From the Prologue

  Hanuman the Elder sat with his narrow back against the cyclopean wall of God Lanfin’s labyrinth. Sonorous song in the voice of a god flooded its halls, a deep, invasive melody dredging up all of his fury from deep inside. He heard the edge of fear in that song, the echoes of it came on stronger in the voices of those other inconsequential beings, his direct descendants, who joined him. Deceitful players in the grand games of the gods—the fights they waged with mortal lives—those unholy beings lent their strength to their father, sanctioned his designs for their futures. For all mortal futures.

  He closed hooded eyes. His planar cheeks lay slack and ran into a heart-shaped jawline that burned youth into cherubic features under the crazed array of silver lines running across his muted, brown skin, a shatter pattern much like his father’s. He sat, and waited as the song threatened the world beyond with instability, as it enticed the River of Time away from its bed, onto a new track carved shallow and wide into the bedrock of the world outside, to dig in deeper with each passing generation, until time again was made stable.

  A rumble took the earth. Soft vibrations traveled across his legs, into his belly and chest, out through rattling teeth and shaking fingers. This shift would bring forth new opportunities, explorations into a time not his. A new life seized, its actions recalled, a man would be immured here and forgotten. His birth undone and death denied him, he was coming.

  It has been too little time since the last one. He thought.

The intervals between reclamations had been thinning. The interval between seizures, between him and the next man to be taken, amounted to thousands of years. Tens of thousands. A day in this place felt so much like a year without sight of the sun and moon to guide it, without the interplay of darkness and light. Above him was a veil of gray clouds drifting aimlessly, promising rains it never delivered.

  How long since Shulraki died for the last time?

  He sifted through memories that did not belong to him, memories which were nonetheless a part of the Elder’s identity now, which had shaped him.

  He could not identify those splinters of the pathfinder’s soul by any direct means. He had been unsuccessful in finding those memories, and perhaps they were not contained here at all, but there had been accounts in other places, outside of the man and the scattered pieces of his soul. Accounts from others who remembered them.

  A disgraced gate guard in the employ of a rebel faction in the bush. A counselor who believed too much resemblance lingered in his bald peer for the man he had helped slay, and both counselors in the cabinet of a politically savvy but nonetheless arrogant queen. A trader in the employ of one of Shulraki’s rivals. All of them had been strategically placed to see their task done. All of them were remembered by someone, and yet the man himself, the Core of their shared soul, remembered none of them.

  He had seen into those memories, too, had seen how they ended with the death of Shulraki Alran, his arrival in the Empress’s Land of the Dead.

  One hundred years or so, certainly.

  A gate guard—a scar running across his cheek which was self inflicted, who was clad in light armor and poppy red velvet, had been the last to go. The last glimpses of a queen deposed accompanied their downfalls as seen through the eyes of that errant counselor so suspicious of his peer.

  Execution. Unceremonious execution on the throne room floor. First for the queen. Then for the conspirators who murdered her.

  He wondered what accounts he might find of the aftermath hidden in these new divisions within the halls, the avenues chaining this newcomer to the Halls of Time, to Shulraki’s domain, and then to Ank the Sanark’s, to Xi Didura’s and then to Hanuman’s. Five reclamations in all  of the time this world had lived beyond Time’s touch.

  Only five, now.

  He wondered what this newcomer had done. What he had done to warrant this punishment. To live out his days in hell.