Free Flesh Gambit by Mark Adam

Chapter One
     
     
    In that time and place where Gomorrah, Tiered City, rose at the nexus of the mortal coil of Helios, Four Gods ruled a mankind grown cruel and decadent. Weak serviced the strong, and pleasures of the flesh were the highest aspirations. The Quatrain, the four living godheads, were fat spiders at the center of human webs, each vying for control of the slave race.
    Cahlii, the whore-mother, ruled as first among equals, and from between her legs she expelled a civilization as degenerate and miscreant as her own lust. The sex-priests of her denomination corrupted the powerful and drove the worship of the dishonored tabernacles into disrepute. The three secondary godheads bickered and plotted among themselves, waiting and watching for the human pawn who could usher in their golden ages on the mortal coil and usurp the hated Cahlii.
    It was not a battle of light against dark or good against evil. It was simply the manipulations of one power against the other. The struggle and maneuvers were, unlike the lives of their pawns, eternal. Capricious and debauched, the deities exploited their faithful with remorseless efficiency.
    In Gomorrah, Tiered City, the savants of the misunderstood solar panels and their mystical energies ruled the populous from covered pavilions, side by side with sachems, traffickers, swashbucklers and slavers. Greed married lechery to produce insatiable gluttony for all sins.
    Into the stinking canker slipped a black Prometheus, stealing and killing in the name of actualization. In a world devoid of moral center, his promises of genuflection to the dishonored tabernacles were lies and his every action an expression of this ideal.
     
    Prior to Ritual Night
     
    Khat shoved his sword through the pirate’s throat.
    The man dropped to the deck of the sunship like a sack of loose meat, and blood spilled out in a waterfall. The small crew of the corsair corvette watched the execution, faces impassive. The man had been a thief, and honor among thieves on the Twisted Cross was the purview of its captain.
    Khat looked out over the railing where the man had stood. The Twisted Cross hung in the fever-warm air two hundred feet above the indigo sea. The glistening spires of Gomorrah reflected the scarlet rays of the setting sun on the horizon. Khat narrowed his single eye against the glare.
    He could make out the tallest spire, the target of his attention, set on the cliffs at the edge of Gomorrah, the Tiered City. The Twisted Cross hung in the eye of the setting sun, invisible to the corrupt and kinky citizens of that chaotic and decadent urban center.
    Khat turned to Orlec, his primate, first among the crew. “Feed the sharks,” he ordered.
    The dusky primate was tall, the tallest man on the crew, but Khat towered over him by a full head and shoulder. Orlec nodded. He snapped his fingers at two nearby cutthroats, and they jumped to dump the corpse over the side. Khat stopped them long enough to rip the only piece of clothing the dead man had, his loinwrap, free.
    “That coven-whore’s magic is making the men crazy.” Orlec confided. “If she doesn’t finish soon and that slave girl you bought on the market in Gomorrah is still around…”
    Khat scowled. He turned his face with its exposed and empty eye socket toward where his men rolled the dead body toward the railing. He cleaned the gore from the blade of his short sword with the man’s loinwrap, then threw it aside.
    “Stop,” he growled.
    The men stopped, hands bloody. Khat turned back to Orlec. “Nail that bastard to the forecastle so they won’t forget. Then go down into the front hold where the opium is and give each man another share. That should mellow them out long enough for the witch to finish her spell.”
    Orlec nodded, and Khat turned on his heel. The giant corsair leader crossed the deck of his corvette. The heat was brutal around Gomorrah and like his men, Khat wore only sandals and a small loinwrap attached to his battle