Across the mountains, in the Sea of Dust, the dead never die.
The peoples of the Assar grow old, grow thin, grow brittle. They waste away just like us, or tigers let their lifeblood out across the desert, or they are stung by the tiniest of their wasps that glint like jewels in the fernbrush, and puff up and turn black in their beds. Then they stop breathing and lie still forevermore, just like us.
But the Assari do not die because they do not accept it.
They are left sleeping where they fall or upon the mattresses where they rested. Their houses will be forever theirs, and theirs alone. Their horses run free in their fields. Their gardens of herbs run wild across the walls and roofs. Their wagons stand ready, their jars of nuts and fruits wait drying on the sill. And everything will always be theirs.
It is said that but a hundredth of their houses are occupied by the living. Whole cities lie silent. And one day, there will be no more room for the young, the breathing, and their entire land there in the seemingly endless expanse of the Sea of Dust will be filled with the dead, and they will father no more children and their entire people will lie down and sleep the centuries away.
They worship decay, for decay is their friend, their salvation. They believe it proof of their immortality, for how can something that changes, year on year, age on age, be said to be no more? The tiniest trickle of the dust of their crumbling bones is life, to them.
Decay is their power, and their protection from end. So it has been since the first peoples settled there. And the power held in that endless life is why their kingdom will go on for all eternity, for none else can go there. Not the bloodthirsty Maller, from their ships of iron in the marshes, or the Seret, upon the backs of their war camels from the dunes that watch over the silence in the north.
And not us, either, the conquerors of all that is west of the mountains that separate us from the dead deathless towns of their sweeping fields of nothing. And we gave them that protection, long ago, when the mighty Sirigo made his long walk across all the known earth.
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It is said that long, long years past, we were the Assari’s only friends. The Maller and the Seret have always coveted the Sea of Dust, and always the farmers of the Sea were pressed hard between starvation and obliteration at the head of a spear. Every season, every year, they put down their rakes and set out across their shallow soils and sleeping, nameless towns to take up arms against their foes. And somehow, always, there remained a handful to live another day, and take up their rake once more, and tend to those parts of their villages and towns where men still drew breath.
We alone came in peace. In those days, we made trails down the valleys and passes of the stone mountains, and took our horses down into the Sea of Dust laden with green foods the like of which the Assari could never grow, and sustained them while they still needed it, before their sleep. And they, in turn, gave generously of those diamonds that lie scattered upon the sands, for diamonds are static, stagnant, and so the Assari do not care for them.
But as our wealth grew, so did our ambitions. We traded the gems for iron, and forged shields and swords and axes, and marched out against those peoples who coveted what we had. Our strength was ample enough not only to turn aside their raids, but soon to launch our own. Over only two or three lifetimes, the green shores of Erden, the mountain fortresses of the Asaki, and the rolling green peace of the Du foothills, all offered up their riches to us. We became the greatest power of the world, and worse still, we knew it.
All our resources, all the bounty of our fields, went to feed war. We had nothing to trade for precious stones any more. We tried in vain to think of them as mere useless trinkets, but men always desire beauty.
The trade was failing. But we looked down upon the deserts of the Assari, so empty save for what we sought, and remembered we need not bargain with anyone.
An army the like of which had never been seen before in the known world gathered at our eastern border. The very mountains trembled to their roots beneath our feet. Three great rolling towers, like walking castles, were assembled by dunes’ edge. Only a single timber remains in our time, and that beam spans the entire Silver House in the city of Marsah. Yet in those times, at our heights of arrogance, they took but a day and countless inconsequential lives to complete.
We flowed like water into the cities of Assar, the cities of our friends and honourable neighbours. But few stood in our way. Their warriors were hard-pressed to north and east, and only the dead kept constant watch as we pushed apart their land. When the Sacred Dune of Aran stood across our path, like a mighty golden cliff, we plunged straight through its heart with spade and tunnel, so our machines of slaughter could seek the blood they so craved.
Yet still, in the great Sea of Dust itself, we could not quench our dreadful thirst. As we had heard tell from generations of merchants throughout the ages of peace, the diamonds and opals too lay like rocks on a beach. But to Sirigo, the general at the helm of his iron horde, they meant now as little as they did to their keepers.
Sirigo was a man born to kill, a true harbinger of the new way of our empire. It is said he never ate, nor drank among his devoted men in the mead halls, until he had slain that day an agent of the forces who still stood against us. Legend tells that when our veteran warriors became mired in a terrible siege of Verna Castle, the last bastion denying our trampling boots the sweet soils of tranquil Veshun, an impatient Sirigo, left behind with seeming mortal wounds from an ambush in the south, rallied ten thousand peasants to his call to vanquish the battalions of Citadel a thousand miles and a year’s strategy beyond the emperor’s schemes.
Now he only wanted revenge upon these foolish desert people for the humiliation they had caused him. For that is what he saw in their feeble struggles to keep his gauntlets off the spoils of the dead, sleeping in their quiet streets to all sides. He needed the assurance of victory in a mighty battle, as in the days of his childhood.
And so, passing through the dust of his lootings deep into the sea, he rose upon the high ridge of the great track left behind by his castles, and saw something colossal breaking the horizon. And gazing but a moment upon that leviathan pyramid of sloping stone, he knew it to be the centre of this dying expanse, and that if he wanted struggle for dominion of it all, he would meet it there.
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Scant resistance met our expedition at the foot of that temple-mountain. Pitchforks and rakes, in all but the hands of Sirigo’s peasants of yore, were no match for iron. Upon yet another victory that caused his heart to thunder with embarrassment and rage, Sirigo rested not, but clattered onwards and upwards towards the unadorned peak beneath which the massacre had taken place. And seeing many paths and stairwells carved into the place, and many doorways like the warren-ways of the rabbits of his home, Sirigo let loose some of his prisoners, and watched them flee. For he knew that, should any power be stirred in protection of this bizarre, uncaring land, it would rise to defend these, the last of its worshippers.
He followed them through the winding ways, past bare plaster and crumbling tunnels, to a room just below the peak of the pyramid. He was disgusted at what he saw, for he had imagined that should the Assari dismiss such treasures as diamonds to lay shining unclaimed in the sun, so they would have wonders beyond belief coveted and hidden away in this, the heart of their civilisation. But the rooms he passed were cold and abandoned, just like the rest of their dead cities. Not diamonds, but the dust of centuries crunched beneath his feet as he climbed.
In that final room, there were many men at least. They were farmers, or indistinguishable from farmers, for all wore the simple brown wraps of their people. And as Sirigo entered that hall, at the head of his eager soldiers, he was filled with dismay, for he saw no equal among them. Yet that was not so.
The remaining Assari were fearful, and shouting all at once among themselves as the invaders crowded the opposite end of the bare chamber. And gradually, the general perceived that they were all pleading with a single man in their midst, though he seemed no wiser, or better adorned, or older, than the rest.
“Master!” his servants cried. “Master Ryl! You alone may speak with those who sleep. You alone follow the march-beat of time, and you alone can trace the path of the stone across the hall even before it fragments. So hear us now! Use your strength, and cast aside these wakeful people, lest they enter our quiet paces and disturb our fathers!”
The one who was called Ryl did not speak, but only looked silently at the floor as he had done since he heard tell of Sirigo’s soldiers at the borders of the dunes.
Sirigo had had enough. Now he understood that there was to be no contest. The emperor could have his riches, and the army could march on, through all the Sea of Dust to seek warriors worthy of his strength. But despite what his eyes and all the days of conquest told him, he was a cautious and cunning commander, and could not risk leaving an undefeated enemy at his rear.
“Priest!” he spat out in primitive Assari, for some little knowledge of the language had been passed down from times when conversation was a treasure in itself. “Priest! I command you; tell me of your lords, so I may visit with them, and arrange your surrender.” Sirigo had seen no palace, nor fortress, in all the mountainless lands of his foe, but he had come to see many types of king in his campaigns, and knew that even gods walked among their subjects sometimes, and kept house like the mortals who served them.
At long last, Ryl looked up. His men had fallen silent, though desperation shone still in their eyes. Ryl’s shone not with anger, or fear, or cunning, but gazed out blue and serene as a lake at his guests.
“Our lord is one and the same,” he said, so quietly that Sirigo had to step closer to hear above his heartbeat. “There is but one path to follow for all men, and animals, and vegetables, and minerals upon this brief earth. The path of freedom.” Hie eyes moved in the dim glow of dusklight, followed happily a vertical line from ceiling to floor where a beam had come loose long ago and lay beneath its bed of dust by his feet. “The path of release.”
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Sirigo, not knowing if this fool meant to ridicule him before his captains, or threaten him, stepped again forward, and drew his sword. The singing metal rattled a pebble free from the wall to his left. Ryl turned to watch it fall with a trace of deep joy upon his thin lips.
“Time is endless, yet men think they have so little,” Ryl said. “But why seek all the treasures of existence at once? We will see, or feel it all eventually, in the ocean at the end of the river. Death is nothing but sleep. And we will awake anew, moulded anew, to experience the treasures from a new and beautiful perspective. Those that breathe will walk, and yet all is in motion.” These words the priest spoke as if to the plaster of the walls, and the wisps of brown moss drying upon the beams, and the air itself, echoing with the ragged gasps of his terrified flock. But, Sirigo saw, they were terrified no more. They had heard in their master’s words the futility of concern. They waited.
Sirigo listened and found nothing to serve him. To trade words with this dreamer would win him little, and his men were tired. The fabled oases of the eastern plains were still days ahead of them.
“You talk of treasure... so show it to me! Jewels to build a thousand castles! Where have you kept them?”
Ryl left his men by the far wall, took seven sure steps towards the general, and held out his hand, fingers together, palm down. “Come, and I will show you greater still, for you seek not the jewel, but the glory!”
And Sirigo, tired of words and poverty and the docility of this uncaring people, raised his sword and heaved it across his body with a mighty burst of strength. And Ryl’s hand came clean off his arm as if it had never been whole, and the rest of the body fell down, and spilled its red blood into the thirsty clay, and died. But the hand, lying alone in the middle of the room, glistening with sweat and rich as bronze, twitched, and righted itself, and waited.
High above, Sirigo looked down upon it. As his captains hurried forward to put the farmers to the sword, he lay his own palm upon it, raised his head, and spoke aloud: “By the power of the emperor, and the might of my sword, I demand of you the greatest treasure of your people, the Diamond of Emre!” For our people then had no small might in mystic arts, and Sirigo had channelled all his fury of the murder into reaching his goals for his lord. And as he spoke, he could think of no greater treasure than the great diamond of Emre, the priest of Assar who came a hundred years and a hundred before that to our land, the records of which tell of a great feast in the Silver House where Emre wore the most glorious wonder of this earth for the only time.
Amid the screams and the blood and the laughter of Sirigo’s men, the hand began to crawl.
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So began Sirigo’s most glorious journey, the end of which we shall all eventually sing of until our halls come tumbling down upon our heads at the end of this age and into the new.
Our great empire held all the lands of Assar in its indomitable grip. To Sirigo, that had always meant it was time to move on, for the way of rule was for others to take. Sirigo had known only how to lead to kill. This time was different, however, for this time, it was time to follow.
As his captains remained to plunder the grave-houses and set about building ingenious land-nets to sweep diamonds from the sands in all their priceless masses, Sirigo set out with but a hundred men, in pursuit of the greatest conquest of all - the fabled diamond of Emre.
It was slow going. Always, the hand of Ryl went first, palm dragging through dust and cobweb and sand, forefinger to the air, tasting the wind. It took a slow, winding path through all the pyramid at the centre of Assar, and at first Sirigo’s heart leapt, for he thought now the jewel surely kept in a hoard beneath his very feet. But the hand, coming out at the bottom stair of a secret tunnel, groped out onto sunlit dune, and went on towards the mountains, from whence Sirigo came. And now his rage swelled in joy’s place, for he was impatient to end his quest and return to our Marsah and receive his reward and his next orders. It seemed a terrible shame, and a waste of time, that the relic he, and a thousand before him, had sought was so close to home, for he had come so far across the desert already.
But, he reminded himself, he would never have found it without the hand, whose owner had tried to tempt him with the ravings of the mad and unambitious. And so he walked on with his men, at snail’s pace, at ease.
The hand did not stop at the edge of the desert, but climbed up towards the mountains. Sirigo looked back angrily over the windswept desolation he had claimed for his country, and stalked on. It was clear now that the diamond had been lost on Emre’s journey, and had never left Sirigo’s own realm, and now he wondered at the emperor’s sentiments on discovering his heroes had been so foolish as to not find what was on his doorstep.
The ascent was quicker with so few men, though the snowborn took a dozen of them in the sudden blizzards that spring up with the coming of winter, and dragged them, screaming and unseen, to their hidden caves where they would freeze ready for springtime feasting. Sirigo considered the hand, struggling through the flurries, and finally took it up in a cloak and hurried over the pass, for even he was no match for elemental forces in their own season, and he was eager for a roaring fire at the end of his journey.
They reached the lower valleys in ten days and ten nights. The diamond must be close, Sirigo thought, for all west of here was bustle and roaring crowds and booming forges, and no secrets could be kept away from these wilds of the border.
But it seemed he had a lesson to learn in haste, for the hand immediately turned for the slopes to the east, and began its ascent again. The general’s exhausted men looked up at the mountains they had just crossed, and looked at their leader, who had led on past their target where he need only follow, and thought of their lost men, and saw precious time slipping away before their eyes.
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The diamond was not in the mountains.
It would not be on the eastern edge of the Sea of Dust either, when they reached the abandoned hamlet they had seen from the top of the temple, two moons before. When Sirigo awoke the next day, next to the bed of bones in the half-collapsed chamber where the hand had chosen to pause, a dozen men had slunk off in the night towards their fame and fortunes.
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Not all great deeds remain in the memories of men, tenuously passed from deathbed to crib enough times to reach us here, amid the river of all our ancestors have performed. We see only those crude boulders that gouge deep channels through the course of time, or the collective wear of a thousand tiny pebbles, souls who stood together to purify or foul the waters. Either way, the river must change.
Sirigo and his wanderers performed deeds, it is true. Mighty feats of axe and fist. Shrewd manoeuvres of mind. Proud displays of bravery and valour. For the world is full of monsters and evil men. The bog-fishers of far Yarlwar have a story of men in starlit armour who came to them around that time, who were so hungry they ventured deep into the woods to live the Three Terrors for a loaf of bread. Explorers from the red city of Venoss found camps containing our arrows, in the Granite Mountains amid the acid billows of the deathstorms where no man was said to have yet gone in that age. The vile and feared Colossus of Ar fell in unseen battle mere moons before Sirigo appeared on the far reaches of its ruined domain.
But the people there remember no names. Nor do the Venosian explorers, or the fishermen of Yarlwar. For Sirigo’s great walk was not in service of altering the river. A single diamond to place upon a mountainous hoard would change no course or bank. All these things he may have done, or may not. The glories of our empire were already channelled into history. New armies ebbed and flowed across new lands, with new legends at their head. So focused was Sirigo upon that one pebble, he lost sight of the banks through which he could cut. And so, through all his journeys behind the hand, Sirigo was merely riding the current.
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Ten years passed. Sirigo walked east of east, and west of west. Twenty. The hand crawled on, up into the ice-lands north, and ice-lands south, until those following could not recall which was which. Plagues harried the peoples of the world, shrivelled away, disappeared. New ones took their place. Wars raged. Peace waned. Dark times came to all those under our sway, struggling forever to add logs to the flames we unleashed from our bloated borders. And Sirigo walked.
At first, the men fretted at news from home. Snatches of gossip in smoky taverns on strange hills, far away. A victory here, a death there. And Sirigo cursed the hand, for at times he held strong to his faith that the diamond of Emre was the boulder he would send crashing down the river of time, where all his plots and feats of old were mere stones. And at other times, he saw the boulder missing the waters, falling short at the bank, and all his efforts laid to waste. And with every curse, the hand wriggled on, agonisingly slow, through sand and mud and snow, looping back on ways they had seen days, or years, before.
And the general, mountainous of muscle, with great, firm boots that could root him unmoving to the earth whenever he desired, or send him leaping through hordes of foes whenever his eyes saw opportunity, began to grow old.
The hairs on his head turned grey looking out over the Royal Sea on the eastern edge of all we know. And then the hand turned back, showing him his gnarled, withered arms in the reflections of a still lake in forgotten Alamere in the west. He lost a tooth in each of the fire-houses that mark the Gold Road from the ports of Ran. And last of all, his mind began to slow, and with that calm slowness of the elder, he saw something that was there to see for the past three long, aching decades of his march.
So, on a bright, sunny winter morning in green Erasil, standing in front of the tumbledown barn his scouts had found for their fitful sleep, there in the heart of our world, he turned to his men. Only twelve remained to him, for some had been lost in blood and war, and others in traps and mazes of the ancients, and still more turned back to their homeland in search of a place in history.
Finally, he bade them farewell, and numbly, scarcely daring to believe their toils were over, and yet that their loyalty all their long lives had come to nothing, they hobbled off onto the pass towards home.
Sirigo, with white beard and shepherd’s staff, looked at the path that the hand was on. The hand did not age, and it did not falter through all the years of its tappings and draggings. Even now it strained for the golden fields and farms on the lower road across the valley.
But Sirigo did not follow. Instead, he turned and, digging his staff deep into the earth to prevent his stick-thin legs failing him at last, he struck out for the ragged miners’ track up onto the bare crags of the hillside.
He did not look back. But when he reached the ridge, and settled into a little shelter of moss beneath an overhanging rock, he looked out across the world, over all the paths he had trodden and across all the meaningless dangers he had overcome.
It all looked the same as when he had set out with the hand, and even from before, when he had ridden across the sacred grounds of others with a rein in one hand and sword in the other. And the simple truth of that view was the truth of the world itself. Forges churned and boiled, trees felled, peoples scattered and banded together and lived and died, and the world was the same. For so many, many years he had striven to change the course of the river of time, and indeed he had in his youth. He had been driven half-mad by the torture in his soul since the start of his walk, in whether best to turn the thrashing waters with this one arduous undertaking, or return to the weak, yet tangible scrapings of years gone by. But what did it matter? A bend here, a turn there, but the river flowed on. And the river, with all its pebbles eroding its banks and boulders crashing down from the springs of heroes, was a beautiful thing. A thing so naturally beautiful, and so deep and strong by nature, that the little twists a person may add did nothing to divert it from its flow, to the final peace and tranquillity of the ocean.
Better to ride the current then, and save your strength of being for that endless end. Alone on the slopes of but one of many thousand hills up which he had toiled, Sirigo accepted his walk for what it was.
There was a scrabbling upon the loose shale then, and as Sirigo sat gazing out over his life, the hand came to him. And in sitting before him, it raised its dark fingers aloft into the sun, and from within its cupped palm, where it had sat cradled for forty years, the diamond of Emre revealed its radiance.
It was a priceless stone, Sirigo thought, and the hand would give it willingly. But a stone was all it was.
Sirigo lay down in the soft moss and slept.
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Our world has changed since the ending of that walk. The common folk, broad and brash in the weed-strewn streets, would tell you that long ago, a sly sorcerer named Ryl of Assar tricked our greatest war-hero into wasting his life, and in doing so, he used his worship of decay to draw power from Sirigo’s failing body and save his conquered kingdom. It is true that since that time, our weapons have rusted away, and we cannot stir our tired forges to fire more, and we have left the Sea of Dust to its sleeping people and those who wait for sleep. And it is true that all our conquests have come to nothing, and towering castles the like of which you and I will never see lie empty hundreds of miles from home, still flying our fading colours, not besieged or torn asunder, but recognised as the folly they are. As pebbles in a river.
Our people turn ever inward, putting down their tools even as the towers of the capital crack and the roads go uncobbled. The mobs say we are cursed, that we must gather our remaining strength and strike out against the magic which binds us. But even they are left without decision. Some argue the diamond of Emre must return, as rightful tribute, to the Silver House where it is meant to be. Others insist we must find and reunite the hand, which came to rest with our lost wanderer, with the body of Ryl the black magician, which lies sleeping among many in the tombs beneath the pyramid where we cannot bring ourselves to go. The only notion that they agree on is that we are running out of time.
But I have told you another story. There is change still in our silent lands where soldiers and merchants and slaves once bustled. The fall of leaves. The winds across a field. The great, inward migration of the keeps and towers and statues we no longer need towards soft earth.
There is a peaceful pleasure in them all. Come, look out of this window, and you can see the river flow. It flows, it flows, and we shall see the ocean, one day, if we find the current.
So take this bed, weary traveller, and rest.