by Col Buchanan
A figure fired a pistol and the dog yelped and leapt backwards, retreating into the tree line.
It was Curl, the young medico. A pistol smoked in her grip as she helped Shard to her feet.
‘Forget the zels,’ the girl shouted. ‘We’re running for it!’
Shard could barely see for the trails of light smearing across her vision now, barely think for the sensations washing through her mind. She was losing her clarity again, her concentration. For a moment she stood there lost in the brilliance of it all, captivated by every motion of the struggling fighters, every glint of steel, every single glitter on the icy snow lit by gunfire.
And then she forced herself to focus.
With her glimmersuit warming against her skin, the Dreamer swept the sweat from her face and sought out Coya in the scrum of movement around the camp. She wasn’t going anywhere until he was by her side.
Over there. Coya was down on his back with Marsh stooped over him, the bodyguard yelling something across the smoking fire – yelling out for a medico.
In a flurry of strides Shard was next to him, bending down to see Coya lying immobile in the snow with a smattering of blood fanning out from his head. It took her a long moment to finally see it, and when she did Shard could barely believe what she was looking at.
A crossbow bolt had gone through Coya’s skull from ear to ear. Inspecting it more closely, she saw that it had gone through the rear portion of the skull, right through his brain.
He’s dead, came the awful truth in her mind.
It was just as she had seen it, days ago when they had buried the Loaf, this very image flashing through her mind.
‘Is he dead?’ asked the bodyguard’s voice in her ear.
‘Not quite,’ spluttered Coya, impossibly so, and he blinked and coughed with the crossbow bolt fixed firmly through his head. ‘I’m all right,’ he gasped. ‘I’m all right.’
‘You’re pretty far from all right, Coya,’ she said down to him. But he could say no more in reply, for Marsh was already lifting his charge with a grunt to throw him over his shoulder.
‘I don’t think we should be moving him like this!’
Marsh ignored her and hurried after the majority of Volunteers who were fighting their way out now, hacking a route through the enemy up the northern side of the hollow. Someone pulled on Shard’s arm too; Curl again, still looking out for her. Shard started after them, struggling up the slope on all fours with her pack and sleeping skins gone now, her ears filled with the howls of the fighting.
In the darkness she could see everything as though it was twilight. Up ahead, a spearhead of Volunteers were pushing hard for the lip of the hollow. Behind her scrambled the rest of the rangers, firing back at enemy fighters rushing through the camp after them. Shard heard Coya’s name passing on their lips; word of his injury or that he was dead. Calls to protect him no matter what the cost.
At the very top of the hollow she paused against a tree trunk to catch a proper lungful of breath, and was startled by the sight of one of the rangers turning around to face their pursuers. More from curiosity than any sense of bravery, Shard turned round too to face them, and saw another Volunteer further down the slope, falling now from the slash of a sword, figures of the enemy clambering over him.
In anger Shard threw a blindness glyph at his attackers, feeling the strain of it now as the figures lurched sideways into the brush. More attackers surged past them though.
Do something, she thought with a surprising calm. When Shard scanned through her glyphs in her mind’s eye, she spotted right away what she needed here – a trick she had picked up from Tabor Seech himself. Willing it to life she launched the glyph down the slope at the nearing enemy and a tangle of sparks ignited in the air, and then the whole side of the hollow seemed to burst into a wave of flames, which rolled over the pursuing men.
‘Nice,’ grunted the ranger by her side, a grizzled Volunteer whose name she had momentarily forgotten. Shard swayed with sudden dizziness. Her glimmersuit was hot now, pulsing with its own heat generated from the casting of the glyphs. With the flames in her eyes she saw the old Volunteer bending down to ram his iron picket pin into the snow, and when he straightened once more there was a leather cord dangling between him and the pin. The man had marked the spot upon which he would make his last stand.
‘Better go,’ he said to her now, squinting downwards. A hound was yelping in circles with its tail on fire. The screams of men seemed to cut through the bones of her chest. For a moment Shard felt sickened at what she had done, but she hardened herself to it.
Already the rest of the party was disappearing into the dense trees beyond the hollow. She thought she glimpsed the face of Curl turning to look back, but something seemed to pin Shard to the spot, just like the old ranger by her side.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked him as the man lifted his short-sword at the ready.
‘Chin Lars of the Inner Isles.’
‘I’ll remember you, Chin Lars.’
His glance shone at her with a lifetime of meaning. But his voice only said, ‘Go. Get out of here.’
The words released her.
She ran for it in her heavy coat, her breath wheezing in and out of her chest, not daring to look back.
Gloom swallowed Shard beneath the dense canopy of the forest. Bushes snagged at her sleeves. The others were just ahead, figures darting along a trail in the snow.
You still alive? came Seech’s voice in her head, even more distant than before.
Get out of my head!
You had me worried there. What are you on anyway? Have you taken the worm juice again, is that it?
In response to her silence she heard his dry chuckle in her mind.
It won’t help you, you know. I’m still the stronger Dreamer, and we both know it.
Shard snarled as she pushed her way through the undergrowth, weak from the previous glyphs she had cast, reminding her that what he said was true.
Don’t think I owe you anything for this. I’m coming for you, Tabor. I’m coming!
Ah, Shard, he said while his voice was fading almost to nothing. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Waiting for Word
Days passed without news from Meer. Days of sweltering heat and waiting.
Ash stood on the foredeck of the Falcon in the shade beneath the silk loft, which bobbed and swayed minutely above his head in the faint afternoon breeze, the leather bindings of the spars creaking slightly, those flexible lengths of wood which fixed the envelope to the ship. Behind him, relaxing in the heat, Aléas and Cole sat against the rail posts playing a game of head-to-head Rash for matchsticks and pride.
The sunlight speared into his goggled eyes. The insects swerved in a crazy frenzy around their heads. Ash wiped sweat from his forehead, wishing they were in the coolness of the sky again.
Everywhere he looked he saw a million points of white reflecting from the jungle foliage around the settlement, and from the individual blades of grass across the field of the skyport itself, and dancing on the rippling water of the river. The air shimmered between all that he looked at.
It seemed their forged Guild credentials had passed inspection, and so far their disguises too. While many of the crew had stained their skins with the oil of rhuberry nuts, many of the older men hadn’t needed to, since they were as swarthy as any Alhazii from so much open-air flying. It helped too that they mostly stayed below decks out of the sun when not working on repairs and maintenance tasks on the ship, the shutters and hull doors flung open wide to relieve them of the stifling heat.
A monkey chattered out from the jungle canopy, and then another replied in what sounded like a burst of derisive laughter. Ash leaned forward to peer through the eyeglass once more, aimed at the top of the nearest mountains.
The clouds were gone today from the high peaks that were the Isles of Sky. Rising from them, Ash took in the arrow-straight line of white which soared straight
into the sky, craning back his head until it was swallowed in its own vanishing point.
The Sky Bridge, Meer had called it, without offering any explanation as to what it was.
Through the lens he saw flashes of violet light pulsing up and down it, as alien as anything he had ever seen.
If he looked hard enough he could see the white walls of the Anwi city up there, which appeared curved and bleached like great whalebones placed on their sides, running along the saddle between two peaks before disappearing in the haze.
Mashuppa, he reflected. City of the Anwi. City of the Lost.
Though he would never have admitted it, Ash was starting to feel the tension of their long wait now. Up there in the city, his apprentice Nico might be stirring in some way with life.
Meer had been vague about the process, knowing little about it himself save for hearsay. Only that it could be done, that certain Anwi were reborn in copies of their bodies grown in artificial wombs, and that the procedure required a great deal of Royal Milk.
Had Meer’s contacts arranged it all without trouble? Had there been enough Milk to pay for their help and to undertake the process itself? What was he doing up there – and why hadn’t he sent word?
With a quiet sigh, Ash followed the winding mountain road from the city walls all the way down to the foot of the slopes and the settlement of Guallo Town, where he caught sight of the cables rising upwards on white pylons carrying boxes up and down the slope, some of them shining with glassed windows.
The cables and the road both ended or began at a large, odd-looking building set into the perimeter wall that surrounded the lower settlement entirely. Meer had called the structure the Clearing House, the only way to get through to the city. Darkened windows wrapped around the upper storey of the structure, which leaned out over the lower half, and metallic cones sprouted from its flat roof. It seemed constructed from some strange material he had never seen before, gleaming white like the perimeter wall itself – a wall with cruel spikes lining the top of it, pointing both outwards and in. A wall intended to keep people inside it.
Watching the scene, Ash suddenly blinked from a flash of violet light nearby. Quickly he panned the eyeglass along the wall. Through the rigging of another skyship he saw something lying motionless on the spikes at the top of the barrier, covered in purple fur. A monkey, he realized.
A puff of dark smoke was drifting upwards through the air above it.
‘Huh.’
‘What?’ asked Aléas.
Ash straightened his back with a wince. ‘Tough one to crack if we had to,’ he admitted, then frowned in frustration. ‘And still no word from Meer.’
Aléas set down the cards in his hand and offered his full attention, though the longhunter Cole carried on as though he heard nothing, squinting out from under his brim at the grassy skyport around them.
‘You think he is in trouble?’
‘I think it strange he has failed to send us news yet.’
Young Aléas shrugged in that loose way of his, a slow roll of his shoulder. ‘Maybe he’s sold the Milk for himself, and now he sits up there with his Anwi lover enjoying a life in paradise, laughing at the fools who brought him all this way here on a false pretence.’
‘That is a poor joke, Aléas.’
‘We’re talking about a man who pretends to be a monk when staying in Khos so he can legally beg for food in the streets.’
Ash’s frown only deepened.
‘Look,’ interrupted Cole, nodding towards the distance.
They turned to see a figure walking between the hangars of the skyport towards the ship – a tall Anwi dressed in a one-piece suit of leather, his head covered fully by a mask and hood. He was carrying something under one arm.
‘He must be roasting alive in that suit of his,’ murmured Aléas.
But Ash barely heard his voice. He stood motionless as a statue, watching closely.
The figure was seven foot tall at least, or so he judged as it approached one of the Falcon’s crewmen standing on the ramp leading up to the open hold. Words were exchanged between them and the figure passed the leather wallet he carried under his arm to the crewman. He glanced up at the ship just then, and behind the clear glass of his mask a pair of eyes locked onto those of Ash. The skin looked dark.
Suddenly the figure lifted its fist into the air by way of a salute. When Ash merely stared back in reply, the Anwi turned and strode away.
Moments later the crewman stepped up onto the deck and passed the leather wallet to Ash.
It was Neels, a young man who seemed to scrub his teeth with a covestick every hour of the day. ‘Fellow said it was for you,’ he said with the white covestick in his mouth even now, handing Ash the thing.
With Aléas leaning over him, Ash opened the wallet and looked down at the paper note that lay within. Next to it was a hard black disc, its outer edge unevenly serrated, with the writing PASS scrawled across its surface. Something else slid into sight as he tilted the wallet for a better look. It was the smallest vial he had ever seen, a needle-like sliver of glass containing what at first he thought was a dose of Royal Milk, though it looked even whiter than the liquid they had obtained from the kree warrens.
Carefully, he read the note aloud.
‘“Success. Your boy is now growing in a . . .”’ Ash squinted, trying to read the word, ‘“in a wetwomb. There is a good chance he may be restored fully, body and mind, with a little help. Please find a small amount of properly fermented Milk I was able to obtain for your use. With it I have enclosed one pass for you to come and join me here in the city to help in the process of bringing Nico fully back. I have also enclosed an image you will be eager to see. Good news all round, Ash. You should rejoice!”’
And rejoice he did, inwardly, when he held up the image Meer had included with his letter – an image captured on a thick square of glossy paper that trembled in Ash’s hand.
It resembled one of those newly fashionable spectralgraphs that captured a person’s likeness with a flash of light. Though this picture was in colour rather than sepia, and the detail was truly remarkable. Like looking through a tiny window onto the real thing.
‘What is it?’ breathed Aléas, craning to see.
Together, they gazed down at what looked like a human foetus growing in a cloudy tank of liquid.
‘Is that him?’
‘I think so.’
‘He’s done it then!’ said Aléas.
‘Yes,’ said Ash, rocking slightly now.
Sudden emotions sparkled in his eyes as he looked up at the city in the clouds. Somewhere in those peaks Nico would soon be reborn. He could finally believe it now, having seen it with his own eyes.
‘Damned lot of fuss over one person,’ Cole growled and tossed down his cards. ‘Does this mean we get to go home soon?’
But they were both too excited to acknowledge Cole, this outsider to their affairs. Aléas was busy reading the note again to himself. When he finished he flicked the page over, and his expression fell.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘There’s another note on the other side here. In different handwriting.’ He grimaced.
‘What is it?’
‘The spelling’s terrible.’
‘Aléas, what does it say?’
‘“Your friend was captured just after he gave me this message to deliver. Authorities are calling him a spy. They say he will be executed like all spies. He has asked for your help in this matter. I suggest you make it quick.”’
They all looked to the distant form of the Anwi walking from the skyport, too far to call back. Ash gripped the wallet in his hand, with its vial of Milk and its single pass into the city.
‘Aléas,’ Ash said with a thoughtful tug of his beard. ‘Fetch my sword.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Infiltrator
Ash waited in line before the door to the Clearing House, trying not to dwell on Meer’s capture, or what the hedgemonk might be going through up there in th
e city at the hands of his interrogators. Captured as a spy, of all things; usually a crime worse than any other.
It was hard to know what could be done about the situation. Nor how they would now retrieve his apprentice, or even whether Nico was still undergoing the strange process of growth.
One step at a time, Ash told himself, as he always told himself when circumstances seemed too much to deal with in their entirety. The Milk was helping in its own way, the tiny sliver of fermented Royal Milk that Meer had gifted him in his Anwi-delivered letter, which Ash had drunk down in the previous hour.
With his head lowered beneath the hood of his burnoose, he listened to the occasional chat of the Alhazii men standing in queue before and behind him, feeling the pulses of the Milk’s rejuvenation coursing through his body, his muscles twitching with energy. The pains of his lower back and most noticeably in his head had diminished almost to nothing.
How long would these remarkable effects last? he wondered.
It was early enough that the queue for the Clearing House was still a long one, though he had been waiting here in the rising heat long enough that most of the line was now behind him. The Alhazii waited to pass through so they could take a cable car up the slope of the mountain to the city, shaded from the tropical sun by their loose burnooses and their parasols. The cars were running on the other side of the wall, dark bearded faces peering out from those with open windows, interspersed with freight cars that he assumed were being loaded from the endless wagons rumbling up from the Alhazii docks, bearing cargo from the warehouses into an open bay of the shiny white building.
From the structure’s darkened windows above, Ash could sense eyes watching him as he finally stepped up to the metal door and waited his turn to enter. His gaze took in the white surface of the building, smooth and without seams just like the perimeter wall itself. Pearlstone, Meer had remarked before he had set off on his mission. An organic substance grown into the shape that was needed.