Fatebreaker

Prologue

Ruia felt the knife in his side. Careful. It felt as though the wound was sucking air. He kept his gaze averted from the red chasm. Afraid now: so very, very. The blade lodged a hairbreadth from his heart.

A few more breaths and he had collected his courage. Need to know whether it's fatal. His hands came away rusty. Not too much blood. Terrified of dying, but ... was he actually dying?

Gingerly, he traced the hilt and its position in his ribs. The iron had thrust through a narrow gap in his armour, navigated his lungs and come to rest with the flat edge alongside his beating, beating, still beating, heart. A fraction higher or lower and he would have either been unharmed – a glancing blow – or dead. It was a cruel kind of miracle.

Ruia was not a religious man, but he felt compelled to say something to the pantheon. Would he thank Them or curse Them?

Better To Do Neither said Thoth, the Great All-Seeing and All-Knowing. A Mortal Should Not Seek Attention From The Divine. We Only Care For Those Who Are Great And Those Who Greatly Suffer.

The God manifested into the mortal realm on a nearby rock.

The ocean wind distressed platinum feathers. A ruby beak reflected the dark waves. It seemed the God had fantasised an ibis, but the form perched before Ruia was a twisted mass of precious metals and minerals. The effect was both sinister and opulent.

And Your Suffering, Ruia Son Of Nobody, Is Trivial.

Ruia regarded the God's apparition with curiosity. The reptilian sacks of his brain were already preoccupied with the fact of his death. The wound would kill him if he moved more than a few paces. There was no escape, no way of reaching a physician. He was alive long enough to bleed slowly out. His life was running in a frozen rivulet down and below him like the winter streams of the twilight grey mountains that dominated this alien land.

I Have Placed You At The Door Of Death And You Regard Me A Curiosity?

Silver talons scraped on weathered basalt. The God turned a black-sapphire eye in Ruia's direction, revealing for a fleeting moment in the glittering orb the wellsprings of eternity.

Not a curiosity. His Patron God, the one he had chosen to follow when he came of age. The mysterious master of knowledge.

Do Not Mock Your Master, Mortal. But A Thought From Me And The Blade In Your Chest Will Sever Your Earthly Tether.

Ruia made a feeble sign of appeasement. He meant no offence. He was a simple man. He was a simple man who had been a press-ganged killer for half his life, stolen from the docks in Alexandria and forced to fight for highborn lords and generals. All he wanted was a few moments of peace. Simply to spend the last moments looking at things beside iron and men, movement in front and arrows from above. Ruia wrapped this wish in appropriate platitudes and sent it out as a prayer into the void of the sky.

The ibis clucked as it considered the petition. I Grant This Wish. Came the reply. You May Die In Silent Harmony. The God evaporated back into the divine nether.

Disproportionately satisfied with this small concession, Ruia lay back on the cold grass of the hillside, propped his head against a deformed lump of granite and gazed down on the spreading arc of the bay.

From this height, the battlefield seemed calm. The watch fires on both sides had been extinguished; the opposing forces were hiding their night manoeuvres. Ghostly mist hung in vales along which soldiers crept, hidden, stepping silently, weapons held in white knuckles.

Ruia turned the gaze of his third eye further, angling at the shoreline, wishing to see something besides war. Lazily he hovered far from his body and watched the ocean waves lunge and recoil, regather; lunge again, retreat again. The pattern of the tide conjured cattle grazing near his home village, two thirds of the world away.