by Col Buchanan
The wolfhounds came in snarling. Marsh shot two of them. Xeno took out the remaining one with his blade. Over the fallen dogs leapt the Purdahs, hacking with their swords.
Reaching for her boneknife, Shard tried to summon a glyph, any glyph, but found her mind too shattered to focus. The action pressed all around her now. Someone bustled against her back. She heard a yell and turned in time to see the medico Curl staggering on the edge of the ravine, her hands grasping out for something to stop her.
Shard tried to reach her in time, but could only watch as the girl fell over the edge with a scream.
She scrambled to the edge and looked over the rocky lip.
Curl was hanging there from a sharp knob of rock, her feet scrambling over the rushing white water of the river far below.
‘Take my hand!’ Shard shouted down at her, but the girl was clearly terrified, and would not release her precious grip.
‘You’re going to fall into that river if you don’t take my hand!’
Curl gasped and shared a frightened glance with her. The girl’s hands were sliding on the smooth rock, her feet kicking for purchase below. With a curse, Shard tore free her heavy coat then carefully climbed down to join the young medico. She had always been a confident climber in her youth, brave too, and it came back to her now with ease. She gripped the same knob of rock so that she hung there facing the frightened medico.
‘Hey,’ she tried for lack of anything better to say.
Curl blinked the sweat from her eyes.
‘Hey,’ she gasped back.
‘I would help you up – but I seem to have squandered the last of my strength getting down here.’
‘Can’t you – click your fingers – or something – and make us fly?’
Shard adjusted her grip and glanced up at the action above.
‘No need. Look!’
Above them the renegade Contrarè were suddenly retreating along the ledge. War yells were rising from further along the trail, and Shard saw the retreating renegades toppling off the edge one by one, blood smearing their buckskins as they fell.
A great bear of a man stepped into view swinging a shortsword before him like a veteran, dressed as a Contrarè and with his skin striped red like the painted warriors who followed behind. Shard thought she glimpsed the tattoos of horns on either side of the huge fighter’s head.
Like a man possessed, the giant was tearing into the enemy Purdahs now, hacking with his blade and fist until the few survivors broke and fled in disarray.
Grit rained on Shard’s head. Blinking her eyes clear, she looked up once more to see a handsome Contrarè man looking down at them over the edge, studying her with a pair of brilliantly blue eyes.
‘Hey-ho!’ he greeted them both warmly. ‘Can I help you up?’
*
‘You’re Bull, the pitfighter from Bar-Khos!’ declared the medico Kris in obvious surprise, addressing the big man who had just saved them all, dressed as a native yet bearing the tattoos of a Khosian soldier. A deserter perhaps.
His face was certainly mashed and scarred like that of a professional fighter. His receding hair was growing long at the back, and he indeed had the horns of a bull tattooed on his temples.
‘I was,’ he answered. ‘Now I’m Strutting Bull of the Longalla.’
‘I’d heard you had fallen at Chey-Wes,’ said Kris.
‘I fell, aye. But then I got up again.’
The big man Bull sounded tired. Dark rings circled his eyes as though he had not slept in some time.
‘You’re Red Path warriors,’ the captain realized, addressing the group of red-striped Contrarè. The captain was still shaking like the rest of them, still trying to find her bearings now that the fight was over, the blood cooling. To Coya, she said, ‘They protect the tribe and the Windrush from hostiles.’
The blue-eyed Contrarè man nodded, glancing again at Shard. ‘We have been tracking those renegades and scouts ever since they entered the forest.’ And he glanced back at the group of Contrarè behind him, dispatching those of the enemy still alive, then gazed down at the stooped form of Coya. ‘And you must be Coya Zeziké. Here to speak with the elders of the council.’
Coya was using a sword as a crutch now. His face was streaked with dirt and blood, his blond hair sprouting up like the nest of a bird – yet he grinned wildly.
‘Ah, you’ve heard then.’
‘Hard not to,’ replied the big man Bull. ‘They’re beating bark all across the forest with the news of it.’ He finished wiping the blade of his shortsword clean with a rag of enemy clothing, and he shoved the weapon back into its sheath.
‘Come,’ he declared, and slapped Coya’s shoulder hard enough to make him stagger. ‘We’ll take you to Council Grove ourselves. We’re almost there.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
City of the Lost
‘First time in Mashuppa?’ asked the young Anwi woman in the tan overall leading the way.
‘Is it that obvious?’
The woman shrugged a bony shoulder, disturbing the flow of golden hair that lay upon it. ‘Every time I show a new Guildsman the city, their expression is the same.’
Her voice was muffled when she spoke. She wore a white mask over her mouth and nose, just the same as the one that Ash now wore at her insistence. It was to help him breathe better, she had claimed, though it only made it harder to inhale the thin air of the city; a remedy, then, for the foulness of the air here, which seemed to hang like a sickly miasma over the streets, scratching on the back of his throat as he breathed, like the notorious Baal’s Mist back in the imperial capital of Q’os.
The Anwi woman had been assigned to Ash in the gate house as some kind of guide, though he was wondering now if something had been lost in translation, for she seemed to be more than that, a minder perhaps.
No Alhazii to be permitted into the city without a guide, she had told him matter-of-factly upon meeting him, before leading the way to the only hotel that foreigners were allowed to stay in, the Guallo’s Rest.
And so now she led the way with her long strides eating up the distance, and Ash hurried to keep up with her.
‘Nice sword,’ she commented briskly.
‘Ceremonial, mostly.’
‘You Alhazii do seem to love your big knives.’
‘A weakness, I know.’
They walked on through the cold night streets with Ash staring around him like the Guallo that he was, realizing how poor Meer’s meagre descriptions of the city had truly been.
Between the circle of peaks, the caldera of Mashuppa was huge enough to swallow a city, and indeed it looked as though it had done just that, for it was choked by the illuminated buildings and roads which filled its bowl-like depression entirely, spreading up over its rim and spilling out onto the rounded peaks; a thriving city in the sky.
Over it all the five white limbs of the Sky Bridge met above the centre point of the caldera, where they entwined like fingers which pointed skywards. One of the moons hung up there beside it, blazing in its fullness, almost too bright to look at.
Meer had mentioned that the limbs were home to the Crucible priests and the legislature of the Isles, including the ruler of the city. Ash was looking at the source of all the world’s exotics and black powder, and the place where his apprentice was supposedly growing back to life. Right there above him in the sky.
He felt a tingle run up his spine.
‘Truly something,’ he said to his silent guide. ‘Why is it called the Sky Bridge, by the way?’
‘Oh, it’s just a name.’
She was being evasive, not wishing to tell him more. But Ash needed information, a sense of context, and she was the only source he had.
‘This netting. What is it for?’
‘Didn’t they explain anything to you, Alhazii?
He blinked innocently like the greenback Guildsman he was pretending to be.
‘The nets keep the flaxon out. Soon as the rainy season comes, they’ll be upon us.�
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‘Flaxon?’
‘Yes. Another blight we must put up with.’
‘You speak good Trade,’ he observed.
‘Just part of my job. Many people speak it here so they can enjoy the imports. It’s a lot easier than Alhazii.’
‘Imports?’
‘Books and newspapers from the outside world.’
‘You people don’t leave the city much?’
She didn’t respond to his question, though she cast him a sidelong glance. Meer had already told him how the Anwi were forbidden to leave the city, and that how, if they did, they were forbidden from returning. It seemed that many Anwi were susceptible to the normal diseases of the wider world, and chose to keep themselves in isolation.
A kind of prison then, this city in the clouds.
‘They told me you all live forever on the Royal Milk that we Alhazii keep bringing you.’
‘Hah, you are thinking of the Elect,’ she said, before she caught herself and said no more.
Too many secrets, Ash reflected. These people held a monopoly in this world with their priceless exotics, and clearly it made them as paranoid of spies and infiltrators as the Guildsmen of Zanzahar.
Together, they walked along a wide thoroughfare lit by street lamps blasting a harsh white light across the black paving, through a district which seemed to be mostly warehouses and silos. A few people hurried through the bitterly cold night clad in thick clothing. Riders on long-haired mountain zels clattered by with their heads tucked down into fur collars. Ash was wheezing a little in the high-altitude air but his guide hurried through the streets without slowing, wanting to get in from the cold it seemed. With clipped warnings she kept him on the pavement, for wheeled contraptions occasionally sped along the roads in both directions with their fierce lights stabbing out at him, whining past on six-wheeled legs like splayed kree, people sitting on seats in front of an open wagon. How they moved was a mystery to him, for there were no zels drawing them along.
‘Groundcars,’ she explained, amused by his stares, though in a semi-bored kind of way, as though she had seen it a hundred times before. ‘We grow their bodies like we do our buildings. Run them on flux like everything else here. Charged coils in their bellies.’
She was trying to boggle his mind yet further, he thought.
Some moments ago Ash had noticed that they were being followed, though he was careful not to betray his awareness of the fact. As they crossed the street he chanced a glance from beneath his hood, spotting a figure some distance behind wrapped in a thick cloak. He made no comment to the woman leading the way. Stopped looking before she noticed.
The Guallo’s Rest was a brightly lit building rendered in the Alhazii fashion of low columns and archways, with balconies all across its upper storeys. It looked incongruous in its surroundings of rounded white structures that were the houses and stores of the Anwi. His minder marched him inside past the stares of two Anwi guards, and Ash took a single glance in their direction so he could study them a moment later in his mind; black uniforms and torso armour and half-helms of polished metal, their eyes covered in visors of dark glass, their belts laden with batons and holstered pistols. They wore breathing masks like everyone else on the streets.
In the spacious lobby his minder spoke to a narrow-eyed man behind a counter in their native tongue, which seemed to be a series of pops and clicks interspersed with words that had no meaning to him. Watching them talk, it struck Ash how every working Anwi he had seen so far was young of age.
His nostrils twitched and his stomach churned with hunger. Meat was cooking in a nearby kitchen.
Not yet, he told himself sharply. Get rid of this woman first.
The narrow-eyed man behind the desk cleared his throat to catch Ash’s attention.
‘No smoking of tarweed or hazii weed anywhere in the building, or in the city,’ he said with a frown as though that was precisely what Ash was about to do just then, spark up a fat cigarillo. ‘No drinking of alcohol allowed except in permitted recreational areas. No loitering in the streets unless you intend to buy something. No soliciting. Curfew for Guallos is midnight sharp. No exceptions.’
Three flights of steps and an endless corridor later, Ash finally found himself at his allocated room. His minder showed him how to operate the light by turning a knob on the wall, similar to the gas lights of Q’os, though there was no hiss of a flame, no sign of any fire at all.
She hovered in the open doorway, leaning against it, while he took in the bed and the glass doors of the balcony and the bowl of fruit on the table, waiting for her to leave.
‘Please don’t think of leaving the hotel premises unescorted,’ she said in a bland and hollow tone, and he saw then how tired she was, how much she wanted to get home to her bed.
The Anwi woman glanced at her wrist, where a device was strapped tightly around it. ‘If you need anything, my replacement will be right downstairs. See you in the morning.’
At last she closed the door and left him alone.
Ash released a pent-up sigh.
*
He locked the door with a turn of the knob and made his way to the balcony, snatching up one of the fruits in the bowl on his way past the table. With a shove he cast open the glass doors and stepped outside into the crisp night air.
The old Rōshun took a hungry bite from the yellow fruit in his hand and gazed out at the night city, chomping on its bitter flavour. The Guallo’s Rest stood in a district right on the northern rim of the caldera, underneath one of the curving legs of the Sky Bridge. Below and around him Mashuppa hummed in all its brilliance, the streets forming strings of light like the arteries of a leaf, the lights of ground-cars crawling along their straight lines. A haze filled the great bowl. Around the opposite rim of the caldera a series of chimney stacks belched smoke and flames into the night sky. Fumes poured from vents in the Sky Bridge limbs too.
Ash tilted his head, hearing the unmistakable snap of gunfire in the far distance. Sirens were wailing somewhere. Several craft circled in the air around one of the limbs of the Sky Bridge, shapes like huge birds with cones of light shooting down from them. He squinted, seeing smoke rising from the district they circled above, and the glimmers of flames from several buildings. Some trouble in the streets, perhaps. Or simply some kind of accident.
His ignorance of this metropolis in the sky was like the shroud of darkness enveloping it all.
As a Rōshun on vendetta, Ash would have spent weeks researching an urban locale he was unfamiliar with before making his move. But he knew next to nothing about this place or its people, the Anwi, and he regretted not pumping Meer for all he was worth.
Ash finished the fruit by swallowing down its core with pips and all, then returned for another, wondering how he went about finding a proper meal in this place. A voice was talking loudly in the neighbouring room. Outside the door something clattered along the corridor, wheels squeaking. The farlander flopped onto the soft bed and sighed. Despite the ongoing effects of the Milk, he was tired at last.
How to find Meer? his mind asked from where it was gently gnawing away on the problem.
Impossible to know from his present vantage. What he needed was a source of information.
Ah! he thought as he sat upright on the bed.
What he needed was a guide.
*
Downstairs in the lobby, an Anwi man lowered the newspaper from his face and squinted up with dour, watery eyes.
‘You need what?’
‘A guide,’ Ash snapped back at his new minder, and he knew he cut a fearsome sight with his dark face inked with Alhazii script. ‘That is what you are, is it not?’
‘But for your room? Why would you possibly need a guide for your room? Are you simple?’
‘Not for my room. For my view. I have no idea what anything is out there. A few pointers is all I am asking for.’
Another crazy Guallo, said the man’s expression, though he sighed as he rose and followed Ash to the stai
rs.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the man, rallying with a smirk. ‘Don’t like elevators?’ It was the same question his previous minder had asked him. Once more Ash recalled the last climbing box he had found himself trapped within, back in the Temple of Whispers of the imperial capital. The raging faces of Acolytes squeezing between the doors.
‘Better for your health,’ Ash replied as they climbed the stairs instead.
He was breathing in the rhythm of sensa again, as he had been on his way down to the lobby, gathering a tension of energy within his sternum. It was hard to cast his voice effectively these days, his vocal cords weakened by age. Back in the private menagerie of Bar-Khos he had managed it, Nico taking cover behind him as he’d frightened off the banthu like a pack of dogs. In Q’os too, surprised by assailants crashing in through the door he was meditating before, Ash had shouted out so fiercely that his attacker had dropped his weapon like a hot iron. But years ago he had been able to do much more with it, and tonight, with a buzz of youth still about him, he was hoping that was once more the case.
Back in the room, Ash closed the door behind them and watched the Anwi man step through onto the balcony. With a final long exhalation of breath he stilled himself entirely, the force inside him pushing for release.
‘So. What is it you want to know?’ came the young man’s voice from outside.
Ash snatched a pillow from the bed as he crossed to the balcony. He snapped the cloth cover so that the pillow dropped out from it, then stopped two strides behind the man, staring intently at the back of his head, twisting the length of cloth around itself.
The mood in the air suddenly changed, and they both sensed it. His minder turned slowly, flinching as he took in the cloth hanging from Ash’s hand and the glare of his eyes.
Without warning Ash lashed his face with the end of the pillowcase. Hardly painful at all but the shock of it opened the man’s eyes wide.
Before he could recover his wits, his context, Ash lashed him again but with his voice this time.
‘Where is he?’