Last of the Khar'Thazaar

The old guard stretched, and felt the exhaustion reach past his muscles for the bones underneath, burning to crush them into dust. Six hours. Nearly six hours standing in the circle, and it would end the way it always ended — the way it had ended every night for forty years.

Khtur had taken his first watch at eighteen. He had believed then.

Above him the sanctum arched away into the dark, obsidian marble catching what little light there was and throwing it back across carvings no living man could read. Artisans had died making this place beautiful. Fanatics had spent three centuries keeping it that way, polishing the skull of a red dragon who gave his life essence willingly and was still, as far as Khtur could tell, extremely dead.

The scriptures in the old library went back three hundred years. Nobody knew who had built the sanctum, or when the first Obsidiere had decided a corpse was a home. Nobody knew who had drawn the line either, or how he had settled on that distance and not a pace further out, and it had not stopped a single one of them from treating it as law. Khtur had asked once, at twenty. He had stopped finding the question interesting somewhere in his fifties.

At the heart of it, in the hollow where the throat had been, sat the egg.

It was taller than a man, black, and dead. No warmth. No movement. Nothing. The old generations had decided the egg must not be disturbed, and from that single conviction they had built the whole architecture of his life: the line scored into the floor around it, the circle set on the line’s edge, four watches of six hours, every hour of every day of every year, so that the thing which was never going to hatch would never hatch unattended.

Forty years, and he had never once put his palm against it. The circle held him where the circle held him.

He no longer looked at it directly. He had stopped some years ago and could not remember deciding to.

His focus slipped again. It had been doing that lately, always in the last hour, and he did not like what it suggested.

“Must be my old age, huh?”

It was barely a whisper — faint as a feather hitting the ground — but someone heard it clearly enough.

“Stop pitying yourself already, Khtur. I’m here. You can rest.”

Footsteps came around the long way, tracking the outside of the line the way every Obsidiere had walked it since before either of them was born. Khtur lifted his head. His friend stepped over the scored stone and into the circle beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, and for a few breaths there were two men where the doctrine allowed only one.

Then Khtur stepped back out, over the line, and the stiffness came all at once, the way it always did the moment the stone let go of him.

“You’re late, dimwit.”

Tavrik shook out his limbs like a man loosening up for a fight, then turned and met his eyes.

“If anything, I’m sorry for keeping you waiting. I was running an errand for him. You can’t blame me for that.”

Khtur could, and did. Tavrik smirked, shook his head, and tipped his chin toward the throat’s only exit.

He understood the gesture. Once an Obsidiere had set himself in the circle, there was nothing further to be said. He turned and left his friend to it, tracing Tavrik’s own steps back around the outside of the line, and headed for the corridor.

His body ached with a stiffness that felt like an argument — insisting he was not what he had been ten years ago, dragging him down toward the black obsidian underfoot. He walked through it anyway, down the dark corridors, toward the only place in this hateful sanctum he actually wanted to be.

The halls were nearly empty. No Obsidiere would have found that strange; these were the last days of the sun year, and in three days, four at most, the sanctum would be full to the brim with pilgrims. Khtur sighed. Full meant doubled watches, tripled guard rotations, and errands from now until the eve.

They came every year. They believed this place was sacred. They brought presents and laid them at the feet of a very certainly dead skeleton and prayed for fortune in the year to come, and every one of them went home satisfied, and not one of them had ever stood six hours in a circle. To Khtur the sanctum had never been sacred. It was a prison with good carvings.

None of them would get anywhere near the egg, of course. Nobody entered the throat but Obsidiere.

He reached his chambers, took the carved black key from his belt, and let himself in. No responsibilities until the eve — nothing but sleep. He stripped off the attire the order required of him, put on something soft, and went straight to bed.

He slept easily. He had earned it, and there would be time enough to rest before the pilgrims came.

…

The day before the eve at dawn, Khtur waited while the boy carried his request up to the echelon.

Seventeen, he guessed. Close enough to the watch to be counting the months, and it showed in him — the straight back, the pride, the eyes still full of it. Khtur remembered that feeling perfectly. Crystal clear, if he was honest. He also remembered what came after.

The door creaked open along its whole shaft and the boy came out and bowed, deep, the way the order demanded for its elders.

Khtur waved it off. He had lost his belief in the order’s demands a long time ago.

“The elders will see you, Khtur.” The boy hesitated. “If I’m not overstepping — please be reasonable. An absurd request this close to the eve won’t be met kindly. Please, step in.”

He stuttered on it. Delivering a warning to an elder cost him something.

Khtur patted his shoulder and went through the door, slow, heavy. There was no reason to hurry toward what he was about to say.

The last few eves had been lax. Khtur had lost his faith in the order’s ways, not his sense — whatever he thought of the doctrine, the sanctum’s security had to be flawless tomorrow, and for years now it had not been. The place was called sacred. That was exactly the trouble. There were men out in the world who made it their work to burn sacred things, worshipping the devil or something worse, or nothing at all — Khtur neither knew nor cared which. Travellers brought word all the same. Ruined cathedrals. Holy houses gutted across half the continent.

He stepped inside and walked to the heart of the room, slowly. The chamber had been chosen for the council long ago and matched the rest of the sanctum — dark, ancient, beautiful. A semicircular table curved around the space where Khtur stopped, plain, no head to it, no side that drew the eye.

Five chairs behind it. Four occupied.

The middle one was empty.

Khtur frowned. This was not what he had wanted. Without him the others would spend the hour maneuvering — pushing their own men toward the tasks that mattered, each of them building something for later.

He bowed, deep, the way the boy at the door had bowed to him. It was the norm, after all.

“Greetings, respected council. I’m grateful you granted my request.”

He rose, and stood straight.

“Before I come to my reason for asking — if I’m not overstepping. Where is he?”

The question hung there.

“He is not here,” said Ghorun.

The oldest of them, and the only one who had not looked up when Khtur entered. His hands stayed folded on the table.

“He rode out four days ago—” began the elder at the far left, and stopped, because Ghorun had lifted one finger off the wood.

“He is not here,” Ghorun said again. “You have your audience with us. Use it.”

Khtur let the silence sit a moment longer than was polite.

“Then I’ll be brief. Tomorrow’s eve, I want the throat closed. Not guarded — closed. No pilgrim past the second hall. Two men in the circle instead of one, in shifts of three hours, not six, because a man on the sixth hour cannot see straight and I know that better than anyone here. Every offering opened and searched before it enters the sanctum. And any pilgrim who is not known to us by name or by face turned back at the gate.”

Vessic laughed — a short, comfortable sound, the laugh of a man who has already won the argument in his head.

“Turned back at the gate. On the eve.” He spread his hands. “Khtur, we take in nine hundred pilgrims that night. They arrive with gifts. Those gifts feed this order for the winter, they mend the roofs, they buy the oil that keeps your corridor lit at the hour you stumble down it. Search their offerings? Paw through a widow’s grain sack looking for knives? They’ll go to Halvest instead and give it to the monks there, who will be delighted, and next year they will go to Halvest again.”

“There are burnt cathedrals across half the continent.”

“There are stories of burnt cathedrals,” Vessic said. “Told by travellers. Who eat better the better the story is.”

Ormek had a ledger open in front of him and had not stopped writing since Khtur began.

“Two men in the circle,” he said, without looking up. “Shifts of three hours. That is eight men a day where we currently spend four. Where do the other four come from? Not the gates — we’re thin at the gates as it is. Not the second hall. So it’s the corridor patrols, which means the corridors go dark on the one night of the year there are strangers in them.” He turned a page. “You have asked me for four men you know I do not have. I would like you to tell me which door you want left open, and I’ll write it down, and it will be your name beside it.”

Khtur said nothing. It was, he admitted privately, the only honest answer he had received.

“There is also the matter of what you are proposing,” Ghorun said.

His voice had not risen. It never did.

“You would bar the faithful from the sanctum on the night the sanctum exists for. You would have us treat every man who walks in here in devotion as a thief, and search his gift, and shame him at the door. And why? Because you are frightened. The Obsidiere have kept the watch three hundred years without fear, and you would make fear our doctrine in a single night.” He looked up then, and his eyes were clear and entirely without malice, which made it worse. “Faith is not a thing you strengthen by locking a door, Khtur. I have watched you a long time. I do not think it is the pilgrims you have stopped trusting.”

The fourth elder had been leaning back in his chair the whole while, turning a ring on his finger.

“How old are you now?” Iskur asked.

Khtur told him.

“Forty years on the watch. Standing in a circle in front of a stone that has never moved.” Iskur smiled slightly. “I would see enemies everywhere too.”

“The stone is precisely why—”

“The stone,” Iskur said, “is a stone. If a hundred lunatics came through that gate tomorrow with torches and hammers, they could not break it. Men have tried. There are chisel marks on it from before any of us were born. Nothing on this earth is safer than that egg, and you want eight men and a locked door to protect it from a crowd of farmers with barley.”

Vessic was already gathering his papers.

“Your concern is noted, and it does you credit,” he said. “Here is what the council will grant. Two additional men at the outer gate for the eve. My sister’s boy has been asking for a post — he’s steady, he’ll do well under you. That should settle it.”

Khtur looked at the four of them. At Ormek, who was right and knew it. At Ghorun, who believed every word. At Iskur, who had made him old out loud in front of witnesses. At Vessic, who had just placed a seventeen-year-old at the outer gate and made it sound like a favour.

Then at the empty chair in the middle.

He bowed, deep, the way the order demanded.

“Thank you for your time,” he said.

The corridors were filling already. Two lay brothers carrying trestles, a girl with an armful of candles who flattened herself against the wall to let him pass, someone’s crate of oil lamps left where anyone could trip on it. Khtur stepped over it and did not have it moved. Ormek would have asked him which patrol he wanted pulled off to do it.

Four days of rest, and he had slept through most of them, and now there was one night left before the gates opened. He had promised himself he would use those days. He had used them lying down.

He went down to the throat.

Serem had the watch — a heavy man in his forties who had never once been late for anything. Khtur came around the outside of the line the long way, as everyone did, and stopped where the scored stone ran closest to the wall.

He did not speak. Serem did not look at him. That was correct.

So Khtur walked the line instead, slowly, the whole circumference, the way he had walked it perhaps a thousand times as a younger man and perhaps twice in the last five years. It took a while. The chamber was larger than people thought, and the line ran wide of the egg on every side — whoever had drawn it had been generous, or frightened, or guessing.

The stone was sound. He crouched twice, once at the northern arc where damp came through in winter, once where the floor dipped, and found nothing — no chip, no scuff, no place where three hundred years of feet had worn the scoring shallow. Somebody was maintaining it. He wondered who, and realised he had no idea, and that there was probably a man in this sanctum whose entire life was that job.

The circle itself, set into the line’s edge, was clean. Serem stood in the middle of it with his hands at his sides and his eyes half-closed, gone into the mindless hours the way they were all taught.

Nothing was out of place.

That was the trouble. Nothing had ever been out of place. Forty years of nothing out of place, and this morning Iskur had said it out loud in front of witnesses — I would see enemies everywhere too — and the worst of it was that Khtur could not prove him wrong. He could only wait to be proven right, and he had begun to understand that he did not want to be.

He looked at the egg.

He had not done it directly in years, and it was strange how little there was to see. Black, taller than a man, unremarkable. There were the chisel marks Iskur had spoken of, low down on the eastern face, four of them, older than the scriptures. Somebody had stood on this line and swung a hammer across it and it had not cared.

The lamps behind him guttered in the draught from the corridor, and for a moment the shadow across the shell moved, and Khtur’s whole body went still in a way it had not in twenty years.

Then the draught passed, and the light steadied, and it was a stone again.

He stood a while longer at the line’s edge, hands loose at his sides. By tomorrow night there would be nine hundred people in this sanctum and two extra men at the outer gate, one of them Vessic’s sister’s boy.

Then he turned and walked out, past Serem, who had not moved, and did not tell anyone what he had felt, because there was nothing to tell.