Fierce Gods

by Col Buchanan

  The Dreamer looked up as Coya held aloft the small leather pouch he had taken from his satchel. Her assistant’s mouth dropped open.

  ‘Hold everything,’ Coya told them both, stamping across to lay the pouch within Shard’s reach on the bench.

  Thunder rumbled outside just then, a long peal of explosions that rattled the few surviving panes in the windows. Coya gripped his cane for support. His heart was racing so fast he thought it might burst if he didn’t snatch a moment to calm himself.

  On their way back they had flown over the Khosian barricades again, where he had seen the defences close to being overrun in many places, even as the Khosian heavy guns from the Mount of Truth lay down all the fire they could along the fighting front.

  He knew there wasn’t a moment to lose if they were to save the city.

  Shard looked as tired as everyone else did these days. She glanced at Coya then looked to the pouch on the table, licking her lips.

  ‘This all of it?’

  ‘Only a sample. Our Visitor is downstairs with the rest.’

  She glanced at him again. ‘Really? Downstairs?’

  Her fingers were trembling as she reached across and opened up the bag. All three of them leaned forwards, peering down at the small mound of moondust glittering in the lamplight like powdered diamonds.

  Coya saw the Dreamer’s eyes gleam with sudden hope.

  ‘Tell him about the imperial farcry we uncovered,’ she breathed as she took a knife and delicately dabbed the point of it into the dust, prompting her assistant to jerk from his daze.

  ‘What’s that?’ Coya asked him.

  Blame seemed unable to take his gaze from the tiny glittering pile. He looked like he was fighting the urge to bury his nose in the stuff, so he could inhale the whole lot in one go. ‘We found that enemy farcry we were looking for. Looks like an imperial cell is working out of a place you call the Heights.’

  Coya frowned in surprise.

  ‘You jest.’

  ‘We had nothing better to do while we waited,’ said Shard, and she drew the knife towards her with a tiny portion of the moondust on its tip. ‘Figured we’d have one last crack at finding it.’

  Shard brought the point of the knife to her lips now, and they both watched her closely as she drew the moondust into her mouth.

  ‘Actually tastes like the real thing,’ she said, sounding surprised.

  And then the Dreamer rocked back on the balls of her feet, eyes instantly glazing over. The colours of her glimmersuit swirled across her skin. ‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘It is the real thing. You realize what you’ve just brought me here, Coya?’

  ‘Just what you asked for. Something to boost your powers. Now will it work? Can you break through the blockade and reach the Caliphate with this stuff? Can you tell them about the charts?’

  Shard said nothing as she picked up the pouch and made her way to a chair in the far corner. When she saw Coya and her assistant trailing behind her, the Dreamer cast them a scowl.

  ‘Give me some space here. This might take some time.’

  Coya clenched his teeth together hard. Time was what they possessed least of all.

  ‘Just do it, Shard, and quickly!’

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Diplomat

  ‘I told you we should have split up,’ Ché huffed from the iron rungs of the ladder.

  Above him, Curl’s small, leather-encased form wriggled upwards into the night.

  ‘You’re not leaving me alone behind enemy lines,’ the girl hissed back down at him.

  ‘It’s me they’re after, not you.’

  ‘Then tell them that!’

  They were both climbing the side of a tall chimney stack, which rose like a skysteeple from a brick building they had sought cover in at the edge of the Flats. Ché glanced down below his feet at the Diplomat following them up the ladder. Two other Diplomats, each one far out on either side of the ladder, were climbing almost as fast up the chimney’s ragged brickwork.

  The figures looked small against the curving side of the stack, this feature in the cityscape that only moments earlier had seemed a viable place to make a stand. It was freezing up here, the cold blasts blowing through his clothes like they weren’t there, numbing his hands and nose and cheeks. In the charged winds a purple light was flickering along the length of the ladder.

  His skin kept getting little shocks of pain as he grasped the rungs.

  ‘Leave the girl out of this,’ Ché yelled down at them all. ‘It’s me you want. She’s nothing to me.’

  ‘You think you get a say in this, traitor?’ called back the Diplomat on the ladder. ‘We’ll do what we like with the bitch, soon as we deal with you.’

  ‘Just try it, asshole!’ Curl hollered down.

  The Diplomat threw his head back to let loose a long animal howl.

  ‘Faster,’ Ché urged her. ‘Don’t waste your breath.’

  His limbs were hollow with exhaustion now. It was shocking how fast Ché had lost his condition, locked up in a stone cell too small to even stand in, let along exercise. Sweat blinded him, and when he swept his sight clear he saw Curl cresting the top of the chimney and hurried up after her, giving it one last effort until he hauled himself onto the foot-wide rim with the wind pressing against him.

  Curl was perched there on the circular ledge of bricks with her legs and arms hugging either side of it, hanging on for all she was worth against the desperate pulls of the gusts. From here the buildings on the ground seemed a long way down. Flames and explosions crossed the southern districts of the city in a ragged line.

  The wind whistled around the great black mouth of the chimney, from which arose a flutter of warm air bearing the reek of tar. Taking a deep inhalation, Ché felt his sinuses and his head clearing instantly.

  ‘Move away from the ladder,’ he told Curl. But she seemed incapable of releasing her grip from the brickwork.

  He sighed and slowly rose to his feet, swaying in a crouch with his arms held out for balance. She looked up at him as though he was mad.

  ‘Curl, quickly now!’

  With awkward backwards shuffles she worked her way further around the rim. Ché took a handful of steps after her, like a tightrope walker battling the wind.

  ‘Keep going,’ he said as he spotted the first Diplomat cresting the ladder with a pistol aimed right at his chest. Ché drew his shortsword.

  The gun went off even as he was throwing the sword desperately at the man’s head. The throw was too hasty, too loose, but then so was the Diplomat’s shot, for it went past Ché’s ear while the flat of his blade struck the man’s face.

  The Diplomat pitched from the ladder in a silent fall to his death.

  Ché swept round to see Curl still working her way around the rim. Another Diplomat was struggling onto the top, not far in front of him. A gust blew and they all clung on for a moment to the brickwork. When he glanced back, the third Diplomat was scrambling up onto the rim too, trapping Ché in between the two.

  ‘Your knife, Curl!’ Ché shouted. ‘Throw me your knife!’

  She grunted as she tossed a stubby blade towards him, but she cast it poorly, so that the kife clattered against the inside of the chimney and fell into its unfathomable darkness.

  ‘Thanks!’

  In front of Ché, the Diplomat was crouching down with a large fighting knife in his hand; a young man of a similar age to himself, his head shaved close, grinning through the darkness.

  ‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ he spat while Ché’s boots scuffled for position on the narrow ledge. But then a shot rang out and Ché jerked in surprise, almost losing his footing.

  Curl was holding a smoking pistol in her hands. Ché glanced back, seeing that the third Diplomat had vanished from sight.

  Now it was his turn to smile at the man before him.

  Like two wolves they leapt at each other snarling, his opponent’s knife whipping this way and that, trying to snake past the blocks of his forearms.

 
Whoosh! Whoosh! went their controlled breaths.

  Ché felt a slash across his arm. He struck the man’s belly with his fist. A hand grabbed his tunic and he knocked it away, but then a sudden pain punched into his side, and Ché hopped backwards along the rim to gain a breath of space. He could feel the sticky wetness where he’d been stabbed.

  When he inhaled, the wound sheared him with a white agony. Suddenly sweat was smearing Ché’s vision, his heart galloping in his ears.

  The man was good; possibly even better than Ché when Ché had still been in top condition.

  He snatched a moment to look across at Curl perched on the other side of the rim, staring back across the black mouth of the chimney with her eyes wide with fear.

  Emotions flared within him. If he was going to do one good thing with his life, it had to be now.

  When next the enemy Diplomat leapt at him with his blade, Ché surged in under the swing to tackle the man bodily with all his force. They both fell back against the rim of the chimney, and then they rolled off so that they tumbled together into the darkness inside.

  As Ché spun through the inky blackness the last thing he heard was Curl’s voice screaming out his name, as though she truly cared.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  High Priest

  Dawn was rising over the deserted district of the Heights, where Michinè mansions perched above the sea and the burning city of Bar-Khos. In her basement salon, Kira dul Dubois sat alone before a roaring hearthfire, trying to soak some heat into her frail and ageing body, reading through reports that suggested the battle was all but won.

  Soon, the Mannian consolidation of profits through loot and slaves could begin, in a process that would include the inevitable fall of Al-Khos to the north and the capitulation of the entire island, opening up the entirety of its resources. Khos’s crop harvests alone were worth an annual fortune. And then there was the Windrush forest, all those laqs of prime timber waiting to be exploited, and yet more slaves in the form of the native Contrarè.

  But Kira could leave her own portion of that to agents of her family. She could fly homewards to imperial Q’os knowing that the projected revenues would be enough to restore her family’s falling fortunes.

  All it had cost was the life of her only daughter.

  A knock sounded on the door as someone opened it. Perhaps this was news of the end now, Kira thought, seeing one of her attendants standing there in his civilian clothing in the frame of the doorway. But then she caught the paleness of the man’s features and the sick look in his eyes, and a sudden chill ran through her.

  ‘What is it, child?’ Kira croaked, shifting in her chair.

  ‘Mistress,’ he panted. ‘You must come at once.’

  ‘I asked you what was going on, Gendan. Now will you answer me?’

  The attendant looked to his feet as he spoke, almost blurting out the words. ‘We just heard through the farcry. The capital has ordered an immediate ceasefire. Our forces are to stop their hostilities against Bar-Khos at once.’

  It was clear he wasn’t jesting. Yet what else could it be but some sick joke?

  ‘The orders must be fake, surely. A Khosian ploy?’

  ‘We’ve authenticated the messages, Mistress. They’re genuine.’

  What was this? What lunacy was she facing now?

  Scowling, Kira gathered her robe about her and rose stiffly from the chair. The man was silent as he led the way with a lantern up the stairs.

  Up on the ground floor of the mansion her people hurried about with an air of tense confusion. They looked to Kira as though she had all the answers and more, but she ignored their tense expression as she stalked from room to room, seeking out the spymaster Alarum, not wishing in those moments to betray any kind of uncertainty by asking where he was.

  Kira found the spymaster at the back of the sprawling mansion, where their farcry was set up on a dining table, and where a few of his people sat connected to the thing by long fleshy cords held in their hands.

  Standing there in that moment, it was only then that Kira realized what was disturbing her so greatly. The city of Bar-Khos seemed to be lying in silence outside. There were no rumbles of cannon fire, no snaps of rifles, no sounds of battle at all.

  ‘Report,’ she snapped, when Alarum finally hurried over to join her in a far corner of the room.

  ‘It’s the damned Khosians,’ said the spymaster in a hush with his back turned to the room. ‘Their Dreamer contacted the Alhazii Caliphate in the middle of the night. She claimed the Khosians now hold charts to the Isles of Sky. They threatened to release these charts to the world if the Caliphate didn’t intercede in their struggle here against us. Immediately.’

  A soft hiss escaped between Kira’s teeth.

  If it was true, this was news that would change the order of the world.

  ‘Mistress?’

  ‘Go on, Alarum, I’m still listening.’

  ‘The Alhazii then contacted Q’os. The Caliphate threatened an instant embargo against the Empire if we did not agree to a ceasefire, effective immediately.’

  Kira swayed back on her feet as though she stood on the cusp of two worlds; the world that had been and the world now to come.

  In her stomach, the sickness was opening into a bottomless gulf.

  She knew the Caliphate would do anything to protect the location of the Isles, and therefore their precious monopoly on exotics and black powder. The Mannian order too would do anything to find the Isles, most of all Nihilis himself, the First Patriarch of Mann, who had been born and raised in the Isles before he had been exiled, his memory of their location wiped clean.

  ‘How could they have come by such a thing? Surely it must be a tactic to buy them some time?’

  ‘I don’t believe so. Our agents in Zanzahar say the charts were mentally projected by way of proof. They’re the real thing all right. Seems the Mercians flew a skyship to the Isles and back while we were engaged in this Khosian campaign. I’ve no idea how they knew how to find them.’

  Her small clenched hands were trembling in anger. ‘They flew a skyship to the Isles and back, and you knew nothing of the venture? Nothing at all, spymaster?’

  Heads turned towards the rising of her voice, but then they kept on turning, twisting towards the curtained windows at the back of the room where a sudden flash of light lit up the back garden like the brilliance of day, and a guard’s shout was cut off in mid-yell.

  Before anyone could react, the windows of the room burst inwards in a rain of glass and confusion. Kira fell with the weight of Alarum rolling over her. Smoke tumbled into the room, pouring from grenades bouncing across the floor. Someone yelled in fright.

  No, it can’t be! Not now, not like this! How did they find us?

  On all-fours Kira squirmed out from under Alarum in a breathless panic and scrambled for the doorway. Terror rode through her as she heard more yells rising from the front of the house. A gunshot rang out followed by fierce clashes of steel. Behind her in the room an ominous series of hollow thuds was sounding out amongst the desperate shouts of her people. When she glanced back through the smoke she saw figures wearing scarves and goggles, swinging clubs at every skull within their reach.

  It was panic that caused her hand to slip out from under her on the wooden boards, so that Kira sprawled to the floor with the breath knocked out of her. There was no way out of this, she realized as she was struck within by a sudden resonance of emotions. Tears smarted her eyes.

  Her whole body was shaking as she reached to one of the rings on her fingers and snapped it open, revealing the poisonous yellow powder inside.

  How dreamlike it all became, when you were this close to taking your own life.

  Kira hesitated, staring bitterly at the poison as though it was the sum total of her life. It was almost impossible to do this act when you had no real desire for your life to end. Yet the alternative would be far worse, she was certain. Captured alive by the Khosians. Caged like an animal and tormented b
y her captors.

  Too late though. For a shoe pressed down against her hand, pinning it to the floor along with the ring.

  Kira blinked through her tears, seeing the end of a cane rap lightly against the floor before her. She strained to peer up through the smoke at a crooked form standing above.

  ‘Kira dul Dubois, I presume?’ said Coya Zeziké with a dazzling, self-satisfied smile.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Nico

  The sun’s brilliance was a furnace heat against Nico’s face, its light snaring in the lashes of his closed eyes, so bright that it filtered through into the constellations of stars spinning in the dizziness of his mind.

  He took a peek, and saw the hunched willow tree he’d just fallen from swaying almost imperceptibly in the blue summer sky overhead. Winded, Nico lay on his back in the long grasses trying to catch his breath.

  Suddenly the head of his dog appeared – Boon, panting with his tongue hanging out. The dog started licking his face.

  ‘Go on,’ Nico told Boon, pushing him away, and the act seemed to prompt some return of his wits. Nico recalled that he was back home on his family’s wild farm; back in the forest garden his father had lovingly created over the course of Nico’s young life, filled with all its varied flora and fauna. His favourite place as a boy.

  He wasn’t surprised when his father’s handsome features appeared above him, his hat partly blocking the sun.

  ‘You all right,’ Cole asked plainly, as though Nico had merely tripped over his feet rather than fallen from the highest branches of the tree.

  Looking up at it now, Nico considered it a miracle he hadn’t broken his neck.

  ‘Uhgnn,’ he said instead of what he really intended, and realized that his mouth was full of blood from his bitten tongue. He spat to clear it, and managed to say, ‘Juth winded. The branth – broke on me.’

  ‘Aye, I saw it. Come on, get up, you fool. Let’s see if anything’s broken.’

  From the cottage his mother’s voice sounded out, calling them for dinner. His father reached out a helping hand and Nico grasped it, feeling the warmth of his touch, its reassuring firmness, as he struggled to his feet.