by Col Buchanan
He offered no response.
‘Then come.’
*
‘A real living Rōshun right here in Mashuppa,’ the Archon said, climbing the steps ahead of him. ‘It isn’t often an Archon is so impressed with his company.’
‘You have heard of us then.’
The man’s thin face appeared in the hatchway he had just disappeared through, flashing his perfect teeth. ‘Stories of the Rōshun’s exploits are sold here throughout the four peaks. Exiles, just like us. They are popular amongst the younger generation, as all fanciful things are.’
Ash followed the Archon up through the open hatchway, finding himself buffeted by the wind on an airy platform on the pinnacle of the roof. He saw how the Archon’s office was fixed to the side of the superstructure’s hub like a blister. From here the vertical span of the Sky Bridge was close, a mammoth spike of white that shot up into the sky before being lost in the haze.
The Anwis’ single hope of returning home, whatever that was supposed to mean.
He glanced down at the legs of the Sky Bridge below, arching over the blocks and parks of the city and the specks of groundcars crawling along its roads, and then back up to the vertical Bridge itself. Struck by wonder, his eyes reflected the violet arcs of light shooting along its gleaming surface.
By his side the Archon took a flask from an inner pocket and sipped from it while they studied the towering bridge together.
‘You Anwi think big,’ Ash said after a time.
‘Yes. It is our gift and our curse. We climb high and we fall far.’
‘What is it, precisely?’
At last a look of surprise on the man’s expression. ‘A ladder, of sorts. Our way home, some day very soon.’
‘Some day?’
The Archon noted Ash’s tone of disbelief, and seemed more curious than amused by it.
‘When it’s completed. Right now it climbs nine-tenths of the way out of the atmosphere, yet we struggle to grow it any taller. The gravity well of this planet is an immense challenge to overcome. To grow it this far has taken us centuries of sustained effort.’
‘But where will it lead you?’
‘Back into the void, where we can build ships for the crossing. From there to our home of Sholos, the blue moon, where we will take back everything that we lost when we were cast out so cruelly.’
Was the man high on something? His pupils were certainly dilated, his eyes more glazed with every little pull of the flask that he took. He was drinking fermented Milk, Ash realized, catching a scent of it on the wind.
‘There is a bridge like this one on the water moon of Sholos, which was used to banish our people to this planet millennia ago following the civil war, our punishment for siding with the ruling cartels and priesthood. It has been a long hard struggle to survive here ever since.’
With a scuff of his polished shoes the man turned his back on the bridge and gripped the platform’s rail tightly, leaning back against the full stretch of his arms. His eyes ranged across the brilliant sky to the sister moons hanging there in the east, ghostly in the daylight, one white and one blue.
Hairs rose on the back of Ash’s neck. In that moment he realized the Archon was sincere in all that he said, and that the Anwis’ history was more than simple myth-making. He rocked on the balls of his feet, feeling as though his life’s horizon had suddenly expanded beyond his reckoning. Ash thought of the lights on the moon he’d seen at night through a scope. People really lived up there, then. A whole living world hanging in the sky all this time.
‘I understand you Anwi are not shy of exiling people yourselves,’ Ash ventured, feeling a desire to know more.
‘The Fallen Leaves, you mean?’ The Archon tilted his head around to regard him with his intelligent gaze. He was rubbing his thumb and forefingers together absently, and the skin around them glimmered with bands of colour. ‘Yes, regrettably we must exile our own from time to time. Mostly, though, it is for their own good.’
‘You would say that.’
‘Yet still it remains true. Even my own brother was cast out in such a way more than a century ago. And he went on to found the greatest empire on this planet.’
‘You mean Nihilis?’ Ash said in surprise. ‘The first Patriarch was one of yours, an Anwi?’
But the Archon only twitched his lips and looked away, offering no more.
Even for the open mind of Ash it was almost too much to take in. At last he sensed the true age of this man, hearing it in the measured strokes of his words, which were almost glacial in their certainty, centuries of time borne behind them. Yet otherwise the Archon hid his years well, as though the near-immortality of the Elect was a preciously guarded gift, best hidden from sight.
Perhaps their influence upon the world was much the same.
Wind rippled their clothing and squeezed their eyes into squints. It was bitterly cold up here, though the Archon seemed oblivious to its touch. Ash had never stood this high before on anything made by his fellow humans. The limbs of the Sky Bridge alone made the sky-steeples of Q’os seem little more than toys in comparison. He leaned forward against the rail and looked around at the far horizon, wondering if it wasn’t curved a little like the big round ball the world really was, then fixed his stare on the two moons again, his heart beating fast.
‘My friend is no spy,’ Ash said into the wind. ‘You have sentenced an innocent man to death, a good and honourable man.’
‘That may be. But my hands are tied. It is done. There is no changing it now.’
‘He still breathes. You only have to give the command.’
The Archon peered at him closely. ‘Your friend is anything but innocent, farlander. He is immune to truth drugs for one thing. And no matter how certain the Committee say they are, he’s no Mannian agent either. Not if he’s working with a Rōshun.’
‘He has his secrets. That does not make him a spy. He was here in the city for a personal matter on my behalf. If anyone is responsible, he stands before you now.’
‘Why are you here, farlander?’
‘To fulfil a promise to a grieving mother. That is all.’
The Archon lowered his gaze and raised a finger to his pursed lips to stop himself from speaking. He turned his back to Ash, a powerful gesture in front of a Rōshun with motive enough to attack.
‘How did you get here, I wonder?’ he mused aloud. ‘Your friend remains quiet on the subject. I doubt very much the Alhazii Guildsmen would have agreed to it. I should inform them to search every ship in the port.’
It was bait, though Ash went for it anyway. He grabbed the man’s arm and yanked him around fiercely. Emotion blazed at last in those glazed eyes of his. Heat seemed to pulse in waves from his body.
Snapping the cuffs of his suit, the Archon spoke before Ash could. ‘In these books I mentioned, this fluff about the exiled Rōshun, they forever claim that no one is safe from the reach of the Rōshun vendetta. I wonder though. Could you kill a Dreamer if you had to? Could you kill me, do you think, if it came to it?’
So it was a test he was after. A challenge for his powers.
‘As easily as any other.’
The Archon’s pupils were two vanishing points beneath his brows, drawing from deep within himself.
‘How, may I ask?’
Ash said nothing, though he allowed a smile to spread across his lips. Just as the Archon opened his mouth to speak Ash slapped him hard and fast across the cheek, and in the same motion drove his pointed fingers at his larynx, stopping just short of the skin, just short of killing him. The Archon blinked in surprise.
‘Timing,’ Ash breathed.
‘I could repair the damage quickly enough, you know.’ His voice was strangled with self-restraint.
‘Not if you were falling too,’ said Ash, glancing to the rail at the Archon’s back. His palm was tingling and the Archon’s cheek was red with the print of it. The man’s ears too had turned crimson.
‘You go too far, child of Honshu.’
; ‘Or not far enough.’
A sudden shout that was a roar. It hit Ash in the chest like the kick of a mule and sent him tumbling backwards across the platform. His burnoose fluttered for a moment then lay still across his heaving chest.
Red pain flashing across his vision. Ash shook his head to clear it, then flipped to his feet with a practised ease.
Keep pushing.
‘If you have any conscience at all, the fact that he is an innocent man should mean something to you.’
‘An appeal to my conscience. What an interesting choice of tactic.’
‘He is no spy,’ Ash said, stopping just within reach of the Archon. ‘There is no need for this.’
‘Really, farlander. You expect me to release your friend simply because it is the right thing to do? Is this truly what you came here to ask of me?’
‘Do it then for the sake of a Khosian mother grieving for her lost son. A Khosian mother facing annihilation with the rest of her people, at the hands of a monster you released upon the world.’
‘Enough of this,’ snarled the man, and it was as though a mask had slipped from his face, all semblance of politeness fled.
Footsteps on the ladder now, guards climbing up to join them as though at some hidden sign. Without hurry they spread out across the platform to surround Ash, half a dozen of them with their stunsticks crackling in their hands.
The Archon’s thin lips stretched into a smile, and then he vanished in a flash of white light. Ash blinked, thinking it was some kind of trick. He glanced up to see the man perched on a high terrace above, looking down at him as though Ash was his prey while the guards did the dirty work of closing in.
So it had come to this already.
One of the guards stepped carefully behind Ash clutching a pair of manacles, while the others held out their stunsticks ready to strike him down. He offered no resistance, for his memories of getting hit by one of those things were fresh in his mind.
‘Do one thing for me then!’ Ash called out as he held his hands behind his back, allowing them to manacle his wrists.
‘And what is that, farlander?’
‘Stay the execution of my friend at least. Meer is more useful to you alive than dead, I promise you.’
It was the one thing he had come here to achieve.
‘Fine then. I will consider that much.’
Roughly the guards marched him towards the hatch. Before they could shove him down the steps, the Archon shouted back one last time.
‘Tell me, assassin. I sense that you’re dying, am I right?’
Ash stopped in his tracks. He looked up over his shoulder at the figure squinting down at him, taking another sip of Royal Milk.
‘We all die. Even you, old man.’
‘Don’t count on it,’ the Archon called back. ‘I intend to live forever!’
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Holding Fast
‘Ash! So you’re the reason they dragged another bunk into the cell.’
The hedgemonk Meer stood trembling in the centre of the cramped room with his reddened eyes staring out from swollen, battered features.
‘They roughed you up, I see,’ said Ash, turning the monk’s face one way then the other, noting the cuts and bruised impressions.
Meer’s eyes watered with emotion as he spoke. ‘Some. When they found out they couldn’t simply raid my mind. I’m fine though.’
Ash nodded. He had been interrogated too but only half-heartedly, as though they expected an old Rōshun to offer them nothing. They hadn’t even bothered to get rough with him. Relaxing where he stood, he studied the small cell he had been roughly cast into: the surfaces of steel sheeting on its walls, the caged light embedded in the ceiling. A bright square of daylight shone from the rear wall; a deep-set window which he stepped up to smartly, finding thick glass held there behind a grille of steel.
Tentatively, Ash leaned forward and peered through the scratched glass and saw that they were in one of the legs of the Sky Bridge with the city arrayed far below.
He was tired now. And his head pains had finally returned for their daily hammering. An effect, it would seem, of being floored by the blast of the Archon’s voice.
‘How are you holding up?’ he asked without turning from the scene outside.
‘Oh, just fine,’ quipped Meer. ‘Save for the matter of an execution hanging over my head.’
No wonder he was so frayed at the edges, waiting here in solitary confinement to be killed. At least Ash could do something about that now to allay his fears.
‘I shared some words with the Archon about that. I may have bought us some time, if nothing else.’
‘Well, for all that and more I’m glad to see you, Ash. I can’t tell you how good it is to see you. But I was hoping you would rescue me from this predicament, not join me in it.’
Slowly Ash turned with a finger held to his lips. The monk blinked.
‘Eh?’
‘We must be careful what we say here. You do not really believe they placed us in the same cell out of the kindness of their hearts?’
The monk’s mouth formed a sudden O, and he looked to the walls and the ceiling with wide-eyed suspicion, tired and ragged in his filthy underclothes.
It had been hard on the man, but at least now he had hope.
‘Hold fast,’ Ash told him sternly. ‘We are not finished yet.’
*
Down in Guallo Town, the longhunter was sitting there alone when Aléas clambered up the rigging of the Falcon on the side of the gently swaying loft. Cole sat in silence, nursing a bottle of potcheen, in the torrential tropical rain falling from the cloudy night sky, a rain which had been falling on and off for the last few days, announcing the beginning of the rainy season.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked the brooding longhunter, feeling somehow responsible for the man now that Ash and Meer were both gone. Carefully, Aléas stepped up onto the wooden platform that ran along the top of the silk loft, its surface wet and slippery.
Cole shifted where he sat in the gloom, and looked up at him with his scarred brows dripping above hooded eyes.
‘Aye, lad,’ he said with a slurred voice. ‘Just thinking is all.’
‘Something bothering you? You’ve been up here for hours, man.’
A sniff. A wipe of his nose.
‘My family. Just thinking about my family.’
Aléas shook his eyes free of rain and felt the burnoose soaking through to his skin. Drops burst against the glass bottle as the longhunter raised it to his lips. The fellow was managing to sway drunkenly even though he was sitting down.
For weeks now he had seen this man wave away alcohol with a dark haunted look in his eyes whenever it was offered. Yet here he was, hammering the strongest of homebrew into his belly, so insensible that he didn’t even know to come down out of the rain.
‘Thought you didn’t drink.’
‘I don’t,’ grumbled Cole, hanging his bald head in the rain. He hadn’t even bothered to wear his hat.
Aléas crouched down on one knee and wondered what he was going to do with the man. Since emerging from the Edge with the rest of the survivors, something had clearly changed in the long-hunter. He had fallen prone to brooding silences, as though he had much to work through within himself; insular moods that seemed to only worsen with the prolonged spells of inactivity on board the Falcon. A man of action, used to keeping himself busy two steps ahead of his own reflection, now trapped on a ship with a crew of strangers all pretending to be Alhazii, facing inner demons stoked to life by his close shave in those tunnels of the kree.
‘What is it you want anyway?’
A trembling hostility in his voice now. Aléas knew an angry drunk when he saw one. Maybe it was the reason he had been forswearing alcohol until now.
What to say though, without provoking him any further?
‘Time to come down, don’t you think?’
‘So now you’re my mother, is that it?’
‘You sai
d you’d help me when the rains came, and now they’re here. I’ll need that help any time now. Maybe it’s best if you keep your head straight.’
A scrape of boots. The man staggering to his feet and swaying wildly. He faced Aléas crouched further along on the catwalk. ‘I don’t need lecturing from the likes of you, boy. A kushing Mannian pup barely plucked from the tits of your bitch mother.’
‘You’re drunk. You don’t mean that.’
The longhunter staggered back a step merely to hold his ground.
‘I said I’d help you and I will,’ he grumbled, and swiped the empty bottle in his hand at the mountains over the town. ‘What was Ash and Meer doing up there anyway? What’s with all the secrecy, eh?’
‘I told you already. He means to restore his dead apprentice.’
‘What?’
‘He means to restore his dead apprentice.’
‘You’re all moonbat crazy, you know that?’
‘I won’t argue with that.’
‘So . . . you know this apprentice of his?’
‘Yes. Nico was my friend.’
The longhunter tried to straighten.
‘Nico?’
‘That was his name. Nico Calvone.’
Cole took a few lurching steps towards him, his face screwed tight by rage. ‘You think that’s funny? You hear me kushing laughing, boy?’
‘I don’t follow.’
Aléas flinched as the man hurled the empty bottle at him, and watched it bounce off the catwalk instead even as Cole slipped and tumbled over the side after it, shocking to witness, even as he lunged and swept out a hand to grab the man but too late, too far away.
‘Cole!’
Below him, the longhunter bellowed a curse in Khosian from where he dangled in the rigging of the loft. With a twist of fate his legs had snared within the ropes so that he hung over the long lethal fall to the ground.
‘Be quiet, will you!’ Aléas hissed down at him. ‘We’re supposed to be Alhazii here, you fool!’
‘Blah-raddy-yah-yah-yah.’
Drunk beyond sense and reason, the young man thought to himself with a sorry shake of his head.
Thankfully the neighbouring ships of the skyport were dark tonight, though soldiers had been stationed not far from the Falcon in the shelter of a large tent, while others stood in the rain around the grounded vessel. They had been there ever since the searches had begun of the port following Ash’s capture in the city. Only the medico Shin’s quick work had held the searchers at bay for this long, after she had smeared the skins of the crew with a poultice to replicate the visible effects of Purple Fever, and then declared the ship under quarantine, no one to enter or leave. Fear of the fever had stopped the Alhazii from boarding the ship for inspection, but still they waited and watched with obvious suspicion from afar.