The Dawnhounds

by Sascha Stronach

  If she ran, if she left, they’d know in an instant. There were men on the wall with Bore Rifles: long guns that could launch a carnivorous larva half a league. New stuff, from the front: the older models of grub usually died in the air before they got that far. They were smaller and lighter with more efficient metabolisms but also less bite power. To compensate, the army alchemists had spiked the toxin load through the roof; you weren’t meant to handle the grubs without protective gear. They had one at the station, tucked away somewhere. She’d heard officers salivating at the thought of using it, but they’d never had the opportunity.

  Yat followed Varazzo through the gate, and on to the other city. She looked imploringly towards her golden follower, but they stayed where they were—they may as well have been a world away.

  It wasn’t Yat’s first time south of the Wall—she’d grown up here after all—but the stark difference still struck her. The streets were clean. There were police officers everywhere, but they were different on this side: no uniforms, no side-eye, no cuffs. A detective she didn’t recognise was talking to a woman in an absurdly large crinoline that made her dress wobble as she swayed nervously back and forth.

  Less visible brickwork over this side, too: they’d made leaps and bounds in covering the structures of the old world in new growth. Tall trees and mushrooms lined the streets, and their internal cooling systems—a series of gill networks that chilled and scrubbed stale air before ejecting it into the street—kept everything a comfortable temperature.

  The further they got from the wall, the thicker and more intricate the biowork got. Some of the structures weren’t even recognisable as plants any more: proprietary breeds whose alchemical designs were closely-guarded secrets. The people she saw flaunted illegal decorative biowork that made the rowdy crew of the Kopek look sombre and clean as Old Faith priests. They passed a man whose eyes appeared to be tiny beehives: bugs crawled out of their holes and over his face. He stuck out a long tongue and peeled one off his face, then swallowed it in a single gulp. He saw Yat looking, and waved: no fear whatsoever that he’d be taken in. He was right: she kept walking.

  In an ornate public garden—totally empty but for the murmuring foliage—Varazzo got distracted by a trellis of Chattering Snapdragons, and Yat slipped away between the maddening, twisted tree trunks. Everything here hummed with golden threads, but they were different from the ones on the north side: more intent somehow. They seemed to follow her as she walked. She heard Varazzo’s cry of alarm somewhere behind her, and she ducked into the cover of a hanging curtain of vines.

  Two officers swiftly met him, coming from the opposite direction. They had bore rifles, and weren’t in uniform, but she knew they were cops—something in the way they carried themselves, like they were accustomed to getting their way and ready to get violent if they didn’t. They had heavy gloves on, and one had a borer hive strapped to his back, encased in glass. An umbilical cord led from the hive to a device in his hands: a tangle of cartilage for plugging into the gun. She’d seen a prototype in training, and the wet sound of the cord’s muscles contracting as it pushed the grubs through still stuck with her on rough nights. They were arguing with Varazzo. They put a tail on me. Not so friendly after all. They held a whispered argument, and Yat could only make out a few words. One stuck out: Wajet. They weren’t taking her to Sen after all. She was already worried about Sen, but Wajet was another thing entirely.

  A hot breath on her neck and—

  She spun, and nobody was there but—

  The golden light, not behind anything this time. She was hiding amongst the stems, but the glow gave her away. A familiar woman with dark skin, a dense network of tattoos, and vines for hair. Vitiligo on her shoulders. Big, Ahwari, rough-looking but handsome in her own way. Where’d Yat seen her before? She remembered the woman’s voice before she remembered her name: I don’t mean sex, little adwi. Not biology. Do you know fucking?

  Of course. Ajat: Sibbi’s muscle. She couldn’t have been the one who called ahead to Wajet, though—she’d been following Yat closely for hours. She’d been right there. One of the plainclothes officers shouted at Varazzo, and Ajat turned to watch them. It only took a second for Yat to slip back through the vines. She jumped and grabbed ahold of a tangle of vine-canes, then hauled herself on top of the trellis. Ajat turned back to where Yat had been. She muttered something in Dawgae: Yat didn’t recognise the word, but she knew swearing when she heard it. Ajat took a step back, took a lock of her own hair, held it up to a nearby tree and—and pressed. The strand seemed to merge with the bark. Ajat’s eyes went white like a blank’s, and the gold—

  Every plant in the garden turned itself towards Yat. A vine snaked up and wrapped around her ankle, and she barely managed to jump back fast enough—it tore apart, but the end of it clung to her leg. She fell from the trellis and hit the ground awkwardly, on her shoulder. She tried to roll, but ended up just falling a second time. At the same time, her head exploded with pain. She could hear the wind whistling through the hole in her skull, and feel her grey matter pouring out, and suddenly the ocean was pressing in from all sides and—

  She was writhing on the grass as two shadows loomed over her. They seemed impossibly immense, as if their presence couldn’t be held by something as mundane as a mere body. Male voices shouted from somewhere nearby, and Sibbi waved a lazy hand towards them. Yat couldn’t see what happened, but she heard glass breaking, and awful, awful screams. Sibbi clicked her tongue.

  “Looks like we’ve got a live one,” she said. Waves of pain rolled over Yat, it was worse than a cnida, worse than being shot, worse than the time she got dad’s experimental protein broth on her skin and had spent the afternoon incapacitated by waves of agony. Sibbi took her by the forearm: gentle, yet strong, and began to drag. Yat tried to fight, but the pain was too much. She didn’t know who the woman worked for or what she wanted, and the fact she didn’t know was what terrified her—Wajet’s friend, taking her away from Wajet’s men. She was paralyzed, and prisoner of the most infamous pirate to ever sail the Sea of Teeth.

  Ajat walked alongside them. The pain receded, but Yat felt empty and lifeless. She looked at her own chest, and saw her golden threads unravelling, glowingly only dimly like fireplace embers in the morning. She knew the feeling well: she’d spent a lot of time living in the grey. It was that, a thousandfold: a total emptiness, and lack of feeling: the killing-cold that made all the anxiety feel like a street faire.

  Both women roiled with golden energy: a walking pair of hurricanes. Their threads drank deeply from her: whenever a spark rose up, they stole it away before it could kindle any fire. They were muttering to each other in Dawgae. She didn’t speak the language very well, but she made out of a few words in her own tongue: Heron Hill, Fantail, Hainak … lamp? She recognised the switch back into Dawgae, but couldn’t understand it.

  She tried to struggle, but the two women seemed so much grander than their mere bodies. She may as well have tried to fight the tide.

  The little hairs on Sen’s arms stood up as he lurked in the shadow of a factory out near Xineng. The priest was dressed like a lower-ranking member of the order but the guards barely even looked at his papers before they ushered him through. Even at a distance, there was something about their body language that Sen recognised immediately: cops desperately pretending they hadn’t noticed something above their pay grade. Despite everything, it felt good to be right. If he wanted to be sure he wasn’t seen, he should’ve hung back. It wasn’t an option: he was straining to keep up already. Every step felt like it cost him five. He was going to need to cash in all his sick days when this was done. The priest wasn’t even through the gate when Sen stepped out and made his way across the road, cane clicking on the ground with each step. It made him very conscious of how many steps he took: it was like he was being stalked by a metronome. No point trying to be subtle with it. He walked as quickly as his leg would allow, trying to mi
nimise the time he spent in motion. A body lay in the street—looked like the poor bastard had been too close to a window when a bomb went off, and got cut to shit by flying glass. He stepped around the man, reached the wall, and saluted.

  “Papers,” said the guard.

  Sen held them up. “Officer assigned to Macaque’s Furrow,” he said. Somewhere he wouldn’t get into trouble. The junior of the two gave Sen’s dirty clothes a side-eye, but the papers checked out and that was what mattered. They waved him through, and he emerged into the other city: the place called Hainak that was a different place entirely. Different clothes, different names, different houses. They even stood differently, as though they’d never had to worry about being seen; as though they’d never even considered the possibility that the way they stood could be used against them; as though they’d never been in need of humbling.

  They let common folks through, sometimes. The occasional scholarship kid going to the university, the occasional clergyman in need of special training they wouldn’t get on the other side. An upjumped alchemist or two. They’d open the gates for religious ceremonies and pat each other on the back about how beneficent they were being. He’d been called in more than once to chuck somebody back onto the right side after they’d overstayed their welcome. He hated it: he’d done it anyway.

  He was so caught in his thoughts he didn’t notice the medical alchemists running up behind him. They shoved past him and almost sent him sprawling. Didn’t even stop: two of them, and two sets of stretcher-bearers, hauling ass down the street. He wanted to curse enough to turn their hair white and the air blue, but he barely had the energy to stay upright. He watched them go, then set off again.

  He couldn’t keep up with the priest, but he had a good idea where he’d go—the grand temple on Heron Hill. It wasn’t far, but it took him almost an hour and he was shaking when he got there. The Temple was one of the only stone buildings left in the south: a proud symbol of traditionalism rather than just a sign that somebody couldn’t afford the upgrades. Sandstone too: you didn’t get any from the quarries near Hainak. It would’ve come from Ladowain: built in the old days, shipped down at great expense. Statues of each of the gods lined the boulevard leading up to it, but all except Crane had their heads removed. Priests moved back and forth, filling bird feeders and cleaning up all the pigeon shit. He sat on one of the benches and watched them for a while. No smudges on any masks that he could see. Not that it meant anything: the lad had probably cleaned it off by now.

  While he waited, he turned the cane over in his hands. He’d spent time training with sticks when he was younger, before he’d joined the army. He’d loved stories about men who practiced the old arts: who could kill a horse with a single kick. Hadn’t been half bad at fighting in his day, though he suspected his days of hand-to-hand were over. He didn’t know what he was watching for, but he thought he’d know it when he saw it.

  It was a beautiful place. Well-made, well-tended, serene. The only sounds were birds and brooms. They hadn’t managed to sort out the humidity, but it was as close to heaven as Sen had been in a long time. After about ten minutes a priest came out of the temple and stormed over to him.

  “Sergeant,” he said. “Don’t you have an assignment elsewhere?”

  Sen shrugged. “Can’t a man meditate on the great divine mysteries and all that?”

  “A man can do that elsewhere, surely. You are frightening the birds. If you won’t remove yourself, our friends will have to remove you.”

  The birds, almost as though by magic, took off all at once. A shadow fell over Sen. He turned to see a giant of a man with scarred hands and a distinctly un-priestly bearing looming over him. Another man was with him: lithe, smiley, eyes a little too wide. You saw a man with eyes like that, you did your best to hide the good silverware and double your best to hide the knives.

  “Źu, charmed,” he said. “And you must be Sergeant Kanq-Sen.” He grabbed Sen’s hand and shook it with a tad too much vigor. The meathead said nothing, but Sen caught a flicker of intelligence in his eyes. He was doing the same thing Sen instinctively did: trying to figure out how much danger he was in. Big men were a yan a dozen, but smart big men? Deeply worrying. Źu clearly saw him looking, and led Sen over as though presenting a debutante at a ball.

  “This is my associate, Mister Źao.”

  Sen shook his hand. He’d expected a bone-crunching squeeze, but it was gentle, almost limp.

  “Wasn’t aware ‘mister’ was a rank,” said Sen.

  “It’s not,” said Źu, then he winked. A chill ran down Sen’s spine. They looked like soldiers and they stood like cops and they were in a very fancy part of town with obviously fake names, and the gods-damned priesthood were apparently fine with it. He’d been in the force too damned long to miss what they were. Fucking Sparrows. Worse, they knew he knew and they were loving it.

  “I’ll just—” said Sen. “I’ll just go, aye?”

  Źu grabbed his arm, and squeezed. Squeezed in just the wrong place, and sent a spasm up the arm that almost made Sen cry out.

  “But you were so close, Sergeant!” he said. “You were onto something, I’m sure. We could have a chat about it, if you’d like.”

  A chat that would involve pliers, and batteries, and probably a special place at the bottom of the river if he was lucky. He’d seen what happened to folks they sent to chat with the Sparrows. It was one of the things he drank to forget.

  “I was wrong,” muttered Sen.

  “Hmm,” said Źu. “What was that?” He grinned. It was the same grin you’d see on a tiger about to pounce. His grip got tighter, and he turned his wrist a little. It shifted Sen’s balance just enough for his leg to scream at him. It was a clear signal: Źu could inflict a lot of pain while exerting almost no effort. It was almost like it was his job.

  “I was wrong,” said Sen, through gritted teeth.

  “Wrong about?” said Źu. His tone was jovial, like a schoolmaster helping a dim student finish his sums. His eyes were sharklike, predatory.

  “I don’t know,” wailed Sen. Źu let him go, and stepped back.

  “Very good, sergeant,” he said. “Before you go, something to ponder: silkworms destroy their cocoons when they break out of them. They make something beautiful, then they destroy it because they’re obsessed with moving on. Do you know how we stop them, Sergeant? We boil them alive inside their cocoon. It seems cruel, but the results are so very beautiful. We preserve their art. In a way, it’s a kindness, and it won’t stop me wearing silk. Do you follow me, Yit Kanq-Sen?” He twisted his wrist, just a little, and Sen’s muscles screamed. Źu winked again. Tohoho, we’re friends ain’t we? Friends sharing a little joke. Sorry, the punchline was a little tortured.

  The two men stood there. The priest cleared his throat. Sen got the message. They’d told him something, even if they hadn’t meant to: if the Sparrows were involved, it was political. Really political: not police department office politics or the priesthood slapping around the edges of relevance political, but top-level bloodshed political. Whether they wanted to or not, they’d told him exactly what he’d come to find out: he was onto something. Problem was, it was onto him. He hobbled away, shaking with pain and the eyes of all three men watched him go.

  When the cold and numbness rolled back, Yat found herself strapped to a chair by thick cellulose bindings. The room was well decorated with biowork, planters and ant farms over every spare piece of wall or floor. The chair was very heavy. She didn’t remember sitting in it. She tried to shift her weight but it didn’t budge. The whole floor rocked back and forth, gently—she’d bet good money she was somewhere below-decks on the Kopek.

  “It is bolted to the floor,” said Ajat. “Good lu—”

  Sibbi raised a single finger, and her bodyguard fell immediately silent. The older woman was smoking another cheroot. The blue-green smoke had an acrid, chemical reek—not kiro, bu
t something adjacent: maybe a proprietary blend? A hard thing to wrangle, but the woman definitely had good alchemists at her disposal: it wasn’t a mad thought. Being tied to a chair by a pair of pirates, now that was a mad thought.

  Yat had been scared and tired and empty for days: now she was mad. Mad at crooked cops and hateful cops and damned impossible criminals. Mad at her father for going off into the sky, mad at her city for not having her back. The room crawled with gold threads: every living thing had them, and they floated from place to plac, chasing down other threads and merging with them, as though the whole room were networked. She grabbed a nexus of gold from a cactus flower, and pulled it into herself. All the room was linked up, and she pulled on every leaf, seed, ant. A surge of energy filled her, and the flowers began to wilt as if—

  It stopped. The threads drew back inside their homes, and Sibbi shone like a beacon. Captain Tiryaźan took a deep drag, blew it out, then smiled. Her canine teeth were sharp, like a dog’s. Yat had seen enough sharp teeth in the last day to last the rest of her life, though these were very different from the Ladowain sharpening: just the canines, done with some sort of bone growth stimulant. It was a Dawgar thing, though you didn’t hear much from them any more: Ladowain had stripped and salted the islands for their part in the war, and Hainak had been too new and fragile to help.

  “Very good,” said Sibbi. “A little rough, but workable.”

  She waved the stogie at Ajat, then laughed. It was a surprisingly warm sound—a lively nicotine chuckle. She had a network of laugh lines around her mouth and eyes that were almost grandmotherly.

  “And you said she couldn’t even grow a pot plant,” she said.

  “She couldn’t,” said Ajat. She leant against the side of an ant farm and waved a lazy hand. “Gods’ honest truth, yesterday she was as magical as a goat shit. Maybe a twinge here and there, but it was all kiro.”