Wrath of Storms

by Steven McKinnon

  Tristan raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Propaganda, sir?’

  ‘Propaganda’s essential in any war, son—and if deployed correctly, it can be more effective than a Sky Fleet bomber. Take this, for example.’ Fallon slid one of the pamphlets on his desk over to Tristan.

  BEAR THE LIGHT!

  STAND AND FIGHT!

  KNOW YOUR ENEMY AND REJECT THEIR LIES!

  BEAR THE LIGHT!

  STAND AND FIGHT!

  The words were accompanied by a caricature of General Fallon with his boot on a child’s throat.

  ‘This literature fouls every street corner in every district,’ Fallon said. ‘And if people see something repeated enough, they start believing it. Step up, Waltham—find these people. That’s priority one.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, you can’t expect anyone with actionable intelligence to simply knock on our door and stroll in. I need resources, I need men and women who know their asses from their elb—’

  Someone rapped on the door, and Lance Corporal Valentine didn’t waste time waiting for an invitation. ‘General, y’all got a visitor.’ She ushered a thin, malnourished man into Fallon’s office.

  ‘Who the hell’s this?’ the general asked, looking over the visitor’s threadbare clothes and scabbed shaved head.

  ‘Name’s Buzz. Do I need to salute you?’

  ‘Says he has intel on the Lightbearers,’ Valentine explained.

  Fallon motioned for Buzz to sit.

  ‘General, really,’ Waltham protested. ‘I know this wastrel scuzzer, anything he says—’

  ‘Is a damn sight more’n what we got so far. Begin.’

  It took the scuzzer a while to talk, like a man desperate to make a confession. Fallon didn’t press him—coaxing a confession was an art form, and when someone was about to give up the goods, you let them get on with it.

  ‘They mark their meeting spots in chalk,’ said Buzz. Tears swelled in the scuzzer’s eyes—he wiped them without displaying an ounce of shame or embarrassment.

  ‘We know that,’ said Fallon. ‘Found their lantern symbols all over the place.’

  ‘Chalk mixed with ignicite,’ Buzz said. ‘Harder to wash off. You see a lantern, you try and clean it off. If it goes, then you’re in the wrong place. If it sticks, then you’re on the right track.’

  Now we’re getting somewhere.

  Buzz talked more—he revealed the promises the Lightbearers made, the food and water they offered. Fallon made notes to step up inspections at every store, especially Barra’s Bazaar.

  ‘My pal’s name was Gilbert,’ Buzz said after ten minutes. ‘I was there when he… When they all marched on Old Town Square. Gil was a good lad. Never once complained about nothing. And that lad Kayn, he could talk—but he wasn’t the one who ordered those buggers to burn ’emselves.’

  ‘Explain.’

  Buzz’s eyes fell to the bowl on Fallon’s desk. ‘Been a while since I ate.’

  Fallon thrust the bowl towards him.

  Buzz slurped oatmeal from shaking fingers. Like a last meal before an execution.

  ‘If it wasn’t Kayn,’ said Fallon, ‘then who? Who’s calling the shots?’

  ‘The Judge—a big bastard, wears a hood.’ Lines creased Buzz’s brow. ‘He just… lobbed the lamp at Kayn… The fire swept right through him… And then the rest followed.’ Buzz shoved the bowl back. ‘The thing I can’t get out of my head is why? What drives a person to that? It’s like they weren’t themselves.’

  ‘Where do we find this Judge?’ Fallon demanded.

  Buzz shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You told us about the special chalk—that’s good, but it’s not enough. Before the fanatics burn themselves, why do they go to the Lightbearers? Why are you alive when the rest ain’t?’

  Waltham stamped his boot. ‘Men like Buzz Fitangus are attracted to anyone who offers them a free meal.’

  Buzz frowned. ‘You Watch reckon we’re all the same, eh?’

  ‘A man learns from what his eyes tell him—drug-addled scum like you would sell a friend out for half an aeron.’

  Buzz stood and stared the Arch Vigil straight in the eye. ‘Aye, scuzz turns things inside out, but that don’t make me an evil man. Did you ever consider that it might be my choice to live on the streets? Real friends are few an’ far between—I could sleep on a bed every night of the week, if I wanted—but likely as not, I’d need to settle that debt sooner or later—an’ I don’t like being at the mercy o’ someone. So don’t stand there lookin’ down on me—you follow orders, I live free.’

  Fallon sat back, watching the exchange. He’d put a stop to it—but first he wanted to get the measure of Buzz.

  Waltham balled his fists. ‘I don’t beg for people’s hard-earned coin.’

  ‘You think that’s all we do? That we don’t work? Oh, please spare me a copper, thank you, sir! Thank you, miss! Most folk give a penny away and reckon they found favour with Eiro because of it. Most of ’em hang around, waiting for thanks. Answer me this, Arch Vigil—is it really charity when you do it to make yourself feel better?’

  Waltham’s face burned red. ‘General, you’re not seriously entertaining this man, are you?’

  Fallon hammered the desk. ‘Enough. The Lightbearers.’

  Buzz threw himself back into his chair. ‘Folk go to the Lightbearers ’cause they offer what you an’ all the rest can’t: Hope.’

  ‘Hope through mass suicide?’ Fallon asked.

  ‘Hope that comes from belonging. Beats me why a person would burn ’emselves to death, but what I do know is how it feels to be part of a gang—of something bigger’n you. It’s near as addictive as scuzz. Why’d they killed themselves and why’d someone put a dead woman on display in a shop window? That I can’t answer. I’m just giving you what little insight I can so’s I can do what’s right by Gil.’

  Fallon held up a hand. ‘What dead woman?’

  Buzz frowned. ‘You ain’t heard? Over in the Slingbarrow, in the old tobacconist. Hanging in a window, she was. Bloodlung.’

  ‘The Slingbarrow’s only a quarter mile from here,’ growled Fallon.

  ‘I’ll send officers to investigate immediately,’ snapped Waltham. ‘Tristan, go.’

  ‘Sir.’ The constable gave a last look at Buzz before sweeping out of the room.

  Humourless laughter hacked from Buzz’s mouth. ‘You ain’t fooling anyone, General. Everyone knows there’s a bloodlung outbreak—and if they didn’t know before, they do now.’ The features on Buzz’s face sagged. ‘Reckon she was put there for a reason. You still wonder why people are turning to the Lightbearers? For years now, this city’s been decaying. You had Amberfire Night, people killin’ each other for a sip o’ water, the attack on Remembrance, that creepy shit the Viator printed about monsters—oh, and a bloody godsdamn airship battle above the city. And it was the Council and the soldiers and the Watch that made it all happen. You want inside the head of a Lightbearer? Maybe it’s just better to die for somethin’ than live for nothin’.’

  Fallon shook his head. ‘No-one goes from scrawling insults onto a pamphlet to gods-damn self-immolation without a good reason.’

  ‘That’s all the info I have,’ Buzz said. ‘Use it however you want. I’ve done my part—you find ’em—and maybe Nyr’ll go easy on Gil’s soul.’

  Fallon leaned back in his chair. ‘Tyson Gallows told me about you.’ And just as Fallon hoped he would, Buzz shrank. ‘You took orders from Junior Councillor Enfield to tail an orphan girl. Tell me, what did you reckon an Idari conspirator was gonna do with her?’

  A sheen of sweat glistened on the scuzzer’s forehead. ‘We all got sins, mister Fallon, sir. Figured Enfield just wanted eyes on her. Figured she was the bastard daughter o’ some highborn bugger. My head wasn’t right—and I ain’t gonna beg forgiveness for trying to survive.’

  ‘Have you heard the saying, “once a spy, always a spy”?’

  Buzz shifted in his seat. ‘You reckon I work
for the Lightbearers?’

  ‘Y’all know an awful lot about ’em,’ Valentine pointed out.

  Buzz’s fingernails dug into Fallon’s desk. ‘I got nothing to do with them.’

  Fallon cocked his head. He knew when a man was lying—knew the difference between those who lied because they were scared and those who lied because they enjoyed it. Buzz was telling the truth.

  ‘You wanna make a difference?’ Fallon asked. ‘You want justice for Gilbert? Then get out there and get me more intel on this Judge. Find out what he’s planning next. Use the skills Enfield exploited to do some good.’

  Buzz burst out laughing. ‘I’m a puddle o’ piss on the floor, ain’t nobody pays me attention.’

  ‘Exactly—use your anonymity. The lance corporal here will act as your handler.’

  Valentine glared at Fallon for that, but he ignored her.

  ‘You know how they communicate,’ the general continued. ‘You know how they recruit better than anyone else.’

  ‘I ain’t a soldier.’

  ‘And I’m not asking you to be. You may not ask for forgiveness, Fitangus, but you sure as shit owe the kingdom.’

  ‘I…’

  Fallon leaned forward. ‘Either that or I’ll send you to the Gravehold for conspiring with an Idari traitor. You can keep Pyron Thackeray company.’

  The colour drained from Buzz’s face. ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘The only reason we didn’t arrest you before was because we couldn’t find you. Arch Vigil, haul this man to the cells.’

  ‘Gladly, General.’ Waltham pulled Buzz to his feet.

  ‘Wait, wait!’ Buzz cried. ‘Gods damn it… What do I need to do?’

  ‘Exactly what you’ve been doing—observe and report. The war for Dalthea’s soul is underway—and I mean to win it.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Damien slipped.

  The rock scraped his palms and cracked against his elbow. Branches snapped and broke from the impact of his fall, and when he hit the ground, it was like being rammed by a freight train.

  Breathless, he struggled to his feet, blood oozing from his hands. The cliff glowered down at him, impassive at his near-death.

  The call of the birds changed around him—they sang laments, as though they knew the dawning of winter wrought change and endings. Even the sun-caught sparkle of jewelled icicles dimmed.

  Damien eased a crick from his back. Again.

  He climbed onto a foothold and jammed his fist into a crack. He steadied his breath, willed the pain from his limbs, and climbed.

  Two hours to scale the cliff. A personal worst.

  Damien’s solution burned in his wounds, but he found it cathartic. When he’d first come to this place, Cleric Adravan had claimed that was the purpose of the Nyr-az-Telun: To cleanse the world of that which ailed it.

  ‘This is holy ground,’ Adravan had proclaimed to his disciples. ‘This is where witches and the demon-possessed come to be cleansed—and only we can accomplish this sacred task.’

  The lonely, the abandoned, the forgotten… Is it any wonder they believed his lies?

  Doubt wormed inside Damien as it never had before; the incident at Hawthorn Gnarl lingered, like the symptoms of a disease long cured.

  But yours isn’t a disease that can be remedied—I’m still inside you, ‘Damien’. I’m still here.

  Sweat beaded his forehead. ‘You’re not real—you’re an auditory hallucination. Adravan and Azima turned me into what I am.’

  His fingertips tingled as the memory of Azima’s body played over them—her slender fingers, her inner thighs—the desires she fuelled…

  Let the thoughts pass, they cannot hurt you.

  Let the thoughts pass, they cannot hurt you.

  But they did. His rituals did little to ease the anxiety churning in his stomach—and every day, the demons in his mind grew stronger.

  Trembling, Damien sat on his sparse floor and crossed his legs. Time has failed to heal me—now a different tactic: Exposure.

  Damien would confront his memories—his urges. He would run and hide no longer; he’d find the moment Adravan had turned him into a weapon. And reverse what he and Azima did to me.

  He closed his eyes and breathed in and out, in and out. He focused on the stillness of his surroundings, on the rhythm of his breathing.

  Memories of the Nyr-az-Telun—long held at bay—solidified. The anxiety worsened—but as Auferustrina let Aerulus’ wrath strike him down, so too did Damien allow the images to wash over him.

  Breathe.

  He forced himself to remember the thrill of his first kill under Adravan’s tutelage—of Azima, and the night they lay together.

  He remembered the training, the drills. He knew Adravan’s words as though the mad cleric spoke them here and now. When had he inspired such bloodlust in Damien?

  Let the thoughts come—they cannot hurt you.

  The weeping wind ushered a low moaning through the gnarly trees. Five years past, Adravan had insisted these moans were the cries of the damned, ‘of the demonic and the wicked, the songs of the slain who clasp their sins so tight, they cannot move on. Nothing grows here, for the place is corrupted…’

  ‘But you will become Nyr-az-Telun, and the Nyr-az-Telun are blessed by the Death God herself.’ Cleric Adravan stood behind a lectern at the far end of the hall, steeped in the red veil cast from two ignium lamps.

  Damien put the cleric in his fifties; he wasn’t tall, and his skin was the colour of decayed parchment, but his voice and posture lent him a giant’s presence.

  As he spoke, the cleric leaned forward, knuckles whitening on the edge of the lectern. His fingers were rough, like the men who worked the fields back home.

  ‘Soon, you will learn to tune out the pangs of hunger and other base desires. Denying ourselves our earthly gluttonies brings us closer to the Gods, but know that Nyr smiles upon you.’ Adravan’s voice possessed the incisive scrape of a concealed knife sliding from its sheath. ‘And Nyr judges the guilty.’

  Exhaustion gnawed at him and his ankles burned—like the ninety-nine other souls under Adravan’s care, he’d been standing upright for a full twelve hours now, but he refused to lie down.

  The hundred new recruits stood in a tight formation, Damien shoulder to shoulder with a male and a female. He didn’t know the man’s name, but she was called Azima—and she delighted in telling the others that she’d been anointed at birth to carry out Nyr’s work.

  ‘We operate in secret, as in ages past,’ Adravan continued. ‘We are the swords of the Indecim, the shields that guard against forces that would wreak ruin across our lands. We strike against the progeny of the Orinul as the Gods did before us. We remove the cancers that blight our world—the sinners, the corrupt, the profaners—’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ a girl whispered at the back of the hall. Her voice crackled with delirium.

  ‘You’d like food?’ Adravan’s lips curled into a stretched grin. He swept a thin arm out from his midnight-blue robe. ‘Then you are free to leave. I release you from my tutelage.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Go.’ The word spun from Adravan like a throwing knife. ‘Leave, and eat as much as you wish. The river is full of fish, the woods full of beasts.’

  The wind battered the door of the great hall, howled at its windows. ‘No, I… I’ve changed my mind. Sorry, Cleric, I—’

  ‘I’ve not made myself clear.’ Adravan strode over, seized the girl by the collar of her robe and dragged her across the rough floor. Though his arms were thin, they were lined with knots of muscle; with one hand, he hefted the bar across the doorway and kicked it open. A rush of icy air filled the hall, snuffing out one of the ignium lanterns.

  The girl protested, but Adravan shoved her outside and slammed the door. She pled and pounded at the door, but the cleric set the bar down.

  Damien met Azima’s eye for a fleeting moment.

  ‘I will show you how to survive,’ Adravan continued. ‘I will show you how
to hunt.’ Like a stoneroach, Damien felt Adravan’s eyes burrow into him. ‘I will show you how to kill.’

  At first, the girl’s cries soared above the howl of the wind and her hands pounded at the door. But the wind is unconquerable, and eventually it sang without interruption.

  Months passed, and Damien came to know the murmuring hymns of the Solacewood well. The number of remaining recruits declined further and further each week.

  They slept on bedrolls in small structures surrounding the main hall, or sometimes out in the wilderness. Adravan was a hard man to please, but Damien found himself respecting him. He cared nothing for the cleric’s stories of the Fayth and the Indecim, but he relished the training, the learning—and the hunting.

  Their quarry was easy at first: Brigands, raiders, robbers. Adravan birthed a bloodlust into his disciples, a righteous fury.

  But that was for the Gods.

  After dispatching the wrongdoers, a feast in the great hall followed. Like training a dog with a bell, this was Adravan’s reward—daily meals were nutritious but unexciting; after a successful mission, Adravan provided his disciples with lustrous fruits and delicious meats.

  Hunger makes a person easier to control. Damien’s father’s words; an excuse not to provide better wages for his farmers.

  So Damien refused to gorge himself upon the exquisite food—he ate enough and no more. As part of Adravan’s tutelage, the disciples nurtured control over every molecule of their bodies, making them as efficient as possible, like a well-oiled gyrogun or airship engine. But indulging even once made it more difficult to get back to optimal efficiency—and Damien did not like being inefficient.

  Rain caressed Damien’s skin in fat droplets.

  ‘Cleanse the wicked of the Orinul’s sins so that their souls may rest in the One Father’s hall,’ recited Adravan.

  Damien’s heart beat faster. The thief squirmed on his knees, mud squelching beneath his protests, but Damien held him in place with one hand.