by R. J. Louis
There is a sound from deeper in the darkness that sounds like laughter, a dry, grating laugh that crackles against her nerves.
“Damn them,” Thunder takes her hand from her gun and reaches into another pocket, pulling out a flint and small stick of tinder. One of the great benefits of a heavy coat was all its myriad little pockets, and the things you could put in them.
She lights the spark, and sees vicious, avian eyes staring up at her from the darkness. Beady yellow, surrounded by wicked looking feathers sprouting from a ridged, bird-like forehead. The feathers look a bloody red on pale scales in the flickering light.
Then the bird laughs again, and the flame goes out, quenched by the dead animal reek of its putrid breath.
Thunder has a second to swear, loudly, and then the beast lunges at her.
* * *
Lily’s muscles ache as she rappels slowly down the side of The Kingfisher. Her eyes scan the darkness, years spent moving in shadow have trained her night vision. The flickering camp-fire paints the camp’s inhabitants in long, drawn shadows across the sand. The shadows dance and sway in a decidedly capricious way. But Lily had learnt long ago not to be afraid of the dark.
She’s exhausted, but the situation is dire enough that it doesn’t matter, the last burning embers of her adrenaline, spiked while fleeing the dragon’s lair, sizzle up and down her spine, keeping her awake, keeping her hands on the rope from slipping.
On board The Kingfisher, her unofficial title is the Knife. Compared to the first mate, engineer, warmaster, magician and navigator, it lacks a little something. Knife is a poor label for what she is, anyway. She’s their trump card. She drops to the sand with barely a whisper, her feet finding easy footing in the soft sand. She crouches low, her lips drawn in a bloodless grimace. Whatever happens down here, she has the power to change the outcome in her hands, and that always makes her a little nervous. It’s a far cry from the political manoeuvring she used to enjoy on Dusk, but instead of affecting hundreds or even thousands of faceless civilians, here her actions affect just a few people she knows, and likes. She’s not sure if that makes it easier or harder, but it doesn’t matter. The fact that actions have unintended consequences shouldn’t be an excuse to not take action. Thunder has taught her that.
She ducks through the shadows, sinking into the darkness behind a tent, and catches her breath. She really shouldn’t be doing so much after yesterday’s antics.
“That’s not good,” Mudge’s voice is nervous, as the echo of Thunder’s curse sends the nearby Solarii’s ears an awkward pink. “Captain only swears like that when she’s in trouble.”
“One might suspect that she’s in trouble then,” Neyara says, her face impassive.
“You’re going to regret hurting the Captain. Anything you do to her, I’ll do to you.”
“I’d be interested to see you try.” Neyara grins.
26 - Slightly Less-Grand Larceny
“Is he dead?” A voice swims in the darkness, an intermingling of youthful curiosity and awed uncertainty.
“How’m I supposed to know?” A gruff older voice answers. It speaks with the stern patience of a parent with decades of experience. “Now hold ‘is legs steady. There’s good leather on these boots.”
“Yes da,” the younger voice pipes. “We gonna go to the market?”
“Psh.” Wilhelm feels a cool breeze on one scarred foot and realises with a semi-conscious calmness that his boots are being stolen. “I can get a better deal from Harrin.”
“But da, the tanners place stinks, and I want to—”
“You want to see Kari, I know. Honestly, sex, sex, sex, it’s all you think about.”
“I never!” The protesting shout rips through Wilhelm’s throbbing head with all the subtlety of a warship.
“Mnnhhgh,” Wilhelm says.
“Quit yer yelling,” the older voice says. “You’ve only gone and woke him up.”
“Kari is not my girlfriend,”the youth says, the effect ruined somewhat by his voice breaking.
“Course she ain’t, too old and too pretty for you by far. You just go ahead and spend all your pocket money at her stall and she’ll keep leading you on.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Sure. Sure. You got a great love, written in the stars and everything. Now would you shut up and help me before he wakes proper?”
“Mgnhgthsgh.” Wilhelm’s mouth tastes like the underside of a camel. His second boot slips off. The air feels surprisingly pleasant on his toes. He shifts. “Hel—”
“Da, I think he needs help.”
“I didn’t hear anything like that. Sounded to me like he said ‘aegghhh.’”
“But—”
“Just leave him, would you? You want to go to the market or not?”
There’s a scrabble that sounds like someone standing up quicker than should be possible, and a coarse chuckle.
“He’ll be right. This is the city of miracles, after all.”
Wilhelm shuts his eyes, stretching his scarred feet out into the loose sand. He’ll have to get up soon. But for now he enjoys the peaceful sensation of the sand between his toes—only partially ruined by the ache in every other bone of his body—and thinks of his home.
* * *
Captain Thunder raises her arms, attempting to block a vicious beak that does not arrive. The wyvern snaps its beak in the empty air in front of her, it puffs its chest out, bleached scales seeming to glow in the darkness. It has the feeling of a challenge, and Thunder steps back, her breath coming in short sharp bursts.
“What is this?” She asks slowly. “You’re the elder?” She shakes her head. “Why am I not surprised.”
The wyvern croaks at her. Its avian eyes stare into hers, weighing her. They narrow, and then the wyvern lifts its scaly head. Its long neck curls back slightly, as it comes to rest on clawed legs. It gives every impression of waiting for something.
“So this is the game?” Thunder says, taking her own step back. She weighs the heavy clawed legs, dangerous, then the beak, viciously sharp, breath stinking of rot and something chemical. Her eyes catch something coiling above, and she squints, before a tail tipped with barbed spikes resolves against the darkness, hovering over her. “Not liking my chances...” Thunder mutters, then reaches into her duster and draws the pistol.
It’s a heavy weight, fashioned of dark metal and carved wood, with a long thin barrel and a small revolving chamber for bullets. She makes a mental note to head to Spark sooner rather than later to resupply.
If she lives through the night, that is.
The wyvern glares at the pistol, it can clearly recognise a weapon of some kind, though Thunder feels confident it won’t have dealt with anything like hers before. Hers is one-of-a-kind, she made sure of that long ago.
“You really don’t want to give me the first shot,” Thunder says, checking the chamber before clicking the gun into her hand, where it fits perfectly. “Even if you can kill me with that bloody tail, I’m pretty sure I can still mess you up pretty bad.”
“Rowk,” the wyvern rowks. It looks at her with a malignant intelligence, and she lifts the gun.
She stands there for a long moment, sighting down the pistol at the wyvern. Its tail hovers over her, and every now and then a small bead of something dangerous hits her duster and sizzles slightly. In the darkness, the beast seems to grin at her. She sighs, thumbing back the revolver. Something feels wrong. The wyvern stands there, judging her. She wonders if other trespassers to the desert’s balance have been in this position. Surely none so heavily armed as her. They were tested by the elder too, and evidently killed by the beast.
They would have used their first strike to make any attack, any movement. And they’d still died. There are probably skeletons littering the cave around her. She can almost smell them. In here there’s no crew to impress, no enemies to look strong in front of. It’s just her, and the wyvern. Two animals, who can either kill each other, or... not.
Sh
e spins the pistol in her grip, and the great beast trembles. Then she pockets the gun, and holds both hands up, palms open toward the creature.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says slowly. “That probably makes me nine different types of fool, but—”
The creature lunges forward. Its vicious beak streaking over Thunder’s open hands and towards her neck.
Another explosion of swearing splits the night, before Thunder realises she’s not bleeding out on the ground. The wyvern nestles close, and nuzzles softly into her, its semi-feathered skin uncomfortable against her own, as it makes a rhythmic noise that sounds almost like purring.
“What the fuck?”
* * *
Mudge’s throat tightens as a blood-curdling shriek rips out from the cavern below, not far off the heels of another expletive-laden shout. The shriek sounds like nothing he’s ever heard before. His eyes narrow as the tension in the Solarii around them seems to ease. Neyara looks at him and grins.
“So,” she says. “It’s over.”
“You’re damn right it is,” Lily says, as she slips out from behind a tent and places her knife to Neyara’s throat.
27 - Riches Beyond Reckoning
Thunder shrieks as the heavy tail wraps around her knees and knocks her totally off balance. She stumbles forward into the wyvern, who twists, undulating beneath her hands as she instinctively grabs at scaled hide. Her fingers clutch at scraggly feathers and jutting bones shifting underneath. Then the wyvern moves, ducking deeper into the passageway, carrying her with it.
She realises with some shock that she is effectively riding the wyvern. Her hands at the scaled junction of where its shoulders jut out to form wings, her legs scrambling up its back, she holds tight to the creature as it descends into the darkness. Effectively blind, Erin can only hold tight and pray to whatever remnants of the Gods are listening that she isn’t getting carried into a nest of some sort, for the purpose of feeding some younglings.
Starlight penetrates the caverns ahead, and Thunder’s hands tighten on the wyvern’s shoulders as the wings crack open, the thin membrane sending dust spiralling and almost making Thunder sneeze. The rocky ceiling of the cave splits open, a narrow window into the starlit darkness above, and beneath her, the wyvern tenses.
“Oh you’ve got to be—”
Her words disappear in a strangled shout as the wyvern launches up, its powerful legs flexing off against the ground as its wings beat the air in the cavern, heaving it into the sky. Thunder’s world tips backwards as the wyvern beneath her rises. It scrabbles, tiny claws at the tips of its wings catching on the edges of the narrow chimney of stone as it kicks and lifts up, scraping against the rocky sides as it pulls Thunder along with it.
Thunder ducks her head, clinging to the wyvern’s back with every ounce of her mechanically augmented strength, the world rippling past in flashes of grey stone and dark shadows. As heavy as the head that wears the captain’s hat is, it is made no lighter by the captain’s hat being almost immediately knocked off, falling past her in a blur before. She lashes out, trusting one augmented hand to keep hold of the wyvern, and grabs the hat before it can disappear down into the darkness of the cave.
And then they are out.
The land opens up beneath them as the wyvern climbs. Great waves of sand glint like silver and gold in the light of the moon. Thunder knows the sky, it has been her home for years. But nothing compares to this. The shard feels huge beneath her, a vast expanse, and it is dwarfed by the sky above, twinkling with stars. The Kingfisher feels big, different. It’s safer. Deck beneath her feet, men and women at her back. Here, she is alone. Just her and the beast beneath her at the mercy of the wind. There is no pressure to make deals with snakes, no need to wear a mask, no deals or politics.
She howls with elation, the wind streaking through her hair, the clear night sky wraps her up. It is both freeing and terrifying. Her hands are tight on the creature’s shoulders, each wing-beat causing the shifting of muscle and tendon beneath her fingers. Her hat stuffed beneath her elbow as she opens her mouth and screams her freedom to the world. The wyvern screams as well, its voice ululating around her.
* * *
Lily feels the heat of the Solarii woman’s spear against her cheek as she pulls the knife taut against the skin of her neck.
“The Gods won’t be able to help you if she’s dead down there,” Lily says. “So I’d think very carefully about what happens next. Best would be if you send some of your friends in and bring her out alive.” Instead, three of the Solarii hunters set their spears toward Mudge and Jonas, leaving them at a stand off.
“Wait—” Neyara says, her voice strained. “It’s not what it sounds like. Atu, give the big one the spy-glass, quickly.”
Before Lily can so much as ask a question, the Solarii with his spear at Mudge’s gut drops it and pulls a spy-glass from his belt. He puts his hands on Mudge’s shoulders and turns him toward the cavern, before lining up the spy-glass in front of him.
“What are—”
“Just watch.” Neyara’s clipped tones brook little argument, even with a knife to her throat. She reminds Lily a lot of Captain Thunder, in that regard.
“What am—Mithra’s beard,” Mudge swears. They can all see the shadow rising out of the distance. It spins in the darkness, a great, barrel-chested wyvern, it takes a second of squinting to see a large person with short-cropped blond hair clinging to the beast, her duster billowing behind her. “That’s the captain.”
“I guess she passed the test,” Neyara says in her honey-drip voice.
“This is the punishment she gets for passing?” Jonas asks, a bitter twist to his voice. “What would have happened if she failed?”
“Punishment? This is no punishment. It is a reward,” Neyara says. “At the very least, it is more rewarding than being killed and eaten, surely. Now, you see, your Captain is alive. So we have no need of these silly dramatics.”
“Alive? Maybe,” Lily says. “But hardly safe. How am I supposed to believe this isn’t some kind of torture.”
A great howl of exultation splits the night, rumbling around them like a summer storm.
“Lily, put the knife down,” Mudge says. “If that’s supposed to be torture, then they’re wasting their time. She’s okay.”
Lily grimaces, then relaxes her grip on Neyara, sheathing the knife. “I think you just can’t deal with me saving you again. Those scales are getting mighty heavy on my side.”
“I’ll pay you back, at some point,” Mudge laughs. The spears drop away, and they watch as Thunder and the wyvern soar.
28 - Wilhelm Walks Alone
Barefoot, bloody, and more than likely concussed, Wilhelm stumbles around the outer wall of Rezir. He’s just one of a thousand other bums who have bet all they had on a losing hand, and nobody pays him much heed. The city has guards, ostensibly, but they’re paid for by the casinos, and since he has no intention of entering one of those, they leave him be. It’s good for business to make the streets of Rezir as unappealing as possible, draws more people into the bright lights and false security of the gambling houses. He comes to a stop outside the city, where the great glass-blowing works expand outward into the desert. He watches, catching his breath, as they work into the night. Glass and gold are the life-blood of the city, shipped all over the other six shards in trade for wood, water, and food. He stands, just one of a dozen other shadows too poor to have their pockets picked, and watches as they mold the glass into great designs, the beautiful fractal shine reflecting the moon and stars as the glass cools from a molten liquid into impressive swirls of artistry. Lucky apprentices might work on bridges and windows, while those still training make countless jars, bottles, and glasses. Meanwhile, the master craftsmen work on labours of love, commissioned pieces by the wealthy of Shatter.
The city stinks. It’s par for the course, being largely enclosed. It’s cramped, crowded, and littered with refuse. Cheap labourers work day and night to clear the muck, tr
ekking it outside on sleds, shooing beggars roughly away from anything particularly shiny that fell down from the higher levels where the air is clearer and the food and water plentiful. The city is unlike any other, cobbled together to take advantage of the limited space, it has spread vertically, rather than horizontally. Great networks of bridges, public staircases, ladders, and rooftops connect buildings, creating thoroughfares and pathways up and down the great towers. The wealthier areas are higher up, with majestic shimmering bridges of glass and metal.
The climb to the docks is slow and steady, and by the time Wilhelm finally reaches the level where The Kingfisher should be, he is struggling to stay upright. He slows now, wary of the kidnappers. The Watchers, as they called themselves, he can only hope that in the City of Miracles, he might pass unnoticed. It doesn’t take him long to find The Kingfisher’s berth, he’s never lost his ship before, never misplaced it. Others in the crew might need a helping hand at a busy city to remember where they docked, but not Wilhelm. Never him.
But now The Kingfisher is gone. Without him. The knowledge rubs at something raw in his chest, a sense of being left behind. Far be it from him to expect preferential treatment from the captain, and as far as he knows, they’re probably off looking for him.
As he scans the ships at rest, he notices a few shadowy figures lurking around the docks, and quickly turns around, limping off back into the maze of Rezir. He needs a way to get a message to the crew. A Scythe priest should be able to call them, but he’s not carrying any of his coin. Everything but the clothes on his back would still be in the prison hold of the ship he’d nearly been marooned on.
He’s just thankful he left his book of maps with Jamala. Everything else in his satchel is easily replaced. But not easy without a coin to his name. He can’t even sell his boots for the leather.