Chapter One

Endings

Enk lurched upright, a wounded boy numbed by heartache, leaking eddies of otherworldly light. He staggered off of his bed and wondered how such a simple thing as a letter could wrought such devastation. He watched tears splatter the ivory paper, watched moisture mutilate Inanna’s ink-drawn characters. His eyes closed upon a knifing intake.

The air was biting, and he savored the sting of it filling his tormented lungs. The missive crinkled in his hand.

He blinked blankly at the crumbled paper, like a child staring at where the hearthfire burns brightest. A few breaths later, he spotted the radiance evanescing from his skin, but he could not seem to summon the necessary horror. It did not seem to matter.

So what if this brought destruction down upon his head?

He had left Ilima to die.

Inanna had abandoned him for the Immortal-Emperor’s bed.

The letter escaped his spasming hand, rafted toward the carpeted floor. He groped for, caught it, then folded it into neat little squares. A violent shudder ran first through him, then the world—another ripple of unearthly brilliance.

He slipped the letter into an inner coat pocket, battered the water from his seeping eyes. He gazed across his bedchamber, his hatred rattling like tossed dice inside his breast, and he observed ochre sunbeams pierce the growing gloom before his window.

A rectangle-shaped aperture swiveled open before it, replacing the view of the cityscape with one more beguiling. And he saw the touchstone of his heart, Inanna peering out of a moving carriage, lost in the study of a flock of migrating geese. Twilight soaked her snow-white mane in scarlet, made her hair seem dipped in gore.

Enk stood rapt and breathless before this vision. And it seemed incestuous watching her like this, her impish face framed by the carriage window. Despite being Ilima’s twin sister, her features held none of the Senmonth bloodline’s familiar female characteristics. Like her mother, she was Mutna through and through, as evidenced by the whiteness of her hair and the preternatural agelessness of her flawless aspect.

Her gaze lowered from the darkening sky, stared directly at him. She stiffened, then looked stricken from whatever she glimpsed in his eyes. Her hand gripped the carriage window.

“You’re mine!” he cried. “Mine!” The trickle of leaking light swelled into a world-ending deluge. “I’ll come for you. I’ll murder the world if I have to, but I’ll come.”

“No. . . !” Horror swam across her turquoise eyes, melted into desolate beads of distress. “You must move on. Let me go. I’m nobody.”

“Wrong,” he croaked in a voice that ribbed the room in liquid radiance, “you’re mine. Mine! My . . . my everything.”

Grief clenched her face, made her lips tremble like rain thumped rose petals. She turned her gaze to the study of the carriage interior, then the aperture faded from view, leaving no trace of its former presence.

No-no!

“Inanna, don’t go!” he wailed, sobbed, dropped to his knees.

Esoteric Light welled faster, roiled and sputtered out of the opening within, brilliant for the depths of torment’s exhortations. The heartsick scion wrenched at it, more out of a sense of purposelessness than fear, but it refused to shut.

He wheezed, blew snot-filled bubbles out of his nostrils as he struggled to impose order upon his inner mystery. Yet the Eerie Portal continued to spurn his mental commands, yoked more firmly to his wayward passions than his will.

Sounds infiltrated the sunlight pricked gloom, pensive and deep, piano keys pressed into intertwining notes of euphony, rising from below, dying beneath the misery of Enk’s harsh breathing.

Someone else was in his home, the young scion realized in sudden terror. Someone invisible to his power.

Dread bore him upright, thrust him out into the hallway’s darker milieu, holding his sword with both hands. And though the music winnowed his concern for all that was not significant, the otherworldly radiance continued to beat the dark along with his thunderous heart. And light rose like ripples on a pond, yet only illuminated what was living—spiders hanging from cobwebs, rats scurrying within walls. His pace varied depending on the stinging in his lungs, his booted feet creeping across once expensive rugs. Abandoned halls and shuttered chambers pinched his chest for the fear of what they might contain. Furniture draped with white sheets riddled his every glance on the third and second floors.

Breathless, he lurched onto the main level, a reanimated corpse with nothing but the memory of breath. He felt the toil of all his recent conflicts in his sinew, in the cuts that lined his battered body, and the wounds that pockmarked his soul.

At last, he reached the ballroom and panted before its barred threshold. And for a time, he simply stood, listening to the soothing tones leaking from behind it.

A cough wracked his hunched form.

He hobbled his trepidation, and, howling as he threw the door open, he charged inside, his blade slicing the air. . . .

His boots scuffed the hardwood floor. His sword gleamed, awash in the evening glow that rafted through the ballroom’s glass ceiling. A giant figure sat at the piano, draped in a cerulean cloak with a massive sword strapped to his back.

“Y-you,” Enk stammered, recognizing the figure almost immediately. Marduk, the Ahriman that was not an Ahriman. The Recorder, he had called himself. In the relentless press of recent events, Enk had nearly forgotten about their first encounter. On the night Merka was murdered, the inhuman figure had waylaid him as he staggered away from the Pit.

Was that only three days ago? Seems far longer.

Marduk did not reply, but his music changed to mirror Enk’s fumbling steps—slowing while imbuing each note with nebulous dread. The Recorder’s hairless scalp shimmered like polished obsidian in the fading rays of the sun, his skin so dark that it appeared to inhale wisps of the evening’s radiance.

“Why are you here?” Enk asked, allowing his sword to dip toward the ground. His chest constricted about a pang that released eddies of uncanny light.

Silence, marred by faltering steps and clanking piano keys.

“Answer me!” the heir of House Gueye yelled.

“I am Marduk,” the inhuman figure grated, “the one who watches, the one who re—”

“Yes-yes,” Enk interrupted, “you told me this before. But why are you in my home?”

“I record. I wat—”

“Record what?”

The creature shifted—groans escaped the piano bench.

Music like claws running along broken rocks.

“Death, Godling,” Marduk whispered. “I am here to record your death.”