Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 12: The Black Earth

With the year’s awakening ceremony ended, the gates of the Council Building opened, and the nobles and the commoners went out by their separate ways.

Kei went out with them. freёwebnoѵel.com

He reached for the way home — for Kaiser’s home — and found he already knew it, the route sitting in him as though he had walked it many times. And as he walked it, the inherited memory began to settle into place, and the shape of the land came up in him piece by piece, until he held the whole of it.

This layer of the Abyss, where the Rakshasa dwelt among the other abyssal things, was the Black Earth. The five-hundredth layer, shaped like a great oval basin lying on its side.

To the east, a blood-red sea, thick with undead things and a few infernal creatures that kept to the deep water. Draw near it, and screams came up out of it in a hundred voices — and so it was called the Screaming Sea. Small islets stood up from its floor.

To the north, mountains and hills and valleys. Nothing grew there; the bare rock slid and avalanched and threw itself down over the ages into a broken, undulating country, and they had named it the Jagged Mountain Range.

To the west lay a dense forest of blood-red growth — the Cruentus Rainforest — home to every kind of abyssal flora and fauna that could end a life. It was reckoned in three parts, by the danger in each: the Cruentus Mouth, the outer forest; the Cruentus Heart, the middle; and the Cruentus Mind, the inner. The clan’s expeditions had bred a rumor of a fourth region past the innermost, a place called the Cruentus Soul — but no one had crossed the inner forest and come back to say whether it was true. ƒгeewёbnovel.com

To the south, the land drowned. Swamps and bogs and tidal marshes, overgrown with red weed and thick with poisonous things, formed where the red water of the Screaming Sea seeped inland — and in some stretches the undead stood in the shallows there too. This was the Black Bowels.

On the edge of those marshlands, behind the protection of the enchanted walls, sat the settlement of the commoners.

They were kept to menial work — labor hired out by nobles, or eternal servitude in the noble houses as shopkeepers, house-help, caretakers, concubines, innkeepers. No commoner was permitted a business of his own; the authority for that stayed always in noble hands.

Their buildings were made of the blood-red reeds that grew in the marsh — bundled and woven into columns, the larger reeds bent into parabolic arches that formed the spine of each structure, set into the wet soil at opposing angles so the arches held themselves taut. Woven reed mats closed them in, their mesh perforations serving as small windows for light and air. The shapes ran from single-room dwellings to long tunnel-forms open at one or both ends, for family or for trade. And so the village had its name. Redweed.

At the center of the basin, where the Rukhs and the Ramiz held the core of the land, stood the capital. Vitium.

The city had its marketplaces and its military garrison, its gambling and fighting dens, its Council buildings and royal temples, the residences and palaces of the nobles, its inns and all the rest. Three layers of gigantic enchanted spiked walls closed it on every side against attack from without. And a long winding road ran from the commoner settlement up to the capital’s southern gate, strung along its length with guard outposts and the small shops of merchants.

Kei walked it, and the map of his new world closed over in his mind, and he understood at last the whole of the world he had woken into.