Prologue
Storm winds howling off the midnight-shrouded Vilayet Sea clawed at the granite-walled compound of the Cult of Doom. The compound gave the appearance of a small city, though there were no people on its streets at that hour. More than the storm and the lateness kept them fast in their beds, praying for sleep, though but a bare handful of them could have put a finger to the real reason, and those that could did not allow themselves to think on it. The gods uplift, and the gods destroy. But no one ever believes the gods will touch them.
The man who was now called Jhandar did not know if gods involved themselves in the affairs of mortals, or indeed if gods existed, but he did know there were Powers beneath the sky. There were indeed Powers, and one of those he had learned to use, even to control after a fashion. Gods he would leave to those asleep in the compound, those who called him their Great Lord.
Now he sat cross-legged in saffron robes before such a Power. The chamber was plain, its pearly marble walls smooth, its two arched entrances unadorned. Simple round columns held the dome that rose above the shallow pool, but ten paces across, that was the room’s central feature. There was no ornamentation, for friezes or sculptures or ornate working of stone could not compete with that pool, and the Power within.
Water, it might seem at first glance, but it was not. It was sharply azure and flecked with argent phosphorescence. Jhandar meditated, basking in the radiance of Power, and the pool glowed silver-blue, brighter and brighter until the chamber seemed lit with a thousand lamps. The surface of the pool bubbled and roiled, and mists rose, solidifying. But only so far. The mists formed a dome, as if a mirror image of the pool below, delineating the limits that contained the Power, both above and below. Within ultimate disorder was bound, Chaos itself confined. Once Jhandar had seen such a pool loosed from its bonds, and fervently did he wish never to see such again. But that would not happen here. Not now. Not ever.
Now he could feel the Power seeping into his very bones. It was time. Smoothly he rose and made his way through one of the archways, down a narrow passage lit by bronze lamps, bare feet padding on cool marble. He prided himself on his lack of ostentation, even to so small a thing as not wearing sandals. He, like the pool, needed no adornment.
The passage let into a circular sanctorum, its albescent walls worked in intricate arabesques, its high vaulted ceiling held aloft by fluted alabaster columns. Light came from golden cressets suspended aloft on silver chains. Massive bronze doors barred the chamber’s main entrance, their surfaces within and without worked in a pattern of Chaos itself, by an artist under the influence of the Power, before madness and death had taken him. The Power was not for all.
The forty men gathered there, a fifth part of his Chosen, did need this show of splendor to reflect the glory of their cause. Yet the most important single item in that chamber, an altar set in the exact center of the circle formed by the room, was of unornamented black marble.
Two-score men turned silently as Jhandar entered, saffron robed and shaven of head as the laws of the cult demanded, just as it forbade its women to cut their tresses. Eager eyes watched him; ears strained to hear his words.
“I am come from the Pool of the Ultimate,” he intoned, and a massive sigh arose, as if he had come from the presence of a god. Indeed, he suspected they considered it much the same, for though they believed they knew the purposes and meanings of the Cult, in truth they knew nothing.
Slowly Jhandar made his way to the black altar, and all eyes followed him, glowing with the honor of gazing on one they considered but a step removed from godhead himself. He did not think of himself so, for all his ambitions. Not quite.
Jhandar was a tall man, cleanly muscled but slender. Bland, smooth features combined with his shaven head to make his age indeterminate, though something in his dark brown eyes spoke of years beyond knowing. His ears were square, but set on his head in such a fashion that they seemed slightly pointed, giving him an other-worldly appearance. But it was the eyes that oft convinced others he was a sage ere he even opened his mouth. In fact he was not yet thirty.
He raised his arms above his head, letting the folds of his robes fall back. “Attend me!”
“We attend, Great Lord!” forty throats spoke as one.
“In the beginning was nothingness. All came from nothingness.”
“And to nothingness must all return.”
Jhandar allowed a slight smile to touch his thin mouth. That phrase, watchword of his followers, always amused him. To nothingness, indeed, all must return. Eventually. But not soon. At least, not him.
While he was yet a boy, known by the first of many names he would bear, fate had carried him beyond the Vilayet Sea, beyond even far Vendhya, to Khitai of near fable. There, at the feet of a learned thaumaturge, an aged man with long, wispy mustaches and a skin the color of luteous ivory, he had learned much. But a lifetime spent in the search for knowledge was not for him. In the end he had been forced to slay the old man to gain what he wanted, the mage’s grimoire, his book of incantations and spells. Then, before he had mastered more than a handful, the murder was discovered, and he imprisoned. Yet he had known enough to free himself of that bare stone cell, though he had of necessity to flee Khitai. There had been other flights in his life, but those were long past. His errors had taught him. Now his way was forward, and upward, to heights without end.
“In the beginning all of totality was inchoate. Chaos ruled.”
“Blessed be Holy Chaos,” came the reply.
“The natural state of the universe was, and is, Chaos. But the gods appeared, themselves but children of Chaos, and forced order—unnatural, unholy order—upon the very Chaos from which they sprang.” His voice caressed them, raised their fears, then soothed those fears, lifted their hopes and fanned their fervor. “And in that forcing they gave a foul gift to man, the impurity that forever bars the vast majority of humankind from attaining a higher order of consciousness, from becoming as gods. For it is from Chaos, from ultimate disorder, that gods come, and man has within him the taint of enforced order.”
He paused then, spreading his arms as if to embrace them. Ecstacy lit their eyes as they waited for him to give the benediction they expected, and needed.
“Diligently,” he said, “have you labored to rid yourselves of the impurities of this world. Your worldly goods you have cast aside. Pleasures of the flesh you
have denied yourselves. Now,” his voice rose to a thunder, “now you are the Chosen!”
“Blessed be Holy Chaos! We are the Chosen of Holy Chaos!”