Gog (Lost Civilizations: 4) by Vaughn Heppner Page A

throat, while an eelskin line threaded from the collar, and to a cleat riveted in the bottom of the craft.
    His name was Lod, and usually, his mind was blank. Today, he seethed. He schemed. Last night in the shed, he had dreamed. In his vision, he had stalked Shamgar with a bloody sword, hacking his tormenters and gutting Enforcers.
    Enforcers often shoved a sharpened stake up a bad slave’s arse, planting the howling unfortunate on the concrete bank of a canal.
    This morning, as Lod crouched at the prow, something new stirred in him. For years, he had endured, grown callous to pain. Surviving the giant canal rats had been his all. Usually, when he rode in the boat, he watched nothing and felt nothing. Today, he grew aware of the welts crisscrossing his back. He fingered one of the puckered, poorly healed bites that dotted his flesh. He was the legend of the canals. Rat bait on average lasted three weeks. He had lasted years.
    Years, he had floated years in the oily water, luring giant rats for his owner’s net or trident.
    The rat boat creaked as his owner stood in back, swaying the oar. Between them, in the narrow craft, lay two dead rats, huge, ninety-pound monsters, their bloody fur wet. The black rat’s rear leg kept twitching. That one had scratched Lod as he had lain like a corpse in the water to lure the foul rodent near enough for his owner.
    His owner had been careless. That made Lod angry, made him secretly clench his fists. The vision had shown him another path, with a sword in hand. Why must he be bait? It was a dangerous question for a slave, a question Lod had always shied away from. He should forget the vision. He should stop thinking and drift back into dullness.
    His head flicked with unusual quickness. He couldn’t drift back. Today, he noticed the filth bobbing in the water. He smelled smoke drifting from a warped shed on the left bank. Fishermen smoked eels and catfish in it. His stomach rumbled. He devoured everything he could lay his hands on, but his youthful body devoured like a smelting furnace whatever lay in his stomach.
    On the other bank, rose a reaver’s stone-built fortress. The weathered wall was ten feet high. A whip cracked. It came from an open gate there. Slaves strained with ropes, dragging a galley out of the canal and into a caulking pen.
    Lod bared his teeth. In the vision, he had held a torch. He had burned Shamgar to the swamp city’s foundations. It was a vain vision, but it… it… stirred something new: hope. That hope burned like fire in his eyes. Somehow, someday, he would escape Shamgar. The idea… was more than dangerous. If he attempted escape, and failed, it meant wriggling out his pathetic existence on a stake that slowly worked up through his body, until the point tore through the skin of his neck.
    Lod crouched at the prow, as another thought struck him. Who had sent the dream? Was it his own? Or had Elohim sent it? Lod pondered this, as the boat passed towers, taverns and slave barracks. He worried his lower lip as toiling slaves pushed a melon-raft past and as harlots, on the left bank, writhed to the beat of a pimp’s drum.
    Lod shrugged as the rat boat neared a Merchant Wharf, a plaza of stalls and open-air shops. He wasn’t a priest or a seer, but bait. Bait took gifts without asking why.
    A shout from the nearest pier caused Lod’s owner to quit rowing. Lod didn’t bother looking up, although he sensed his owner’s unease.
    Strange yipping, like laughter, caused Lod to shift his head, peering through his tangle of white hair. Spotted, doglike beasts jumped and pranced on the pier. Lod blinked in surprise. A throng of people jammed the pier, staring at him. Had Shamgar’s god, or one of the god’s sons, gained evidence of the vision? Lod imagined that a vision like his would be grim heresy, punishable by death.
    Lod concentrated on the beasts. They had heavy shoulders, lower hindquarters and faces like dogs, only there was something vile about the