Sag’Churok would never forget that laughter. The sound was carved into his very hide; it rode the swirls of his soul, danced light on the heady flavours of his relief and wonder. Such knowing amusement, both wry and sweet, such a cruel, breathtaking sound.
I have heard the dead laugh.
He knew he would ride that laughter through the course of his life. It would hold him up. Give him strength.
Now I understand, Kalyth of the Elan, what made your eyes so bright on this day.
Behind him, the earth shook. And the song of laughter went on and on.
The swollen trunks of segmented trees rose from the shallows of the swamp, so bloated that Grub thought they might split open at any moment, disgorging . . . what? He had no idea, but considering the horrific creatures they had seen thus far—mercifully from a distance—it was likely to be so ghastly it would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life. He swatted at a gnat chewing on his knee and crouched further down behind the bushes.
The buzz and whine of insects, the slow lap of water on the sodden shoreline, and the deep, even breathing of something massive, each exhalation a sharp whistle that went on . . . and on.
Grub licked sweat from his lips. ‘It’s big,’ he whispered.
Kneeling at his side, Sinn had found a black leech and let each of its two suckers fasten on to the tip of a finger. She spread the fingers and watched how the slimy thing stretched. But it was getting fatter. ‘It’s a lizard,’ she said.
‘A dragon.’
‘Dragons don’t breathe, not like we do, anyway. That’s why they can travel between worlds. No, it’s a lizard.’
‘We lost the path—’
‘There never was a path, Grub,’ Sinn replied. ‘There was a trail, and we’re still on it.’
‘I preferred the desert.’
‘Times change,’ she said, and then grinned. ‘That’s a joke, by the way.’
‘I don’t get it.’
She made a face. ‘Time doesn’t change, Grub, just the things in it.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘This trail, of course. It’s as if we’re walking the track of someone’s life, and it was a long life.’ She waved with her free hand. ‘All this, it’s what’s given shape to the mess at the far end—which was where we started from.’
‘Then we’re going back in time?’
‘No. That would be the wrong direction, wouldn’t it?’
‘Get that thing off your fingers before it sucks you dry.’
She held it out and he tugged it loose, which wasn’t as easy as he would have liked. The puckered wounds at the ends of Sinn’s fingers bled freely. Grub tossed the creature away.
‘Think he’ll smell it?’ Sinn asked.
‘He who?’
‘The lizard. My blood.’
‘Gods below!’
Her eyes were bright. ‘Do you like this place? The air, it makes you drunk, doesn’t it? We’re back in the age when everything was raw. Unsettled. But maybe not, maybe we’re from the raw times. But here, I think, you could stay for ten thousand years and nothing would change, nothing at all. Long ago, time was slower.’
‘I thought you said—’
‘All right, change was slower. Not that anything living would sense that. Everything living just knows what it knows, and that never changes.’
She was easier when she never said anything, Grub decided, but he kept that thought to himself. Something was stirring, out in the swamp, and Grub’s eyes widened when he studied the waterline and realized that it had crept up by a full hand’s span. Whatever it was, it had just displaced a whole lot of water. ‘It’s coming,’ he said.
‘Which flickering eye,’ Sinn mused, ‘is us?’
‘Sinn—we got to get out of here—’
‘If we’re not even here,’ she continued, ‘where did we come from, except from something that is here? You can’t just say, “Oh, we come through a gate,” because, then, the question just shows up all over again.’
The breathing had stopped.
‘It’s coming!’
‘But you can breed horses—and you can see how they change—longer legs, even a different gait. Like turning a desert wolf into a hunting dog—it doesn’t take as long as you’d think. Did someone breed us to make us like we are?’
‘If they did,’ hissed Grub, ‘they should’ve given one of us more brains!’ Snatching her by the arm, he pulled her upright.
She laughed as they ran.
Behind them, water exploded, enormous jaws snapped on empty air, breath shrieking, and the ground trembled.
Grub did not look behind them—he could hear the monstrous thrash and whip of the huge lizard as it surged through the undergrowth, closing fast.
Then Sinn tore herself free.
His heels skidded on wet clay. Spinning round, he caught an instant’s glimpse of Sinn—her back to him—facing a lizard big as a Quon galley, its elongated jaws bristling with dagger-sized fangs. Opening wide and wider still.
Fire erupted. A conflagration that blinded Grub, made him reel away as a solid wall of heat struck him. He stumbled to his knees. It was raining—no, that was hail—no, bits of flesh, hide and bone. Blinking, gasping, he slowly lifted his head.
A crater gaped before Sinn, steaming.
He climbed to his feet and walked unevenly to her side. The pit was twenty or more paces across, deep as a man was tall. Murky water gurgled, filling the basin. In that basin, a piece of the lizard’s tail thrashed and twitched. Mouth dry, Grub asked, ‘Did you enjoy that, Sinn?’
‘None of it’s real, Grub.’
‘Looked real enough to me!’
She snorted. ‘Just a memory.’
‘Whose?’
‘Maybe mine.’ Sinn shrugged. ‘Maybe yours. Something buried so deep inside us, we would never have ever known about it, if we weren’t here.’
‘That makes no sense.’
Sinn held up her hands. The one that had been streaming blood looked scorched. ‘My blood,’ she whispered, ‘is on fire.’
They skirted the swamp, watched by a herd of scaly, long-necked beasts with flattened snouts. Bigger than any bhederin, but with the same dull, bovine eyes. Tiny winged lizards patrolled their ridged backs, picking at ticks and lice.
Beyond the swamp the land sloped upward, festooned with snake-leafed trees with pebbled boles and feathery crowns. There was no obvious way around the strange forest, so they entered it. In the humid shade beneath the canopy, iridescent-winged moths fluttered about like bats, and the soft, damp ground was crawling with toads that could swallow a man’s fist and seemed disinclined to move aside, forcing Grub to step carefully and Sinn to lash out with her bare feet, laughing with every meaty impact.
The slope levelled out and the trees grew denser, gloom closing in like a shroud. ‘This was a mistake,’ muttered Grub.
‘What was?’
‘All of it. The Azath House, the portal—Keneb must be worried sick. It wasn’t fair, us just leaving like that, telling no one. If I’d known it was going to take this long to find whatever it was you think we need to find, I’d probably have said “no” to the whole idea.’ He eyed the girl beside him. ‘You knew from the very start, didn’t you?’
‘We’re on the trail—we can’t leave it now. Besides, I need an ally. I need someone who can guard my back.’
‘With what, this stupid eat-knife in my belt?’
She made a face. ‘Tell me the truth. Where did you come from?’
‘I was a foundling in the Chain of Dogs. The Imperial Historian Duiker saved me. He picked me up outside Aren’s gate and put me into Keneb’s arms.’
‘Do you actually remember all of that?’
‘Of course.’
Her eyes had sharpened their study. ‘You remember walking in the Chain of Dogs?’
He nodded. ‘Walking, running. Being scared, hungry, thirsty. Seeing so many people die. I even remember seeing Coltaine once, although the only thing I can
see in my head now, when I think of him, is crow-feathers. At least,’ he added, ‘I didn’t see him die.’
‘What city did you come from?’
‘That I can’t remember.’ He shrugged. ‘Anything before the Chain . . . is gone, like it never existed.’
‘It didn’t.’
‘What?’
‘The Chain of Dogs made you, Grub. It built you up out of dirt and sticks and rocks, and then it filled you with everything that happened. The heroes who fought and then died, the people who loved, then lost. The ones that starved and died of thirst. The ones whose hearts burst with terror. The ones that drowned, the ones that swallowed an arrow or a sword. The ones who rode spears. It took all of that and that became your soul.’
‘That’s ridiculous. There were lots of orphans. Some of us made it, some of us didn’t. That’s all.’
‘You were what, three years old? Four? Nobody remembers much from when they were that young. A handful of scenes, maybe. That’s it. But you remember the Chain of Dogs, Grub, because you’re its get.’
‘I had parents. A real father, a real mother!’
‘But you can’t remember them.’
‘Because they died before the Chain even started!’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because what you’re saying makes no sense!’
‘Grub, I know because you’re just like me.’
‘What? You got a real family—you even got a brother!’
‘Who looks at me and doesn’t know who or what he’s looking at. I’ll tell you who made me. An assassin named Kalam. He found me hiding with a bunch of bandits who were pretending to be rebels. He carved things on to my soul, and then he left. And then I was made a second time—I was added on to. At Y’Ghatan, where I found the fire that I took inside me, that now burns on and on like my very own sun. And after, there was Captain Faradan Sort, because she knew that I knew they were still alive—and I knew because the fire never went out—it was under the city, burning and burning. I knew—I could feel it.’ She stopped then, panting to catch her breath, her eyes wild as a wasp-stung cat’s.
Grub stared at her, not knowing whether he wanted to hug her or hit her. ‘You were born to a mother, just like I was.’
‘Then why are we so different?’
Moths fled at her shout, and sounds fell away on all sides.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied in a soft voice. ‘Maybe . . . maybe you did find something in Y’Ghatan. But nothing like that ever happened to me—’
‘Malaz City. You jumped ship. You went to find the Nachts. Why?’
‘I don’t know!’
She leapt away from him, rushed off into the wood. In moments he had lost sight of her. ‘Sinn? What are you doing? Where are you going?’
The gloom vanished. Fifty paces away a seething sphere of flames blossomed. Trees exploded in its path as it rolled straight towards Grub.
He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound emerged.
The blistering ball of fire heaved closer, huge, bristling—
Grub gestured. The ground lifted suddenly into the fire’s path, in a mass of roots, humus and mud, surging upward, toppling trees to the sides. A thousand twisted brown arms snaked out from the churning earth. The writhing wall engulfed the rolling sphere of fire, slapped it down as would a booted heel crush the life from a wayward ember. Thunder shook. The earth subsided, the arms vanishing, leaving nothing more than a slowly settling, chewed-up mound. Clouds of steam billowed and then drifted, thinning as the darkness returned once more.
He saw her walking calmly towards him, stepping over shattered trunks, brushing dirt from her plain tunic.
Sinn halted directly before him. ‘It doesn’t matter, Grub,’ she said. ‘You and me—we’re different.’
She set off, and after a moment he stumbled after her.
Never argue with a girl.
It was a day for strangers. One was beyond his reach, the other he knew well. Taxilian and Rautos had prised loose a panel to reveal a confused mass of metal coils, tubes and wire-wrapped cables. Muttering about finding the necessary hinge spells needed to unleash sorcerous power, thus awakening the city’s brain, Taxilian began poking and prodding the workings. Crowding behind him, sweat beading his brow, Rautos ran through a litany of cautions, none of which Taxilian heeded.
Last had devised a trap for the lizard-rats—the orthen—and had headed off to check it, Asane accompanying him.
At the top of a ramp and in a long but shallow antechamber, Nappet and Sheb had found a sealed door and were pounding at it with iron-headed sledges, each blow ringing like a tortured bell. Most of the damage they likely inflicted was to their ears, but since neither had anything to say to the other, they’d yet to discover it.
Breath was exploring the Nest itself, the now empty, abandoned abode of the Matron, finding nothing of interest, although unbeknownst to her residual flavours flowed in through her lungs and formed glistening minute droplets on her exposed skin. Vague dreams of producing children dogged her, successive scenes of labour and birth, tumbling one upon the next like a runaway nightmare. What had begun as a diffuse irritation was quickly building to an indefinable rage.
Breath had been living inside the Tiles since creating them, but even she could not find the meaning she sought in them. And now the outside world was seeping into her. Confusion swarmed.
And then there was the K’Chain Che’Malle drone. Climbing, drawing ever closer to this hapless collection of humans.
The ghost drifted amongst his family, haunted by a growing trepidation. His people were failing. In some ineffable, fundamental way, they were pulling apart. Even as he had wondered at their purpose, now each one—barring perhaps Taxilian—was doing the same. A crisis was upon them, and he could feel the growing turbulence. They would not be ready for Sulkit. They might even kill the drone. And then all would be lost.
He recalled—once, a thousand times?—standing on the deck of a ship, witness to the sea’s surface spreading out smooth as vitreous glass on all sides, a strange quality suffusing the still air, the light becoming uncanny, febrile. And around him faceless sailors scrambling, pale as motes—bloody propitiations to the Elder God, the bawling bleat of goats brought up from the hold, the flash of sea-dipped blades and twisted blankets of blood floating on the seas—all around him, such rising fear. And in answer to all of this, he heard his own laughter. Cruel as a demon’s, and wide eyes fixed on him, for they had found a monster in their midst. And he was that monster.
I called storms, didn’t I? Just to see the violence, to draw it round me like the warmest cloak. And even the cries of drowning mortals could not break my amusement.
Are these memories mine? What manner of beast was I?
The blood tasted . . . good. Propitiation? The fools—they simply fed my power.
I remember a tribe, corpses cooling beneath furs and blankets, and the stains of spite on my hands. I remember the empty hole I found myself in, the pit that was my crime. Too late to howl at its depth, its lifeless air, the deadness inside.
Betrayed by a wife. Everyone laughing behind my back. For that, all would die. So it must be, and so it was. And I fled that place, the home I destroyed in the span of a single night. But some holes cannot be climbed out of. I ran and ran, and each night, lying exhausted, I fell back into that hole, and I looked up at that mouth of light far above, and I watched it ever recede. Until it winked out.
When you see my eyes now, all you see is that deadness. You see the black, smooth walls. And you know that, though I look back at you, I see nothing that makes me feel . . . anything.
I am walking still, alone on the empty plain, and the edifice I approach looms ever bigger, a thing of stone and dried blood, a thing eager to awaken once more.
Come find me.
Asane came staggering back into the chamber where Taxilian and Rautos still crouched at the gutted wall. Gasping, frightened, she struggled to find her breath, as Rautos turned round.
‘A demon! One lives! It found us!’
They could hear sounds now on the ramp, leather soles and something else—the click of claws, the flicking hiss of a tail brushing stone.
Asane backed to the far wall. Rautos hissed, ‘Taxilian! Get Nappet and Sheb! Quickly!’
‘What?’ the man glanced back over his shoulder. ‘What is it?’
Last appeared, looking faintly bewildered, but otherwise unharmed. Two dead orthen hung from a string at his belt. Moments later, the K’Chain Che’Malle loomed into view. Gaunt, but no taller than a man, thin-limbed, a tail that lashed about as if possessing its own will.
The ghost felt the fear, in Asane and Rautos. But in Taxilian, who slowly straightened from the exposed machinery, there was wonder, curiosity. And then . . . excitement. He stepped forward.
The drone was studying the chamber, as if searching for something. At the incessant clanging from above, it cocked its head. A moment later there were shouts of triumph from Nappet and Sheb—the door had opened, but the ghost knew that the surrender of that barrier had not come beneath their sledges. Sulkit had simply unlocked it. A moment later, he wondered how he knew this.
Breath reappeared from a side passage. ‘Blueiron,’ she whispered, staring at the drone. ‘Like a . . . a Fulcrum. Taxilian, go to it—we need it.’
‘I know,’ he replied, licking dry lips. ‘Rautos, go up to Sheb and Nappet—keep them occupied up there. I don’t want them charging down here with swords out. Make them understand—’
‘Understand what?’ Rautos demanded.
‘That we’ve found an ally.’
Rautos’s eyes widened. He wiped sweat from his face. A moment later, he backed up, then turned and set off up the ramp.
Taxilian spoke to the drone. ‘Can you understand me? Nothing works. We need to fix it. We need your help—no, perhaps it’s the other way round. We’d like to help you bring all of this back to life.’
Silence. The K’Chain Che’Malle seemed to be ignoring everyone in the chamber, its tentacled fingers writhing like seagrass at the ends of its arms. The rows of fangs glistened in its broad slash of a mouth. After a moment, the drone blinked. Once, twice, three times, each lid distinct. Then it walked in a hitching gait to where Taxilian had been working. It picked up the panel and deftly replaced it. Straightening, it turned and faced the ghost, eyes fixing on his.
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