the moor and it wouldn’t be long before he reached the ruins. Indeed, Shathsprey already fancied he could see extending from one of his hands the long, thin line of a sword-blade.

 

Shathsprey hobbled through the doorway of the least ruined cottage. His head was suddenly full of memories of the battle and the subsequent retreat and slaughter. He tried to concentrate. What of his weapons? His hands slapped against the bloodied, mud-encrusted rags that remained of his battle-dress. Wait… He’d been captured, those weapons taken from him… But later he’d acquired a sword, a Veleedran one. Where was it? Not on him. He suspected sometime during the long, agonising trudge from the bog to here, it’d dropped out of his numb hand without him noticing.

He rummaged in the part of the cottage where the roof hadn’t collapsed and where only human debris covered the floor—the floor’s hard clay had been treated with some substance that stopped the moorland plants taking root there. He found a staff and shook off its dirt. The wood was coated in varnish and remained firm.

From a shadowy corner, she spoke again. ‘Who’s approaching?’

Shathsprey didn’t bother to turn towards the corner. She was a being of the supernatural or a figment of his own madness. Either way, he supposed he’d never see her fully. ‘A soldier,’ he said, ‘from the fighting.’
‘What fighting?’

‘Haven’t you noticed? The kingdom of Karnshel’s in flames to the east. The forces of Veleedra are razing it.’

‘Did you fight there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe the man coming this way is someone from your side.’

‘I doubt it. The Karnshellan soldiers I was leading all died in the bog below. A company of Veleedrans butchered them. Butchered many of them after they’d captured them, for entertainment.’

‘Why aren’t more of those Veleedrans coming? Why just one?’

‘Because then those bastards were slaughtered themselves.’ Shathsprey realised his voice had become gleeful—hysterically so. He calmed himself. ‘It turned out that bog’s infested with creatures. Dangerous, savage creatures…’

‘Moon-crawlers. We were so scared of them we never ventured down there.’

‘Moon-crawlers? My soldiers called them the orybadak. Well, the orybadak, moon-crawlers, whatever, attacked their camp. Overwhelmed them, devoured them. They did that with a little help from me—I distracted the Veleedrans so that they didn’t realise what was happening until it was too late.’ He went to the door, leant against the inside of the jamb and peered out. ‘Not all of them were devoured, evidently.’

She sounded like she was right beside him, leaning against the same stones. ‘For how long has this war gone on?’

‘It was brewing for years. The Veleedrans gradually moved their forces to Karnshel’s borders. Then a year ago they encroached on one of its outlying provinces. The full invasion started late this summer.’

‘I wonder if that’s why the sheep’s fleeces are so heavy. It’s been a long time since Lord Palchak sent his shearers to cut their wool.’

‘Lord Palchak will know what’s happening in the east. And if he has any sense, he’ll have gathered together all his people, and trained them to fight, and made them into a militia. That bog and the orybadak form a barrier between Karnshel and this territory. But sooner or later the Veleedrans will find a way to cross it…’ Something occurred to him. ‘Was it because of those sheep your people were murdered?’

‘Yes. He decided it was uneconomical having people living here. Grazing sheep on it instead, and harvesting their wool, was more profitable than taking our rent-money.’

‘I’m sorry…’

Shathsprey got no reply. The woman had gone. He recalled what’d caused her to vanish last time and turned from the doorway. In the section of the cottage where the roof had caved in, standing amid the rotting thatch, was a figure with a horned head and a body swollen by a huge shaggy coat of wool. Now it looked as much human as sheep-like. It rose upright on two human legs and two human arms hung at its sides. Perhaps it manifested itself using parts of the living creatures that were in the vicinity at the time. Previously, there’d only been sheep, so it’d appeared as a monstrous version of one of those. But with men arriving here, it’d incorporated parts of them too and created this hybrid.

The Veleedran would soon be in earshot, so Shathsprey spoke quietly. ‘Would it be too much to call upon you for help?’

It made no response—no sound, no movement. It merely observed him from the gleaming blackness in its eye-sockets.

‘I didn’t think so. The folk here worshipped you but you did nothing for them, either. You let their lord kill them and replace them with livestock.’

Still the thing watched him impassively.

‘Not a talker, are you? Is that why you keep that poor girl’s soul with you? Does she act as an emissary, to communicate between you and the living?’ He sighed. ‘I have to say, you’re not much of a god.’

To be fair, he’d encountered gods and their followers before. Most had been of little use to anyone.

The soldier outside was surely just yards from the settlement now. Shathsprey whispered, ‘Well, at least wish me luck.’ Rather than emerge through the door, he went past the chimeric figure and scrambled up a mound of thatch lying against the cottage’s rear wall. He dragged himself over the ridge of the wall and dropped onto the moorland behind it. In one hand he gripped the varnished wooden staff—his new sword.
 


While Shathsprey had been in the presence of the woman and her master, it seemed some of the supernatural energy that animated them had suffused him too. He felt he’d regained his old strength and alertness.

Outside the cottage, though, he realised he was still feeble.

He tried to stand up and nearly toppled over on his beleaguered legs. On all fours, he moved to the corner of the cottage behind the shrine. He looked around it and studied the gap between the shrine and the cottage’s end wall. It wasn’t wide and, as the sun neared the western horizon, it was filling with shadows.

Shathsprey left the corner, shambled forward to the shrine, and pressed himself down amid the vegetation growing along its side.

It took longer than expected, but eventually he heard the trudge of heavy feet. He held his breath and lowered himself even further, hoping the shadows and the ferns, grass and heather around him were enough to hide him.

The man must have come out of the moor in front of the partly roofed cottage, because he immediately saw the shrine at its end. Shathsprey watched his big, dark bulk pass before him and halt at the shrine’s steps. A tracker or woodsman would have noticed the flattened plants below the steps where, earlier, Shathsprey had lain unconscious. But Veleedran foot-soldiers weren’t known for their tracking skills or, indeed, for their guile or intelligence. They were merely trained to swing swords, clubs and axes as powerfully as possible, to destroy their enemies with brute strength.

Shathsprey listened. A couple of yards away, the man wheezed painfully. And when he didn’t wheeze, he muttered. Shathsprey knew nothing of the Veleedrans’ language but the fact he was muttering to himself suggested he no longer had a full grasp of his wits. Then again, having recently conversed with ghosts and gods, Shathsprey probably didn’t have a full grasp of his, either.

The Veleedran finally turned away from the shrine and went past the façade of the cottage. Shathsprey crawled forward and stuck his head around the cottage’s front corner. He saw the man sway as he walked—he was limping. Encouraged, Shathsprey clambered to his feet. The moment he was upright, again, he almost fell over. He only avoided going down by managing to prop himself with the staff.

It didn’t feel like a sword now. More like a walking stick.

He stumbled after the Veleedran. In the gloom, the man’s back grew larger. He’d lost his helmet and a mane of tangled, probably verminous hair covered his nape and shoulders. Shathsprey came close enough to hear him wheezing and muttering. He raised the staff… But before he could slam it against the head, the woman materialised before him and screamed into his face: ‘No!’

It wasn’t her scream that alerted the Veleedran. He couldn’t hear her. Shathsprey assumed only he could perceive her, and her master too, because he was the one who’d restored the shrine. Instead, the Veleedran heard him.

He cried out because he glimpsed her face. From her voice and what he’d seen of her figure, he’d imagined she was in her twenties. But confronting him now was a face terrifyingly old. It was so gullied it resembled the outline of a face carved on the bark of an ancient tree. For how long had she been the god’s servant? And did time pass at a different rate in the netherworld she inhabited with her god, the netherworld where they’d been stranded while the effigy on the shrine lay in pieces?

Shathsprey pondered this as he staggered backwards. Again, he prevented himself from falling by using the staff for support. The woman had vanished. The Veleedran was coming at him, both hands fastened around his sword-hilt, the blade raised over his right shoulder. Shathsprey forced himself further back as the sword swung. The blade-point missed his flesh but scored the front of his tunic and possibly the skin underneath as well. Then his balance went, and he did fall.

The Veleedran tottered past, also unbalanced, by the momentum of the sword-swing. Shathsprey twisted over, off his back and onto his hands and knees, and scrabbled away. He remembered the staff and grabbed it while he moved. The spot where the altercation had happened was beyond the partly roofed cottage, but he encountered a wall, the remnants of one, whose highest stones barely rose above the tips of the ferns and grass. Shathsprey clutched onto the broken wall and tried to lever himself upwards.

He was halfway to his feet when he saw the Veleedran coming at him again with the sword. He thrust out his hand holding the staff, and the man blundered into its end. By good luck, it caught him in the face. The Veleedran screamed in pain, dropped the sword and clamped both hands over his features. Shathsprey hoped the staff had broken his nose or, better, punctured one of his eyes. Then the Veleedran stumbled and fell onto his knees. Shathsprey wrestled himself the rest of the way up, situated himself beside the Veleedran and began smashing the staff on his head.

‘Die,’ he babbled as he delivered the blows. ‘Die, you bastard!’

Unexpectedly, the Veleedran looked up, then raised a hand so that the staff smacked down against his palm. His hand closed. Holding the staff, he rose off his knees. Shathsprey glowered at him from its other end.

‘Let go of it,’ he croaked. ‘It’s mine. I found it!’

They fought over the staff, one yanking at it while the other lurched forward, until the last of Shathsprey’s strength left him. The staff’s end slipped from his grasp the next time the Veleedran hauled on it. The Veleedran staggered back and Shathsprey, empty-handed, spent, collapsed against the broken wall.

From the ground, he watched the Veleedran stumble about drunkenly, then equilibrize himself and begin to approach him with a sudden purposefulness. However, the man sagged on one side and, as Shathsprey had done, needed to use the staff like a walking stick. He was limping, Shathsprey remembered—he’d incurred a leg injury during the battle or the subsequent carnage at the camp. Meanwhile, Shathsprey felt the stone slabs that made up the remains of the wall beside him…

Their positions reversed, the Veleedran loomed over him and lifted the staff for the first blow. But before he could bring it down, Shathsprey found a lingering shred of strength and kicked at him. His foot struck the man’s injured leg. With a howl, the Veleedran pitched onto his knees again. And again, Shathsprey clawed at the broken wall and used it to propel himself upwards. This time, he took part of the wall with him. He heaved free a slab of stone…

Clinging to the staff, the Veleedran tried to get up too. But he stopped when the slab crashed down on his head.

He keeled against the ruined wall. His head ended up resting against its jagged ridge, two feet above the ground. He had no time to move from there, for Shathsprey dumped the slab down on his head again. And again. And again. Each time, Shathsprey reeled but somehow kept both his balance and his grip on the stone. Each time too, he raved, ‘Die!’

With Shathsprey pounding one side of it, and its other side trapped against the slabs still on the wall, the Veleedran’s head cracked, caved, then burst apart. A mush of brains oozed down the wall. Down it too fell clumps of hair and fragments of skull, stuck to flaps of skin and tissue. ‘Die!’ Shathsprey repeated until his voice was an exhausted rasp.

He dropped the slab at last, then dropped himself and sprawled over the Veleedran’s legs. The evening was dark now, and he welcomed that darkness as it seeped into his head and smothered his senses and thoughts.
 


Later, Shathsprey was glad he’d fallen face-down, with his features buried in the Veleedran’s muddy, bloodied leggings. That meant the crow—which woke him after it landed on his shoulders—wasn’t able to peck at his lips and eyes.

He realised what was happening and swatted in disgust at the bird until it flapped off him. He sat up from the dead man’s legs. The crow alighted on the broken wall nearby, where several of its fellows were perched. Greedily, they poked their beaks at the gore of the Veleedran’s head, which slathered the stone slabs under them.

Shathsprey struggled onto his feet, then bent over and spent several minutes retching, even though his stomach contained nothing and all that came up were strings of bile. When the fit passed, he gathered his wits. It must be shortly after dawn. A dull, greasy light enveloped the moor while, below, the bog and the burning horizon were buried in mist.

Some yards away, he observed a figure walking towards the mist—a woman.

‘You,’ he whispered.

The figure paused and looked back at him. The hideously aged face, which’d resembled a mask made out of old tree-bark, had gone. What contemplated him now was a much younger face—the one she’d had before her death.

He accused her: ‘You wanted me to die. First, when I lay on the ground, you tried to persuade me to stay there, until the life had ebbed out of me. Then you prevented me from attacking the Veleedran, which gave him a chance to kill me. Why?’

She replied, ‘I didn’t wish it. He did. And I had to do his bidding.’

‘So why did that man-sheep monstrosity want me dead?’

‘You intrigued him. You’d experienced life. You’d wandered, seen things, done far more than I had. I was nothing compared to you. All I knew was the little community amid the moors where I’d grown up—where I’d died. I had no inkling of the wider world. So he desired you as his next servant, his next emissary, his next companion.’

‘I don’t understand…’

‘It’s the rule. Each person who dies in this place has to serve him, the local god. Their soul has to stay with him until the next person dies. Then the next soul takes over the role of servant, emissary, companion. But I was the very last one to die here… You can imagine why Lord Palchak’s men saved me for last, can’t you?’
Shathsprey lowered his gaze and mumbled the same, useless platitude he’d offered the day before. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘After me, no more people lived and died here. No more souls could serve him. Also, when Lord Palchak’s men smashed the shrine, they severed the connection between our world and his. I feared I’d be trapped with him for eternity. But you rectified that. You fixed the shrine. And you were close to death. He hoped you would replace me.’

‘What happens to you now?’

‘He no longer needs me. I’m free to go.’

‘Go where?’

She smiled—an apprehensive but beautiful smile, Shathsprey thought. ‘That’s the mystery we’d all like answered, isn’t it? Well, I suppose I’ll know the answer soon. I’m sorry I won’t be able to report back and tell you. Though you’ll find out yourself, in your own time.’

She resumed walking. As Shathsprey watched, her figure became transparent and then her outline dissolved into the murky morning light.

The moment she was gone, he heard a cry behind him: ‘Hey, you. What’s happening here?’

He turned towards the ruins and saw the Veleedran, on his feet, making desperate, beseeching gestures with his arms. But not the Veleedran. His corpse still lay on the ground, his pulverised head still against the broken wall under the beaks of the crows. No, this was a phantom version of the Veleedran, an uninjured and cleaned-up version whose face was strangely blurred and unseeable.

The man went on, ‘There’s just you and me here… and that thing.’ It occurred to Shathsprey he shouldn’t be able to understand what he was saying, because only a few of the Veleedrans’ officers knew the Common Tongue and this was a foot-soldier, not an officer. But the words didn’t enter Shathsprey’s head through his ears. They appeared inside it, among his thoughts, which presumably made the language-difference irrelevant. The Veleedran pointed into the midst of the ruins. ‘Can you see it? What is it?’

Shathsprey followed the direction of the man’s hand and wasn’t surprised to see a phantasm with four human limbs and a head adorned with sheep’s horns. However, instead of a fleece, it now had a coat of black, glossy feathers. Also, a giant, hooked beak protruded below its obsidian-like eyes. Shathsprey glanced again at the crows. He’d surmised rightly. It assembled itself from parts of whatever living creatures were present at the time. Long ago, when several human families had lived here, it would have looked more presentable—fully human in form, like the figure on the shrine.

Shathsprey retrieved the wooden staff from the ground. In addition, he noticed the Veleedran’s dropped sword. He picked it up and after much fumbling managed to fasten it to his side. He reflected on how absurd their battle had been the previous evening—how they’d fought for possession of the staff while, just feet away, this deadlier weapon lay forgotten.

All the time, the Veleedran—or the Veleedran’s ghost—continued to question and plead. ‘What are you doing? You’re not going away, are you? You can’t do that. You can’t leave me with this monster. I know, we were enemies before. At the same time, though, we’re both soldiers. Kindred spirits in a way…’

Shathsprey started moving in the direction he’d been heading yesterday, steadying himself with the staff. Behind him, the man begged, ‘Tell me one thing at least. What is it?’

Shathsprey went as far as the shrine, then paused and looked back. ‘You’d better get used to him. He’s your new master.’

He had an idea and slowly made his way up the shrine’s steps. He raised the staff, ready to swing it at the stone figure, demolish it, scatter its pieces as they’d been scattered yesterday—and banish the god and its servant from this world again. Shathsprey stayed in that pose for a long time. Behind him, the Veleedran remonstrated and lamented, the carrion-birds cackled and squawked. In the end, he didn’t swing the staff. He lowered it and hirpled back down the steps, leaving the figure intact.

Before he continued walking, he addressed the Veleedran a final time. ‘I suppose because of the war your people started, more folk will cross the bog and come up this way. Fleeing the horror... Injured ones, dying ones. Sooner or later, you’ll be lucky. Someone will die in this vicinity and your soul will get its freedom.’ He couldn’t help but look again at the corpse. It was a pitiful sight, huddled on the ground, a mantle of crows covering its upper half. ‘Me, I’m sick of death, sick of war...

‘Be thankful for that. It’s made me merciful.’