The Learning - David Guymer Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  The Learning – David Guymer

  One

  Two

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Hammerhal & Other Stories’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  The Learning

  David Guymer

  One

  I

  The isharann fane was a long way from their home in Túrach. His mother held his hand. Monsters swam free around the túrscoll, she had warned him, and it would not do to get lost. The thought of monsters did not frighten him, but he decided not to tell her that. If she thought that he was unafraid then she might let go of his hand. He sensed that when she let go, it would be for the last time. He did not understand. Through darkness and cold, they swam. Through silence. Through shoals of translucent fish that were all teeth and spines and which burst into individual fleeing shapes at their approach, his grip tiny but firm in hers.

  After a time that did not feel long enough, they arrived at the temple. He sensed the size of it, smelled the coral from which the structure had been grown. He could hear the scrabbling of the little things that lived inside, the restless murmuring of the kelp gardens in the currents that came in off the open ocean. He tried to look back. His mother would not let him.

  They set down before a bivalve doorway. It was ribbed and grey, and appeared to be breathing slowly. Blind aelves with huge swords and straps around their arms and chests stood in front of it. Five of them. Namarti. They looked unfriendly. He drew back into his mother.

  ‘All will be well, Ubraich.’

  She lifted him in the water until their faces were level. Her face was eyeless, smooth skin growing over the hollows, just like the warriors. She stroked his face around his eyes, just as she had done since he had been small. It had always seemed to make her happy, and sad.

  Like now.

  ‘You go to a better life,’ she said.

  ‘When will I be allowed to come home?’

  She hugged him tightly.

  ‘I love you, my brave isharann.’

  II

  He never saw his mother again.

  He tried not to look as though her removal from his life had taken from inside him everything that was warm and strewn it over the walls of his little cell. The isharann masters punished such emotion, and in pretending not to feel it, it did become easier to ignore. The cold helped too. The isolation. The dark. Even if he did still stroke his eyes until he fell asleep each night. Isharann, he had learned by that time, were aelves of pure soul who had been judged by the soulscryers as being gifted in magic. Those better suited to the warlike arts had been sent instead to the azydrazor to become akhelion. Pure soul. He was starting to understand what that meant too. How it had made him different.

  There was tutelage of a sort, but it passed in a blur of homesickness and misery. He was taught the healing stones of the tru’heas, the foundation songs of the chorralus, how to track a single soul across a thousand leagues of ocean, to tear a soul from a mortal’s body or to bend one to his will. With no explanation given, the faces around him began to fall away. Gone were the lessons in soulrending and tidecasting. Instead he learned the names fangmora, allopex and leviadon. He learned what they were, how to mistreat them, how to train them.

  He learned how to hunt them.

  III

  He became an embailor the night his master came into his cell with a knife.

  The tide was late and he had been sound asleep when they burst in. Three eyeless thralls, their bodies sculpted and lean, covered in cruel-linking ink calligraphy and scars. The musk of the embailor quarter entered with them. Ubraich started from his shelf, but he was confused, still half asleep, and they knew what they were about. Two namarti took his arms. He struggled, but he was a boy. He was outnumbered and the namarti were both strong. A third hung in the water with arms folded across his chest. Since he had been old enough to understand the difference between isharann and akhelion and the soulless namarti, Ubraich had puzzled over why it was that the latter needed to lose their eyes.

  He wondered if it was so they could not look into another’s soul and feel pity.

  An old aelf entered behind them.

  Everything about his appearance conferred a greyed-out hollowness. He wore an armoured robe of steelglass and black nacre that seemed too large for his frame. His cheeks were drawn and scarred. The faded semi-circle of an allopex bite cut his face in half. His neck was so withdrawn it had become paper over dry bones. His hair was colourless. It floated out behind him in a tail. The skin beneath one of his eyes was a scarred mess.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked. Even his voice was empty.

  Ubraich nodded.

  Giléan Six-Eyes.

  Ubraich recognised him from his lessons in beastmastery. It would not do to say that he had enjoyed those lessons. Such feelings were discouraged. But he had excelled in them and been satisfied in himself. He had sought no praise from his masters, and none had been forthcoming.

  Until, perhaps, now.

  The old embailor held out the staff that he was carrying. It appeared to have been fashioned from the fused vertebrae of something very large, possibly a fangmora. The pumiced bones had been painted black and carved with druhíri dread-runes, an ancient aelf form that existed solely as an expression of pain.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked.

  Ubraich shook his head dumbly.

  ‘It is an embailor pain-stave. And it is yours.’

  ‘It is too large for me.’

  The embailor looked him up and down. ‘You will grow.’

  Swimming between the looming namarti, Giléan let the staff drift towards the wall of the cell and drew in alongside Ubraich’s shelf. With one aged talon of a finger, he traced a line down Ubraich’s cheek. Ubraich shivered. The two namarti held him down.

  ‘Your scars will heal, but you, like the beasts you will tame, will never forget the pain of this night,’ said Giléan, as he drew a hooked and rune-heavy knife. ‘This is the first lesson my master taught to me. It will be the first that I teach to you.’

  IV

  The túrscoll was a creation of living coral, coaxed into its current form by the spells of the isharann chorralus, those with the talent for shaping the native materials of the idoneth’s ocean home. It glowed, and as his embailor powers grew, so too did his ability to discern every tiny being that dwelled there. He could see their souls. The idoneth economy, he knew, turned on souls. The miniscule lives of the coral-dwellers might have been too small to interest the incubati who tended to the infant namarti, but there were those who earned their living from harvesting them, trading them to craftsmen who would use the soul material to make healing gems, soul-lights and restorative potions. The embailors were central to the industry. Most could be wealthy if they chose to be.

  Even the unearthly splendour of the coral, however, paled before the creations of the ishratisar. Artists and artisans of the isharann, their magic left an immortal imprint of their own souls on the works they left behind, and made them glow in the senses of the sightless. Even to an aelf numbed to sensation by his own environment, the statues were wondrous: giants in silver, depicting heroes of the cythai, the sea-aelves of the first oceans. The beasts they had ridden were creatures that no embailor had ever described to him, with huge wings or legs instead of fins, and clad in metal in the style of the surface races. They bore names like asglir and caldai – Silver Helms and Dragon Knights.

  Over the tides that followed, Giléan Six-Eyes proved a rel
uctant mentor, stirring himself from seclusion only rarely. It was to the aelves shown to him by the ishratisar that Ubraich found himself drawn for solace or guidance. They looked so proud, so wise, as if the solution to all problems had once been theirs. They rode their wondrous beasts without saddle or harness.

  To aspire towards such nobility was as natural as breathing.

  V

  ‘Why did Teclis not make the cythai perfect?’

  Giléan, on those rare occasions when he roused himself from isolation, betrayed a fondness for thought puzzles and riddles. He believed them to be the most elegant expression of eolas. The word was of the cythai, and it had several meanings. Knowledge. Teaching. Another name for the god Teclis himself.

  Most often, however, it was understood as ‘The Learning.’

  He turned his brutalised face to look back at Ubraich.

  The two embailors were swimming through the pens. The globed nets rippled and bulged like jellyfish, glowing internally with the souls of the monsters they held. The billion tiny gems of the túrscoll and, some way beyond it, Túrach itself, were brilliant and austere. Like a moonrise. Giléan preferred to pen his most monstrous beasts here. There were two reasons: it kept those beasts well away from the túrscoll, and it served as a deterrent to all but the largest of ocean predators that might otherwise be drawn to the enclave.

  Ubraich paused, his arm in a bushel of fish. A hungry allopex beat its snout against the inside of the net. The globe bulged. It gnashed its teeth furiously, trying for purchase. Its eyes were glassy and yellow, glaring through the diamond pattern in the net.

  ‘Perhaps Teclis is not perfect?’ he guessed.

  Giléan cocked his head, as though considering, but Ubraich knew him well enough to know that that was not the answer he was seeking.

  Ubraich proceeded to feed the allopex.

  ‘Or maybe the cythai were never meant to be perfect,’ Giléan said.

  ‘Why would a creator god do such a thing?’

  Giléan grinned, pleased to have been asked. ‘So that we must strive for the Light that blinded the cythai. That we might learn again, however painful.’ The old embailor swam to the next net. His pain-stave was larger than Ubraich’s and far more elaborate. Its structure incorporated the vertebrae of more than one beast, greatly enhancing the range and scope of its powers. It was topped by an enormous splayed fin that the embailor seemed to be relying on more heavily than usual.

  ‘Are you injured, teacher?’ Ubraich asked.

  Giléan glanced at his arm and presented a rueful expression. ‘A beast that I have not yet broken in thirty years of trying. It had the better of our encounter again.’ He looked back at Ubraich, his gaze appraising. ‘You will be able to assist me, I think. When your magic is strong enough.’

  VI

  The corral was the heart of the túrscoll’s embailor quarter. Circular and roofed with a thick accumulation of nets, it was large enough to confine a whole battalion of leviadon. The walls were high and silvered by ishratisar panelling, a living diorama of laagering knights so vivid that the thunderous silence of their hooves was disorienting.

  ‘Have you ever broken a deepmare before?’

  Lady Sithilien frowned at him through the narrow slits in her helmet. The akhelion knight was fully clad in blue scales, a shield of organically shaped coral worn across her back. A bundle of delicate white hair emerged from beneath a coif of turquoise mail, dancing in the weak currents of the corral floor. She held a voltspear disinterestedly.

  Giléan sneered.

  Ubraich did not answer.

  There were those races in the Mortal Realms that knew an innate and equal bond with the beasts they rode. He had been told tales about them at the fane. The Stormcast Eternals and their Celestial dracoths. Fyreslayers and their magmadroths. Even the brutish beastclaw ogors and their mournfangs. For reasons that no isharann had been able to explain to him, an animal had never yielded willingly to the idoneth. They had to be broken. Deepmares were the most dangerous and difficult. Too fiercely intelligent to be courted by promises of friendship. Too mean-spirited and guileful to be dominated easily by the embailor’s arts. They were also the mount most desired by akhelion nobles raised on the soul-memory of the old asur; images of asglir and caldai and Teclis’ eolas. Giléan had broken deepmares for two Túrach queens and a king. He wore the six eyes he had taken from them on a string around his neck.

  ‘He will not be breaking this one,’ said Giléan, his face turned upwards. ‘He will be assisting me, and perhaps learning something.’

  The akhelion swept the fringe from Ubraich’s face with the back of her hand and studied him. It was little more than a brush of knuckles on skin, but to the sensation-deprived it was like being bitten by an electric fangmora. Ubraich did his best to suppress a shudder.

  ‘Leave my apprentice be, akhelion,’ said Giléan.

  ‘He is very young,’ said Sithilien, staring hard into his eyes.

  ‘They all begin that way, I am told.’

  The akhelion chuckled blackly and released Ubraich’s face.

  ‘You are nervous,’ said Giléan. ‘You are making the boy nervous.’

  ‘Nervous? Either your beast will kill me, and probably both of you, or we will break it and I will be begged to join the highest rank of Túrach’s warrior nobility, a place within the asglir’akhelion itself. Why ever should I be nervous?’

  Even through her blank helm and cold eyes, Ubraich could sense the ferocity of her smile. His pale skin blushed a diffuse shade of indigo, and he averted his eyes.

  To see an older woman betray her feelings so…

  The Lady Sithilien laughed without pity. ‘Have you never been to the surface, child? Have you swum in the aethersea?’

  ‘No, lady. What would a taker of beasts do on the surface?’

  Giléan nodded, possibly approving.

  ‘Those who have raided have a different perspective on things,’ she said. ‘I have stepped outside our ocean and seen it from beyond. I have felt the sun warm my skin and seen light in all its colours. It is an experience that changes you. Not all emotion is to be feared or sensation to be avoided.’ She subjected Ubraich to a new, more deeply discomforting appraisal. ‘I have eight children, you know. All of them namarti.’

  Ubraich’s mouth worked soundlessly.

  ‘He is a hundred years too young for you,’ said Giléan.

  ‘And you are a hundred years too old.’ She produced a smile such as Ubraich had only seen on hungry allopexes.

  ‘I will give you a deepmare,’ said Giléan. ‘Any ambitions beyond that must wait for another tide.’

  The old embailor nodded upwards.

  Ubraich, and then finally Sithilien, turned to follow his gaze.

  A shoal of muscular namarti converged over the great nets above the corral as they watched. They swam like fish with arms at their sides and legs together, long hair slicked back in tails. Their souls were a constellation of muddy colours. Stunted hybrids of aelf and human, aelf and duardin, aelf and orruk, fused together so that those unfortunates born without souls might persist beyond infancy. Those namarti fortunate enough to have received the souls of aelves taken in the surface raids were favoured as personal servants and guards, but even they were noticeably diminished to Ubraich’s senses. There had been a time when he had perceived the namarti differently.

  It was difficult for him to imagine such a time now. The differences between them were too stark.

  With ropes knotted around their waists, the namarti drew one of the rippling globe nets down from the beast pens in the water above. They docked it to the corral roof. Other namarti swam in quickly to secure the two sets of nets together with metal rings. Ubraich felt the tension in the namarti rising. He fidgeted with his pain-stave and saw Sithilien doing something similar with her voltspear. This was where so many namarti of the emb
ailor túrscoll earned their scars. He watched them dart through the holes in the nets, threading them with the ropes tied around their waists. They unwound them, transferring the knots over to the netting. They fastened them tight, then drew knives to begin cutting away the ropes that held the two bodies of netting separate. Coral-encrusted ropes fell away. The two netted enclosures effectively merged to become one, and the namarti scattered like startled prey as the beast swam into its enlarged pen.

  Ubraich clutched his pain-stave to his breast. Trepidation and fear tingled uncertainly under his skin.

  It was a gulchmare, one of the rarest and most dangerous breeds of deepmare to be found in the oceans of Ghyran. It was half again as large as the monster that Giléan had broken to Queen Anaer’s saddle. Its clawed fins and tail spines were the restless green of seaweed, but it had no single colour. Its flanks were rainbow swatches of armoured reef. The rippling, wriggling, puckering creatures that had colonised those encrustations conferred a sense of fevered energy and menace to the beast’s every movement. Ubraich lost a moment to awe. It was majestic. The gulchmare looped and rolled, swimming foalishly around the larger enclosure.

  It had not yet noticed the three idoneth in its midst.

  ‘Bounties of Mathlann!’ Sithilien crowed.

  Her voice rose in pitch to a keen of whalesong as she kicked off the corral floor and shot towards the gulchmare. The beast turned towards her, then tossed its head as though something had just crawled inside. With one hand on his pain-stave, Giléan held the other outstretched. His face was a rictus of concentration. Sithilien deftly evaded the distracted beast’s fin-claws, then gave a whoop as she swung herself onto its back. The gulchmare arched its spine and roared, but Sithilien had wedged herself firmly between the beast’s spikes and held on. The akhelion then set about with the butt of her spear.

  Giléan turned to Ubraich.

  ‘It is a defiant beast. Only through pain and the fear of pain can its walls be broken and its soul dominated. I cannot both cloud its wits and break its defiance. I need you to confound its mind, Ubraich, while I get in close and aid the Lady Sithilien.’