The Dawnhounds

by Sascha Stronach

  Ajat sat with her and watched her eat. Yat went at the bowl hammer and tongs, and dared anybody to challenge her on it—the sleep had refreshed her, and she was still riding off last night’s anger.

  “Right,” said Ajat spooning herself some rice porridge from the big bowl in the middle of the table, “so you’ve got the art. That’s power, and power that can be hard to control. You want to stay sane and healthy, there’s some ground rules. First rule is don’t get caught. They kill you, you’ll pop right back up again. They change you? You’re done for. They can only extend your lifespan so far, but trust me: a century as a blank is more than enough. We haven’t even had blanks long enough to see what that does to the mind, but I don’t think we want to. ”

  The chatter and the clink of cutlery didn’t die down so much, but there was a definite movement of attention towards them—this seemed to be news to a lot of the crew, too. Their threads were mostly ordinary— some of their biowork seemed to channel and move them in odd ways, but few of them glowed like Sibbi.

  “Which leads,” said Ajat, “to rule number two: don’t let them know where you died. You’re gonna show up in the same place, in the same shape every damn time. If they know where you’re gonna be, then you’re as good as caught, ‘cept killing yourself isn’t an option. I’ve heard stories of people showing up elsewhere, but I’ve never seen it myself and I wouldn’t put weight on it.”

  “Wait,” said Yat. She didn’t want to interrupt, but she needed to know. “Does that mean people know? Who’s sending people to pick us up? The police?”

  “Sometimes,” Ajat said. “Individual officers don’t seem to know, but they don’t need to know in order to do what they’re told. You’ve heard about the Lords’ Sparrows, of course; sometimes we show up to pick somebody up, and they’re just not there any more.”

  Yat almost laughed. There’d been rumours about it for years, of course—a secret station, north of the wall or south of the wall or out in the thrice-cursed jungle. Orders from the top, no oversight. Organising a mix of well-timed accidents and suicides. They were meant to have been there before the revolution; the Lion took local boys from bad homes and paid off the family to pretend they’d never existed. Sometimes, officers would take command of innocuous operations, then they’d disappear when it came time to write it up. Every case where the details seemed off, somebody would joke the Sparrows had been pecking at it. Nonsense, of course: the force could, broadly, barely shit and wipe in the right order. You couldn’t hide something like that: there’d be a paper trail halfway to the North. The whole force would be elbow-deep in forms. Ajat saw her smirking and shot her a look.

  “Number three,” she said, spearing a piece of fish with her fork just a touch too hard, and shifting the plate, “is that all power comes from somewhere. You can move it around, but you can’t make more. If you do try to push without pulling from somewhere, it’s going to come out from you and that’s a good way to really, actually die. You get hollowed out, little adwi, you’re gone. Not even the Gods can weave without a thread.”

  She chewed on her fish, staring at nothing. After a moment, her eyes snapped back to Yat and she nodded.

  “The fourth and final rule is this,” she said, “don’t die. Don’t die permanently, but don’t die temporarily either. Every time you come back, you lose a little more of yourself. There’s some like us that are thousands of years old, and you don’t want to meet them—it takes a lot of force of will to hold onto yourself through all that; the wind has a way of breaking mountains down. It’s something you can do but it’s never something you should seek out. We’re not about death on this ship. Captain’s orders.”

  A call come out from somewhere above, then somebody rang a bell. Ajat groaned.

  “We’re moving,” she said. “I need to be downstairs. You want to learn something? Come with me.”

  She pulled her hair back, and for a moment it seemed to be almost moving on its own. She stomped over to Yat and motioned towards the staircase, towards the lower decks. The room was clearing fast: sailors leaping to their feet and running off in all directions.

  “C’mon,” she said. “It’s going to be a big jump. Sibbi wants to hit up one of our stashes in Dawgar. Not the biggest jump we’ve ever done, but not one I look forward to either. There used to be a mountain of lead down there we could use to lock in our vector, but it’s all been mined away now and we’re basically flying blind. Sibbi’s not even told me why we’re moving, but if she’s going to do a stupid thing, then I’m going to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”

  Another cry from above, then the ship rolled hard and Yat almost lost her balance. Her hand shot out to her cup, and she managed to stop it spilling. Ajat’s glow had turned almost white. The big woman extended a hand. Yat hesitated, only for a moment. She took the hand and hauled herself to her feet. Their threads seem to mingle, and that strange warmth filled Yat again. Not overpowering this time: merging with her, making her stronger. The energy was a lot to deal with, but she had braced herself for it and she managed to ride the wave. Her body had taken her halfway down the stairs by the time she even realised she was moving.

  They found their way to the glowing green heart in the bowels of the ship. It shone so bright, it hurt. The whole room around it seemed to ripple and dance. There was so much life in it: a city worth of souls all pressed together in one place.

  “Just one,” said Ajat. She sighed, and ran a gentle hand across the surface of the heart. Yat hated that they could read her threads so well. She tried not to let it show, but she knew it was written on her somewhere, intangibly, in a way she couldn’t understand but everybody else could. Ajat took her hand again, and placed it against the heart.

  It had hurt when she’d killed the parrot: an awful heat like she’d grabbed handful of Tinker network wiring. This was worse: the bird had gone into her, but she was going into the heart, and becoming less. Then Ajat spoke.

  “Focus,” she said. Yat could feel her somewhere inside the heart. She was part of the system, sending its energy up through the walls, up through the mast and onto the deck where a tremendous weight stood: Sibbi. She was pulling from the whole ship, tying it together inside herself. Yat was part of their network: power was flowing from her, but not enough to hurt her: she was just helping to guide the heart’s energy to where it needed to be.

  Yat tried to reach out, and realised she was still standing below-decks but she was seeing from the crow’s nest. Warmth filled her. She was part of the whole ship: one part of a beautiful and dense organic system all turned to a single purpose. It was exhilarating. It was—

  Focus. There’s part of your soul that wants to live only for you, and it’ll destroy you if you let it. Your goals, your wants, the wind at your back: you live like that, and reaching out will tear you in half. It’s a liar: it dresses your selfishness up and tells you it’s virtue. This is not a place for the selfish, nor pretence. Focus. To reach out is not destruction, or sacrifice: it is an act of creation. Life exists in the places between us: we make it together. Focus.

  She was inside Sibbi, feeling the monstrous energy build and build. Sibbi fashioned it into a harpoon, and threw—

  Across the waves, seeking, but something was wrong

  Across the stone, seeking, but something was wrong

  Across the reef and into the mouth of a cave where—

  The harpoon struck something. Mist poured over the gunnels, impossible mist for a warm summer’s evening. It came on fast, covered the deck. The crew vanished inside it, and Yat could only sense Sibbi: a terrifying white heat that could char timber and melt stone. In her network now, it was as though Yat could reach out and catch a passing memory, or—

  “Good work,” said Ajat. She was smiling, but there was something else to it. Yat had been inside her head only moments before, inside Sibbi’s head, inside the ship, inside …

  Something else
. Something in a cave that wasn’t what it was meant to be. The memory was gone, though: like trying to remember when she died, it just wasn‘t there. She pushed her unease aside: she’d done something, though she didn’t know what. It had made her feel strong. It had been both her and Ajat doing everything —she’d felt the woman’s thoughts inside her own head, guiding her but not steering her. She’d felt her thoughts, in Ajat’s own language, and understood them perfectly. There was a small tinker’s horn built into the wall, and Ajat was talking on it.

  “Did we jump?” she said. A tinny voice said something Yat couldn’t make out.

  “Shit,” said Ajat. She turned to Yat.

  “I need to check on Sibbi,” she said, “sometimes she’s a little brave for her own good. Jumping takes a lot—I can get myself around without ending up inside a wall but gods-forbid I try to move anybody else. I guess that’s lesson five: know your limits. I need to see my wife: she’s tried to swallow an ox again. Jumping a ship without preparing a circle—Gods, that impossible woman. ”

  It was strange to hear the word so openly. Her curiosity about jumping was flattened beneath a more earthly concern; Yat was hardly ignorant about the intimacies of the thing, but folks in Hainak tended to bury it ten-layers deep in euphemism: Oh they’re such close friends, they’re inseparable, she doesn’t have a husband but she’s well-attended. The nakedness of it stung her a little. She looked at her feet and pushed her lips together.

  Ajat left. Yat rubbed the vine between her thumb and forefinger, and felt it pulling at her: the entire weight of the ship calling out to her. Tentatively, she let her consciousness travel up it again.

  It was harder alone: she was being pulled in all directions. She could feel the sea below her: filled with life, but totally empty of magic. It had a sort of expectant emptiness, like a monstrous rumbling stomach. It pulled at her even more than the ship. She focussed, and went up the vine, to the crow’s nest. She looked down at the quarterdeck, and saw Sibbi slumped over the ship’s wheel. Her threads weren’t glowing the same way they had been: they seemed faded, frayed. Ajat rushed out to her across the deck, and put her arms around her, and magic flowed between them. Sibbi lit up: less than she’d been when Yat met her, but still something strange and fearsome. Ajat shouted an order, and another sailor took over the wheel. The wives stumbled down the quarterdeck together, leaning on each other like drunks in the earliest light of dawn. Nobody sneered at them, or made snide comments—the crew respectfully let them pass while they went about their work.

  Yat didn’t want to look at them any more. It made her angry, but angry wasn’t quite the word: she wasn’t angry at them, she was angry that nothing else was like this. She was angry at everything except them—they were like a pair of stars that curved the empty night around them. She was angry that her own love had to be temporary: dying embers of nights she couldn’t afford to remember. It was a lot to take in. There was only one thing for it: tea. She stumbled up the stairs, running her hands along the ship’s wooden sides and feeling all the little threads roil and tug.

  The bar was halfway full of sailors returning to their abandoned breakfasts and cleaning up the messes they’d made when they scrambled to their feet. There were still a lot of empty seats; Yat didn’t know how many crew they needed to keep the ship going, but it seemed to be about a third of them at any one time just to stop it tipping over. When Sibbi and Ajat came through the doors, appreciative whistles and claps rang out. Sibbi was pale and a little shaky, but she was standing on her own. She made her way to the front-end of the bar, where there was a small stage.

  “First order of business, we’re in Dawgar but this isn’t a social call. I’m taking a small crew ashore, but the rest of you stay here. We’ve got work to do, and I’m not losing a single sailor to the pub.”

  The sailors were too energized to boo, but that definitely brought the mood down. Yat reached out her new golden sense, and then recoiled: something outside the ship was very wrong. She looked to Ajat; the woman’s threads writhed around her, tight and controlled but still agitated. The plan had been to leave the ship, but something had changed. There was life outside the ship, but it was unfamiliar—familiar lines, but the shapes were all wrong. Dawgar were the pirate isles: populated by raiders and lowlives, but very much populated by people. Whatever was outside the ship wasn’t quite people, and the not-quite-ness was the most painful part of it.

  “We’ll get you some wine, you reprobates,” ray-PRO-bah-tees she said it, as though she’d never heard it aloud. It still got an appreciative murmur. Yat was trying to read her threads: she’d been inside the woman, but she wasn’t giving much away. Yat swore she felt a tiny flicker of some unnameable emotion.

  “And duqqa!” said one of the crew.

  “And feta!” said another.

  “And olive oil!” said another again.

  Sibbi waved them down, nodding, smiling despite her threads coiling up inside her like a rattlesnake.

  “Yes yes,” she said, “the usual. I know a man at the floating market. We’ve still got friends in the isles: I can get us the good stuff. Anyway, before we head out, there’s something that needs doing. We have a new crew member, so it’s time to tell an old story; let’s talk about the Old War.”

  A hush fell over the room. It didn’t seem frightened: it was almost religious. A few sailors bowed their heads and closed their eyes. Some made signs she didn’t recognise.

  “In a time before time,” said Sibbi, “there was a god for every star in the sky. You know their names.”

  “Fierce tiger,” said a woman with braided red hair. It was the first time Yat had seen her without a face-mask on. She was squat, heavily-muscled, covered in tattoos and scars.

  “Stout Ox,” said a sailor with dark skin and a shaved head: the other guard from her first day. They were small and androgynous, with a large, heavy ring pierced through the bridge of their nose.

  “Clever monkey,” said Yat. The words came to her from nowhere, but she knew they were right. There was a murmur of approval.

  “Noble crane,” said Ajat. That got a response too: a certain unspoken tension that was as much absence as action.

  “And more and more,” said Sibbi. “If we sat here telling all their names, we’d waste our days and get nothing done.”

  It felt very rehearsed, but it got a laugh. You get people wound up and they’ll laugh at anything. Tension, release.

  “In the time before Hainak, before the men of Suta, when the Sea of Teeth was calm and when all people lived with fear, there was no death. Magic flowed freely.”

  The lights dimmed a little, and Yat noticed Ajat twiddling with a vine on the wall.

  “But then men grew greedy,” said Sibbi. “The land gave enough for each man, but enough wasn’t enough. They used their magic to wage war, and left great scars in the land. The gods saw this, and wept: their gifts were never meant to be weapons. They came together, and they made a new place —they tore magic from the world of men, and moved it into their new world, and placed the doors deep beneath the ocean and at the top of the sky. Both are empty and endless, and if you fly high or dive deep enough, you’ll find yourself going from one to the other.”

  “But magic is life,” she said. “It is the thing that animates. As rivers flow to the ocean, life flows into the new place—a place of pure magic, but magic over which men have no control. As magic left the world, men died as their threads pulled them under. In time, the new place became the place of the dead. Every soul is dragged down, in time. They scrounge for scraps of magic to keep themselves together, and then they run out, and fade, and become part of the great fabric.”

  “The shearing of world from world left great wounds: in our world, and in the world of the dead, and in the flesh of the gods. They were caught in the madness of men: the gods went to war. In the lands of the dead—infinite, and filled with the endless possibility of
pure magic—they began to devour each other. Tiger was not fierce enough; ox was not stout enough; elephant was not wise enough. They exist only as shards: they twist in crane’s belly, and drive him mad. Only monkey escaped: despite all his cleverness, all he could do was survive. Now crane rules the place of the dead, and the shards of his family twist in his belly and drive him mad.”

  Well shit. It all hit her at once: the Erzau Priest outside her house with his leering bird mask, the sparrows on the road when she’d first fled the Kopek, the parrots peering in through the windows of the abandoned house where she collapsed. Birds and birds and birds, keeping an eye on her. She felt a little less guilty about killing the damned parrot.

  “But monkey ain’t done,” said Ajat. That got a cheer. “Monkey ain’t the fiercest, or the wisest, or the strongest. Monkey is a fuckup; monkey was always the odd one out, just like us. Monkey is quick, and monkey is clever, and monkey is the only one still fighting—and sometimes that’s enough. A thousand and a thousand and a thousand years have passed, more years than we have numbers for, more years than our minds can hold, and crane has never caught him. And crane sure as shit ain’t gonna catch us. The stars are in their houses, the seas are drawing back—the walls are coming down, and magic is again in the world. We’ve all had the dreams, whether we’ve got the spark or not—there’s a fire in heaven, and somebody’s gotta put it out.”

  A cheer rang out, a slamming of cups against tables. Ajat turned to Sibbi, and an unknowable look passed between them.

  “We fight the Old War,” she said, “no matter which land we came from, no matter who it was that threw us back.”

  Another cheer. For camel. For snake. For boar. For scorpion. For elephant.