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  PRAISE FOR MICAH YONGO

  “A strong work from a very promising new author.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Yongo invigorates the epic fantasy genre with his original and accomplished voice in the striking and throroughly enjoyable Lost Gods.”

  Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time

  “Fast-paced and intriguing… with an African-inspired setting that makes a refreshing change.”

  Anna Smith Spark, author of The Court of Broken Knives

  “Lost Gods is fresh, fierce, and lush with inspiration from the lands and mythology of ancient Africa and the Middle East.” Cameron Johnston, author of The Traitor God

  “Yongo’s debut feels fresh in its conception and worldbuilding, exploring an intriguing landscape from the points of view of a diverse array of characters of different social strata.”

  Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Lost Gods

  Micah Yongo

  PALE KINGS

  For the survivors…

  “If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

  PROLOGUE

  DUSK

  In many ways a bloodtree is a beautiful thing, or so Suryal had always thought; the way its life – so mysterious, so fickle – can span generations, its roots resting beyond time, living out the secret of its seed to mirror the sha of the one to whom it has been bound. Over the years she’d had her favourites, and in better times would sometimes come here to the Forest of Silences just to visit them, strolling unseen beneath the broad elegant canopy of Tutor Maresh’s acacia, her steps brightening the shadows as the sun lowered beyond the mount’s peak; or at other times gazing upon the sweeping boughs of Master Sol’s magnolia as the season changed, its dainty blossoms, ruffled by the breeze, cascading to the ground like flakes of snow.

  She thought back on them all, allowing her memories to drift through the centuries to chart the path that had led here to this point. She’d watched, as her kind must, when Qoh’leth had planted that first tree, slicing his palm to soak the seed in his blood, before giving it to the soil to birth the Brotherhood of the Shedaím.

  “A strange thing isn’t it,” Abdiel said, walking beside her, “that all we have been witness to – centuries of conflict, both seen and unseen – should now rest upon them.”

  With that Suryal had to agree. As much as she’d known it would come to this, it still amazed her to think the fate of worlds could now be tied to the fates of the four trees they’d come here to find; the bloodtrees of Neythan, Arianna, Josef and Daneel: the surviving members of the Brotherhood’s last sharím.

  “They are young, it’s true,” she replied. “But the Brotherhood has raised and trained them well.”

  “It has. Yet there is no training for what comes.”

  To which Suryal said nothing. She knew Abdiel’s words to be true, but there was no helping that now. With the fall of the Brotherhood, and after having been forced by the betrayal of their elders to scatter across the Five Lands, these four, young as they were, were the only ones left to trust in.

  Suryal glanced up at Josef’s bloodtree as she passed by it, a solid strong oak – straight, unyielding, towering into the evening sky like a sentry to survey the grounds. Beyond it, she could see his twin brother Daneel’s, with that slight twisting kink midway up its trunk, and those bright autumnal leaves flickering in the breeze like erratic tongues of flame, making the tree itself seem perpetually on fire. Steadily, she moved deeper into the Forest, Abdiel at her shoulder, continuing further up the slope to find Arianna’s bloodtree, which even now remained like no other she’d ever seen: the beguiling way its boughs opened fearlessly to the sky, and the way its blossoms, blooming in every possible colour, continued to shift tone from week to week: one day darker, another day lighter, as changeable as the wind. Finally, they came to Neythan’s – the tree that had remained stunted and barren for so long, and that now reached beyond the Forest’s canopy, taller than the others, its branches clustering in complex matrices as Suryal came to a halt and stood before it.

  “He goes south with Arianna and Caleb now,” Abdiel remarked. “To the Summerlands, led by the Súnamite mystic to uncover the secrets of the Magi scroll.”

  “There is hope in that,” Suryal replied.

  “Yes. There is always hope.”

  “And what of the others?”

  “Daneel has fled north with the boy, hunted by what remains of the Brotherhood for rescuing the child he’d been sent to kill. Only Josef remains part of the Shedaím now. He does not know that it is dying. He remains blind to what it has become, but loyal to the throne.”

  “As was said he would.”

  “Yes. As was said… It is left to them now. They must do what must be done, seek what must be known.”

  “Yes,” Suryal agreed as they stood there, staring up at the pale trunk of Neythan’s bloodtree as the dusky sky continued to dim. Even though she knew there was no choice but for things to be this way, she remained uneasy. She turned, surveying the grassy shallow slope they’d climbed, the beginnings of the village loitering beyond the slim stream that bordered the Forest below. The sky was darkening, the night coming on. She looked up once more at Neythan’s bloodtree. “I shall wait for you here,” she whispered to it, and then reached out to touch its smooth white bark. “But I cannot wait long,” she added. “The shadow comes, and shall not abate… The time is short.”

  ONE

  OUTLAW

  When Neythan was a boy he’d awake to the sound of the irhzán, a kind of long ended flute with cuttings of willowcane enclosed in the mouthpiece. He’d listen to the burred woody sound drifting up through the morning and gliding along the edges of the dawn as the sunlight nudged above the mountains. The day, just starting, would be silent but for those long meandering notes, wandering haltingly like the storytelling voice of an elder by campfire. His mother would find him listening as he stared out through the window of their hut toward the east where the mountains stood caped in shadow by the sun’s ascent, no more than dark crooked shapes against the horizon, the sky behind ablaze, nascent day spreading out from some vast hiding place beyond the blackened ramparts and beckoning him, to see if he could search it out beyond the mountains, to see whether day was a place rather than a time, or both.

  “What else do you remember?”

  Neythan glanced up from the ground and peered at Filani through the smoke of the campfire as he kindled it. It was late, or perhaps by now it was early. He shrugged. “Little. No more than scraps. In Ilysia it was forbidden to talk of life before the Brotherhood. The Shedaím was to be our only kin, thoughts of all else were to be buried… I remember once, I asked Josef and Daneel where they’d lived before being brought to the mount. When Tutor Hamir heard of it he beat me so hard I couldn’t sit for a week. I was six, I think…”

  He tossed another chopped bough onto the fire and poked at the smouldering pile as the flames curled around it. Caleb, still asleep, coughed where he lay on the other side, snoring as usual whilst Filani’s niece, Nyomi, slept on her back beside him, undisturbed.

  “Strange now I think about it,” Neythan said. “How easily it happens, I mean. How quickly you let go. There was a time I’d think only of home, being back in Eram. Not an hour would pass without my thinking of it. The sea. The fish. Mother. Father… A few moons in Ilysia and it fades. A while more and you can scarcely remember their faces. In time they are no more than ghosts. It’s as if they never existed at all.”

  “And yet they did,” Filani said. “And still do, within you.” She glanced up at him. “The sha keeps all things. It never forgets. I will help you. You will see.”

  “Help me?”

  “To remember.”

  “How?”

  But she just did that thing of pretending not to hear, busying herself with the frayed hem of her skirt. It was beginning to get light again, the sky turning dim emerald; the sun, hours from rising, trying to compete with the moon for what was left of the night.

  They’d journeyed for more than a week through the sands of the Havilah to the edge of Súnam after fleeing the elders’ temple. And then on through the sweaty clamour of its jungly forests, the ground growing increasingly lumpy from the crowded undergrowth and tree roots until in the end Filani thought it best to untether the animals and leave the unwieldy cart behind. And so they did, and continued on with just the mule and camel as Filani and Caleb rode with the provisions slung across the burdened beasts’ backs whilst the rest of them went on foot.

  For most of the way here Neythan had distracted himself with the strange sights and sounds of the jungle: the bright sappy leaves and thick lazy insects and flowers and birds he’d never seen before, each stranger than the last, as though everything had grown gaudy and mad in the sun’s wild white glare. Tiny sparrow-like birds with shimmering yellow breasts. Long-limbed monkeys climbing through almost luminous greenery. Green lizards. Yellow frogs. Purple ants. Even the dirt was different, a bold silty red, as though worn rusty by the sun’s stifling heat as beneath it all the loud continuous croak of insects filled the silence.

  Not that it mattered. At night the distractions peeled away anyway, leaving Neythan’s mind to wander through the small hours, leaning inevitably toward the memory he’d been trying to avoid. The sight of Master Johann’s slim dark eyes blinking slowly as his tired mouth hung ajar, mouthing Neythan’s name as he lay bleeding beside him on the dusty c
anvas of the temple floor. Like a suffocating fish. Hands clutching the wound in his gut, the wound Neythan had put there. The wound that–

  “You’re shivering.”

  Neythan followed Filani’s gaze down to his bandaged hand where, weeks before, a blind elder had thrust a dagger through to pin him to the floor of the temple of the very Brotherhood that had raised him. His fingers were twitching, again. He held them still with his other hand and folded them into a fist, and then glanced up at Filani watching him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “The one thing you are not, is fine, Neythan.”

  “It will pass.”

  “Yes… you have been saying so for nearly two weeks now.” She gestured at Arianna, sleeping a few feet away with her shoulders hunched beneath a ragged blanket. “Ten days and she was well. With you the elder’s fever persists.”

  Neythan coughed, as though to demonstrate.

  “Your struggle to sleep,” Filani went on. “The dreams you have when you do. These things are why you must remember.”

  “I don’t see how remembering life before Ilysia has anything to do with it.”

  “It has everything to do with it. You will find no rest until you do. It is as I have said, Neythan. The sha keeps all things… but sometimes it seeks to tell them.”

  “And that’s what this is? My not sleeping?”

  Filani shrugged, scraping her teeth with a narrow twig to clean away a lodged crumb.

  “And you can help?”

  “There are ways…” She turned to the fire. It was warming now, beginning to grow. “Tomorrow, when we come to Jaffra at last, and speak to the chieftain and elders concerning the scroll. Afterwards, when we have rested, I will help you remember.” She looked up at him from the flames. “You will not be whole until you do.”

  They came to Jaffra before noon of the following day. Neythan couldn’t help but be stunned by the size of the place. The settlement was broad and sprawling, with narrow streets lined by high walls that turned the city to a kind of labyrinth. Tall palm trees speared the horizon above the pale stonework and straw-thatched roofs. Above it all loomed a high pyramidal tower of whitewashed stone that seemed to mark the city’s centre.

  “It’s a ziggurat,” Filani explained. “A way for the priests to speak with gods, or so the tradition goes.” To which Neythan nodded numbly, eyeing the surroundings. He’d imagined the Summerlands to be little more than plain and dusty, an unending horizon of white cracked earth lying neat and still and naked as bone beneath a blue and silent sky, perhaps a village here or there, like the Salt Lands they’d journeyed through further north, only warmer. Instead the settlement before him sprawled out, bold and broad, as large as Hanesda probably, and just as busy.

  People moved along the narrow, walled streets in both directions. Tall-necked women with gleaming black skin ambled by with baskets and jars of clay propped elegantly on their heads. Others wore long wrap-around skirts, intricately woven, arms swaying slowly as they strode along the road. Children scampered and giggled along the walls. Cattle groaned as they were led slowly through the scrum. Whilst above it all, perched on a yard-wall opposite, a dirty-turbaned old man slapped a drum, his eyes closed, his naked narrow torso swaying as his palms flashed rapidly above the skin.

  Every street they turned into was the same, the whole place crammed ready for trade. The market, if there was such a thing here, rather than being gathered in one place instead sprawled out along the various broadways wherever the tall walls were wide enough. Frontages sat splayed with the wares of their occupants – wickerworkers, bayweavers, sandal-makers, spice-sellers – all lining the wider streets on both sides, and then, as they turned into another road, a tanner. Neythan’s nose wrinkled at the tired reek of meat as he eyed a pair of scraggly rawhides draped over a bench fronting the house wall.

  “You see, Neythan?” Filani said, walking beside him. “The world is bigger than the Sovereignty. There are more lands than just the Five.” She smiled, nodding at the surroundings. “As you can now see.”

  Neythan nodded again, taking it all in – the people, the clothing, the smells – all of it so different and exotic and yet, in a way, strangely familiar too. Both his father and uncle were Súnamites, and although Uncle Sol had rarely spoken of his homeland, Neythan couldn’t help but feel a sense of kinship with it, as though a part of him had always been waiting to come here – waiting to return home.

  “Master Sol never said how pretty this place was,” Arianna said, as though hearing his thoughts. She was at his shoulder, examining a set of peculiarly carved trinkets hanging from a nearby tree. There were more of them along the road, strange objects hanging from the gables of shack doors and houses; little bars of sculpted wood, no bigger than a finger, each one tethered with tufts of feather and straw bindings and bits of bone. Others tied with bird skulls and silver trinkets, or twigs bound together in strange latticed shapes; all hanging like wind-chimes from the rim of doorways or the boughs of cypress trees by the roadside.

  “They are tokens,” Filani said. “Keepsakes.” She pointed at a cradling of twigs with chunks of moss and straw tucked into it, hanging in the shape of an uneven pyramid from the bough of a tree overhanging a wall on the street. “That one is for Talagmagon. She governs the harvests.” She pointed to another icon beside it, a column of carved wood hanging by two twisted threads of yarn. “This one is Ishmar, the Rainspeaker. She both commands the rain and speaks through it. In rainy season the priests will interpret her words, tell what sacrifices should be brought to ensure the health of their crops.”

  She glanced back, saw the uncertain smile on Arianna’s face, the mild frown on Neythan’s. “There will be many things here that will seem strange to you. But remember, we are all foreigners in another’s home. Your own customs were once just as strange to me.”

  They rounded a corner further up the road into a narrow, cobbled walkway with terraces on either side and the beginnings of a half-built gangway arching overhead. Fewer people here. Filani’s fingertips brushed the painted stones of the walls where faded pictograms of black two-headed serpents and what appeared to be a bear chased each other, merging into a winding medley of colour. Neythan glanced over the images, wondering what story they told, and of what god.

  “How long since you were last here?” he said.

  Filani looked at the painted wall and smiled. “Too long…” Her gaze turned to the street ahead of them, her smile fading as she considered the clutch of shanty housing at the other end. “But not long enough… Come. We are close.”

  As they stepped into the adjoining street Arianna laid a hand on Neythan’s shoulder and nodded. Neythan followed her gaze to an old skinny man ahead of them. The stranger was standing in the road, allowing the ongoing tide of people to pass around him as he stared at Filani and the rest of the group. The man said nothing, his coffee-dark body just turning slowly as he continued to watch them pass by on the opposite side of the road.

  In the next street Caleb noticed a woman staring at them, flat-eyed as a goat, before turning to whisper to a friend beside her who duly left off from what she was doing to join her companion in watching them as they walked. Caleb came alongside Filani and leaned down from the mule. “Foreigners not so common a thing here as they are in the Sovereignty I take it.”

  “We’re nearly there,” Filani said.

  By the time they’d reached the next street a small group had gathered; people who’d drifted idly into their wake or kept pace from the other side of the street, following along, their gazes fixed unabashedly on the strangers.

  Arianna was beginning to get agitated. “Why are these people following us?”

  But Filani didn’t answer. They walked on toward a growing mob – twenty, thirty perhaps, it was hard to tell. Dark sun-baked figures filled across the narrow passage to bar the other end as more climbed along the tops of the walls on either side.

  Filani heard the scrape of Arianna’s blade pulling loose from the sleeve. She turned to face her.

  “No.”

  Arianna glanced at the men on the walls. The crowd was growing.