Vessel, Book I: The Advent Read online

There was a river named Ket.

  The Ket used to empty into another river, and that river eventually emptied into the Nile, long before the people along its famous banks had assembled into anything but small tribal nations. Along the Ket, there were only two such nations, vastly isolated yet separated from one another only by the wide, shallow river running between them. The larger one to the west was called Amphet. The smaller one, settled on the eastern bank of the river, was called Nifushunm.

  Amphet was the reason there were no other settlements around. Prosperous and relatively metropolitan for its time, it had a substantial population, an impressive defense, and territory expanding widely into the feral deserts―things any respectable one-goat town would look for in a neighbor. Amphet's neighbors, however, had this historical way of being driven away, razed to the ground, or enslaved. The valleys on Amphet's side of the river were fertile, and so were the women. Hence, Amphet had no use and no tolerance for another city anywhere near it. The only exception was Nifushunm.

  Nifushunm was small and sparse, not much more than a walled cluster of communal tents, and it hadn't produced a soldier for hundreds of years. Instead, it produced great diviners. Necromancers and healers, seers and priests, people with strange but undeniable gifts. It was these diviners who had made the smaller nation so invaluable―and therefore so remarkably invulnerable―to Amphet. The very walls around Nifushunm were built and maintained by Amphet, and Amphetians guarded its perimeter by night. The diviners of Nifushunm were not spiritual zealots or deceptive magicians. They performed no painted dances or petty tricks, and they didn't babble in tongues. Their craft was a science, methodological and measurable, and known only to them. And it was highly profitable to be their friends.

  The diviners lived unquestioned. Their method of reading the surrounding world, of interpreting its messages to fit the context of their mortal existence, was seemingly as old as human life itself. They liked to claim that the shapers of the universe―namely the forces governing nature and life―actually breathed these gifts into the first generation of diviners. From then on, the people believed, the diviners could breathe their powers into newer generations of chosen students. Literally. As in through the mouth.

  Whether or not their gifts came from the breath of gods, no one could deny the diviners' accuracy. By means of trances and instruments, personal sojourns, coordinated sacrifices, careful mathematics, and risky alchemy, the diviners of Nifushunm were able to understand the world around them in layers which others could not see. They read events in the stars and in the patterns of the sand. They could chart the movement of the wind and know when to hunt, when to slaughter, and when to make love. Their advice doubled crops and fattened livestock. They could heal wounds, listen for news in the water, and hear the voices of the past.

  And one of them, a man called Dahrkren, would learn how to speak with death itself.

  Dahrkren was a revered necromancer in Nifushunm during a period of low spirits and soaring tension. Though the diviners themselves were as potent as ever, fewer and fewer young citizens were showing the inherent abilities necessary to respond to the breath of divinity. The stars and sands had been telling mixed omens of oncoming terror and misfortune, but it was difficult to determine just what these messages were referring to. There was a lot of misfortune going around.

  The shortage of diviners was not the worst of Nifushunm's problems, not by a long shot. Of greatest concern, actually, was a serious case of neighbor drama. Warring tribes were beginning to swallow one another, competing for land in the river valleys and relishing the growing concept of empire. Amphet's king in that time, whose name is lost to prehistory, was no exception.

  This king was as inclined toward conquest as any other warlord king during his day, only he believed himself to have the most formidable advantage of all: he had the diviners of Nifushunm on his side. Or so he liked to think in the beginning.

  The diviners had been offering up their guidance and talents to Amphet for centuries, in exchange for peace and protection, and so the king began dogging them repeatedly for counsel on matters of battle and strategy. And each time, they gave him the same unwelcome answer: that he would lose.

  That didn't sit well with the king of Amphet, who was said to be a notoriously determined and mistrustful man. He began to suspect treachery from Nifushunm, and feared that the diviners were conspiring for his defeat. He also feared the diviners' powers, as all misunderstanding minds did, and so he would not dare attack them outright. But he could, he thought, secure them as his own. And he tried. First with open arms, then with clenched fists, then with a sword in hand.

  The rift began with the messages, polite little invitations for Nifushunm to be peacefully annexed―for its own sake and security, of course. The king truly believed that by exercising fuller authority over the diviners, he could force them to increase his nation's strength and influence. What he failed to grasp, however, was that the diviners were not shapers of events; they could only read what was to be and guide others accordingly. And sometimes, as was the case for this stubborn king, their guidance was not pleasant to hear.

  When annexation was refused, the messages became more confrontational. Amphetians began blaming battlefield defeats on the diviners themselves, claiming that they were being sabotaged by supernatural craft. The accusations mounted higher and higher, and soon moved beyond the realm of military failures. Suddenly every illness in Amphet, every day of drought, every still-birth, every dead cow and lost bet and hangnail, was marked to be the work of the insidious diviners of Nifushunm.

  The people of Nifushunm balked at the accusations. They made no plea of innocence. They had other things to worry about, droughts and dying infants of their own, not to mention the increasing onslaught of bad omens. And worst of all, at the height of all this smack talk, their own aging king died.

  Nifushunm was not ruled by a blood heirship, nor were any of the nations around them. That trend wouldn't catch on in the region for a few more centuries. There were other ways to choose a king back then―ordination through mysticism, tests of valor, duels to the death. The kings of Nifushunm, in particular, were traditionally chosen by its eldest diviners, who customarily spent days fasting and hallucinating in the desert before making a decision.

  This time around, their divining led them to a young citizen named Ahmul. Ahmul was an upstanding enough young man. He was said to possess a gentle heart and a faithful respect for the divine gifts. He had none of these gifts, however. Not a lick of them.

  That fountain had apparently run dry into his five older sisters, who were some of the most gifted individuals Nifushunm had ever seen, despite the recent drought of talent. Ahmul's sisters were unprecedented seers, tried-and-trusted interpreters of the constant natural messages around them. And when they heard of their brother's ordination, the sands issued the five of them a specific and strong warning:

  Get the hell out of town, girls, said the sands.

  So those sisters did as they were told. They packed up, wished their brother love and luck, and left Nifushunm without knowing if or when they would return. Unaccompanied, they travelled into unclaimed desert, watching for instructions from the stars. The stars told them to stay put. The stars had plans for them. And so they waited.

  And while they waited, their only brother made a few desert sojourns of his own. As king, it was his duty to listen to the desert's voice, to seek its counsel during his people's time of distress. He was supposed to find answers.

  Unfortunately for the rest of us, he found Zabur instead.

  He found her on the final evening of his soul-searching trip, while he and his attendants were hunting along a ravine. Alone on the trail of a wild dog, Ahmul found himself running further up the ancient river's path, deeper and deeper into the stretch where it had long dried up. Far from the rest of his party, he came across the ruins of a small, forgotten settlement. Ahmul entered the site and paused, startled by what he found there. The dog was nowhere to be see
n, but a solid black horse stood among the ruins, its coat gleaming in the barred sunlight that was flooding down into the cragged earth.

  Ahmul's gaze shifted upwards to the light, where a broad, broken pillar of sandstone lay across the ravine’s edges overhead. And stretched out upon it, spread out before the great red sun, was a woman―bronze, beautiful, and completely naked.

  Despair filled Ahmul's heart at the sight of her. As king, he knew, he would be denied a great many of life's pleasures. He was not to drink wine or sleep during daylight hours, and he was not to love a woman.

  That last part did him in.

  Typical man.

  The woman noticed him. And instead of crying out or hiding her body, she stood up straight with the disc of the sun quivering behind her. She placed her hands on her ample, athletic hips, howled like a beast, and jumped to the bottom of the ravine.

  Torn between running away in fright and charging forward in passion, Ahmul opted to drop to his knees. The woman advanced towards him, demanding that he name himself. Her eyes were wild and round, so round that the whites of them circled their singular black ornaments completely.

  Ahmul readily declared the truth, that he was Nifushunm's new king. And to that, the woman smiled a smile of unmatched power and pride, as if she were crushing a planet the size of an insect between her lovely fingers. That smile drenched Ahmul with fever. Was she flesh? Was she a vision? He begged to know her name.

  The woman laughed, and the sound multiplied against the walls of the ravine.

  I am the mouth of the desert, she said. The witch spirit of this place. I have no name.

  As she spoke, the wind moaned through the ruins, and the black horse paced a nervous circle behind her.

  You are a king, the witch said, and your people are sick with fear. You come seeking my guidance.

  Ahmul, shocked by her accuracy, could only nod his accord.

  The witch laughed a soft, drunken laugh. Her lips seemed to drip the words formed by their motions. She asked him to swear obedience to her counsel, to bind himself to her instruction, lest she release a storm of ruin upon his nation.

  Ahmul, still on his knees, agreed. He had to wonder if his five sisters saw this sort of thing all the time. If so, then he had really been missing out. As the woman backed away in slow, graceful steps, his eyes drank their fill of her flesh, but his ears were desperately dry. He wanted her, he wanted her words, but why was she backing away? In the distance, he began to hear the calls of his men, searching down the ravine for him.

  The witch hastened to give her instructions. She stood rigid, her voice resonating the hollowness of the wind as if speaking on its behalf. When you return to your people, she said, there will be a message waiting for you from Amphet's king. A proposition. You will answer it 'No'.

  The calls of Ahmul's party drew closer, but their voices were not enough to pull his eyes away from her.

  In a week's time, the witch continued, the king will send another message. Again, your answer will be 'No'.

  Ahmul nodded.

  In yet another week's time, she said, the king will send a third and final message. Here the witch paused, contemplating, listening to the wind maybe. Her strange, wild eyes bore deep into Ahmul's.

  Answer it 'Yes', she said.

  Ahmul tried to catalog all of this in his mind. He was more focused, however, on the feeling that this woman was about to disappear forever. He rose to his feet.

  Your people will rage at you, she said in haste, and say you betray them, and betray the order of things, but do not sway. Answer it 'Yes'. For me.

  Before Ahmul could speak his pledge, laughter broke over the witch again. She turned away, lunging for the steep ravine walls, and the black horse ran another way, knocking Ahmul to the ground and taking the breath from his lungs. When his attendants came within sight moments later, their king was alone, shouting and scrambling to the top of the ruins, frantically seeking the horizon in all directions.

  The woman was nowhere. The horse was nowhere. Ahmul was a fool.