Read Online Wrath of Kerberos by Jonathan Oliver - Free Book Online Page B

the desert – from a fiery red to a deep midnight blue. Despite being drained from each day’s journey, he and Katya would sit and watch the display, apart from the rest of the camp, not talking but holding each other; and this, for now, was enough.
    Lead by Illiun, the crew of the Llothriall and a selection of people from the settlement had set out several days earlier, having sufficiently provisioned themselves from the ship. Silus and his friends had got on peaceably enough with their new companions, though Kelos had a distrust of the three silver-eyed men who accompanied them. The silent servants talked to no one but Illiun, seemed to take no food or water and, at night, they didn’t sleep, but stood watch over the camp, unmoving as they stared into the desert. “I don’t like those things,” Kelos had confided in Silus. “They’re not natural.”
    “What do you mean ‘not natural’?”
    “They appear to be artificial, magical constructs of some kind, but there’s just no magic there.”
    And this, Silus knew – and not the appearance of their strange alien companions – was what was really bothering Kelos. Each night the mage would sit and try and practise his art, but each night when he reached for the threads of magic he would find them absent.
    “A world without sorcery, Silus. Before we came here, could you have even conceived of such a thing?”
    “But didn’t sorcery bring us here, Kelos?”
    “I don’t know anymore.”
    Something had gone out of Kelos. Dunsany tried to cheer him with ribald songs and simple affection, but even though the mage would join in with the occasional verse or smile at his friend, his responses were empty.
    Silus knew how he felt. He, too, was feeling lost on this dry and savage world. Before he had come here, he had been something special, unique. The Chadassa blood that ran in his veins linked him to the ocean, giving him extraordinary abilities: the ability to breathe water as easily as air, the ability to connect to any mind in the ocean no matter how alien, and a burgeoning preternatural strength. But he wasn’t on his world now. Here there was no ocean and no god, and Silus was just a man. Although he professed to Katya that was what he had wanted all along, he still felt the call of the sea, still dreamed of swimming through lightless deep-water trenches, communing with creatures that no human eye had ever seen. Here he felt impotent, unable to protect those he loved should they be threatened. It was true that he was proficient enough with a blade, but who knew what manner of creature they would encounter here, or whether it could be met with nothing more than tempered steel?
    Out of all of the surviving crew of the Llothriall, though, it was surely Bestion who looked the most lost. For him, the absence of his god was bad enough, but he was utterly appalled to find himself amongst a people without faith. Illiun’s people put no faith in any god, and Bestion would spend hours sitting with them, arguing points of theology, trying to make them see that a life without God was a life without hope. And they would argue that on countless worlds they had seen the damage that faith had done: whole planets devastated by conflict wrought in the name of one deity or another; innocent people punished or murdered for espousing ideas at odds with an established church.
    “Can you not see, Bestion,” Shalim said to him one evening, “that a life without a god is a life without tyranny? Does having a god make you any more capable of appreciating the wonder of existence, or the majesty of the universe?”
    But rather than being swayed by these arguments, Bestion was frustrated and even angered. Once, when he had been on the point of boiling over with rage, Silus had stepped in, taking the priest outside the camp and sitting with him at the edge of the lamplight.
    “Bestion, you shouldn’t let these challenges to your faith affect you so. They should strengthen you, not bring