by William King
“I’m not counting on it.”
“That is probably wise.”
In the distance the card game had broken up. Valerius beckoned for Rhea to come over and join him. Ulrik remained where he was, studying the distant ships, wondering what it would be like to be on a command deck again, and wondering if he would ever know.
Chapter Eight
Ulrik lay awake in his narrow bed staring at the ceiling of his narrow cabin. It was the middle of the night and he could not sleep. It was not the thrumming of the wind outside the ship’s porthole or the vibration of the walls and deck all around him that kept him awake. Nor was it the drone of the engines. He had been a sailor most of his life. Normally he would have found such things relaxing. He feared he would have another nightmare. The strange dream disturbed him more than he cared to admit. There was something a little too real about it for his liking.
His fingers found the scar on his chest, and probed it like a tongue drawn back again and again to a hole in a tooth. It felt like any normal scar now, but it wasn’t and what lay beneath it troubled him. Within his chest was a dormant demon which might at Valerius’s whim come to life and devour him body and soul. Perhaps Valerius would not even need to will it. No magic was perfect. Perhaps the binding would come undone by accident, and the demon would be freed. That such an event might spoil Valerius’s carefully laid plans was no consolation to Ulrik. He would not be around to enjoy the wizard’s discomfiture.
He raised himself from the bunk and pressed his face to the chill porthole window. His breath misted on it, and moisture ran like tears down the translucent crystal surface. He could see the stars as though through thin clouds.
His earlier talk with Rhea had stirred up memories, ones he was not sure he wanted to engage with.
He had never really known his own father. The old man had disappeared on some tramp airship when Ulrik was barely old enough to walk, leaving him and his mother to fend for themselves. He had often wondered whether it was deliberate abandonment or some accident. They happened often enough aboard airships- a misstep, an explosion, an elemental becoming unbound or a moment of carelessness near a whirring rotor blade was all it took. And those were simply the hazards shipboard.
There were many more when a sailor hit port. A knife in the back from a robber who wanted a pay-bulging purse was all it took, and Ulrik had seen it happen often enough. A sickness caught in a far port. A bad reaction to some fleshgraft. There were a hundred ways a man could step out of this world. Of course, none of them were quite as bad as the one Valerius had prepared for him. That was an act of cold, calculated cruelty that the worst of pirates would have been proud to call their own.
He touched the scar again, as if by doing so often enough he could rub away the taint. Awareness of it had been growing in him. He wondered if it was the demon itself, its life force, its presence, its own faint but growing consciousness.
The irony of it was that he had never felt better. He was stronger than ever, robust, glowing with health. His mind was sharp and his reflexes quick. His grafts were operating at a level of efficiency they had never achieved before. His sight was keener, his movements surer, his strength greater than it had ever been. And yet beneath all of that he was aware of something ominous.
He was like the sufferer from lung rot who had just noticed the first spots of blood on a handkerchief, or the patient whose physiomancer had just pronounced the divination of a tumour. He had a sudden eerie sense of the fragility of his life and just how quickly he could be sucked into a hell of pain.
Death had walked at his shoulder since he was a lad. He had fought on the blood-slick decks of doomed airships and on the gritty sands of gladiatorial arenas but he had never felt this sick certainty of something bad about to occur.
He had known before every battle that this day might be his last. He was intimately familiar with fear but not this nagging worry. Perhaps the difference was that then he had known that to some extent his fate was in his own hands, that by his skill at arms he could ensure his own survival. There was nothing of that when it came to what Valerius had done to him.
His fate was entirely up to the wizard. Even if the spell unravelled and the demon became accidentally free, it was would be because of a failure of spellcraft on Valerius’s part.
He had lived under life and death discipline before— what sailor on a pirate craft had not? A captain’s word was final when an airship and its entire crew could be lost by an error of judgement, but he had never felt oppressed by it the way he did now. It pressed down on him like a huge weight. He was aware of it with almost every breath.
By day, he could distract himself, going about the ship, paying attention to his surroundings, talking to his companions, but at night, alone in his bunk, he could not avoid awareness of it. He could not keep his thoughts from circling around on this dismal track.
He lay back down on the bed. The crumpled silks beneath his back seemed filled with stones. The air was close and his chest tight, and he felt as if he were about to have some difficulty breathing. How long would it be till dawn, he wondered?
Think of something else, anything else. He tried to remember what his father had looked like, but could recall only the vaguest of memories of a big man, and there was no telling how accurate they were, for any man would have seemed big to the small child he had been.
It was easier to remember his mother, although she had lasted only a few more years after his father had vanished, sunk into an abyss of drink and tears and lung rot. He could at least picture her face though, with its meagreness and its sad, lost, drinker’s eyes.
He could remember her cremation quite vividly and the hard weeks of begging and being kicked around the village from shelter to shelter till eventually he had been indentured to a tramp airship captain who had taught him the basics then sold on his contract to Karsh, the brutal captain who had turned out to have a sideline in piracy and smuggling. It had been a life of fighting for scraps in the gunrooms, learning all the myriad ways in which a ship worked. Karsh was based in Hydra, the greatest rats’ nest of robbers and pirates on the planet, a city whose location sometimes shifted depending on the reach of those who hunted it, but whose inhabitants invariably ended up being the same.
He had made some good friends and learned the tricks of his trade and he had felt like part of something. He had belonged to Karsh’s crew and that had counted for something, for a crew relied on each other in many a life and death situation, aboard ship and ashore. He had served out his indenture which, much to his surprise, had been honoured by Karsh, for he had yet to learn that for all of their disregard for the world’s laws, sky pirates had great regard for their own, particularly those that affected crews, for what else did they have to bind them? He had stayed with Karsh for two years after that and transferred out to the Golden Maiden when Karsh’s first mate Yalam got his own ship.
He tried to picture Yalam and his crew and managed to bring back a few faces. He remembered some of the ships they had taken, and the mesa villages they had burned. He remembered his first woman, a screaming villager thrown on a grimy floor while his blood swam with drugged fury and hard liquor. He had been fifteen. She must have been thirty and begged for her life and those of her children.
He remembered buying his first stormlance. It had cost him twenty terces, which had seemed like a fortune at the time. Remembered the feeling of power carrying the crystal tipped rod with its trapped elemental had given him. He could remember using it to shoot devilbats from the air with a bolt of its trapped lightning. He could remember the first man he had killed with it too, cast into the air by pillars of magical electricity, his protective amulets overloaded, his eyes popping, his skin turning black.
Life had been strange and sweet in those days but there had been a great deal of anger in him and the desire to share that anger with the world. Hydra had seemed like the centre of the cosmos to him. He had not known then just how new it was. The scattered fleets had only ju
st returned to the ancient ruined city, rebuilding it once again after it had been destroyed by the fleets of Typhon. War raged between the great empires of Typhon and Korveria providing the perfect opportunity to open the city for business once more.
In the chaos, none of the powers had paid any attention to the pirates. After all who could tell when a ship was lost to enemy action and when it was lost to corsairs? Many of the powers had paid the Council of Captains to attack their enemies and there was good money to be made fighting for all sides. There had been plenty of loot, plenty of slaves, plenty of fighting and plenty of money. It had been a golden age of sky piracy and that had attracted more men, more ships and more money. Merchants had funded the building of raiding ships. Captains of Imperial warships had deserted with their crews. Traders had brokered deals with the pirate fleets in order to do business in Hydra. It became a place where agents, spies and diplomats thrived, and a neutral meeting place for representatives of the empires. It had filled a role that many people found necessary.
At the time it had seemed as if it would never end. Ulrik had risen through the ranks spectacularly, for he had grown into a powerful man that other men would follow and he was clever and quick and he knew everything there was to know about flying and managing an airship. It had not been difficult – airships had been his home since childhood. By the time he was in his early twenties he was seen as a promising young man, one of the coming generation of leaders. He led the boldest raids, took the biggest prizes and appeared to fear nothing under heaven or out of hell. It had seemed only natural to be offered his own ship by a cartel of merchants and that he should recruit his own crew.
It was during that period he had met Anna, and by a strange miracle she seemed able to love a huge ugly cruel man with a passion that had matched his for her. It had made him fight harder and take greater risks, for he soon had a family to provide for and the dream that one day he would make enough money to get out of the life and start all over again, fresh in a civilised place. That dream had died along with the plague that took his family.
The empires made peace. Piracy was once more a nuisance and an impediment to trade. The military no longer turned a blind eye to raids against enemy shipping on their own territory. He supposed he should have seen the portents. The omens were all there. The pirates began to suffer greater losses. Fat merchantmen turned out to be disguised warships. The imperials seem to know when pirates would strike. He supposed they must have paid enough for that intelligence.
It had been one of those disguised warships that had got him and his crew. He should have sensed that there was something wrong when he approached it but he had been overconfident, lulled into a false sense of security by a long string of successful raids. His ship had been overmatched by his opponents and he had lost everything in that one battle.
Now he was here, the slave of a man he would once have regarded as his prey. He wondered if things could have turned out any differently but he suspected the answer was no. He had lived through an age that was an anomaly. There had been other such ages in the past and doubtless there would be again. But for the moment the era of the sky pirate was over.
Or maybe not. Maybe someone had found a way to build their strength again by making pacts with the demon worlds. There had been rumours before he had left of a sorcerer called Molok, a creature half- man, half-demon who had promised the Council of Captains a way to strike back at those who hunted them. Perhaps they had taken him up on it.
He lay there awake for a long time as the ship thundered through the sky. He touched the scar again, wondering if the evil thing would wake within him and what the future might hold.
Chapter Nine
Dawn found Ulrik on the foredeck, near the prow of The Pride of Karnak, staring towards the horizon. He had always loved to watch the sun come up over the wastelands. He had almost as good a view as the captain and his officers in the superstructure behind him.
Ahead of him the long line of the convoy filled the sky. Warships swarmed the air around it, sweeping backwards and forwards like caged devil-hounds looking for something to attack. Off to the right, below them he could see a long trail of dust rising, most likely a war-party of Uruk raiders on the move. He wished he had a spyglass. He would have been able to make out the details. He shaded his eyes and squinted in the bright early morning light.
“I believe it’s a Shadar pilgrim band,” said a voice from nearby. Ulrik looked up to see Valerius. He was surprised. He had thought his master would still have been enmeshed in the sleeping silks he shared with Rhea.
“This is an unusual part of the Wastes for them to be in,” said Ulrik. He added master as an afterthought. Playing the servant did not come easy to him.
“Every year the Shadar become more numerous, every year their territory increases. Soon the walking dead will outnumber the living-- then perhaps all the cities of humanity will have something to fear,” Valerius said.
They passed directly over the dust cloud now, heading in the opposite direction. There were thousands of people on the move down there- walking under their own power or mounted on bony, rotting steeds. Strange tattered banners floated on the wind. Such a huge band could only be corpsemen. The Uruk clans never travelled in such numbers and no merchant caravan could support so many.
“Why do their numbers grow? What animates them?” Ulrik said. He did not really expect an answer.
“The Blights grow larger. The cancer of dark magic eats out the heart of our world. The barriers between life and death grow daily more thin. Some say it’s a sign that the End of Days grows near, that the Demon Princes are returning.”
“Do you think that is the case?”
“They were masters of this world once. Before they were banished. They have many followers still who wish them to return.”
“You think one of them made the black blade?”
“It is their mark, the sign of their favour, the weapon of their chosen champions.”
“Why did the Pit owners let Lem carry one?”
“We live in decadent times. It gives people a thrill to see the signs of our ancient enemies. I think there are those who hunger for an ending, for our civilisation to be swept away.”
Already the dust cloud and the horde of walking corpses had started to fall behind as the convoy progressed across the sky. “In the deep Blights they have cities,” said Ulrik. “Ruins they occupied, buildings they live in. They have their own lords and their own empires.”
“So I have heard. You speak like one who has seen such things with your own eyes.”
“Many times I have flown over the deep Wastes.”
“I have been told that was impossible.”
“Dangerous—not impossible. You can fly an airship over the Blights. The currents of dark magic make navigation difficult, and the elementals unruly, but it can be done, if you are desperate enough.”
“Like when you’re being pursued by Imperial Pirate Hunters?”
Ulrik shrugged. “Or hunting fleeing prey.”
Something drew his companion’s attention to the horizon. Within the past few minutes something had sprung up there, a roiling mass of dark clouds that obscured the curve of the earth. Warning bells sounded as The Pride of Karnak’s lookouts saw it too.
“We’d best go below,” said Valerius. “It looks like a storm’s coming and it’s going to be a big one.”
“I think I will wait here and watch,” said Ulrik. “It’s been a long time since I witnessed a tempest of this magnitude.”
“Suit yourself.”
Lightning bolts blazed across the face of the onrushing wave of clouds, like a predator flashing its fangs. Not long after, the roar of thunder provided it with a voice.
The rotors began to whine. The Pride of Karnak bucked a little as the outrider winds of the storm touched her. The railings vibrated. A sailor tugged at his sleeve. “Best return to your cabin, sir. Looks like it’s going to be a bad blow.”
A long rope dangled fro
m the man’s safety harness. A strong clip attached it to the railing. Tempted as he was to stay on deck, Ulrik realised the sense of the sailor’s words. Storm winds could toss a man overboard.
“What’s going on?” Rhea asked as Ulrik entered the stateroom.
“Storm coming in,” said Ulrik.
Valerius had a wizard’s robe thrown about him. Colours flowed across his chest and back, sometimes blending in with the décor of the stateroom, sometimes clashing with it violently. He stepped out onto the balcony and studied the sky. Multi-coloured clouds roiled across it. Long streamers of turbulent greenish yellow mist raced passed them. The ship bucked and groaned. Valerius had to flex his legs to keep his balance.
“What do you think?” he asked Ulrik.
“It’s going to be bad.”
“Bad enough to take this ship down.”
“I doubt it. The Pride of Karnak has a double liftkeel and the biggest engines I have ever seen. It would take the mother of all storms to knock her out of the sky.”
Suddenly the whole ship shuddered and bucked. The thunder roared again, like the voice of an angry god shouting outside their window. “Of course,” Ulrik said. “This could be the mother of all storms. We’d better strap ourselves in.”
They took up positions on the stateroom couches and fastened the leather harnesses around them. For what seemed like hours the ship bounced and juddered. Her joints creaked. Her prow plunged and Ulrik could almost feel her racing downwards to bury herself in the sands of the Wastes. Polychromatic lightning burst all around them, illuminating the stateroom with its hellish glare. In his mind’s eye, Ulrik pictured captain and crew wrestling with the storm for control of the ship.
He saw fear in his companions’ eyes as the ship rolled to one side. He did not blame them. The force of the storm must be colossal to shove a ship the size of The Pride of Karnak around like this. The glowglobes flickered. The elementals grumbled and fretted. Ulrik tried to force the image of the broken hulk of the airship lying burned out in the desert from his mind, but he could not. If this wind should force them over a Blight, the consequences for everyone on board could be catastrophic, and the presence of the Shadar earlier suggested that there might be one of those sour and tainted lands not too far away.