Fierce Gods

by Col Buchanan

  Shard wondered what that dashingly handsome young Rōshun called Aléas was doing right now, the one with the long blond locks and cocky manner. A young man who still refused to acknowledge even the most blatant of Shard’s flirtations.

  Maybe he doesn’t like women with half their faces burned off, came the awful words in her head.

  Shard frowned, feeling the white veil against her skin which masked one side of her features. She lifted a hand so she could study it in the dim glow of the fire, and gazed at the second-skin of her glimmersuit shining like water, rainbow colours catching the light.

  Maybe he didn’t like women covered from head to toe in what looked like a suit of oily water. Though most men seemed attracted to it.

  ‘You still cold?’ Blame asked as he panted towards her.

  ‘Freezing. Hypothermic.’

  ‘You should try running on the spot for a while.’

  But Shard had a better idea. She slid her stockinged leg free from the quilt so that it stretched across the mattress like an open invitation. ‘Better if you came back to bed and warmed me up, don’t you think?’

  He glanced at her on his way past again, and she tugged the quilt from her chest too, the cold air snapping her nipples into points beneath the thin silk. ‘My breasts are so cold I can’t even feel them any more. Are my breasts still there, Blame?’

  His head was shaking as the gloom engulfed it. Shard followed the slap of his sandals more than the vague suggestion of movement, passing fast below the high windows. His breath was a dry rasp from across the room.

  ‘Can’t. I’m thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Last year. What I did during Kamasat back at the Academy, when it was nearly Year’s End.’

  Back when he had been a mere student there, he meant, wintering over at the Academy of Salina as some of them did.

  Before she had brought him to this city of death as her only surviving rook.

  ‘We got high and drugged the Chancellor with poppy tea, and rigged ropes to lift him and his bed out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night, and all the way up to the top of the observatory dome.’

  ‘I remember,’ she drawled, for she had seen it herself. As resident Dreamer and expert rook, Shard lived at the Academy all year round and did not like to ever leave it. ‘Even with their hangovers, everyone turned out to see him up on the dome.’

  ‘You remember how they woke the Chancellor with their calls? Hah! How he saw where he was and leapt out of his bed?’

  Below, a chorus of voices rose up to greet a newcomer coming in from the night.

  ‘Yes. He nearly slipped to his death, poor fellow.’

  Shard jerked as a wail rose from the ground floor below. For the briefest of instants she thought that one of the enemy’s Shades had made its way into the building, but then she recognized the sounds of a fiddle striking out to join with voices rising in raucous song. They were mostly young men down there, many of the Rōshun merely apprentices by all accounts. It sounded like their Kamasat party was only just beginning.

  Maybe she should try her luck below, see if she couldn’t catch Aléas in a particularly drunken condition while Blame ran off whatever it was he needed to up here.

  Shard lay back with a wistful sigh. She was still weak from having flushed the sandworm from her guts, but her libido was starting to return to its usual hungry vigour at last. For some reason the flickering firelight was making her think of the Windrush forest, home of the Longalla, cousins to her own people in the south, the Black Hands. Shard thought of half-naked Contrarè dancing around a blazing bonfire; the dazzling gaze of Sky In His Eyes snaring her own.

  Sky In His Eyes . . .

  Even now the man lingered in her thoughts, like a promise unfulfilled.

  ‘I’m almost a corpse here,’ purred Shard. ‘You could do anything you wanted to me and I couldn’t stop you, couldn’t even lift my little finger to protest.’

  Shooting through the circle of light, Blame flashed his handsome sideways grin at her, the same one that had won him this job in the first place. ‘Stop it, woman. You’re making me hard again. Have you any idea how sore it is to run with your prick whacking about in front of you like a stick?’

  ‘Well, you know I have just the thing for that.’

  ‘You’re a succubus. A succubus intent on killing me with her endless needs.’

  Yes, she was rather hungry for him right now.

  Little wonder though, considering the rising tensions of their situation. Behind them lay a week of running skirmishes in the Black Dream which they had barely survived, always outnumbered and surrounded. And still they were no better off than before. Worse even. For the Imperials continued to block every farcry in Bar-Khos, even the one belonging to the Alhazii Embassy down by the docks, the imperial rooks smothering them with projections of noise so they couldn’t be used at all. There was no way for anyone in the city to reach the outside world.

  Shard had never seen such a successful blockade before within the Black Dream, that mysterious medium linking every farcry in the world, and allowing communication of thought to be carried between them.

  So far casualties were mounting on both sides. Young rooks of the democras, scattered across the Academies of the Free Ports, rallied in their attempts to break through the blockade while the enemy seemed willing to throw everything they had into maintaining it, as though determined to see Bar-Khos cut off in every conceivable way. Already it was the largest battle ever seen within the Black Dream. For the very first time, the young rooks of the Free Ports – who had invented the very craft of rookery, of slyly manipulating farcrys using cloned homegrown versions of their own – were finding themselves evenly matched by their Mannian counterparts.

  The Empire had finally caught up.

  In the inkiness of the Black, you could see them shooting like stars across the firmament, mental projections of rooks dogfighting in their straight lines and rapid zigzags, marking their deaths with startling cascades of light that often crashed against the sphere of the blackout itself – a shell of white noise, hanging around the small cluster of suns that were the city’s few working farcrys.

  Trapped within, Shard and her rook assistant Blame could only continue their efforts alone. But here inside the blockade they were always heavily outnumbered by enemy rooks who could pass through the shell of white noise at will. Sometimes Shard and Blame fled from dozens of enemy rooks, firing off every defensive and offensive glyph they could at the little sparks of brilliance swarming to cut them off. Their close calls were too many to be remembered now. They hardly seemed worth the slow but steady trickle of casualties they were inflicting on the enemy forces. But every venture into the Black Dream gave them another chance to try their breaching glyphs against the barrier, another chance to break the code that was allowing the imperial rooks to pass through it.

  Something had to give, eventually. But for once, Shard was not so certain it would be the enemy.

  Yet again she wondered if her ex-lover Tabor Seech, traitor to the Free Ports, and his personally trained stable of mercenary rooks, had a hand in this sudden improvement in the Empire’s rooking effectiveness. Seech had been hired by the Mannian General Mokabi, but Mokabi was now dead, his campaign against the walls of the Shield thwarted. And following their recent duel upon the walls, she had thought Tabor Seech himself to be gone.

  But maybe she had been wrong.

  Are you still alive? Are you still out there, Tabor?

  Nothing. No thrum of intuition either way.

  Clack clack clack—

  She heard a dull tapping sound growing nearer. But only when the stooped form of Coya emerged from a gap in the inner wall did she give it any thought, seeing his cane rapping across the floor.

  ‘Ah, Shard,’ Coya declared upon seeing her on the mattress, and quickly Shard pulled the quilt over her breasts and drew her stockinged leg back under its cover.

  Coya blinked at what he had just seen
, then sniffed at the sight of Blame trotting across the floor in all his nakedness, clearly high as a kite.

  Her friend was hardly the type to let such a thing dissuade him. Clutching his cane, Coya sat himself down on the corner of the mattress nearest to the fire, making himself at home, his only remark a single eyebrow raised a fraction higher than the other.

  ‘Chee?’ she asked him, playing along, and propped herself up in the bed with the quilt held over her chest, knowing he was as versed in sarcasm as any other Mercian. ‘A pipe? Some hot breakfast to warm your cockles?’

  ‘My cockles are just fine, thank you,’ Coya grumbled, flashing another glance towards Blame, who was heading straight towards them.

  ‘Hey,’ breathed Blame, flapping past.

  ‘Hey there,’ said Coya.

  Coya looked back to the flames of the brazier, hands extended to catch their heat, dark shadows under his eyes. He was still grieving for his bodyguard Marsh, she saw, burnt to ashes in the explosion that had ripped through the Bar-Khosian Council Hall.

  He showed no sign of the crossbow bolt carried in his skull, save for the bandages covered by the wool hat that he wore, tassels dangling from each side of it like plaits. She had done what she could for him when he had first been wounded in the Windrush. If her strength ever came back to her, and if Coya survived without dropping dead until then, she hoped to do more.

  ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a slap of the mattress, as though just recalling why he was here. ‘That Diplomat I asked for has arrived downstairs. I wondered if you couldn’t have a look at him. Check him out as it were, see if he has any schemes lurking in that head of his.’

  She should have known. Coya Zeziké, fellow member of the Few, troubleshooter and trouble maker; here to drag in the war on his heels.

  There was no hiding from it. Not in this city. Not even if she hid under the quilt until he was gone.

  ‘What are you doing, Shard?’

  ‘I’m hiding under the quilt until you’re gone.’

  ‘A bad time is it? Resting here in your comfort while soldiers risk their lives on the wall?’

  It always flowed this way with Coya. Always he asked for more.

  Shard sighed and popped her head above the quilt. Coya was still staring at the flames, looking glum and lonely. Missing his sick wife as well as Marsh, she supposed. Her annoyance faded. For an instant, Shard wished there was something she could do for him to alleviate his mood. But Coya hated the pity of others even more than their scorn, and so she clamped down on the emotion for fear he might catch a glimpse of it.

  ‘Coya, your Diplomat will just have to wait. I’m stretched thin as it is trying to get our farcrys working again. Not to mention tracking down an enemy farcry we think might be operating in the city.’

  ‘An enemy farcry, here in Bar-Khos?’

  ‘Yes, possibly. We’re still trying to zero in.’

  Coya chewed over the news unhappily.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘All I’m asking is that you check him out when you next get the chance.’

  Clearly surrender here was the only way to get rid of him. ‘Fine, soon as I have the time. Now is there anything else?’

  He looked up just then, blinking, as he registered the tone of her words, and seemed to remember his manners. With an effort, Coya clambered to his feet, grasping his cane as though it was the helping hand of another.

  ‘That’s all,’ he said, turning to leave. ‘Oh – there is one other thing. I don’t suppose you have news on those mythical charts of ours yet?’

  The Dreamer bit down on her bubbling impatience. ‘I tried some free-dynamic question and answer methods last night, about all I can manage right now. I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that the charts are somewhere in the city.’

  ‘They are?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Well, that is good news at least. Now all we have to do is get our hands on them.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Blame again.

  Coya took a step towards the hole in the wall and the stairwell beyond.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked after him.

  ‘Better now, Shard. Goodnight, Walks With Herself. Goodnight, Young Man Yonder!’

  And then he was gone.

  Shard snuggled deeper into the warmth of the quilt, calling out even as she did so.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she told the distant form of Blame. ‘Now, for the love of Mercy, will you climb into this bed before my nipples get frostbitten?’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nico

  Nico was on the burning pyre again. Smoke rose to obscure his vision, yet he could tell he was in the imperial arena of Q’os, staked to a bonfire on the sandy floor for all the thousands of spectators to watch from their seating, and the jeering soldiers closer by. He struggled against his chains as flames rose up around his legs, scorching his skin wherever it touched, though no matter how hard Nico fought to be free he knew there would be no escape from this. These people would not be sated until they watched him die in fiery torment.

  Once more the madness of those moments seized him like a deranged and foreign spirit. As the flames rose ever higher around him Nico gibbered in terror, crying out aloud from agony and despair, seeking mercy from the Great Dreamer.

  Help me now! he screamed.

  Please, someone, help me!

  ‘Hey, take it easy. Don’t move.’

  Nico blinked against the blinding light of day, rolling his head back to take in the grimy faces staring back at him. He was rocking on a hard wooden bench at the back of a moving wagon, facing women apparently manacled and chained together, huddling beneath blankets in their ragged clothing.

  ‘You were shouting out in your sleep.’

  ‘What – where am I?’ he blurted, and he struggled to his feet only to find them bound together. With a curse he pitched over and fell hard.

  He was drooling, he realized, as he lay there on the floor of the wagon gathering his thoughts. When he tried to wipe his mouth dry he found his hands bound together too, by thongs of leather, and then it all came rushing back to him, the slavers in their camp and how he had walked in thinking to save his mother, only to become another captive himself.

  Sweet Mercy, what a fool he had been.

  ‘I told you not to move,’ said the woman’s voice again. ‘You might have a concussion, with that lump on your skull.’

  ‘With my thick head I doubt it,’ Nico grunted, shifting over onto his back. Above all the jostling knees a pretty girl was frowning down at him, blonde haired and fine featured, her cheeks pronounced like ripening apples.

  ‘Hey,’ Nico gasped up to her.

  Her eyes glittered within two purple bruises. She offered him a hand and with a firm grasp helped him back onto the bench beside her.

  He winced, gripping his head. This headache would surely be one to remember. Tentatively he probed at his scalp until he came to the lump crusted in blood.

  ‘That was reckless of you, walking into the camp like that on your own. These people look on others as prey.’

  Nico squinted at the girl pressed against him, her chains rattling and clinking as their shoulders brushed together, their legs. Hazel eyes dazzled him, flecked with gold in the sunlight, and it took an effort of will to look past her to the front of the wagon, where the driver swayed back and forth, and beyond him to another wagon on the road ahead, where a woman’s bronze hair shone in the daylight.

  His mother wasn’t here. He could only assume she was further ahead on the road with another slaver party.

  ‘I thought my mother was amongst you,’ he said in a hush.

  ‘Trying to save his mother, do you hear that?’ the girl declared to those closest to her, and his companions brightened for a moment, impressed by what they heard.

  ‘Well, I wish one of my sons was trying to rescue me right now,’ declared a lean, short-haired woman sitting opposite him. ‘Those good-for-not
hing layabouts probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone yet.’

  ‘At least your sons still live,’ rasped another woman from further back.

  Her grim voice silenced them all. Past her, the dark ribbon of the road wound its way through low wooded hills. Nico stared at the other wagons behind them, drawn by steaming teams of oxen, wheels clattering over furrows or locking in the cloying mud, squirming this way and that as dogs trotted alongside. A whip cracked and an ox bellowed in complaint.

  Armed riders accompanied the line of wagons, a dozen hard men with black scarves tied across their faces and grey cloaks over their armour; mercenaries of the Empire, here to protect their cargoes of pleasure slaves being brought to the front for profit. The riders were watching the surrounding countryside closely for sign of the Khosian enemy, and Nico looked out at the snowy hills too.

  The Breaks, they were called – this last range of hills before the plains of Bar-Khos. Hills which his father knew well.

  Where are you? Nico brooded bitterly, hoping to glimpse his father somewhere up there on the forested slopes, a movement blocking a crack of light between trunks.

  But he saw nothing, only the stark emptiness of deep winter, the monotony of snow and the bare limbs of the trees. It was still early, the sun slowly rising in the sky. Nico had been unconscious all night long. Plenty of time in which Cole could have acted.

  In his head he reviewed all that he knew of his father, wondering how much he truly knew him after all. Could it be – and here Nico was barely able to contemplate the question – that his father was the kind of man to desert his wife and son twice to their fates?

  But no, surely that was nonsense? Cole had returned with him to Khos and the war, wishing to be reunited with his family. He could have run for it at any time.