Here in Cold Hell Read online

  I should have killed him at the first stroke. Why play? Some can die, but not I or he …

  Vashdran stepped back.

  ‘Good morning, darling,’ he said.

  Curjai straightened, spat on the marble, and lifted his handsome head.

  ‘But did you slumber well, my pet?’ he inquired tenderly. ‘Maybe I can lullaby you off to sleep again.’

  Behind him, Vashdran heard the swords and knives of Yorrin and Kuul at work on those of the other two – Heppa, Ginngow. No man had been given a shield. So this one would not sprout wings and take to the sky.

  Curjai sliced in at him.

  Vashdran felt the knife – long as any sword and square ended – unseam his forearm and drizzle over the bone.

  Left-handed he struck Curjai in the face and Curjai’s left hand came in turn, punching into Vashdran’s throat.

  Vashdran staggered back. He gagged, but his vision stayed lucid. He must end this. How to slaughter what could not be killed?

  He heard Kuul singing a battle chant of the Jafn Irhon. Yorrin used slamming damning thuds of flesh and steel. But these other fights were miles away.

  It was like love. Did Vashdran know what love was? Exclusive, immediate, augmenting or painting out the remainder of existence with its colours.

  He bent, skimmed the unalive sword along the marble, its passage raising a foul shriek, brought it upwards in an arc. Curjai was leaping forward. The blade met him exactly as and where Vashdran had desired.

  Vashdran felt the resistance and give of severed flesh and sinew, muscle and skeleton.

  A rose-red fountain flamed into the air. The head of Curjai, so well made, dark locks swirling, tumbled away along the arena.

  Vashdran straightened.

  The moronic, probably unreal people on the tiers were screaming in adulation, and the filthy eye-flowers raining down.

  Vashdran looked briefly over his shoulder. He saw Kuul drawing his sword from the heart of the foe called Heppa. And that Yorrin too was dead – or ‘dead’.

  Looking again at the head of Curjai. Vashdran could see it had bowled to the far barrier. It lay there. The eyes blinked. But Curjai’s body was stretched out quite close, flaccid, as if resting.

  Vashdran went to the body. He kicked it once, sharply in the side. And at this it spasmed.

  Then he heard Curjai calling hoarsely, softly, carryingly, under the tumult of the tiers, ‘Here – come here, you …’

  The body flipped over. It got up on all fours, and crawled, like a bemused dog, away over the stadium.

  ‘Here – here – hurry up. I’m waiting.’

  Vashdran burst suddenly into laughter. Above and around those on the benches were laughing too. And Curjai’s head also laughed.

  The crawling dog of body reached the cut-off head. They united, without shame, and were again scarlessly one.

  Curjai stood up on the oval, and raised his arms, and the crowd thundered, and the flowers fell like the snow of a winter world.

  Vashdran caught one, as he had before. He looked into the petals and saw, not an eye, but a mouth fixed with pointed hungry teeth. He stamped on it.

  Kuul was there.

  ‘Yorrin’s dead.’

  ‘We can’t die. He can’t. It happened before on the plain, remember, and he lived.’

  ‘No, he is dead. Some still can die.’

  Vashdran looked, and Yorrin lay on the ground, bloodless. But Yorrin’s opponent, the one whose name meant Swanswine, and whom Kuul had dispatched, was healing at a great rate, pulling himself up, making obscenely definite gestures at girls in the crowd. Kuul’s own slain match, Heppa, was also back on his feet.

  ‘Truly,’ said Kuul, ‘surely and for ever. This is Hell.’

  Vashdran woke screaming. Kuul shook him fully awake.

  ‘Sleep is still the main enemy,’ said Kuul.

  ‘So … you Jafn say.’

  ‘Aren’t you Jafn, Vash? I thought you were.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Vashdran. He sat up. They were in one of the long rambling nothing-halls of the labyrinth. It was evening. Elsewhere the feasting went on, as it did every night, apparently. Or at least as it had done for the eleven days and nights they had now been in the purlieus of this palace.

  ‘I was dreaming,’ said Vashdran absently.

  Kuul looked at him again. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I dreamed of my death.’

  ‘The death today when that cutcher Curjai finally killed you? It’s the first time he has. Ten times before you’ve—’

  ‘Decapitated him, impaled his heart, gutted him. I recall quite well, Kuul. He always jumps up again and his head can call his body back like his hound or hawk. It wasn’t that death, today, my dream. Death here is only pain, and a handful of moments that touch oblivion with one finger. There’s no such thing as death any more, for us.’

  ‘No, Vash.’

  ‘You die here too. Is it the same for you?’

  He asks almost like a child, Kuul thought, surprised. Sometimes he’s like that, though so vital and shining. Who is he? I can never quite remember, though I remember a war – I remember a chariot, and riding at his back. And I must have died then, actual death, and I don’t recall that either. Only my fake deaths here.

  ‘About the same as you say. Like a faint. Like … sleep,’ said Kuul.

  Vashdran got to his feet. He had believed he and Kuul were alone in this chamber, but Kuul himself had followed him, and now Vashdran saw others must have followed Kuul. They too then had heard him cry out in terror. Anger set Vashdran’s face once more like the stone face of the King.

  He stalked across the space and stood glowering down on the Olchibe Ginngow, which meant Swanswine, and the other man, Heppa, who were playing some type of game with peculiar rounded dice. Curjai sat nearby, his back to the wall, carefully paring his nails with the edge of his knife.

  ‘We meet too often,’ said Vashdran. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Here’s as favourable as anywhere,’ replied Curjai temperately, not looking up.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Vashdran, in his beautiful voice that carried now no meaning, ‘I’ll think of something more challenging for you.’

  ‘Yes, it loses its savour, all this unfruitful death.’

  ‘Not for some,’ muttered Swanswine. ‘Not for Yorrin.’ He threw the dice and seemingly won, though how or what was unclear. Vashdran leaned over and pulled him up anyway in mid-cackle. He lifted Swanswine high, like a boy, and slung him about sixty paces off, skidding down the room to land hard against an adjacent wall.

  Heppa said stupidly, ‘What was that for? We’ll get enough of that tomorrow.’

  After the first bout in the arena eleven days back, they still fought, but now two against two, since Heppa had been allocated another group. Swanswine fought Kuul. Yorrin’s death had necessitated this. For Yorrin had died when Swanswine cut him down, and afterwards they had seen the corpse dragged away, as others had been. Where the bodies went none knew. The indigenous population could or would not say – neither the phantasmal, brainless crowds and the automatons of snake-head guards, nor the pleasure servants. Perhaps the stadium dead went to the same graveyard as had the cadavers off the battlefield, for no stench of decay had blown up from the plain.

  ‘Why are you here, Heppa, you blown-in snot-rag? You no longer fight with them.’ Kuul was trying to keep the front united.

  Heppa shook his head. He did not know, it seemed. He was a big, shaggy lout, a Vorm, though he did not much talk in their way, from the outer isles of the world, and dropped in the formative years on his brain, Kuul deduced.

  Swanswine meanwhile was lumbering back up the hall, his braids clinking with tiny skulls, gathering speed to run at Vashdran. Vashdran shot him one withering glance, never shifted.

  It was Curjai who shouted, ‘Ginngow! Put your anger up your arse and come and sit down, for the love of Attajos.’

  Kuul sniffed in disdain – Attajos, some foreign, unimportant god.


  But Swanswine shook off his rage with an oath, then sat placidly down by Curjai.

  ‘Let us talk,’ said Curjai, ‘like civilized men.’

  ‘Where on the face of the world do you hail from that you think yourself civilized?’ burst out Kuul.

  ‘A beautiful upland, flowing with pretty snow and ice and galloping with herds of edible animals. I’ve remembered it all. You?’

  Kuul shrugged. ‘Similar. But you’re brown-skinned. Where did you get that?’

  ‘From my gods.’ He nodded idly at Vashdran. ‘As did he. And like you,’ he added, now looking directly up into Vashdran’s face, ‘I dream of my real death. And wake up yelling for my mother, as you do.’

  Vashdran bristled, grew expressionless again. ‘Well. I imagine we’ll meet tomorrow as usual. We can debate it then.’

  ‘Let’s meet now.’ Curjai rose. He held out his right hand for Vashdran to clasp. And Vashdran recollected how he himself had taken men’s hands, and seen the current of his power course into them, seductive and total. There had been one who refused, as if guessing what would happen. He had been a king, but only a mortal one.

  Smiling, Vashdran copied the words of Bhorth, the Rukarian king who refused. ‘I will not.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Curjai softly, exactly as had Vashdran on that occasion, ‘I must take your hand, then.’

  Curjai’s grip was not familiar, despite every various contact they had had when fighting – killing – each other. It was strong, nearly calming, full of a steady pulse. But what did Curjai feel? His eyes widened slightly, that was all. They were lighter in shade than Vashdran had thought, or perhaps that was only because Curjai, now, was not in combat.

  And Curjai said, ‘Blue eyes,’ to Vashdran. ‘It’s the berserker scarlet I usually see on you.’

  ‘What’s this,’ said Vashdran, ‘a handfasting?’

  ‘Surely. Don’t warriors make that where you come from?’

  ‘Blood-brotherhood.’

  ‘Then certainly you and I already created that. Have we tasted enough of each other’s blood, do you think?’

  ‘The last man I swore the bond with I tricked and defeated and sent to his real death. A bad one.’

  ‘Time then to polish the bond up again with another.’

  ‘Not with you.’

  ‘It’s done. Too late.’

  Vashdran said, in a low angry drumming voice, ‘I’m royal by birth and supernatural otherwise. My father was a god.’

  ‘Fine as sunny days,’ said Curjai. ‘Mine too.’

  ‘You lie.’

  Curjai laughed. He still gripped Vashdran’s hand, and Vashdran had not yet pushed him off. The other three squinted at the phenomenon lamely, Kuul with his knife drawn, Heppa scratching, Swanswine wearing an uncomfortable sneer.

  ‘How to prove my birth-line,’ said Curjai. ‘Tell me. I’ll convince you.’

  ‘This is the Death Place. Nothing can convince here. Or if it does, I’d be as great a fool as you.’

  ‘There are none of my countrymen with me that I’ve seen,’ said Curjai. ‘I lost them all on the way. But maybe even they wouldn’t have sworn to what I am – or was. Not here.’

  ‘Curjai, I have no concern as to what you were, or are. I bother to fight you every day because, as yet, I can think of no better activity.’

  ‘Let me suggest one.’

  Vashdran dropped Curjai’s hand – or it loosed itself. They stood there, still looking eye to eye.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘We tell them, our supposed masters here, we will no longer fight. We’re matched. We can destroy each other over and over and nothing can come of it.’

  ‘That will be the idea,’ whispered Kuul. ‘We’re in Hell.’

  ‘Then let’s invent another idea,’ replied Curjai, not taking his eyes off Vashdran. ‘This one grows too boring.’

  It was Swanswine who chuckled. Then Heppa, only taking his lead, perhaps.

  Vashdran said, ‘Presumably then we’ll earn some punishment.’

  ‘So what? Whatever they do can’t harm us. And it might make a change.’

  Startlingly maybe, Swanswine pronounced, ‘They could exile us to some new spot. I heard that, in the halls: exile if you won’t fight.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘It just – mutters about. Haven’t you heard that? Fragments of talk and music, moans, sighs – like ghosts. It comes out of the walls.’ Each of the other men, even Vashdran, nodded. Yes, they had all caught these snatches of sound. The walls spoke to them, or to nothing. They trapped bits of song and vocal sorrow, and subsequently let them go, to waft through the maze of the palace. The walls were not alive, precisely, but it seemed that something in them was.

  Vashdran thought, In fact, that is where they come from, those men and women we encounter here – guards, slaves, mobs. Out of the walls …

  Curjai said, ‘Exile. If we’re in Hell, where else is there to go or be sent?’

  ‘Somewhere worse,’ said Vashdran with distaste. ‘Where the twice-dead were damned to – Choy, Yorrin. All the rest.’

  But Kuul said softly, ‘Or somewhere better?’

  Vashdran stepped away from Curjai, turned and walked off over the floor. As if at a signal, the other men also scattered. And as they did so, a whining roar broke through the black, dull-starred sky above.

  A piece of that sky now dashed down on them. It was another of the vast boulders, which every day or night inside the labyrinth they had either heard crash, or occasionally seen thundering into the river in the feasthall.

  Now the howling rock hit the floor between them, a direct impact, with a sound that hurt the ears, shook the earth, made the walls sing like a harp-string.

  The floor parted. As the river did, the marble received the missile, shimmered with rings and waves, settled, and was once more whole.

  ‘Ice heals like that,’ said Heppa, gaping at the unmarked ground.

  Each man of the five turned as one and moved off alone, across the hall and on, into countless identical others.

  FOUR

  He found the Stadionum by night because he willed to do so. As Vashdran had suspected, you only had to search for a goal to locate it.

  It was especially uncanny, the stadium, in the dark. Only starlight, no moons, illumined its pale, viscous-looking surfaces, the tiers of benches, the stairs and the arena. No one was there but for himself.

  Slowly he descended the tiers, and sprang over the low barrier to the arena floor. He recalled, by now having seen it often, how the floor drank men’s blood, just as the floors of the palace halls swallowed rushing boulders.

  But, solitary in the arena, Vashdran felt himself become afraid, although he had never experienced any fear when fighting.

  He thought again then of his true earthly death.

  The dream tonight had shown him. It had not, in the dream, happened to him; he had seen it happen to a man who without doubt was himself.

  There had been an ocean of the world, some huge dark mass, no ship – instead, a monster of the deep. On the back of this leviathan was Lionwolf, as he had called himself in life. Lionwolf entirely resembled Vashdran as now he was, even to the long red hair. But at once something had started to work on Lionwolf, a kind of psychic acid. He dissolved downward through breakneck periods of youth, childhood, infancy; became after this a baby, lying kicking there, mindless and shrieking. But the baby too was soon psychically eaten away. It sank into an embryo, a seed, a smoke … It disappeared.

  Despite living through none of this personally in the dream, Vashdran was drenched by horror.

  He thought, had the man named Curjai also dreamed of his own dying, as he had said? Very likely. All of them here perhaps must now and then do that.

  But Vashdran’s Lionwolf death was the product of some excessive sorcery. An Unmaking.

  He knew, despite an effort to deceive himself, that several important details before this death stayed anxiously incoherent. The beast in the sea, for example, which had
itself wanted to kill him and so activated his fate in such an appalling scenario.

  He leaned on the barrier wall now, and sensed it shift slightly against him, like an accommodating animal. Indistinct murmurs rose from it, but he did not pay attention.

  His mother too had died. He knew that. And his uncle, Guri, who had been almost better than a father to him. But the uncle was adoptive, and besides a type of ghost. Also he was an Olchibe, sinewy and braided and yellow-skinned like Swanswine, and with painted teeth.

  Vashdran had recaptured their names. Yet even so – what had they been, these people?

  The barrier walls made one of their sighing sounds, as if trying to tell him.

  ‘Hold your noise,’ he said.

  The walls rustled and grew dumb.

  Vashdran paced up and down the length of the arena. Overhead the large dull stars blinked as if tired.

  He knew, or thought he did, no one would pursue him here until dawn. Then Kuul would arrive, and Curjai who lyingly claimed immortal blood, and all the others too. Dawn was when they assembled to fight. But the crowd – they were why Vashdran had come here. More than privacy, with a perverse and jagged curiosity he wanted to see where they emerged from, and if it was as he believed.

  He slept awhile again, and the sun was rising in the unseen east, dyeing that side of the sky-roof thinnest blue. All around, as he opened his eyes, he heard them evolving. Just as he had reasoned, the people of Shabatu either lived, or were constructed, in the walls.

  They stepped out in strands like garlands of bodies and draperies. Shapes became women with flowers wound in their hair and bracelets on their wrists, and men dressed for a holiday. They had, as usual, every sort of clothing he had ever seen in the world, and other styles of garments too. The moment they erupted forth they formed, like bubbles from a strange white clay, and were somehow instantly coloured in and finished off, as if by invisible craftsmen.

  Already they were chattering, warbling. Probably it made them, whatever unhuman golems they were, happy to be free and in bodily format, able to hurry about and flap their arms.