SHIANG

by C. F. Iggulden

  He dropped the piece of lead and nickel into a bowl and began to press and tap Bosin’s chest. Burroughs pressed his ear to Bosin’s ribs and held up one finger for silence. Hondo held his own breath.

  ‘There. It’s still in him. There’s infection already – you can hear it in the wheezing.’

  ‘He had a cold before,’ Hondo said. ‘We were on the road for weeks without rest.’

  ‘Something must have been urgent,’ Burroughs said without looking up. ‘If it’s trade you’re after, I have a few contacts. As I say, there are more legends than facts about Shiang. The consort keeps his past close to his chest, of course.’

  ‘ “Consort”?’ Hondo said in confusion. It was not a word he knew.

  ‘Tellius – your man, I believe. Isn’t he from the east? I heard he was.’

  The doctor was speaking while he worked on the patient, without looking up. He had no idea of the shock he caused. The twin rose to his feet, his hand drawing a knife from his sleeve that he would use to get whatever else the doctor knew. Hondo held up a flat palm to stop him.

  ‘I would like to meet this consort, this Tellius of the east,’ he said.

  Burroughs chuckled as he smeared a dark yellow liquid all over Bosin’s chest. As Hondo looked on frozen, the doctor widened the bullet hole with deep cuts, then attached a brass clamp with a steel screw to hold the unnatural lips apart. Blood flowed and Bosin stirred, groaning in pain to himself, though he did not wake. His skin had taken a pallor close to the wax stillness of death and Hondo wondered if he would ever wake again. In that moment, it seemed unlikely. When the doctor spoke once more, it jolted him from a stupor that was down to exhaustion.

  ‘There isn’t much that goes on in Darien without the consort hearing about it. If I had to guess, sir, I’d say you’ll meet him soon enough. Men of Shiang? Arriving dead, half dead and shot to pieces? Likely as not, he’ll come to find you.’

  On the table, the unconscious Bosin suddenly coughed. Blood dribbled both from his open wound and down his unshaven chin. The twin dabbed at him, his face stricken. In the same moment, Burroughs nodded as something clicked in his tongs. After an age, he held up a second piece of shining metal, peering at it.

  ‘Fine workmanship, though I am surprised it didn’t go straight through your man. Even at his size, a bullet like this would pass through a shoulder blade and likely the man standing behind him.’

  ‘He was wearing heavy layers of fur, leather and wool, doctor,’ Hondo said. ‘Will he … live?’

  ‘He might now. The bullet looks to be in one piece, for which you can thank the gunsmiths of Darien. It didn’t hit a bone and shatter, so I have it all. No, your worry now is infection – fevers. He’ll need to be nursed. Now I, er, heard you’d be willing to pay. I could include the services of two nurses for a week, if you have the funds.’

  Hondo held up two thick gold coins and the doctor’s eyes widened as he accepted them.

  ‘That is more than enough, sir. I’ll have Basker bring up some of his chicken and leek soup – it’s very good. And I’ll arrange for new blankets and whatever dressings he’ll need.’

  The man hesitated for a moment, then pressed on.

  ‘There is still the matter of the body … the, er, gentleman downstairs.’

  He saw Hondo look to Je for an answer and the doctor’s gaze followed that authority.

  ‘Cremation or burial? I’m afraid the Families won’t let you leave him in Basker’s yard. There’s too much fear of plague, especially these days.’

  ‘I will bury my brother,’ Je said.

  Burroughs frowned uncomfortably. Where before he had been in his element, he was never quite sure what to say to the recently bereaved.

  ‘I’ll send the head of the city mortuary to you, sir. He’ll arrange the plot, the stone, anything you need. It will be a ceremony of the Goddess, if that suits you?’

  ‘The Goddess?’ Je asked, confusion warring with grief.

  ‘The service. Darien is a Goddess city, though we don’t speak her name. The funerals will consecrate your brother to her.’

  ‘That is not what he would have wanted!’ Je said. ‘If we were in Shiang, my brother would go into the family tomb.’

  Burroughs tilted his head. He hardly needed to point out how far they were from Shiang.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if you took him out to the forests again. Three or four days from the city, I don’t think anyone would know if you just buried him there. Or I could have him embalmed and made ready for travel, whatever you want.’

  ‘I don’t want any of this!’ Je shouted suddenly.

  He stood up from where he leaned against the wall and was in an instant, a dangerous presence in that room. Even Hondo sensed it and stood back, preferring not to interfere with raw grief. With a growl, the twin went out of the room and clattered downstairs.

  ‘It is a recent loss,’ Hondo said. ‘He needs a little more time.’

  Burroughs shook his head.

  ‘I am sorry, but there are half a million people in this city. I won’t be responsible for bringing some pestilence in. It should be cremation really.’

  ‘Like a mad dog,’ Hondo murmured.

  Both Burroughs and Adams flushed.

  ‘It is not meant to be disrespectful. Public safety comes high on the list of concerns at the moment. Half the city is training for some threat this winter. I won’t be the man who brought it in.’

  Burroughs was certain of himself once more and Hondo nodded when he saw there would be no compromise.

  ‘Cremation, then. Send your friend of the mortuary. His brother will want the ashes returned. I advise you to call me when they arrive to collect the body, however. My companion is in the first throes of grief. It might take another mad dog to keep him calm.’

  Gabriel came down the slope to a plain that stretched as far as the eye could see. The sun was setting ahead, smearing colours across the horizon. There was no sign of a road, or even tended fields. Scrub grass and wild streams dominated the landscape, with a dark blur of forests away in the distance.

  His motley group looked ragged, somehow, after crossing the mountains. Lord Ran’s beard had come in white, so that he looked twenty years older and was much thinner than the first time they had met. Gabriel reminded himself to feed the man, when next he had the chance. It was easy to forget and Lord Ran seemed not to care much for his own health.

  Thomas scouted ahead, loping off and ranging for miles around them as they sought out some sign of a village or horses. He followed orders well enough, though there was something contained about Thomas that gave very little away. He had been the second of them to step through and he was almost as fast as Gabriel himself. Thomas certainly felt the pulsing thump as strongly, like blind bees turning to a queen. He had begun to raise his hands to it, as if in greeting or worship. Gabriel wondered if any of them were masters of their own fate. Had they even chosen to head west? Or had they been drawn there on strings they could not see? In his heart, he feared the answer.

  Sanjin had developed a certain swagger since the high pass. The experience of walking with the heat of the sun and watching the drifts curl back and vanish had delighted him. Gabriel was not sure if he disliked the mage Sanjin more than the crippled swordsman he had been before. At least he still limped. For all Sanjin’s ability to warm the snowstorm, he had not been able to restore his foot. Gabriel hid a smile at the thought, until his gaze drifted across Marias, talking to the Fool on his leash.

  She tormented Gabriel, simply by existing. He returned to her again and again, but he had not dared order her to stay behind. He was uncertain what he might learn if he did. So she remained, proof of his fears.

  Only the Fool seemed content, though Gabriel suspected he understood nothing. The poor devil who’d come through had found himself in a smaller room than he’d known before. Gabriel imagined the higher thoughts snipped off in the instant of arrival. A brain that had been ruined could not hold a man. Perhaps i
f the Fool had asked him to try and heal him, Gabriel would have, but he could not ask. There were times when Gabriel saw some awareness in his eyes, but they were few and more pitiful for existing at all.

  Gabriel rubbed the bristles on his chin, still black, unlike Lord Ran’s. They would not have looked like a formidable force to anyone who stumbled across them, but he had walked with just these few through the Mazer swordsmen of Shiang, right into the presence of the king himself. Gabriel touched the sword on his hip. It may not have cut as well as it had for the previous owner, but it remained a symbol of his throne.

  Thump. He felt it, stronger than ever in the air. Each of the others froze for a second, and the Fool stumbled and hissed to himself. Gabriel clenched his fist. Perhaps he had no choice, but when he had gathered the stones, he would be able to go anywhere he wanted, do anything he dreamed of doing. He understood what they were in a way few others could imagine. Power called to power, he thought. He and Thomas and Sanjin and the Fool were all the Aeris Stone. It had dragged them from the grey land and it ran like white gold in their veins. He could feel its sisters in the distance, not quite as separate points, but the source of the call to him. Darien. He would fall on that city like an invading army.

  Tellius watched as the body was cut apart. There were three mortuaries in Darien, but this was the only one owned by the Sallet family. It had taken a few quick moves and a bribe to have the dead Shiang swordsman brought to that place for cremation, but Tellius did not regret the loss of time or money. The furnace huffed and creaked in another room, heating the whole building, so that the mortuary was warm and comfortable while snow lay on the ground outside. Tellius felt knots in his shoulders ease for the first time in weeks.

  The body on the table was as if he looked back in time. The hands bore sword calluses, while pale scars showed on the forearms and thighs – duelling cuts to show first blood, rather than any deep gash. There were only a few of them, which meant either the young man had been inexperienced, or that he had been very skilled indeed.

  The king’s physician, Master Burroughs, cracked the chest while Tellius watched, retrieving one whole bullet and two pieces of a second that had spiralled through the young man’s gut. Whoever the swordsman had been, he had not had a chance. Tellius scratched his chin and considered how much he disliked the guns that were being made all over the city. Perhaps Lord Canis had been right that the things would change the city for ever, or at least the relationship between those who ruled and those who were ruled. Tellius realised he was biting the inside of a lip as he thought. He’d been doing that more and more over the previous month and made himself stop with an effort. There were different rules for peace and war, whether Lord Canis understood that or not. In peace, Tellius might even have agreed with him.

  There were new bodies caught in the river lock gates each morning, dumped there by one of the gangs of the city. They had the same holes in them as the swordsman on the table. Tellius had heard a dozen complaints and private pleas to do something about the guns, but the problem was that he was spending another river of gold on vast orders of them.

  Whether Lord Canis approved or not, or Lord Bracken or any of them, Tellius had seen the black wave crashing over the city. He would not deny the new militias the best weapons they could get. To make them stand and face an enemy with just cold steel would earn him only their contempt.

  He winced as Burroughs began to sew up the chest once more. It was somehow more disturbing to see loops of thread drawn tight in the skin than it had been to see the breastbone chiselled in two.

  ‘Same gun?’ Tellius asked.

  Burroughs nodded.

  ‘As far as I can tell, yes. Same calibre of bullet, same location. Adams said it was Vic Deeds. We have enough to hang him, I’d say.’

  Tellius chuckled.

  ‘We’re preparing for a war, doctor. I had enough to hang him when it was just a suspicion.’

  ‘I don’t believe I heard that announcement,’ Burroughs said, his face stern. ‘Is it martial law, then?’

  ‘Very droll, doctor. You know what I mean.’

  Burroughs finished his sewing and cleaned his hands in a bowl.

  ‘In all honesty, sir, I do not. We are not a dictatorship and there are laws. The Twelve Families say they are above such things, but I think there are natural laws as well – and no man stands above those.’

  Tellius blinked at finding rebellion in such an unlikely place. He might have replied, but three sober young men wrapped the body in the sheet on which it lay and bore it away to the furnace. Tellius shook his head in regret at the waste of it. That body had been built by years of labour into an extraordinary thing – and then made into meat in a moment. He turned to leave and then stopped.

  ‘Why did you stitch him up, doc?’ Tellius asked. ‘He’s going straight into the furnace, after all.’

  Burroughs shrugged.

  ‘For his dignity. I have a son about his age. It was a small thing to do for him.’

  Tellius looked at the doctor for a long moment, then nodded.

  ‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘Now I think I should meet his friends and see what brought them to my city.’

  16

  Assault

  Loggers needed sleep or they tended to get hurt, so Moke wasn’t exactly happy about being left to stand in the dark woods all night. Though he’d been a witness to Vic Deeds shooting those strangers, he didn’t think it was worth setting guards like they were some sort of military camp either. They were woodsmen and loggers – almost the opposite of soldiers, when you thought about it. Moke would have abandoned his post and gone back to bed if the others in his hut wouldn’t have beaten him black and blue in the morning. Some things turned a camp sour and the rest of them seemed to take their turns without too much grumbling. Moke swore under his breath. Nineteen years old and alone in the dark in the middle of winter. It was hard enough to stay warm in his bunk some nights, never mind out there, no matter how he stamped and blew on his fingers. They wouldn’t let him have a fire, of course, saying it would make him blind in the darkness. They were bastards, is what they were.

  He heard a rustling begin nearby and he shook his head, instantly angry with his bunkmates. He’d known they’d try something. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find half a dozen of them creeping about, just to make him shriek like a woman in the night. It was a rough old crew, but the money was good and he liked not bothering to wash for weeks at a time. No one seemed to mind the smell and it wasn’t too bad in the cold anyway.

  ‘Come out, you sods,’ he hissed into the darkness.

  He had a torch of oil-soaked wool on a pole, but he’d been told not to light it unless he was actually under attack. The man from the timber company had said they would take it out of his wages if he lit it without good cause – and it wasn’t cheap, either.

  Moke heard footsteps and his nerve failed. The head of the torch rested on a serrated iron ring about the length of his hand. He found the flint that dangled from a cord and scraped it hard onto the slick wool. Sparks showered, revealing the trees around him in a flash. He blinked at what he’d seen, but held still as the flame caught and spread, so that the light grew.

  Three men were walking towards him, with darker figures following along behind. Moke didn’t know any of them.

  ‘You’re not …’ he managed, before Gabriel put him down with a single stroke.

  The torch fell from his hand and Thomas snatched it from the air, walking past the body without looking back.

  ‘Hello, the camp!’ Gabriel called to the silent wooden huts. He was hungry and cold, after walking so many miles. The forest had been endless and he’d followed an old track for an age before deciding it led nowhere and come back. He was tired and angry and in no mood to be baulked.

  A few men stumbled out, rubbing their eyes and yawning. They did not seem unduly alarmed and Gabriel’s patience frayed like rotten cloth.

  ‘Fire!’ he shouted. ‘Treachery!’

>   It had the desired effect. The entire camp came alive at that and poured from the huts. Gabriel saw three other torches lit, revealing the positions of sentries around the camp. They came in with the rest and faced him, like schoolchildren before a master.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Gabriel said loudly. ‘I need food for six and directions to Darien.’

  ‘Damn it! More of them,’ one of them growled.

  The logger’s arms were powerful, though his belly strained against a shirt and a thick belt. He stood with a surly expression and black whiskers, glowering. Gabriel looked at him and smiled.

  ‘No. You haven’t met one like me before.’

  The man reached behind him and raised a black iron pistol with a long barrel, pointing it at Gabriel.

  ‘I saw one just like you. And I saw what put him down as well.’

  Without another word, the man pulled the trigger and there was an almighty crack of sound. Gabriel took a step back in shock. It felt as if a strong man had swung a hammer against his chest. He could taste blood in his mouth as well as anger.

  The man who had shot him gaped as the smoke cleared and he was still standing. Gabriel reached to a spot high in his chest and pinched the flesh there, as if to hold it closed. Before the eyes of that crowd, a shining bullet tip appeared slowly between finger and thumb. It eased out, bright in blood, until Gabriel held the whole thing. He was very aware of Sanjin’s gaze on him in that moment.

  ‘If we get the stones in Darien, I’ll heal you,’ Gabriel said. ‘On my soul, I swear it.’

  Sanjin nodded, the pact sealed.

  The gunman stood wide-eyed in disbelief as Gabriel turned back to him. The man’s hand quivered as if the weight of the gun was too much. Gabriel saw the moment he decided to keep shooting, when the tendons of the forearm tightened. The weapon was formidable, Gabriel had to admit. Yet there was only one. The others carried hatchets or axes and he was not afraid of those. They were not fast enough to bring him down.