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  Mindripper

  Half a God Book 1

  Baron Blackwell

  Copyright © 2019 Baron Blackwell

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by

  Evan Beaubien

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  To my father,

  because once was not enough.

  Prologue

  God Killer

  Once again, the time had come to kill a god.

  Near breathless, Kalum Sane crept forward, a silhouette slithering slowly through a field of knee-high wheat. Yellow fragments of light burned in his veins, the remnants of the otherworldly narcotic distorting the surface of his brain. Sweat dripping from his brow, he crawled the corpse-strewn halls of his past—crawled among smiling hallucinations.

  The reality-twisting effect of the Gold Dust never failed to dismay Kalum. There was something terrifying about an existence where nothing was solid, where stalks of wheat dissolved into a froth of howling faces. Something not even repetition could fully master.

  At last, he came to the small village he sought: Nineven, a cluster of impoverished wooden buildings, glittering with faint lamplight beneath a moonless night sky. Shadowy figures wandered its winding streets, armed with torches and homemade spears.

  Before Nineven could morph into something else, Kalum shut his eyes. His heart hammered in his chest, and colors whirled at the edge of his closed eyelids. He shifted the musket slung over his shoulder, touched the hilt of the sword at his hip, thumbed the wooden grip of his cavalry pistol. . . .

  Unholy booms pounded his ears. Kalum jerked, opening his eyes to scan the sky.

  Cannon fire.

  Billowing clouds of Silver Dust descended onto the village, sent forth from exploding mortar bombs. Wails of distress and dread ripped through the air, then the boiling mist engulfed Nineven and the god’s thralls. There was no time to run. Lungs gasped. Limbs thrashed like babes fresh from the womb.

  Kalum rushed into the village, his chest burning from the gray smoke. His legs slowed and his eyelids fluttered with repressed lethargy, but the Gold Dust kept the worst effects at bay.

  Prone figures reached for him with feeble hands. Figures that stretched like the wings of mythical beasts before collapsing back into men. Hands that shimmered iridescent through the veil of fog.

  Focus. Must stay—

  With the force of rolling boulders, something touched Kalum’s mind, yanked his tired limbs to stillness, then slipped from him. His heart clenched. Timber roofs transformed into smoking husks, thrummed in tune to the pounding in his skull.

  STOP!

  It was a honeyed voice, roaring in his head like a toppled tower. The panicked mental shriek of a Mindripper. The anguished howl of a god.

  Kalum lurched forward with gritted teeth, his musket coming into his hands. Phantoms swam in his vision, burning corpses bumbling out of homes to block his path to the church. Men who had yet to succumb to the plumes of Silver Dust.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  Kalum fired, and the kick of the weapon reached all the way into his bones. A three-eyed corpse twitched back, its descent spewing bone and fluid into a fine, red mist.

  WHY HAVE YOU COME?

  The musket clattered to the ground, and Kalum drew the pistol from its leather holster, discharging it into the leering visage of a bronze-horned abomination. Whether solely an artifact of a drug-addled brain was impossible to discern. Wobbling onward, he choked on the noxious fumes released by the pistol and tossed it aside.

  The force returned, great stamping limbs, thrashing in an attempt to tear rents into his skull. Kalum groaned, his vision blurring, then the pressure skidded from the oil-like mire the Gold Dust had made of his mind.

  NO! A cry of desperation from a god, as loud as a hurricane’s rumble and as piercing as a widow’s shriek.

  Uncowed, Kalum reached into his coat, fumbled for a glass vial. Spasming legs gave out beneath him as he freed it from an inner pocket. Crimson flakes gleamed within the tiny bottle. Red Dust.

  LEAVE US IN PEACE.

  Vial uncorked, he sprinkled a line of the scarlet powder onto the back of his dark hand and inhaled it through his nostril. Pain, like a hissing river of molten glass jolted through him, lifted him upright on a growing cloud of fiery incandescence.

  Kalum Sane, Lord-Inquisitor of the Church of the Holy Ark, flashed gnashing teeth and unsheathed his sword. He tasted blood. A bellow came from his rage heated lungs, powered by the body-twisting effect of the Red Dust. There was living fire contorting in his veins. Living fire!

  PLEASE.

  Kalum stepped among the horde of shifting illusions, undisturbed by their ever-changing shapes. His blade rose and fell. He was running out of time. The Red made the Gold burn faster. When it ran out, he would be at the mercy of the Mindripper.

  The forms tumbled, clutching at bloody wounds, and a chorus of anguished cries perforated the night. One by one all fell, until only he was left.

  Kalum stood still, his harsh breathing rifling through the sudden quiet, his eyes lost in the examination of the godhouse. Made of white plastered stone, the religious edifice towered over the surrounding buildings as a perfect cube. The pulsing heart of Nineven.

  Techno-colored smoke billowed from a hole in its roof. Undoubtedly, a cannon shot guided by Worship Osei’s weaving of the infinite probabilities.

  The Mindripper struck again, desperate, struggling to find purchase on Kalum’s grease-slicked consciousness. A rain of ethereal blows. Colored plumes warped into a thousand gnarled faces.

  Kalum pressed onward, the flutter in his bowels pulsating in rhythm with his quickening heartbeat. He entered the church and fell under the scrutiny of a man. A god.

  Two realities warred.

  In one, a golden-skinned man sat atop a throne, draped in a long blue cloak, his erect penis glistening through the whirling vapor. In the other, a corpulent boy, more round than tall, glared down through drowsy eyes, his member flaccid and raw.

  A lie and the truth.

  NO, the Mindripper cried in denial, his mental voice somehow less, yet still powerful.

  Kalum shook his head and dropped his gaze. Long-haired banshees lay strewn over the floor, their ruby eyes vacant, their clawed hands twitching.

  “What are you? Why won’t you heel? Why won’t you obey?” Saccharine words uttered by the most perfect specimen of Man. A calligraphy of bestial sounds, stuttered from the mouth of a drooling abomination.

  Kalum tracked his way to the figure, stepped around prostrate forms, moved past rumble from the holed roof, stopped with the point of his blade pressed against the god’s chest. “Thou art undone. I am death, Mindripper. Death.”

  “You love me,” whispered words, barely intelligible. A command.

  And suddenly Kalum did. The feeling came—a warm rush—spreading ecstasy from his loins into his chest. Tears of joy sprang to his eyes. He stood poised in the presence of his brother, his father, his wife.

  Unfortunately for the Mindripper, the Lord-Inquisitor had killed those he loved before, had been forced to by a command of another would be god. His lips trembled. His stomach clenched.

  He stepped forward, speared a human heart. The squish of parted flesh. The bewildered look of a pimple-faced boy.

  Kalum wept silently, sensed the last of the Gold Dust fade from his blood as he stared up at the mural of the Holy Harlots, the four God cursed women from which the nobility of the Gilgian Empire descended. Their distinct features and odd-colored hair bared no resemblance to each other nor to his own. Despite his rank and position, he did not belong here. And perhaps he never would. His lips twitched into a grimace.

  He heard t
he soft pitter-patter of footsteps, but did not glance back.

  “They always give into the temptations of the flesh, these abominations,” said a voice.

  Kalum turned and saw Worship Osei standing amid a tangle of half-naked female bodies. Clothed in a religious habit, comprising of a white coif and a loose tunic made of blue serge, the aged Worship peered at the sleeping forms of the dead god’s harem through cataract eyes.

  “It is done,” he said.

  Osei nodded, leaned on her wooden staff. Done, her weathered visage seemed to say, only until the next one is born.

  Chapter One

  Gather

  Visions like images glimpsed through burning glass.

  You see vast armies clashing across a hazy vista, girdled within the fiery distortions consuming the margins. You see war chariots crashing to earth and fire-breathing dragons swooping above them, wafting in obsidian smoke. You see an eidolon of feminine perfection walking across the roiling waters of a boiling sea. She peers at you with eyes that are impossibly brilliant in the vermilion light.

  And then she speaks in a voice so sweet that it can only belong to a lover, whispering, “Scatter.”

  ■■■

  Enk Gueye jerked into consciousness, wheezing, struggling to weather the spasms that rocked his sweat-slicked body. He thrashed, an insect dangling from spider silk, swinging and twisting above oblivion. Blood flushed heat through his extremities, steeped his chest in raw emotion. Like the Great Flood that had shorn asunder the world in Deep Antiquity, the nightmare had come. All at once. Without warning.

  Now its shadowy remnants filtered through his mind, and terror wafted from his skin. Nightmare and memory mingled. The voice in the dream had sounded like Inanna’s own. . . .

  His lungs drew in tiny wisps of air.

  A hairline crack ran across the ceiling.

  Enk peered up at it, gasping and exposed behind watery eyes. An errant moonbeam pierced midnight pools to illuminate the flaw. It skittered this way and that, sketching half loops across a once perfect surface.

  Merka, his household’s last remaining servant, entered the unlit bedchamber with a candle and a jar of ointment, adhering to a ritual established after his first asthmatic episode. Luminous even in the feeble light, she lowered herself onto the bed, placed the candle on the table and leaned over him. Her sheer, white nightgown tightened across her large bosom.

  He inhaled sharply.

  She was a striking figure, possessing a nun’s serene countenance, two full lips stressed into what looked like genuine concern, arms so deeply pale that he could see the veins pumping blood within them, and a single streak of blue ran through the golden hair at her temple—evidence of someone with a touch of the Naunak bloodline in her ancestry.

  The young scion of House Gueye averted his gaze from the pointed majesty of Merka’s rounded mounds, still fighting his constricted lungs. His eyes burned and his loins tightened with an aching need.

  Merka’s cool hands slathered soothing ointment onto Enk’s chest. He returned his gaze to her breasts, his breathing now slower. Deeper. At Dilgan’s Grand Academy, members of the Second Estate, young nobles like himself, all told tales about laying with their former wet nurses. It was a rite of passage, to hear them tell it.

  I love Inanna . . . and only her.

  As if to prove the hollowness of this claim, Merka’s fingers tracked their way down his abdomen. Each point of contact germinated an inkling of heat within him.

  “You’ve grown so big,” she said, her lips quickening with the lure of ripened fruit. “It seems mad to think you once suckled at my breasts. You were so small then, just a tiny babe. I was always so terrified of dropping you, did I ever tell you that?”

  He met Merka’s eyes, her lustrous blue eyes, felt her soft hand tighten around his throbbing flesh. Inanna is gone, her smile seemed to say, she’ll never know. His heart leapt. His body trembled.

  Merka . . . unraveled, and he saw, saw through her veil of skin into the grooves of her mind. She had planned this little seduction, planned it for weeks to help soothe the ache of Inanna’s leave-taking.

  No boy should lose his sweetheart to the Immortal-Emperor, not even for a night, she had thought.

  Enk gasped, overwhelmed by the depth of her devotion. She matched his inhale, her body quivering. She loved him, he saw it like golden lantern-light pitched against the dark fiber of her being. There was no guile here, no perversion. This was. . . .

  The baying sound of a woman’s raucous moans seeped through the walls of his bedchamber, snuffing out the warmth from the very air. Mother and her latest lover. He sensed his cheeks flare with shame, felt himself soften in his former wet nurse’s grip.

  “That will be all, Merka,” he said in a voice as cold as a frozen tundra.

  She flinched, her expression of pain etched by candlelight. The hurt was gone from her face in an instant, hidden behind a mask of blankness, but he could still see it in her eyes, a weeping wound on something that once glittered bright.

  Merka stood, a wraith of wrath despite her outer calm. “I wonder what it must feel like to be chosen as a Tribute of Flesh? How can any other man compare when you’ve surrendered your maidenhood to the Helmsman of the Holy Ark, to the Holy Immortal-Emperor himself?”

  Enk blinked fresh tears from his eyes and watched Merka leave the same way she had entered, with jar and candle. Alone in the dark, he listened to the whorish moans of his mother. And his skin pimpled with the understanding, no one can hurt you more than those you love.

  No one.

  ■■■

  Enk awoke in the predawn glow, his head abuzz with a vague sense of what had happened the night before. Coughing into the crook of his elbow, he lurched from his bed, passed shelves bulging with leather-bound books, and drew back the curtains from his bedroom window.

  He peered out across Dilgan’s cityscape, and ignoring the large homes that lined the cobbled street outside the walls of his townhouse, allowed his gaze to shift to the Cobalt Gate, an ancient construct nestled in the gloam and haze of immense mountain peaks. One of the Four Great Gates that connected the Gilgian Empire to the Ancient World.

  The heart-clenching bulk shone with an azure sheen, the golden lens upon which all of the light of the rising sun converged, only to pillar the Shade, Dilgan’s worse districts, in an obscene and unholy glow.

  The young scion of House Gueye blinked away tears. It all looked the same. He had lost the love of his life, yet no fires consumed buildings. No lightning struck rooftops. Nothing had changed, but everything had. A dark carriage ambled past, its horses neighing as they moved through a small patch of fog.

  I’m all alone.

  He turned from the window to a plump chair, covered with linen of the same chintz-style, woodblock pattern that graced the room’s wallpaper, and dropped onto it. He wet his lip and reviewed the previous night’s events, then followed it up with a shake of his head.

  No. He must have imagined that part. It was not possible to read another person’s thoughts.

  His throat tightened, constricted by a sense of dread. He did not believe that, not really. He remembered how it had felt to peer inside Merka’s mind.

  Something cold seized his heart and squeezed. He closed his eyes as the old wheezing returned to rattled his chest, clutched his hands into fists and counted his breath:

  One.

  He strained beneath the power of another asthmatic attack, rocked on the chair, his entire body knotted and quivering.

  Two.

  For a time, all he could do was struggle to breathe, but he was more than familiar with the torments of his ailment. It had plagued him since he could crawl, had confined him to his bed when children his age laughed and played, had forced him to grow strong in other ways.

  The scion of House Gueye opened his eyes. Across from him, his wardrobe stood ajar, stuffed with finely embroidered coats, breeches, and boots. Yet despite their regalia, most, if not all, were secondhand item
s, gifted to him by Ilima, Inanna’s older brother. His eyes settled upon a ruined toy, peeking out through some discarded shirts at the back of the wardrobe—a wooden soldier riddled with cracks and splinters.

  Forcing himself to begin his day, he dressed in a silver coat, bedecked with gold and fined with sable. Once there would have been servants to wash his face and brush his blond hair, but those days were long gone, so he did them himself.

  “It’s just another day,” he told himself as he stared into a small mirror, pressing thumb and finger to a yellowish bruise on the side of his face. “Nothing has changed.”

  Enk buckled on his sword-belt and left his room, feeling as though he were adrift on wild and turbulent winds. He wandered his home the way a stranger might, seeking clues to what sort of people would inhabit such a place. The hallways on the third and second floor were so worn and weathered as to seem abandoned. Cobwebs knotted the corners of ceilings, white sheets draped tables and chairs, and closed doors concealed dust-filled chambers from his eyes. It was only on the ground floor that the mansion’s former grandeur still pulsed true, throbbing like the last light of a dying volcano. Its warm glow welcomed his panting form with gold-framed paintings and spotless floors as he descended the last step of a winding staircase.

  In the dining room, he found Merka bent over a long table, arranging forks and plates for the morning meal. She glanced over her shoulder and studied him. Aside from the wrinkles around her eyes, she looked even more beautiful by the light of day. A nymph haloed in the pale rays cast through the long windows of the gallery.

  He forced a smile and approached the table.

  She greeted him warmly, but her words from the night before hung naked between them, a red-dripping blade:

  “How can any other man compare when you’ve surrendered your maidenhood to the Helmsman of the Holy Ark, to the Holy Immortal-Emperor himself?”