Prologue

God Killer

Once again, the time had come to kill a god.

Near breathless, Kalum Sane crept forward, a silhouette slithering slowly through a field of knee-high wheat. Yellow fragments of light burned in his veins, the remnants of the otherworldly narcotic distorting the surface of his brain. Sweat dripping from his brow, he crawled the corpse-strewn halls of his past—crawled among smiling hallucinations.

The reality-twisting effect of the Gold Dust never failed to dismay Kalum. There was something terrifying about an existence where nothing was solid, where stalks of wheat dissolved into a froth of howling faces. Something not even repetition could fully master.

At last, he came to the small village he sought: Nineven, a cluster of impoverished wooden buildings, glittering with faint lamplight beneath a moonless night sky. Shadowy figures wandered its winding streets, armed with torches and homemade spears.

Before Nineven could morph into something else, Kalum shut his eyes. His heart hammered in his chest, and colors whirled at the edge of his closed eyelids. He shifted the musket slung over his shoulder, touched the hilt of the sword at his hip, thumbed the wooden grip of his cavalry pistol. . . .

Unholy booms pounded his ears. Kalum jerked, opening his eyes to scan the sky.

Cannon fire.

Billowing clouds of Silver Dust descended onto the village, sent forth from exploding mortar bombs. Wails of distress and dread ripped through the air, then the boiling mist engulfed Nineven and the god’s thralls. There was no time to run. Lungs gasped. Limbs thrashed like babes fresh from the womb.

Kalum rushed into the village, his chest burning from the gray smoke. His legs slowed and his eyelids fluttered with repressed lethargy, but the Gold Dust kept the worst effects at bay.

Prone figures reached for him with feeble hands. Figures that stretched like the wings of mythical beasts before collapsing back into men. Hands that shimmered iridescent through the veil of fog.

Focus. Must stay—

With the force of rolling boulders, something touched Kalum’s mind, yanked his tired limbs to stillness, then slipped from him. His heart clenched. Timber roofs transformed into smoking husks, thrummed in tune to the pounding in his skull.

STOP!

It was a honeyed voice, roaring in his head like a toppled tower. The panicked mental shriek of a Mindripper. The anguished howl of a god.

Kalum lurched forward with gritted teeth, his musket coming into his hands. Phantoms swam in his vision, burning corpses bumbling out of homes to block his path to the church. Men who had yet to succumb to the plumes of Silver Dust.

WHO ARE YOU?

Kalum fired, and the kick of the weapon reached all the way into his bones. A three-eyed corpse twitched back, its descent spewing bone and fluid into a fine, red mist.

WHY HAVE YOU COME?

The musket clattered to the ground, and Kalum drew the pistol from its leather holster, discharging it into the leering visage of a bronze-horned abomination. Whether solely an artifact of a drug-addled brain was impossible to discern. Wobbling onward, he choked on the noxious fumes released by the pistol and tossed it aside.

The force returned, great stamping limbs, thrashing in an attempt to tear rents into his skull. Kalum groaned, his vision blurring, then the pressure skidded from the oil-like mire the Gold Dust had made of his mind.

NO! A cry of desperation from a god, as loud as a hurricane’s rumble and as piercing as a widow’s shriek.

Uncowed, Kalum reached into his coat, fumbled for a glass vial. Spasming legs gave out beneath him as he freed it from an inner pocket. Crimson flakes gleamed within the tiny bottle. Red Dust.

LEAVE US IN PEACE.

Vial uncorked, he sprinkled a line of the scarlet powder onto the back of his dark hand and inhaled it through his nostril. Pain, like a hissing river of molten glass jolted through him, lifted him upright on a growing cloud of fiery incandescence.

Kalum Sane, Lord-Inquisitor of the Church of the Holy Ark, flashed gnashing teeth and unsheathed his sword. He tasted blood. A bellow came from his rage heated lungs, powered by the body-twisting effect of the Red Dust. There was living fire contorting in his veins. Living fire!

PLEASE.

Kalum stepped among the horde of shifting illusions, undistributed by their ever-changing shapes. His blade rose and fell. He was running out of time. The Red made the Gold burn faster. When it ran out, he would be at the mercy of the Mindripper.

The forms tumbled, clutching at bloody wounds, and a chorus of anguished cries perforated the night. One by one all fell, until only he was left.

Kalum stood still, his harsh breathing rifling through the sudden quiet, his eyes lost in the examination of the godhouse. Made of white plastered stone, the religious edifice towered over the surrounding buildings as a perfect cube. The pulsing heart of Nineven.

Techno-colored smoke billowed from a hole in its roof. Undoubtedly, a cannon shot guided by Worship Osei’s weaving of the infinite probabilities.

The Mindripper stuck again, desperate, struggling to find purchase on Kalum’s grease-slicked consciousness. A rain of ethereal blows. Colored plumes warped into a thousand gnarled faces.

Kalum pressed onward, the flutter in his bowels pulsating in rhythm with his quickening heartbeat. He entered the church and fell under the scrutiny of a man. A god.

Two realities warred.

In one, a golden-skinned man sat atop a throne, draped in a long blue cloak, his erect penis glistening through the whirling vapor. In the other, a corpulent boy, more round than tall, glared down through drowsy eyes, his member flaccid and raw.

A lie and the truth.

NO, the Mindripper cried in denial, his mental voice somehow less, yet still powerful.

Kalum shook his head and dropped his gaze. Long-haired banshees lay strewn over the floor, their ruby eyes vacant, their clawed hands twitching.

“What are you? Why won’t you heel? Why won’t you obey?” Saccharine words uttered by the most perfect specimen of Man. A calligraphy of bestial sounds, stuttered from the mouth of a drooling abomination.

Kalum tracked his way to the figure, stepped around prostrate forms, moved past rumble from the holed roof, stopped with the point of his blade pressed against the god’s chest. “Thou art undone. I am death, Mindripper. Death.”

“You love me.” Whispered words, barely intelligible. A command.

And suddenly Kalum did. The feeling came—a warm rush—spreading ecstasy from his loins into his chest. Tears of joy sprang to his eyes. He stood poised in the presence of his brother, his father, his lover.

Unfortunately for the Mindripper, the Lord-Inquisitor had killed those he loved before, had been forced to by a command of another would be god. His lips trembled. His stomach clenched.

He stepped forward, speared a human heart. The squish of parted flesh. The bewildered look of a pimple-faced boy.

Kalum wept silently, sensed the last of the Gold Dust fade from his blood as he stared up at the mural of the Holy Harlots, the four God cursed women from which the nobility of the Gilgian Empire descended. Their distinct features and odd-colored hair bared no resemblance to each other nor to his own. Despite his rank and position, he did not belong here. And perhaps he never would. His lips twitched into a grimace.

He heard the soft pitter-patter of footsteps, but did not glance back.

“They always give into the temptations of the flesh, these abominations,” said a voice.

Kalum turned and saw Worship Osei standing amid a tangle of half-naked female bodies. Clothed in a religious habit, comprising a white coif and a loose tunic made of blue serge, the aged Worship peered at the sleeping forms of the dead god’s harem through cataract eyes.

“It is done,” he said.

Osei nodded, leaned on her wooden staff. Done, her weathered visage seemed to say, only until the next one is born.