The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  On the way back to the workshop, Shilly reflected that, although their packs might be light, she and Sal were rich in other ways. They had friends and accomplices all through the town; they helped out in myriad small ways, from purifying water to treating minor ailments; they were making progress in working out how they fitted into the world. They would be missed, just as she would miss her home.

  The greatest treasure they owned lay in their heads and their hearts. Nothing could take that away from them, no matter where they went or what they did. Golems and ghosts had tried in the past, and failed; Highson Sparre's Homunculus—or whatever it was—would fare no better.

  Later that night, when Tom had fallen into a heavy sleep broken by the occasional snore, Sal removed himself to a dark corner of the workshop and squatted on the earthen floor. Their evening meal—rabbit fried in local spices with a side dish of seeds and nuts marinated in honey, washed down with a glass of clear white wine that had been given to them a year ago by a grateful customer—roiled in his stomach like surf on the sands. He had to try something before giving in to his fate.

  Shilly had been busy all evening, rummaging through Lodo's recipes and old notes; some last-hour concoction, he presumed, that they would deliver when they set out the next morning. Even now she fussed and bothered among Lodo's tools.

  Sal closed his eyes and blotted her out. She was still there, but he wasn't paying her any attention. He did the same to Tom and the rest of the workshop, until he was just a point of awareness floating in the blackness behind his eyes, breathing slowly and deeply.

  When he had the rhythm right, he began to visualise.

  He stood on the boundary between sea and land, but it was no ordinary beach. The sea glowed like the sun and the land was molten with power. The air crackled. He breathed deeply of it, and strength filled him. His skin felt as transparent as glass, as hot as a lantern left burning too long.

  Highson Sparre, he called, where are you? He pictured his true father's face as he had last seen it: brooding eyes, broad features, skin as warm as dark honey. He took the lines of those features and bent them around a simple charm. The world was seeping into him with every breath. Wherever Highson was in the world, the charm would help him to know of it. He poured all his energy into the effort.

  Highson, save me the trouble of leaving and answer me!

  A fluttering of wings distracted him. The face dissolved. A burning bird with bones of charcoal circled him, trailing flames. A sea creature made of stone surfaced from the fiery ocean and landed with a crash. He irritably waved them away with a flex of his will. They were symbols: the sea of the Sky Wardens, so familiar to him in his everyday life but always a reminder of his fugitive status; the bedrock of the Stone Mages, who had sent him back to the Strand rather than shelter him from his enemies. That he routinely bypassed the usual teachings and went straight to the source, the borderland of stone and water, fire and air, proved that they were conventions only, and neither essential nor dangerous to cross.

  They had, however, successfully distracted him. No matter how he tried, he couldn't quite reassemble Highson's image. It eluded him. Or the charm refused to accept the image, and he could only think of one reason why this might be so: if his father was no longer in the world, then the charm would never work no matter how hard or often he tried.

  A black sun rose over the burning sea, casting rays of darkness across the land. Burning bird and stone sea creature fled before a rolling hum that grew louder the longer Sal persisted. He knew that sound. He had heard it too many times to ever mistake it. It came from the Void Beneath, and it meant that he was trying too hard. He retreated immediately, unravelling the illusion as he went. The hum faded back into the ebb and flow of his breath, and the darkness of the black sun became the red-tinged oblivion of his closed eyes. The charm dissolved.

  It was odd, then, that the feeling that he had been getting close to something remained. Not to his father, but to the tear that had opened in the world, somewhere…

  “No luck, huh?”

  He opened his eyes to see Shilly watching from a position directly in front of him. Time had flown. The glowstones she had been working by were yellow and dim, almost depleted.

  “No,” he said, unfolding his legs.

  “Worth a try.”

  He sighed. The thought of leaving made his insides tremble with both excitement and fear. And now he was tired, too. He should sleep. They would get precious little of it over the next few days.

  “I keep remembering Larson Maiz,” he said. “How must it feel to die of fright? I don't want that to happen to anyone I know. To you.”

  She reached out to cup his cheek. “We all die someday, Sal. Yesterday's people are tomorrow's ghosts. And we can't stay hidden here forever.”

  “I know, but…” He stopped, unable to find the words to express what he was feeling. “We'll have to be very careful.”

  “Don't worry about me, Sayed,” she said. “Or yourself. I'll be so terrified nothing will get within a hundred metres of us without me noticing.”

  Her face was just visible in the yellow warmth of fading glow-stones. Her words did reassure him, even though he knew that, like himself, she had little idea of what they were heading into.

  “I love you, Carah,” he said, knowing that she returned his love as fully as it was offered. Whatever happened, he could depend on that.

  When he finally slept, he dreamed of the road moving under him as rapidly as the wind, as it had for most of his life before coming to Fundelry. Dafis Hrvati, the man he had thought was his father—who had raised him and loved his mother; who had protected him when she was taken from them by the Syndic and imprisoned in the Haunted City; who had brought him to Fundelry in a vain attempt to save him from his wild talent; who had died at the hands of the Alcaide in order to set him free—rode alongside him. His tanned, weathered hands firmly gripped the steering wheel. He smiled at Sal, and winked.

  Sal woke with tears on his cheeks. The feeling of loss lingered, and grew stronger as their journey began.

  “There is power in blood, just as there is power in air and fire, water and stone. No one would deny it, but only the most desperate would use it, and even then not willingly their own.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 195

  Chu led Skender up a staircase that circled a central column no wider than his head. It was difficult to talk, and he had plenty of questions. His knees and back were getting stiffer with every turn around the spiral. As a result, his frustration levels were high and rising.

  “What does this place have to do with mining?” he called to her.

  “Wait and see,” returned her muffled voice.

  He ground his teeth together and kept climbing, trying to work out the solution to the puzzle. Her reticence on the subject of his mother was almost total. Apart from sly hints and digs at his ignorance, she had very little to say at all, even about their deal and the so-called freedom he was supposed to help her attain. She wandered the streets of the walled city without restriction and no one questioned her or got in her way; she seemed, on the face of it, to be as free as he was.

  “You've been down in the caves,” she had said to him as they left the coffee parlour and headed off through the winding streets. “Did you notice any sign of digging?”

  He hadn't, but he'd been looking for signs of his mother, not evidence of the city's mineral wealth or lack thereof.

  “You're lucky you didn't stumble across one of the sewage channels,” she told him with a malicious chortle. “Then you'd have seen firsthand what we normally use the old tunnels for.”

  For that much he was very grateful. “So you mine elsewhere, away from the city?”

  “Look up,” she had said. The usual patchwork of drying clothes and banners briefly allowed a glimpse of the sky. “What do you see?”

  “Birds,” he'd replied, noting numerous gliding shapes against the bright pale blue, circling and looping in mathematical spirals. “We
re you expecting something else?”

  She'd laughed again and told him to stop dragging his heels. “You're about to see something stone-boys like you only dream of.”

  He bit his tongue. Since then, he'd seen little more than her backside as she preceded him up the stairwell. Attractive it might be, but that wasn't what he had come to Laure for.

  Just as his patience reached its limit, she stopped. A creak of wood and inrush of air followed. He breathed deeply, not realising just how close it had become in the narrow stairwell. She moved again, climbing two more steps then suddenly lifting her legs upwards, out of sight. A trapdoor. Her hand thrust down at him. He brushed it aside and hauled himself through the square hole without assistance, ending up on his hands and knees on a roof high above the city. The sky was brilliant around him. A steady wind blew, as fresh as a draught of clear water.

  “Almost there,” she whispered in his ear. One hand pressed him down when he tried to stand. She crouched next to him, peering around a nearby chimney. Her full lips were so close to his ear that he could feel her hair brushing his neck. “You have to be quiet for this last bit. Can you manage that?”

  He nodded stiffly.

  “Good. Follow me.”

  She scurried off, moving in an awkward crouch from chimney to chimney, keeping her head low. He followed her lead, noting that they were atop one of several tall thin buildings at the heart of the New City. Just visible in an intersection two blocks across was a yadachi perched on the top of a pole, red robes trailing beneath him like a flag. To the north, east, and west, sprinkled with the yellowing remains of the Old City, sloped the sides of the depression Laure occupied; to the south was the smooth blankness of the Wall, as brooding as a thundercloud. Beyond that, invisible, lay the eerie chasm of the Divide.

  He noted that birds flew over the Divide as well as the city, circling all along the length of the mighty chasm to either horizon. What they hunted and ate was a mystery to him…

  Except they couldn't be mere birds. For them to be visible at such a distance, their wingspan had to be huge.

  “Down.” Chu squeezed him beside her in a niche between attic wall and ventilation shaft. She peered through a hole made by a missing brick, then, moving aside, gestured that he should look, too. What he saw left him breathless.

  On the next building across a young man stood strapped to a crescent-shaped canvas wing spread out above him. Several others in various stages of preparation waited nearby, adjusting buckles or checking struts, dressed in brightly coloured uniforms bearing stark geometric patterns, none of them identical. They congregated on five separate platforms stacked one on top of the other, each one sticking out further than the last. They were close enough that Skender could hear their voices coming to him in snatches on the wind. Their words, diced with the chopping blade of the wind, were meaningless.

  As Skender watched, the boy wearing the wing took a running jump for the edge of the platform and, with a cry, plunged headlong into empty air.

  Skender gasped, then mentally kicked himself. He'd read about gliders and balloons in the Book of Towers and other texts—books he doubted his guide had heard of. He should have had some inkling of what was coming; now he looked like a hick from the deep desert.

  As the boy fell, the wind caught his wing and twisted it. Skender admired the skill it took to bring it into line, to angle his glide into a tight swoop so he wouldn't crash headlong into the unforgiving face of a nearby building. Gusts tugged him to and fro until he managed to ascend above the nearest towers, then his flight levelled out. From below, Skender could see that the wing was covered with hand-drawn charms that rippled and flowed like shadow clouds in fast motion. The wing tilted, and the boy swept away over the city.

  What Skender had seen from street level—and from a distance, while approaching the city—weren't birds at all. Neither were the things over the Divide. They were all people, gliding aloft on wings and will.

  “Amazing.”

  If Chu was amused by his surprise, she didn't rub his face in it. “It is pretty cool.” She pressed in close to peer through the hole with him. Her leather outfit creaked. “You should try it up there. The air is clear and fresh. There's no smoke, no stink. You can see forever.”

  “You—?” He turned to look at her, startled for the second time. “You're one of them?”

  Her face twisted. “Used to be. Crashed my wing. Couldn't afford to pay for repairs, or for my licence when renewal fell due. Now I'm stuck here on the ground, just like you. I'd give anything to be back out there.”

  “Ah,” he said. “So that's what you meant by freedom.”

  “Yes. And you're going to help me get it.”

  “How?”

  “We'll work on that. I have a few ideas.”

  I bet you do, Skender thought. “You have to keep your side of the bargain first.”

  “Haven't I already?” Chu shook her head. Her deep brown eyes held immense reservoirs of amusement. “I assumed you would have worked it out by now. Oh well. See those gliders over there?” She pointed to the Divide. He nodded. “Watch them for a while and you'll find your answer.”

  He did as he was told, simmering at her tone. He wasn't an idiot—far from it. He was just a long way from everything he took for granted. The time would come, he swore, when he would turn the tables on her, and then she'd know how it felt. She'd be the one to feel embarrassed and stupid. She—

  He stopped in midthought when something about the distant gliders penetrated the thick mire of his anger.

  They were swooping like gulls snatching fish from the ocean. But there was no ocean, no fish. There was just the Divide, a deep wound gaping in the surface of the world, from which all manner of strangeness had been observed to emerge…

  Suddenly, in a flash, it all made sense. It was insane, but it did fit the facts.

  “The people in the gliders,” he said, choosing his words with care as he thought it through, “they're scavenging for artefacts in the Divide.”

  “And?” Her nod was purely probationary.

  “And when they find something, they dive down to check it out.” His mind reeled at the skill required for such missions. First, the pilots had to spot items of interest on the surface of the valley floor, far below. Then they had to negotiate unreliable air currents and approach closer to see if it was something genuinely valuable. Finally, since voyaging out into the Divide on foot was generally considered foolish, the most daring might try to snatch the bounty off the ground and whisk back up into the air. “I can't believe so many people would be willing to risk their lives like this!”

  “It's a matter of economics,” Chu said. “This area has always been rich in artefacts. The foundations of Laure were laid a thousand years ago, and the city was once full of metal and ceramics and other trinkets. Long since picked clean, of course, but there are deposits outside the city. And the Divide is full of such things if you know where to look. Now, I know you haven't been in Laure for long, but I'm sure you've noticed that we don't have much of anything else here. We can't grow crops because the water table is too low and what the yadachi can summon doesn't leave enough for irrigation. The ground is empty of any metals that weren't left behind by the ancients. Cattle live barely long enough to breed outside. So our only export is what we can find in buried ruins and the Divide. That means the people out there—” she indicated the flyers with a thumb, “—the miners—they're very well paid for what they do, and they play an important part in keeping the city alive. You see, now? It's not just for kicks, Skender, if that's what you're thinking. Next time you're using a fork or admiring a jewel, consider that it probably came from the Divide or somewhere similar, and ask yourself if you wouldn't do the same thing, in our shoes.”

  Her speech was impassioned. He could see that this really mattered to her, that she wasn't showing it to him just to make an out-of-towner feel small. But he still couldn't see the relevance. “What does this have to do with my mother?”

/>   “It's all to do with timing. Rogue man'kin and other creatures too weird to name are often sighted along the Divide, moving back and forth as the will takes them. We leave them well alone; some of them can be extremely dangerous. Just lately, though, there's been an increase in foot traffic along the Divide from the Hanging Mountains. What they're doing here, I don't know, but they're mean and they're in a hurry. And they're dropping things as they go.” She indicated the flyers again. “Normally there'd be just a half-dozen of them out there at this time of day. Not now. Every able flyer has been called in to take advantage of the situation. There's lots of stuff out there just waiting to be harvested. All you have to do is pick it up.”

  She sighed. “Of all the times to lose my wing, it'd have to be now.”

  There was a look of yearning in her eyes that reminded Skender of how frustrated and stifled he had been before his adventures outside the Keep. He felt for her, but his mind was simultaneously working on his own problem. He'd assumed that his mother's party had headed for the tunnels of Laure to look for the thing they sought. But if the tunnels were mined out, that was exactly the wrong place to look.

  A dark smudge on the far edge of the Divide drew his gaze and held it. Laure was half a city. Before the Divide had come along, it had been whole. Therefore, the tunnels that now gaped into empty air once connected to matching tunnels on the other side—under the forbidden Ruin called the Aad.

  Right idea, he told himself; wrong place. All he had to do was get across the Divide and under the Aad to see if he was right.

  However, Chu's description of the Ruin was still vivid in his mind. Disease; bad luck; inhabited by creatures of the Divide…

  “Judging by your face,” she said, “you've just worked out where your mother is.”