Chainworld Read online

  CHAIN WORLD

  ©2019 Matt Langley & Paul Ebbs

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu. Artwork provided by Maxim Kostin

  Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2019

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are property Aethon Books & the author.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  The Creation Myth

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  The Creation Myth

  Creation Myth

  When the Gods created this universe, they built the anvil of creation upon which all species of this universe were forged. Some called it magic, but it was far from that. It was crafted, shaped, refined. It was constructed. The only magic lay in the fact that its creation lay beyond the understanding of smaller minds. That made it seem more wondrous than it was. But that was the way with such incredibly advanced technology.

  When the God-King was happy with what he had made, he left creation to populate the new universe itself.

  It was his way.

  The energies this universe transmitted would go towards feeding him, his God-Queen, and his children for many millennia.

  Satisfied, the Gods travelled to create another universe. And another. And another.

  It was their way.

  As is the way with beings of ultimate power, when you can create anything, when you can do anything, all that is left to you are petty jealousies, imagined slights and an immense and paranoid sense of betrayal.

  The God-Queen became unhappy with the God-King. The reasons for this are lost.

  They fought.

  They parted.

  The God-Queen wanted to kill the God-King—but it was a ludicrous notion. Gods can never die.

  So, if you cannot kill your enemy, what can you do?

  Well you could break something he loved.

  The God-Queen could certainly do that…

  Prologue

  “Forgive me Mother for I have sinned.”

  “How long has it been since your last confession?”

  “Thirty-five thousand, four hundred and ninety-six years,” he said. There were days and months in there, but he thought such accuracy was irrelevant.

  “This is going to take some time, I assume?”

  “I have much to confess,” he agreed.

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “Difficult.”

  “Start where you are comfortable starting then.”

  “Thank you. I’ll start before the beginning.”

  The horse died before Shryke reached the line of clouds shrouding the top of the sacred peak.

  There were better beginnings, and better endings. He felt no pity for the beast. It had served its purpose. Its death merely slowed him on his journey out beyond the links of Chainworld up to the Sun-Machine.

  Shryke imagined his Familiar anxiously waiting for word of his success. He had sacrificed much to protect the Dreaming Armies from the ravages of the God-Queen, but sacrifice and failure were different creatures. Shryke did not fail. It was not in his DNA. He imagined his Familiar with her head in her hands. It was as close to mourning him as she would come. She was practical. She would already be looking for someone else to carry out the mission she’d given to him, assuming failure on his part.

  Shryke took a breath and reset the codespells in his mind.

  The lines of code would mask his thoughts from all but the most savage enquiry. They were a thin defence, but his head was filled with thoughts that were too dangerous to think, so any trick he could employ was better than leaving himself open. That way lay death and madness. Or worse.

  Shryke should have anticipated the horse’s death; the animal had struggled with the unrelenting rise up through the mountain range. Even Shryke, a hardened veteran of the Thalladon Climbs, felt the hollow rasp beneath his breath that marked the onset of mountain sickness. It would be nothing short of a miracle if he made it all the way to journey’s end: The Sky-Shrine.

  The mere thought of the place caused a tingle in the codespells as they moved quickly to erase the image from his mind and suppressed any further thoughts of the mission.

  The scrubland stretched all the way to the solid cloud line up ahead. Behind him lay the tan line of the trail cutting through the rocks and tangled undergrowth—a scar that ran all the way back down into the valley where the river, fat with autumn storm water rushed and sparkled in the smoky dusk.

  There was too much cloud to see clearly an Overchain stretching across this section of mountain-halved sky.

  The loopmoon was fast approaching, and with it wolves and mountain cats who would be drawn to his horse’s carcass. Firstsun dropped below the far rim, meaning Shryke could look forward to five hours of Quarternight. The cloud line thickened as the temperature dropped.

  Heaving his pack across his back, hanging a gourd from his thick leather belt, and holding his sheath of steels under his arm, Shryke struck out for the cloud line, knowing there were five more miles of mountain ahead of him.

  The forest was hidden in a permanent fog.

  As the Firstsun waned the heat it provided chilled away quickly, the mist-shrouded forest became a cold place.

  For the first half-hour he could still see his feet, dim shadows in the mist, working mindlessly like the clockwork automata he’d seen on hawker stalls in Saint Juffour, the walled town at the neck of Lake Tarsh. Willing the darkness away, he walked on, keeping a hand outstretched, to feel for the trunks of pines and other thick undergrowth.

  He listened for any signs of predatory animals …or worse, tracking him, as the darkness descended around him. His ears were filled with his own muffled footfalls and the heavy silence of the fogged wood. He couldn’t smell anything beyond the rank dampness of the air. Even the delicate aroma of endless pines was engulfed by the fog. But if Shryke couldn’t smell so much as the rich resins and perfumed fronds of the trees then he had to believe the predators out there would have the same difficulties picking his scent out on the
foul air. It was a small mercy.

  Shryke stalked on in the damp darkness.

  The temptation was to throw up a couple of the seedlights he carried in his kit, but they would betray his position to anything watching. So, better darkness.

  His Familiar had briefed him in terms of what to expect: after a few miles the forest would thin out, and the he would break the cloud line. He was to find the stream, which when crossed at a narrow pinch-point, would lead to a track hidden by two levels of security magic that he would need to circumvent.

  If he could have risked the use of magic, getting through the hidespells and other alarums would be relatively simple. Shryke had more than enough codespells of his own to side-step even the most elaborate defences, but the screaming vengeance that would befall him should he risk even the pettiest of his codespells made that choice suicidal. No, he would need all of guile and none of his magic to continue his journey.

  Which was why the horse dying had fucked up everything.

  It slowed him down.

  He should have reached the pinch-point before Firstsundown. Instead he was going to have to find the path in the dark, without the aid of his codespells.

  Shryke spat a curse as his luck drained away. He heard the howl in the near-distance. It could be a wolf, but it could equally be something considerably bigger.

  The crunching of his feet in the damp brush had taken the guts out of the howl, but the beast was on him, a fat-pawed, snarling monstrosity crashed into him, lunging out of the dark. Its rank breath stank, making his eyes water as the gnashing jaws bit and tore at his protective synthskin armour.

  Shryke fought desperately, forced to defend himself with his bare hands as he fell back. The beast snapped and snarled at his face. Instead of recoiling from those wicked-sharp teeth, Shryke went for them, thrusting his elbow between the jaws to rob them of their bite. With his other hand Shryke punched up into the animal’s rib-cage, with such brutal strength behind the blow he felt the snap of bone on impact. The wolf howled and tried to withdraw, tearing at him with its front paws, but Shryke was not about to let the animal off so easily.

  He curled his arm around its neck, prepared to deliver a vicious final snap as a voice in the darkness barked, “Hold!”

  The wolf relaxed in Shryke’s grip as the single word cut through the Quarternight. The word had power. It sizzled on the air. Shryke relinquished his hold on the animal through no conscious act of his own.

  A myriad of seedlights floated before Shryke, coalescing into a ring of light around a woman. She wore the red habit of a nun and held a staff in gnarled hands. The wolf lay at her feet, licking at the fur above its broken ribs and eyed Shryke warily.

  “Mother Superior?” Shryke asked, knowing it had to be.

  She nodded, the seedlights keeping the fog at bay.

  Her dark eyes glittered with long experience and acute intelligence.

  “Shryke, I presume?”

  He nodded, his codespells reeling. How could she know? Had she dug into his mind already from a distance? Was he exposed?

  “We had word you were on your way,” she said in answer to his unasked question.

  Shryke faced the old woman. “I told no one.”

  “Words are not always spoken Warrior Shryke. Sometimes words find us by other routes. Shall we?”

  And in that moment, he knew that he was vulnerable. He felt the emptiness around his mind but couldn’t understand how his codespells had failed.

  The Mother Superior offered a hissing signal and the wolf’s ears pricked up. The animal looked at her, then loped off ahead into the fog and the dark.

  The sphere of clarity and light moved with them as they walked.

  Shryke wasn’t about to give voice to his reason for travelling to the Sky-Shrine, and the Mother Superior seemed happy enough with the silence, so they walked on without unnecessary words.

  The Order of the Sky-Shrine of Thalladon was not a silent order but such was their remoteness, living high up on the rimwall near a lonely cloudbridge that stretched the miles up to the Overchain, meant they did not see many visitors.

  Shryke was almost certainly the first in a dozen years or more.

  This Order’s needs were humble, their devotions non-taxing and their lives simple.

  There was a good argument to be made that the Order was mainly forgotten on this Link.

  In many of the towns and villages between here and Port Rain there were few mentions of their existence let alone their magnificent spired eyrie in the clouds.

  And that was as he needed it to be.

  Very soon, the seedlights dispersed.

  Shryke and the Mother Superior climbed higher, beyond the fogbound pines towards the thin stream curling amongst the rocks. The air was clear now but thin, and each breath bit with ever-increasing razor-sharpness into Shryke’s lungs.

  The Mother Superior, for all her years and seeming frailty, was fully acclimatized to this rarefied altitude. She moved easily as Shryke took step after stumbling step. His muscles burned. His ears sang. He was grateful that the Mother Superior’s wolf hadn’t waited to attack him. He would not have been able to fight it off. He wasn’t even sure he could muster the strength to fight off the Mother Superior, never mind her hellish hound.

  They crossed the stream.

  The Mother Superior waved her hand to unlock the security spells hiding the track up to the Sky-Shrine and its attendant cloudbridge. It was a dizzying sight. He had reached the end of his journey.

  “Please, Mother Superior,” he said, struggling to catch his breath. “A moment.”

  The old woman looked at the tall, brown-muscled warrior, with his heaving chest and the raven, sweat-lank, hair plastered to his brick-like forehead and shook her head as though she was so incredibly disappointed by his all too human frailty. She curled her wrist and muttered an incantation.

  Almost immediately, Shryke felt his lungs fill with cool, nourishing air.

  He could breathe.

  “All you had to do was ask,” she muttered with a chuckle that rustled like ashes falling into a grave plot. She took pity then, taking his huge hand into her tiny, bird-like claw, with its cracked and yellowed nails. The skin stretched across the bones in dry whispered skeins of flesh. “Not far now. The shrine is but a mile along the track. Once there you can rest and eat. And when recovered, we can get down to finding out why you’re really here…”

  Shryke said nothing, but his codespells buzzed and sparked behind his eyes, trying desperately to protect his thoughts from her invasion.

  The Sky-Shrine of Thalladon rested upon the lip of mountain that hung out over nothing.

  A two-mile drop into the valley from the rimwall made it look like it was floating in space. Black night enveloped it and the two vivid loopmoons arced through their otherwise empty horoscopes. Behind it, lit faintly by a third loopmoon, the cloud bridge curled up towards a smudge of Overchain, like a wisp of hair blown from a giant’s forehead.

  The first smears of Secondsun were unfurling on the horizon of the far rimwall and a cool breeze dried the last of Shryke’s sweat sodden curls, as they made their way towards the edge of night and the impossible Shrine.

  Even though he had seen the stone spires and gilded minarets of the Sky-Shrine once before, a churning sense of awe rushed through his veins, not unlike the first time he’d seen the Guild Nest on Pantonyle. Such were the manmade wonders of the Chainworlds.

  Ivy coursed up the thick stone walls in a green tide. Windows shone with a yellow, welcoming, warming light. In the walled gardens below the battlements, Shryke saw novices, marked out by their yellow habits, marching from the iron-doored entrance, holding their hoes and shovels, ready to tend the vegetable beds. Shryke knew good loam-rich farm-magic when he saw it. The low levels of personal energy needed to maintain those tiny spells were easily recouped from the abundance they produced.

  Shryke did not sense many Wielders behind the walls as they approached.

  Almos
t certainly the sheer force of the Mother Superior’s raw energies swamped the others, drowning them out.

  But there were at least three Wielders amongst the order.

  Shryke remembered them from before.

  Perhaps they had persuaded more to join the Order in the interim? Regardless, the shrine wasn’t awash with codeweavers. The Mother Superior’s breath-salve was beginning to lose its vitality, but his lungs were adjusting to the altitude now.

  Shryke allowed himself a wry smile as they walked through the shadowed portcullis into the courtyard beyond.

  Secondsun reflected like white fire in the windows of the highest turrets.

  Quarternight was firmly at an end.

  Rested and fed, his trail-dirty clothes had been replaced by roughhewn shirt and britches stitched, he assumed, out of a nun’s habit. Dressed, Shryke made his way across the Secondsunlit courtyard to the Sacristy, where the Mother Superior waited to hear his confession.

  He had his story prepared, and ringed in his head with two more codespells, doubling his mental defences for all the good it would do him. If he had been a religious man, he would have prayed that in doing so he hadn’t betrayed himself to the Assassins, lighting up his location in the Quantum Aether.

  He was not optimistic.

  The sacristy was a hollow stone chamber with a large, clear-glassed window. Through it, he saw the whole, endless blue void of sky between rims.