Silus shook as another dry heave gripped him and a string of saliva slowly dripped to the floor. He wasn’t sure whether it was the after-effects of the incense used in his communion with Kerberos, or the stress of what he was about to say to Illiun and the settlers that had made him so sick. Katya knelt beside him, rubbing his back and making soothing sounds. He didn’t feel at all deserving of her sympathy.
Eventually the nausea subsided and he got unsteadily to his feet.
“Okay now?” Katya said.
“I think so, thanks.”
Silus had told Bestion to gather everybody together, and he found them in the vast, harshly-lit hall of the ship’s council chamber. Someone had set up a podium for him in front of the ascending tiers of seats. He raised his hand against the glare of the lights as he took to the stand. Silus had hoped for the occasion to be somewhat less formal. As it was, he felt like a preacher, about to deliver a sermon heavy with blood and thunder.
It broke his heart to see the expressions of hope and trust written on the settler’s faces, but Silus knew that he had no choice but to follow Kerberos’s plan; if not to save Twilight itself, then to save his wife and child from oblivion. This was why he was going to have to spin his lie.
“Kerberos — the entity — has spoken to me,” he began, “and I am to deliver His message to you.
“Although I know, Illiun, that you and your people fear my god, He is not without compassion. Kerberos has spoken to me of your origins, your flight across the universe and the deprivations that you have suffered. It is true that your ideology differs from that of our god’s. It is true that you have committed what the Swords would deem blasphemies. Now, however, you need run no more.
“Kerberos has agreed that you may finally settle upon this world.” There was a collective sigh of relief at this. “But not in this place. I have been tasked with leading you to a new land where you will be allowed to make your new home, in the understanding that you will not leave the territory given over to you.” There were rumblings of dissent and Silus waited for them to die down before he continued. “Should you do so, the punishment will be severe.”
The wave of anger that greeted this statement was so sudden and vehement that Silus staggered back, almost tripping over the edge of the platform. The settlers were all shouting at once and he noticed the Swords growing restless, clearly wanting to silence the outrage with their blades.
“You will listen!” Silus shouted, and eventually the tirade of abuse died down to discordant grumblings.
“Thank you. Kerberos has spoken, I am merely His mouthpiece. It is I who argued your case; I who appealed to my god for compassion. If I had not intervened on your behalf, you would have been annihilated in the blink of an eye.” Yet, still he would lead them to their deaths. “I have done my best for you, but this is not your world. You are not part of His plan. But, through my communion with the god, I have enabled the deity to see a solution which does not involve your slaughter.”
By the look on Ignacio’s face, it was clear that he would have considered the slaughter of Illiun and his people a better solution.
“Illiun,” Silus said. “You must realise that this is the best option for you. When Kerberos appeared in the sky you feared instant death, but now you have been given the hope of a new life, free from the fears of old, all your debts to Kerberos paid. Please, you have to understand that this is difficult for me too.” And it was, it truly was. But if Illiun and his people were not brought to their deaths, then the entire population of Twilight, no matter where they be, would be plunged into nothingness. Silus just couldn’t have that on his conscience.
“And what of us?” Ignacio spoke up. “What happens to the rest of us after you have led these heretics to the promised land? Where are we to settle? We certainly can’t live with these blasphemers.”
“Kerberos has assured me that He will take us all home.”
“Where you will answer to Katherine Makennon for your crimes!” said Susannah, rising to her feet and raising her fist.
Silus saw Kelos roll his eyes and whisper something to Dunsany.
“I will be more than happy to answer to Makennon on our return.”
“How long will it take to reach this new home of ours?” Illiun said.
“I don’t know,” Silus admitted. “But I will follow the guidance of Kerberos and He will show me the way.”
“Do you always show such slavish devotion to your god?” Shalim said. “Has it ever occurred to you that He might not have your, or our, best interests at heart?”
“If you denigrate the name of Kerberos one more time — ”
“Susannah, stand down!” Silus shouted.
Susannah looked like she was going to defy him, until Ignacio put a hand on her arm and gestured for her to be seated.
“Thank you, Ignacio. I appreciate it.
“And Shalim, I can assure you that Kerberos has often come to me in times of great need. It is through His machinations that I and my companions are here today. It is through His intervention that my son, Zac, was saved from the clutches of the Chadassa’s god.”
“We will go,” Illiun said, rising to his feet. “Silus had already shown us that he is a man of courage and dedication. It is clear that he has a personal relationship with the entity and that he has won us a reprieve from a fate we were certain would befall us. We shall prepare ourselves for the journey.”
“Thank you, Illiun,” Silus said. “Gather together anything you think you’ll need. We will leave in two day’s time.”
He left the room before anyone could rise from their seat. Zac reached out to him as he passed, but he didn’t even look at his son. The shame of the lie he had just sold to the settlers burned deep in his breast, and he could feel a sharp nausea rising from his gut.
Silus staggered from the ship and vomited into the sand.
That night he began talking in his sleep. Katya listened, but couldn’t make out anything more than a jumble of nonsense words. Silus’s brow creased as he fought with a stream of formless dialogue, sweat gluing his shirt to his chest. Katya stroked the back of his hand, hoping to soothe him out of his nightmare. As soon as she touched him, Silus cried out. She shook him, but he clawed his way to wakefulness slowly, shouting all the while and disturbing Zac, who began to add his own distress to the cries of his father.
Katya gathered up Zac, before climbing back into bed beside Silus. The small boy whimpered in her arms and she noticed that when Silus looked at his son, his eyes filled with tears.
“Bad dreams?” she said.
“The worst.”
“Daddy was shouting,” Zac said, burying his head beneath Katya’s chin.
“It’s okay, Zac. Daddy was just having a bad dream.”
“Yes, Zac,” Silus said. “Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep now.”
Zac soon nodded off and Katya returned him to his own bed. Next to her she could feel that Silus was still awake, but she didn’t say anything, only letting herself relax when his breathing became deeper, more regular. She realised, then, that she was afraid of her husband.
Katya looked out of the window at the night sky, to where the cold light of Kerberos masked the glimmer of the few stars she could see. She remembered back to her first night with Silus, bathed by glow of the deity as they made love on the deck of his fishing boat, the Ocean Lily. Katya wondered if, even then, Kerberos had been drawing up His plans for Silus; whether the first time they had come together as a couple she was already losing him.
When he had first smiled at her across the crowded village square, all that time ago, Silus had seemed like a godsend. The Feast of Absolom Zavak was in full swing, and virtually everybody in Nurn was carousing and feasting in the name of the long-dead saint. That was one of the few consolations of the Church; the Final Faith had so many saints to its name that you were never far from the next feast day. It certainly made living under Katherine Makennon’s edicts somewhat more tolerable.
At this particular celebration, Silus demonstrated none of the boorish behaviour of the other local men. Not for him the drinking competitions or wrestling — mock-fights that often turned into genuine fisticuffs, with egos hurt and bones broken. Instead, Silus sat beside his mother, chatting to her while he entertained his niece with a game of coloured stones. He had caught Katya looking at him as he made the child laugh, and he had briefly raised his hand, sharing the moment with her. For Katya it was so refreshing to be acknowledged with something other than a leer or a grope that she fell in love there and then.
When she had later told her future sister-in-law how she had led Silus away from the festival and seduced him, Karen had responded shock: “You little tart!” But she had only half meant it, and Katya and Silus’s lovemaking that night was far more than a drunken fuck fuelled by booze. She wouldn’t have given herself to him if it hadn’t felt so right, and Katya was sure that Silus wouldn’t have responded purely on the whim of desire.
Eight months later they were married. At the insistence of Silus’s mother they had taken their vows before a priest of the Final Faith, although they later held their own ceremony out on the Ocean Lily, just out of sight of shore and witnessed by a handful of their closest friends.
While Katya would hesitate to describe the years that followed as domestic bliss — the life of a fisherman’s wife is fraught with worry and hardship — she was happy with her lot, and Silus was an attentive and loving husband. Their lovemaking hadn’t lost its intensity; she never saw anything but compassion and kindness in his eyes. But no matter how often they gave themselves to each other, their coupling refused to bear fruit.
Both Katya and Silus came from big families. They had enough nieces and nephews between them to never want for the company of children, but none of these children were their own. Each time Katya’s period arrived, to her it felt like a failure. And then the cycle of hope and disappointment would start all over again. Often she would weep hard and long in Silus’s arms as the first cramps closed a fist around her womb. She feared becoming childless and embittered, like her aunt in Oweilau, and she well knew how the Final Faith judged barren women. However, Katya refused to believe that this was the judgement of the Lord of All, so no matter how much it pained her, no matter how many times she raised her hopes to have them dashed, they kept trying.
Finally, the miracle came.
By this time, Katya had started to come to terms with being a family of two. When they made love there was no longer the pressure of procreation; now they gave themselves to each other for the pure pleasure of it. There was still the desire for a child, but it didn’t burn quite so fiercely, didn’t tear at Katya and Silus as it once had.
When Katya’s period was late, she thought nothing of it — often in the past it had failed to arrive on time. Then, one morning, while she had been helping Silus bring in the day’s catch, the strong smell of the fish had caught her like a slap and she had emptied her stomach onto the quay. Katya lived in a fishing town, she was married to a fisherman; never before had she been so affected by the smell. She dismissed it as the onset of a cold, or a stomach bug, but when she threw up every day for two weeks, and her period didn’t show, she knew what was happening.
“I’m pregnant,” she announced one afternoon, as Silus sat mending nets by the fire. They wept in each other’s arms then, thankful that their prayers had finally been answered.
As Katya had come to learn, however, such happiness was fleeting. A few months later the Chadassa invaded Nurn and they had been forced to flee. Everything had changed, not least her husband. From being a quiet, considerate fisherman, Silus had gone on to become the saviour of a nation, fighting against the foul alien creatures who had bequeathed him his burgeoning preternatural powers. Katya had been appalled to discover the legacy that linked Silus to the Chadassa, especially in consideration of their son. Zac, however, had so far displayed none of his father’s talents when it came to the sea. He was a perfectly normal little boy, seemingly unscarred by the events that they had all lived through, and Katya had grown closer to him day by day, while drifting away from her husband.
She had fallen in love with Silus at a glance. When he had first spoken to her, Katya felt like she had known him all her life. Lying beside him now, on an alien world, she had never felt more distant from her husband. Silus was no longer hers. Other forces guided his fate now, and Katya felt like a mere passenger, carried along by events beyond her control. She wanted Silus to hold her and tell her that everything would be alright; that one day they would return home and things would carry on as normal, but he had fallen so far from her that she no longer believed any of that was possible.
Silus began to mutter again in his sleep and Katya wondered whether he was conversing with Kerberos, and what the god was asking of him now.
Illiun sat amongst the piles of mouldering paper, water pouring through a hole in the ceiling and lapping at his heels. Though coils of wire snaked across the floor, there was no danger of electrocution; the ship was dead, and in a few hours he would leave it for the final time. Once Illiun had made his preparations for their exodus, he had lit a candle and come here into the depths of the vessel, hoping to salvage at least some memento of his people’s long history. The archive room, however, had been all but destroyed — the data cubes containing their history had been burned out in the power surge created by the Swords’ misguided sorcerer, and the paper records had been turned to pulp by water from the ruptured pipes. Thousands of years had been reduced to nothing. The only history they now had were the stories they carried in their own heads. Illiun understood that it could have been a lot worse for them; that they would have been annihilated by the entity but for the intervention of Silus, and that it was only through his mediation that they had been allowed a hope of survival at all. But it still hurt to know that for all the centuries they had been running, for all the generations raised on the promise of a better tomorrow, all Illiun could now offer them was some far corner of a desolate world.
He didn’t blame Silus; he had done his best for them. If any blame was to be shouldered, then it would be shouldered by Illiun alone. He had been there at the end of the world that had created them. He had taken the ship, leading his people on an exodus across the stars, keeping the story of their origins alive while all around him generations of his people had come and gone. Through the ship, Illiun had lived for thousands of years, and now that the ship was dead it was only appropriate that he share the fate of the people he led.
But he wouldn’t leave without a physical memory of their past.
Illiun ascended to his own quarters, skirting around fallen girders and crawling through crumpled corridors. His bedroom was blackened with smoke and the lights in the ceiling hung on frayed cables, slowly swaying in the warm breeze that breathed through the broken ship. However, one thing remained untouched and this he lifted from the bedside table.
The photograph showed Illiun standing beside an elderly man, grinning, with his arm around his shoulders. Tears trickled down his face as he studied the picture, remembering back through the millennia to the man who had given him life, who had made him the leader of a whole new race created by science.
“Forgive me father,” he said. “I have failed you.”
Illiun tucked the photograph into his jacket before making his way out of the ruined ship. His thumb stroked the picture’s surface as he looked to where his people were gathering, collecting together their possessions for the long journey ahead. Taking one last look back at the vessel that had carried them through the void for so long, he turned and joined them.