by Ben Galley
Nilith rested upon the other stool, finding a position that didn’t ache or stab her, and ran her fingers through her sandy, mud-clumped hair. ‘As much as I detest admitting he’s right, he is,’ she said with a sigh. ‘He pulled it off. Conned the whole city, the Cloud Court, even his wife and daughter. For years Farazar managed to convince us all he was safe and sound within his Sanctuary while he enjoyed the delights – and daughters – of Belish.
‘I realised after far too many years of passing his decrees to the court. A loathsome job, with time. They became erratic. Sometimes odd. He refused to speak to me through the door or even emerge at all, as he used to. He ignored us all, and I was the one blamed for it, especially by Sisine. When I began to suspect something was different, I couldn’t shake the inkling, as preposterous as it sounded. I started to track him down. It took a year of questions, asked as quietly as possible, but when I found out where he was, I left immediately. That was almost three months ago. I haven’t stopped since.’
‘The Court and Chamber thought you had run east to Krass, back to your father.’
Nilith nodded. ‘And that was the story I let them believe while I went south. There were more than a few times on the road when I wished I had gone east, and seen my father, grey and sitting by his fireplace. It would have been a short-lived peace. Araxes’ evil will spread in time.’
Heles worked her jaw while she thought. ‘From here to Belish and back. A treacherous road.’
‘You wouldn’t believe.’
‘How long has it been?’
There seemed to be no avoiding that question. It was a cloud that had followed her since raking the knife across Farazar’s throat, and it had grown darker and stormier each day. It’s only when a person is running out of time that they curse not using it more wisely. Perhaps that was the entire reason Nilith sat there, beaten and exhausted, with the ghost of her husband draped over her horse. She could remember staring at the intricate workings of the Sanctuary door and wondering how a decade had swallowed up her life in a blink. Minor trinkets had distracted her here and there: learning Arctian history; playing the Court’s games; staying alive, of course, which was always an accomplishment in the City of Countless Souls. All petty things. No true deeds of wonder besides a daughter whom Nilith had been banned from raising. Nothing to etch into the base of her statue when they erected it beside Farazar’s in time to come. No great imprint upon the world. Nilith could remember staring over the railing of her Piercer balcony, contemplating the streets far, far below, and letting her mind ponder them for too long.
Heles cleared her throat. ‘Hard to count them?’
‘Not at all.’ Every day was lodged firmly and vividly in her mind. Even when she had spent them in bleary, swollen-eyed dazes, she had logged them.
‘Thirty-five days.’
The scrutiniser tried to whistle, but a loose tooth proved problematic. ‘Five left.’
In the corner, the ghost growled bitterly.
Heles looked stiffer than she had before, and Nilith found her eyes avoiding her. She began to replay her words, wondering what she had said, but the scrutiniser had enough confidence, or enough exhaustion, to challenge her empress. Perhaps murder lowered the need for respect.
‘And so this is your great deed?’ said Heles.
‘What?’ This echo of her thoughts threw Nilith.
‘To claim the throne? Be the first empress in, what – three generations to forge a new family line?’ Heles met Nilith’s gaze then, and with accusation in her eyes. Her voice was a strained whisper. ‘I told you duty bound me to your side. Well, that’s a lie. My duty is to the city and its salvation. When I first saw you in that cage, arguing with the ghost, I heard you say something I don’t think this empire has ever heard uttered. You said, “When I’m out of this cage, you’ll know what it means to have a ruler, instead of a monarch”. I never thought I would hear such words from a royal, not in twelve years fighting for justice in these bloody streets. I have worked for it, tortured and killed for it, and I have even prayed for it on more desperate nights. I had all but given up hope, about to take matters into my own hands for the last time, when your cage came past. Well, you’re out of that cage, Majesty, but you’re not sounding like any ruler I would want in the emperor’s place.’
Nilith drew herself up, her royal blood and breeding kindled. You forget yourself, were the words poised on her tongue, but they sounded far too similar to Farazar’s, and she bit her lip. ‘You do not and cannot know what I have in mind, Scrutiniser Heles,’ she replied, trying to restrain her regal tone. ‘And if you did, you wouldn’t doubt me. Your empress.’
‘What, then? What have all these lies been for? All this struggle and hardship?’
‘Yes, what, Nilith?’ Farazar piped up. ‘Do tell us. It would be about fucking time.’
‘You must trust me, Heles.’
‘And that’s the problem. I don’t trust anyone. If there’s anything I’ve learnt in all my years in the Chamber, it’s that people are fickle. People are liars. People are greedy. People change their minds.’
‘And how am I to trust you?’
‘You’re the one with the sword, Empress,’ Heles said coldly. ‘And that’s fortunate for you, seeing as I don’t take kindly to people doubting my loyalty.’
Perhaps it was the anger in her heart. Perhaps it was how long she had held her secret, trusting nobody, and now, like a fermenting barrel lashed to her back, it threatened to burst. She was tired of carrying it alone. Maybe it was the fact Nilith wanted to hear whether it was madness after all. All such ideas were fragile in that way.
‘I intend to release them,’ Nilith said, her voice shaking, a tremble in her hands.
The silence was not comforting in the slightest.
The first question came from Heles. Farazar was too busy curling his lip.
‘Release them? Who?’
‘The bound dead. The ghosts. The shades.’ Nilith felt the sword twitch in her hands. Its metal grew colder.
‘Which ones?’ the emperor snarled, eyes wild and glowing white. Spittle would have flown their way had he not been dead. Furrows were gouged in the sand around his fingers.
Nilith fought the urge to sag and got to her feet instead, staring down at his pathetic display of rage.
‘All of them,’ she said. ‘Every single one of them.’
‘You cannot be serious!’
‘You thought this was all for you and your coins, Farazar. You think far, far too much of yourself. This is for Araxes. For Krass. For the Reaches.’
‘I…’ Heles stammered. ‘How…’ She blinked, eyes glazed in thought.
Nilith stood taller. ‘That is the only cure for the city’s sickness. End binding. Restore the balance. Accept nothing short of complete reversal.’
‘You’re mad! A fool! It will never be accepted!’ Farazar was half-laughing, half-apoplectic with indignation. ‘A thousand years, we have bound the dead, and you think you can simply take the throne and change it all? Ha! They’ll destroy you!’
‘They will try,’ Nilith replied. Her blood rushed through her in a way she hadn’t experienced since breaking out of the Cloudpiercer at night, heading south for Belish. ‘They can try all they want, and they will see what a Krass empress can be made of.’
There was an awkward moment as Heles also struggled to her feet. Nilith’s hand alighted on the pommel of the sword, but Heles took no action other than to bow, as low and as long as she could.
‘Finally,’ said the scrutiniser. ‘I’ve heard the first words of sense ever spoken in this city.’
Nilith bowed back, their bruised and bloodshot eyes locked.
Farazar exploded with rage. ‘They will kill you! You can’t be seriou—’
A mound of cloth descended on him, snuffing out any further argument. Heles and Nilith shared a look before seeking their beds. ‘Five days?’ asked the scrutiniser.
Nilith nodded grimly. ‘Five days.’
It was a
golden and dewy morning that awoke the city. The fog started to fade away, and dawn’s fingers probed eagerly into the streets, sneaking into shutters until they forced them to open.
Chaser Jobey watched the night’s shadows edge away from the toe of his black boot, replaced with yellow sunlight. The warmth didn’t improve his mood. His tortured face remained in a scowl. His hands were firmly tucked into his armpits, lest the pain of itching of his face be forgotten and he scratch again. Instead, he picked at the scabs and dried blood under his nails.
The birds had wreaked havoc on his face. His left eye had been rent in two, blinded and useless. One ear was practically shredded. Claw-marks crisscrossed his face and neck. Both forearms were heavily bound in cloth. A mound of a bandage sat on his shoulder like a white tortoise.
The cage at his side rattled again, and the slithering hiss came to meet him in a cloud of breath. Jobey had been lucky the slatherghast had only clawed him during the fight, not bit him. It was still striving for the last flesh it had sank its fangs into: the debtor from the desert. The escapee.
‘Shortly,’ Jobey grunted. ‘Have no fear.’
No sooner had he said it than a door whined behind him. The chaser did not move, instead waiting for the woman to stand by his shoulder.
‘The directors will give you another chance,’ said the overseer in a flat tone. No emotion was necessary in business.
‘As well they should. You know my record. I have never lost a repayment before and I refuse to now. I will not disappoint them a second time.’
The overseer tutted. ‘You had better not. You know the rules, Chaser Jobey: the first mistake is free. The rest cost. Remember that.’
Jobey nodded, itching to drag his nails over his face. ‘Circumstances were out of my control.’
‘Hmm, apparently so. Birds, was it? How strange.’
He slowly turned his face to her, and after much avoidance, she looked at the mess of gashes and scrapes. Her eyebrow raised questioningly. Jobey knew better than to expect sympathy. ‘Birds indeed. A dozen of them,’ he said. ‘And a beggar too.’
The overseer’s disapproving look didn’t wilt. ‘I have seen chasers return their debts with limbs turned to stumps and still bleeding, Jobey. If you want to be considered for promotion, I suggest you get back out there and change the directors’ minds. And mine, while you’re at it.’
With a parting tut, she left him to the morning and went inside. Jobey was left with his slatherghast and the rising heat of dawn. He looked down at the creature weaving back and forth, its eyeless gaze locked somewhere in the north. Its grin was wide; it had the scent of its prey. If Jobey wasn’t mistaken, he thought he heard a grumble come from the ghast’s bunched coils.
Chapter 10
Time’s Lance
The sky is just another ocean calling to be sailed.
Excerpt from a controversial speech by Admiral Nilo, Champion of Twarza
Flying is not meant for those born without wings. That which dares to ply the skies in defiance of the dead gods’ natural laws must invariably come crashing to the ground.
And so we did.
The Vengeance clipped the roof of a squat tower with a dire crunch. The whole craft bucked, sending half its occupants sprawling. Beneath me, I felt the hull being ripped away in chunks. I stared out of a porthole and saw ochre rubble and splinters spinning in our wake. As I watched, the ground abruptly turned from brick and adobe to undisturbed sand. We had left the city behind us and now the desert was rushing up to meet the craft and punish us for Widow Horix’s audacity.
Although I was already dead, an odd horror run through me as I watched the gap close between earth and flying machine. The sand became a butter-yellow blur in the dawn’s half-light. It rose and fell suddenly, grazing the splintered hull again as we passed over a sharp dune.
On the next wave of sand, there came an almighty bang as we struck again. Grit sprayed through the cracks in the hull. The window in the bow became a cloud of sand. The men handling the cogs and levers were smashed against it. One left a bloody streak and a spider’s web of cracks in the glass before slumping over the controls. The soldiers surrounding Horix tried to drag his body out of the way before the next crash, but they were too slow, or the Vengeance too fast. I couldn’t tell.
The rumpled peak of the next dune reared up before us. It broke our fall, and by the sound and judder of it, half the ship too. Yells and screams accompanied the crunching of wood and nails. With what little weight I possessed, I was tossed from my seat and thrown forward with the ship’s momentum, my vapours trailing behind me. I met the gust of sand and wind that burst through the front window. I fell against a bulkhead, feeling no pain, only inordinate confusion.
The Vengeance begin to slide down the dune, like one of those Scatter Isle brats on their wooden wave-boards. I rolled across the deck, bodies falling with me. My fear grew as the ship skewed to the side, almost rolling onto the ballon-like envelope. Amongst the pile of bodies bunching up around Horix’s chair, I heard my fear shared in the horrified silence of those around me.
In that elongated moment of terror, time seemed to slow, and every slip of sand beneath us was palpable. Vengeance teetered on her side during the slide, but thankfully she righted with a thud at the base of the dune.
The collective exhale was audible. Several soldiers slumped in relief, banging their helmets on the wood. The ghosts aboard began to extricate themselves from broken oar spars and the moaning living.
‘Everybody out!’ yelled a muffled voice. It sounded like the new colonel. As people began to pick themselves up, he was soon uncovered beneath splintered panels, sporting a bloody nose smeared across his cheek.
Horix had apparently strapped herself into her chair using some sort of belt across her shoulders and chest. Soldiers clung to handles on its base, or to each other. They were pale, for Arctians.
Judging by the way Horix rubbed the neck under her cowl, she hadn’t escaped completely unscathed. I found myself disappointed. My guards had given up guarding me in the crash. One was in fact lying against the stairwell, his neck at an odd angle. I wondered whether I had time to snatch up one of the discarded spears around my feet and finish the job of taking my half-coin. I didn’t. Horix was quickly upright and limping from her craft. I followed her, watching her as if she were an unattended chest of gold.
Dawn was still in the process of rising over the Arc. Halos of mist still wreathed some of the city’s towers, but otherwise had faded with the morning’s warmth. The sun was a dusty rose in the east, but the night still held sway on the other points of the compass. I could feel the heat rising in the air already.
A sheepish breeze stirred the sand at my feet, adding to the ripples etched there, as if a tide had recently receded. I idly traced the footsteps spreading out from the Vengeance, and found my gaze dragged to the vast horizons. The desert seemed an endless carpet of dunes and scorched earth, ending in hazy, dark peaks to the south. I still had never felt so dwarfed by a landscape. ‘Barren’ was a description it wore effortlessly. In Krass, there was always some snowy peak, gully, steppe or forest in the way. Here, there was just undulating sand, stretching for more miles than even the map-makers could accurately count.
I instantly loathed the fucking place.
Araxes occupied the north, and most of the east and west. Against the indigo sky of dawn, the buildings were a black mountain range speckled with lights. Only then did I realise the claims of Araxes as the largest city in the Reaches – perhaps the known world – were true. There was no arguing it, even if I could be bothered to do so. I had seen the breadth of it from the Troublesome Sea, but not the depth, the ocean of adobe that stretched from the Outsprawls to the core. And above it all, the Cloudpiercer: miles of stone rising up in a tall spike to scrape the heavens.
‘Caltro!’ came a hoarse yell. Horix had remembered me.
Soldiers came on the tail of my name, quickly grabbing me before I could wander off into the dunes. It h
ad crossed my mind, but I suspected wandering aimlessly through an endless desert for the rest of eternity would have made me feel more like a ghost than I already did.
The widow met me with hands on hips, a brace of soldiers standing either side of her. They seized me by the shoulders immediately. A few spots of blood lingered on Horix’s pursed lips, as if she’d bitten one in the crash. There was a quiver in her wrinkles, as if her temper raged beneath the surface, barely kept in check.
‘What?’ I asked brusquely.
Horix slapped me good and hard again, rings scratching white lines on my cheek. I set my jaw and waited for the pain to subside.
‘If you are harbouring any ideas of wandering off, you can forget them immediately. I refuse to lose any more useful things today.’ She patted my half-coin, still around her neck. I couldn’t take my eyes off it as I answered her.
‘There’s no freedom for me out there in the desert,’ I said.
‘Good half-life.’
I was not finished. I was confident I now knew Horix’s plans, but there was something missing. Reason, besides greed and games. This plan of hers must have been years in the making. Decades. Patience of that calibre was always driven by some deeper emotion: great hurt, sorrow, or anger, and I wanted to hear it from the widow’s mouth. ‘But I will take some answers,’ I said.
I saw her jaw working, grinding old teeth together. I just smiled at her, and laid my logic bare. ‘If you want me to work for you, I think I deserve to know what you have in mind for me. And why.’
‘The dead deserve nothing. I gave you your writ of freedom—’
‘I think we both know how worthless that writ was. A distraction. An empty promise.’ Never mind it being trapped in Horix’s tower, with everything else she’d abandoned.
She smiled knowingly. ‘You are merely property. You will do as I say.’
‘Not without answers. If not, you can break my coin right here and be done with me.’ It was a bold bluff, but I suspected my worth was the only thing that mattered right now, with her precious flying machine nosing the sand behind us and Kalid still lying dead and broken in her courtyard. And since she had thrown Pointy from the Vengeance, I was in no mood to parry niceties. I cast a look over my shoulder at the peaks of the city and wondered how in the Reaches I would ever find the sword again.