by Ben Galley
His next word was a snarl. ‘Horix.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The bitch who sent this message. Widow Horix.’
‘I do not give a golden fuck who sent it, Temsa. I want to know if it is true! Do you have Caltro Basalt in your possession?’
‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Though it was true. That Krass bastard escaped me during the raid on Serek Finel.’
Sisine threw her hands to the ceiling. ‘What a disappointment you are turning out to be, Boran Temsa! I should have you stoned and pulled apart by horses for your insolence and betrayal—’
The putrid little man burst from his chair and slammed his palms on the table. ‘I know where he is!’
Sisine listened to the creaking of gauntlets gripping spear-shafts around her. Etane’s sword grated against the marble, like a fiddler preparing his strings.
Temsa continued, calmer now. His hands left streaks of sweat on the marble as they withdrew. ‘In fact, Empress-in-Waiting, I was just planning how to reclaim him before you arrived so unexpectedly.’
‘Were you indeed? And at which point were going to tell me, your empress-in-waiting, about any of this? My shade explicitly ordered you to keep me informed!’
Temsa flashed her a glance under heavy brows, childlike, as if he had just been told off for guzzling too many sweets. ‘When I had him back, obviously,’ he growled. ‘Caltro Basalt’s half-coin belongs to a tal by the name of Widow Horix. She’s an old crone that appears at the soulmarkets occasionally. I sold her Caltro not knowing who or what he was, and after Tor Busk stole him from her, I happened across the shade in the streets. Naturally I put him to good use, for our mutual benefit. But Horix is a meddling bitch, and she sent a spook by the name of Crale to come oust him. That failed, thanks to Danib, but Caltro got big ideas and slipped away during the attack on Finel, sneaking back to his mistress Horix, I’d wager. Before his escape, my intentions were to reclaim his coin. For you, Majesty, of course. I ask you, what use was it delivering you a shade that wasn’t mine to give? A half-life that could be snuffed at any moment by a widow’s whim? Now, I am a position to both claim Caltro’s coin and stop Horix from interfering. I intend to do so promptly. Tomorrow night, in fact.’ Temsa forced a polite smile. ‘With your permission, of course, Majesty.’
‘I see,’ Sisine replied. It was an irritatingly sound argument, even if it did sound like Temsa had just yanked it out of his arsehole. The man had lied to her once already. That was not to be forgotten, nor forgiven. She stared deep into his bloodshot eyes, searching them for sign of deeper lies. ‘What else are you keeping from me, I wonder? Is there anything beyond your own carelessness that may affect our arrangement?’
Temsa answered quickly and firmly. ‘No, Empress-in-Waiting. There is not.’
‘Then consider our business concluded, for now. You may deal with this Widow Horix, but I wish to be there.’ With some satisfaction, Sisine watched Temsa’s jaw clench. ‘To add some royal supervision and ensure you don’t fail me again. And after I have Caltro’s coin, you will remove another serek from his tower.’
‘Who might that be?’
‘Serek Boon. I want him turned to smoke. And soon.’
Temsa nodded sagely. ‘Right you are, Majesty. He’ll be taken care of sure enough, after Horix.’
‘Until tomorrow.’
Silks flailing, mail ringing, Sisine withdrew, though her eyes stuck fast to Temsa’s even as her soldiers swarmed about her. It was only when the door slammed that the stare was broken.
Before the echoes had died, and before she was treading the stairs, Sisine had already made up her mind. She decided to tell Etane. Decisions grow flesh when spoken aloud.
‘That man’s time in this city is growing rather short.’
Temsa pushed himself back from the table, eyeing Finel’s matted and bloodied hair. He distracted himself with ripping chunks of calloused skin from his fingertips.
As he pondered, Ani began to walk away, muttering to herself. Confused, a few guards trailed in her wake.
‘And where do you think you are going, m’dear?’ Temsa called after her.
She didn’t bother to turn around. ‘To see to the spoils. The binders have been grumbling about running out of Nyxwater.’
Temsa was on his feet in an instant, nails scraping at the marble. ‘You face me when you speak to me, Ani!’
Ani turned, though her feet didn’t skip a step. ‘I warned you about playing a cult and an empress against each other,’ she said in a strained voice. ‘I remember a time when you answered to nobody. Now you’ve got two bosses to keep happy. Guess it’s true what you Arctians say: the higher you climb up the mountain, the more treacherous it becomes.’
‘You stop there!’ Temsa’s screech fell on deaf ears, and before he could barge his way clear of his seat, she had vanished into a stairwell.
An awkward silence came on the tail of his shouts. A few guards cleared their throats while Temsa stared, red-faced and shaking, at the doorway. It took some time before he realised Danib’s gaze rested upon him.
‘Don’t you dare agree with her,’ he warned the shade as he stamped away, sparks flying from his talons. ‘Don’t you fucking dare!’
Temsa limped his way along the breadth of the table, leaving his guards to blow sighs and shake their heads.
‘What do you mean “leaving”?’
‘She’s leaving! Have a look, Colonel.’ The spyglass had been glued to the soldier’s face for so long it had left a deep red ring around the man’s eye.
Kalid snatched it to see for himself, grunting as he crouched down beside the chimney stack. From the low rooftop, he could see down the street and into Magistrate Ghoor’s old courtyard. Sure enough, as the soldier had said, Sisine’s entourage was filing out of the doorway.
Colonel Kalid tensed. He saw no bloodied weapons through the misted view. No wounds. Temsa’s men even bowed accordingly as the empress-in-waiting departed.
‘Fuck!’ Kalid dashed the spyglass against the edge of the roof, watching the cracked lenses skitter over the whitewashed stone.
Two hours he and his best fighters had waited there, watching. Two hours his soldiers had spent crammed into alleyways and rooms below, poised to wet their blades. The brewing storm had petered out and left a limp wind in its place. That weasel Temsa must have talked himself out of his fate, or struck a deal, perhaps. Kalid felt unsettled. Not just anyone avoided the royal rage so deftly. It was almost – dare he think it – impressive.
Working his teeth around the inside of his lips, the colonel listened to the faint clanking on the air as he watched the glittering procession head back to its armoured carriage.
‘Back to the tower!’ he barked irascibly.
‘But…why?’
‘Ain’t nothing happening here! Silver tongues win over steel today,’ Colonel Kalid shouted as he followed his men down the stairs. His heels punished the steps as he grumbled privately.
The widow was going to be far from pleased.
Chapter 6
A Poor Welcome
Araxes wasn’t always the mighty city it is today. In ancient times it was a scattered collection of towns spread between the Duneplains and the Troublesome Sea. Farmers to fishermen, disparate faras – or lords – fought for control. It was only when Emperor Phaera’s grandfather Narmenes united the lords to fight the Scatter Isle pirates that the Arctian Empire was born. How sad, that it takes an enemy much greater than ourselves to unite us.
From writings of the philosopher Themeth
It was a gloomy day that greeted Nilith when she finally gathered the energy to crack her eyes open. One of those rare squalls off the Troublesome Sea had come to wash the city of its blood. The dark clouds had finished with the Core Districts, and were now moving on to the Outsprawls. Blue sky had been replaced with a slate ceiling, and scattered patches of drizzle were already beginning to turn the sand to silt and mud.
Beyond the gloom and spatter of rain, there were othe
r differences to frown at, and each of them were no cheerier than the approaching downpour. Since their veer into the Sprawls a day or more ago, the adobe huts and squalor had picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and gathered some semblance of order. The streets and thoroughfares had begun to come alive.
Nilith’s minder – the loathsome Chaser Jobey – had stuck to minor routes, steering clear of markets, and more often than not, covering the slatherghast with a sheet to keep it from prying eyes. The only attention they received was due to the wafting stench of Farazar’s body, which had taken on a fresh reek given the added moisture. Farazar’s ghost had spent half a day berating Jobey for his insolence, coming close to yelling his true name and identity once or twice. He would have done so had Nilith not kicked his bars and caused the slatherghast to gnash at him. Farazar was getting desperate, and that made him more dangerous than ever.
Sleep had been forgotten. Nilith blamed the wet and the freezing cold seeping up her left arm, making her shoulder ache as if she lay in ice. Instead, she busied herself by watching the slow passage of the streets. Nilith had spent so many desert nights longing to be within the city’s boundaries once more. Now she was here, she wanted to drink it all in, despite the dire nature of her situation, despite the city’s foulness.
If there was an air of danger and threat in the centre of Araxes, in the Sprawls it was a thick smog.
Groups of hooded figures lingered in doorways to avoid the rain, some emblazoned with tattoos, others covered head to toe in coats of leather or mail. Clubs and daggers hung from their belts, and even some of the sellswords gave them a wide berth. Smart-dressed fellows loitered under the eaves of smoky taverns and brothels, waiting for drunken fools to collapse into the gutter, or for bodies pushed from the higher windows, their throats already cut. Card dens and snuff houses employed young men and women with bare chests and faces caked with sparkling dust to stand at their doorways, beckoning people into small, dark, and questionable basements beneath the streets. A few whistled to the silk-wrapped Jobey, high on his cart, but the chaser didn’t bat an eyelid.
Where merchants lined the wider streets, thieves went to work. For every two yells of a bargain, there was one of, ‘Stop him!’ or, ‘Cutpurse!’ Mercenary street guards seemed to ply their trades only when it suited them, content to slouch near the taverns or merchants that lined their pockets and watch the detritus pass by from under leather and duck-feather umbrellas.
Half the crowds were travellers, the other half an equal mix between dishevelled living and cheap-looking dead. Most of the shades Nilith saw were horrifically wounded, barely worth a few silvers at a soulmarket. Here and there, bellies were sliced to show glowing entrails. Others lacked jaws or eyes, or showed the viciousness of mutilation. One or two dragged themselves through the wet sand, legless, their deliveries strapped to their backs. Nilith caught Farazar staring at them too, and hoped he realised how kind her knife had been. It made her think of her own fate, lingering beneath the rags wrapped around her left forearm, and she had to look away. She refused to acknowledge the slatherghast’s poison.
Nilith had thought she knew the depths of the city’s depravity, but on seeing these streets, and what the Tenets and Code had driven their denizens to, she realised now that depravity was fathomless. Not for the first time in the last few days, she wondered why she had even started this quest in the first place. The benefits – the cause – were being drowned by the cost of struggle and loss.
That stoked a deep and righteous outrage in her, one that caused her to briefly consider ramming Farazar’s head against the bars a dozen times, as fruitless a task as that would have been. Instead, she held the anger within her, nurtured it, and tried to turn it into something useful. Something to stoke her spirits and reassure her this path had not become a fruitless one.
A brief commotion broke out as a bald man came tearing from the mouth of an alley, rolling a fat barrel alongside him, one with black-stained staves. Spit streaming from his mouth, eyes wild, he narrowly dodged a beetle bearing a sack of wool before careening down an opposite alleyway. Before Nilith could wonder what was going on, a small mob of men and women appeared, hot on the man’s tail and clamouring at the top of their voices. Several passersby joined their chase. Not for civic duty, of course, for this was Araxes. No, Nilith wagered the barrel was full of Nyxwater.
‘There really is a shortage, isn’t there?’ she asked the chaser.
Jobey said little except to order them to be silent. He had grown tired of their conspiratorial whispering. They had planned nothing, but muttered small talk in an effort to distract the man. Anoish had done his part, even unknowingly. There were many things in a city capable of spooking a desert horse. The swarms of the dead, giant centipedes and scarabs, the clanging of a blacksmith, the frequent screams. More than once, Jobey had to halt the wagon to calm him. Fortunately for Anoish, the horse’s stout legs and frame were worth the hassle, and Jobey’s triggerbow stayed on his seat.
Bezel had shown his face twice so far, and each appearance had been overwhelmingly comforting. Once hovering over the face of the moon the night before, and again that very morning, perched and shrieking on a washing line, scaring away parrots and pigeons. If Jobey had noticed, Nilith hadn’t seen it in his face. She wagered Bezel wasn’t the only falcon in the mighty city of Araxes. Just the one with the foulest mouth.
Nilith looked around for the bird, but instead found the avid eyes of a cluster of young, skinny lads, a spectrum of ages from snot-nosed to sprouting his first chin hairs. Beneath their rags, they had the pale skin of Ede cave-folk, but had blistered in the Arctian heat so many times they looked pox-scarred. They clustered so tightly together in a dark culvert of stone that they looked like the face of an albino spider, many eyes blinking independently. Seeing Jobey’s cream silks and gold chains, the boys emerged into the street and began to trail after the wagon, gaunt legs shifting quickly. Nilith watched them weave like hungry cats through the handcarts and travellers.
Before they could come closer, a sharp whistle from above stopped them dead. Back to the culvert they went, heads down, shoulders hunched. Nilith looked up to a balcony three stories above the street, where an obese woman, pale as milk and swaddled in blankets, sat with a spyglass balanced over one arm.
‘What is it about you, Chaser Jobey, that keeps you from being robbed like every other poor bastard wearing gold and silks in the Sprawls?’
It took Jobey a moment to take the bait, but any chance to bray about his accomplishments and his Consortium was too juicy a worm to pass up. With a thumb, he raised one of the chains about his neck and showed Nilith a glyph carved in gold.
‘Promises. Favours. Call them what you like, the Consortium have many connections in the Outsprawls.’
‘Is that so?’ Nilith mused. ‘You make it sound as if the Consortium are like the Nyxites or the Chamber of the Code.’
‘To many, they are. The royals think the city ends at the edge of the central districts. Out in the Sprawls, the Chamber and their scrutinisers might as well be a myth. The Consortium, however, are well known to those who matter, and it pays not to get on their bad side. Therefore, this glyph affords me some respect and safer travels,’ he said, turning over his shoulder to face Nilith. ‘Only fools or the uninitiated dare to attack an agent of the Consortium.’
‘In all honesty, I’m surprised the Consortium would care so much for a lowly errand boy like you. If I was a waylayer or soulstealer, I personally wouldn’t hesitate to drive a knife through your spine.’
‘As I said: fools,’ Jobey replied. ‘Though it does not surprise me. You seem educated, noble, and yet you are clearly no more moralistic than any of the other people in these streets.’
‘What are you implying?’
‘That you’re a murderer,’ Jobey said, nodding to the silent and brooding Farazar. ‘No? Is that not correct? I am not often interested in the details of those I chase and catch, but you, madam, have piqued my curiosity. W
hat is he to you? Your half-life? How did you come by him?’
‘None of your business, is how,’ Nilith answered. ‘He got what he deserved. Like any that insist on standing in my way.’
Jobey snorted. He was about to speak when another panicked whinny came from behind the wagon, distracting him. Nilith quickly flicked Farazar’s arm, and he flinched away, looking disgusted at her touch. Help me, she mouthed.
‘Blasted horse!’ Jobey yelled. He pulled his own steeds to a halt and jumped down to the mud. Though Nilith’s heart beat hurriedly, the bow stayed put on the seat once more. Jobey blew rainwater from his lips as he stalked past, eying his prisoners warily.
‘We need to get out of here soon. This Consortium of Jobey’s could be right around the corner,’ Nilith whispered.
Farazar pretended she hadn’t spoken, lifting his chin aloofly.
‘You can’t fool me, husband. I know you want out of this cage as much as I do. For different reasons, perhaps, but the same prick stands in our way. Let’s work together. Just like in Abatwe.’ She nodded towards the chaser, still trying to manhandle Anoish into calm. ‘Farazar—’
‘No!’ the ghost snapped angrily, turning further away from her. ‘I refuse to help you any longer. You started this. You can finish it.’
‘I see you found some testicles in the dunes, husband.’ Nilith dug her nails into the deck of the wagon in frustration, accidentally prising free a thick splinter. She clasped it in her palm, turning her back to the slatherghast. Somehow, she knew it was watching. Always watching. She shuffled to the side so the creature wouldn’t see her grasping the lock of the cage. The splinter was stout, and she heard the click of tumblers as she waggled it about in the keyhole.
‘You can’t be serious,’ Farazar muttered.
No, Nilith realised, she was not. The lock was a bulky cube of wrought iron, and she felt all sorts of teeth in its keyhole. ‘Know any good locksmiths?’