by Sparks,Cat
The entirety of Mohandas’s table’s polished surface hadn’t been glimpsed in years. A small rectangle remained defiantly visible, the spot where the housegirl placed a tray bearing fresh tea or coffee every hour—sometimes even orange juice when oranges could be found—whether he was sitting there or not. He measured the passage of time by beverage. It was mid-afternoon when tea became red wine. Sundown was marked by aperitif. Port when it was time to go to bed.
Mohandas took his evening meal in the lavishly appointed dining room; its walls hung thick with tapestries, an oppressive crystal chandelier dipping low above the table. The glittering centrepiece did not give light, but it served to impress the wealthiest of his clients whom he met for discussions concerning important matters: safer trade route deviations, border tariffs, tax hikes, and those ever-present, pesky Sand Road warlords. Around his table, traders shared their commiserations at all the many elements they could not control.
Only not today. Not yesterday, nor the week leading up to it. Not since Angels started falling from the sky. First it was just one, then others. More than he had ever thought were up there. Each one that fell made the town more crazy. Reliquary was reliquary and brought out the greed in all. Nobody yet knew what the things were worth, what sort of prices the fortress cities might pay for their retrieval, whole or broken. Nobody but Mohandas—he knew only too well. The sight of the falling things filled him with deep dread.
A soft tap at the door made him jump out of his chair. He relaxed when he saw it was only Vette with her tray of honey-jasmine tea and cubes of cheese. She gave that rough curtsey all the outer homestead girls offered to those they knew to be their big town betters.
He’d half been expecting one of his market spies with reports of yet another Van pulled in to the already overcrowded caravanserais. Vans had been limping in thick and fast ever since that first blasted Angel fell. The cursed things had shaken the length and breadth of the Sand Road loose from its senses. Stirred up the tankers and sent them veering in dangerously close to Heel.
The girl set down the silver tray, curtsied again, and slipped out, silent as a mouse. Mohandas’s thick, jewelled fingers reached for the dainty cup, wavered, then selected a cube of spiced goat’s cheese instead. Its flavour was more tangy than he favoured.
His thoughts returned to the pods of offshore tankers disturbed by Angels landing like pebbles in a pond. Fallow Heel was still reeling from those ripples and reverberations. The sands surrounding the Obsidian Sea were swarming thick with them. Once you’d have been lucky to catch distant sight of three or four across a week. Tankers were territorial beasts —or once had been. He’d heard tell of them ramming each other to the death, emitting ear-piercing song strong enough to kill a crew. And now, competing pods of them were offshore, so ripe for the taking that a harvest had begun, with every able-bodied wannabe sand sailor charging off, many on flimsy skiffs and blokarts barely able to hold their own against the wind.
Many were fated never to return, their widows and orphans milling listlessly around the docks. They’d eventually be selling off family possessions one by one, until all there remained to sell off was themselves.
Falling Angels, of all the cursed luck. A few days after the first one fell, he’d started thinking about the past. About the events that had brought him to Fallow Heel when it was little more than a glorified caravanserai surrounded by grubby hovels, tents, and goats. Before he’d discarded the name of his birth to reinvent himself as a trader of spices, wine, carpets, and relics both puzzling and incomprehensible to most. But not to him. He knew with certainty where such dug-up curiosities could fetch big coin. From old-world relics, he had built his empire, and all without his friends and business rivals ever suspecting the truth of where he hailed from—or how he knew where buried treasure lay. These were secrets he guarded with his life, ones that surely would have gotten him killed.
But now, Angels were falling from the sky.
Most of the ancient relic-maps he had used to build his wealth had been destroyed. Most of them, but not all. He had not been able to bring himself to part with every single one, even though he understood the risks. Such beautiful artefacts from a long-gone world. Nobody knew they existed—not his daughter, nor any of his staff. With the whole town distracted by drink and promises, he had snuck down to the docks, and he had hidden the maps in a place no one would find them.
Those Angels made him nervous. Since they’d started falling, the port was changing for the worse, becoming infested with lust and greed, streets overflowing with hooligans and drunks. His own daughter, bless her, would soon be demanding more be made of such a lucrative situation. The fruit had not fallen far from the tree with that one.
A week had passed without incident. Mohandas doubled his household guard, expecting trouble from strangers at his door. Fallow Heel was growing faster than its infrastructure could support. So many poor, so many tainted. Trouble could not be far away. But no one had come, and the precious maps had remained safe in their hiding place.
Mohandas sipped the tea the girl had brought. It had already lost its heat, but not its sweetness. He drank the rest of it without tasting, his mind slowly flooding with potential trade transactions. New players were entering the game. Old powers emerging upwards into the light. He would pit them against each other and see who’d offer more. He chewed his lip, excited by the possibilities.
He was reaching for another cube of cheese when a knock came on the door. Mohandas frowned. Vette again—could another hour have passed already? It wasn’t time for tea or a meeting, or anything else he had an interest in.
“Go away,” he shouted, returning to his tally books, briefly checking the coffee supply which had, for the second time in months, been held up at Portwine by excess tariffs.
That knock again, much harder this time. Harder and more insistent, too hard a knock for the girl who brought his drinks. Mohandas rubbed his furrowed brow. “Who’s there?” He bellowed the name of his bodyguard, expecting his hired man to rush in through the door. But nothing happened. No one came, yet someone was out there lurking in the corridor. He could hear the subtle creaking of floorboards smothered beneath a century of carpet.
= Fifteen =
It was not the first time Tully Grieve had snuck aboard the ship. He wasn’t even the first to try it, but unlike the others, Grieve had never been caught. He considered himself much smarter than your average thief and realized that if he played his cards right, the Razael could be the gift that kept on giving, so long as he didn’t get too greedy or complacent. So long as he kept his wits firmly about him.
Throughout his twenty summers, Grieve had seen some pointless things, but the Razael really took the prize. A sailing ship, like the ancient vessels moored along the coast. An ocean-ship modified and mounted onto giant casters thick enough to crush everything in their path. Or they would have, if the ship ever cast off and set sail, which it most certainly did not. The Razael was a rich man’s folly, languishing in port with its fancy wooden deck, massive masts, and neat-furled canvas sails. Built to go nowhere—not likely built in Heel at all. Different from all the other craft setting out across the Black Sea in chase of tankers. Junked-up vessels, one-fifth the Razael’s size at best; hammered platforms of rope, rail, and sail, designed to trick the wind into transportation, bearing crews across the hard, black flats to where the creatures rolled and rammed and raced.
Grieve trod silently across highly polished boards, slipping in and out of cabins when lucky enough to find a door unlocked. Each one contained old and lovely objects, the likes of many he’d never seen before, not even in the grander houses he’d robbed and raided along the coast. Houses were always burgled under cover of darkness and with extreme haste. Belowdecks on the Razael, he had the time to linger, and more often than not was too awestruck to even figure what to steal. Instead he just stood there, drinking in the glaze of
opulence. Soft carpets, tapestries, and light. Crews relentlessly scrubbing and polishing. Crews who dressed identically and never swore out loud. Men and women who kept their eyes averted, their nimble fingers away from the precious silverware.
The Razael was an anachronism. Built before Before. Old before the whole world went to Hell. Property of one of the rich, fat idiots occasionally seen strolling along the docks with his retinue of household staff and well-armed bodyguards. A showpiece, a trophy. Only one of its kind.
Putting together a uniform that would blend into the surroundings on board this vessel had been the tricky bit. Granted, the garments Grieve knocked up himself would not bear up-close scrutiny, even though he could stitch as well as any sailor, sand or sea. All his people were handy with a needle. And ropes. And blades. And guns. But if things got up close and personal, there was likely much more than his clothing to arise suspicions.
So he’d crafted strategies keeping in mind that he needed to avoid scrutiny. He’d sneak past if the colours were true, if he’d successfully memorised the patterns of the watch. Then he could lurk amongst the below deck shadows, keep out of everybody’s way.
The trick, as always, was not to get too greedy. To not go grabbing every shiny thing and stuffing it into pockets until they bulged. To pass up the gaudiest ornaments—they were far too easy to trace. Plainer fare was better, so long as he was quick. Quick was what he was best at. Quick was how he made his coin in the township he’d adopted as his own.
He ran his hand along a polished panel: wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Truth was, he’d fallen more than a little in love with Fallow Heel, and now he could feel himself falling in love with the ship that belonged to a different time and place. Wi th the fancy wooden panelling that had not been stripped and burned. How many had died to protect this piece of property? How many were going to die to protect it in the days to come? The balances of power were shifting ever-so-slightly along the Sand Road and its succour towns.
Fallow Heel had weathered well the worst of the tainted years. It had prospered long before the tankers had come, and was doing better every day, bursting at the seams with those trying their luck at a better life. Loaded with commerce, promise and, increasingly, strangers. Travellers not much unlike himself, seeking better futures, running from darker pasts. Leaving friends and families behind. He cut himself short at the beginning of that thought before it went much further than he could bear.
The uniform trick had worked so well. Grieve had not intended to linger. Not until he made an exciting discovery—a forgotten cupboard within a cupboard, located at the far end of an overlooked storage space, once stacked to the low wooden ceiling with dusty tarps and boxes of musty books, their ancient pages fused together with mould.
A hidey hole. It would not take much to clean it up, to make himself a comfortable nest. A refuge from the savagery of the docks, for when he was low on coin or owed bad people money. A place to rest and listen to the footsteps overhead. Voices, sometimes muffled, sometimes clear. The far off cries and clanging of the docklands’s blacksmith hammers.
Cracks in the wooden panelling above let a little light bleed through. He pulled the stolen ornament from his pocket and held it high in a slender beam, a delicate thing of porcelain and coloured glaze. A little girl in a floral dress with a puppy in her arms. Her face was clean, her hair in perfect ringlets. He’d never seen such a girl in all his life, but somebody would pay good coin for it. He was running through a list of likely fences when voices issued from the far side of the wall.
He stuffed the puppy girl back in his pocket, and pressed his face up close against the gap in the wooden partition, which offered the best view into the plushly appointed stateroom on the far side.
The stateroom had been empty when he’d crawled into his hidey hole to examine his stolen treasure. Grieve was certain—he always checked. Vigilance was the price of freedom—his mother had taught him that, if not much else.
His first hope was for a glimpse of the beautiful girl who he had often seen accompanying her father to the docks. She was always dressed in immaculate splendour, always snapping the head off some poor crewman, complaining about the unsatisfactory way he or she performed some menial task.
His heart sank. It was not the girl, but three young men, close to his own age, wearing the strangest garments he’d ever seen.
One with a beard unfurled a map across the table. Another with dark curls and a golden earring started berating him about it. It was not the right map. There were, apparently, other better maps.
Grieve pressed his ear against the crack but he could make no sense of their words. Eventually he lost interest. He snuggled down into his hidey hole and rolled over on his side. Time for a nap. If he was really lucky, the beautiful girl might be there when he woke.
= Sixteen =
Star heard someone calling her name. She looked up to see Anj waving furiously from up near the base of the Sentinel, not far from where the dogs were fed and chained. By the time Star reached her, Anj was in a state.
“Where have you been? You gotta see this!” Anj offered Star no choice. She dragged her around the side of the Sentinel and pointed to a slim dark opening.
Star stared at it stupidly.
“Somebody forced the door,” Anj explained. “We found it like this—Remy’s inside with Griff. There’s stairs going straight up through the centre.”
Anj stepped towards the narrow entrance. Star grabbed her. “No, wait. It’s forbidden. What if someone sees?”
“I’ve been inside already. Came out to find you. Come on, Star. Nobody’s watching. Don’t you want to see what’s inside one of those things?”
She did and she didn’t. Road law was road law, its punishments clear and cruel. The Sentinels had to be out of bounds for a reason—bad magic, Yeshie would have said. But she didn’t know what that reason was; nobody did anymore. And as long as Kristo didn’t catch her . . .
Star slipped through, close on Anj’s heels, her curiosity having gotten the better of her. Inside was dank and musty smelling. She paused as her eyes took time to adjust to the weak light bleeding down from a circle in the centre, high above a slender winding staircase.
By then Anj was already on those stairs, boots echoing loudly.
Remy stood waiting for them at the top. The last person she wanted to see. He looked like he had something he wanted to say to her, so she pushed on past up the stairs and by him, and went to stand with Griff, whose hands were resting on the biggest reliquary she had ever seen. It was an angled bench that ringed the circumference of the chamber at approximately the height of her hips. Objects were embedded into the metal at regularly spaced intervals. Knobs and switches and things like clocks with hard glass surface coverings. She’d seen such relics at Bluebottle’s grand bazaar. Old men salvaged them from the desert.
Directly above the angled bench was the biggest, thickest window she had ever seen, offering a clear view across the top of the Vulture, all the way to the brooding, storm-riddled horizon.
“Amazing, huh,” said Anj. “It goes all the way round. You can see in all directions.”
Star placed her hand upon the glass. “Doesn’t look like a window from the outside.”
Anj nodded. “Amazing, like I said.”
“There’s more,” said Griff. “A flashing light. Wasn’t flashing when we first came in.”
They clustered around to stare at it, a small thing blinking red like a flaming jewel.
“What do you think it means?” asked Star.
Griff shrugged.
Anj moved on, already bored with it. “I’m gonna stay up here and watch the storm.”
“What if Benhadeer or Kristo finds out?”
“They won’t. They’re busy dealing with that lot. Trying to keep everybody calm.”
Star stared down at the Vulture, wondering not for the first time how it had come upon its name. If anything, it looked more like a spider crouched and ready to pounce.
Remy moved up to stand beside her. “Storm clouds are beautiful,” he said.
Star nodded. She wasn’t looking at the clouds, but at the many and varied colours of people’s sand cloaks. A range of hues from pink through browns and greens to dusty ochres, all illuminated by a mix of storm and lantern light. It was much more interesting viewed from above than ground level.
“Never seem them like that before. Never with all those colours.”
Remy was talking about the clouds, not the clothing, but she nodded anyway.
Anj cut in. “Pooh, something stinks in here, like some animal died—Hey, what’s going on down there?”
Griff stopped what he was doing and went to look. “Shit. Down below. Someone’s messing with the camels!”
No further words were necessary. Everybody ran for the metal staircase, coming close to stumbling in the dark. Tentatively, they felt their way through the ground level’s dim light, then squeezed through the jimmied doorway, one by one.
Griff ran off to alert his fellow riders. They’d be lying around somewhere together, drinking or sleeping or gambling away their coin. Lucius at least would have his wits about him. Remy vanished into the milling throng. Probably going to fetch his precious rifle. Star and Anj headed directly for the camel thieves, not thinking about what might happen when they got there.
“Look!” Up ahead, just inside the periphery stones where the hobbled camels grazed, was a spill of greasy lantern light. Both girls headed straight for it.
“Who’s there? What are you doing?” Calling out was pointless, but it didn’t stop them.
A lantern lay on the ground on its side. Weak illumination did not reveal much.