The Empire of Ashes (The Draconis Memoria)

by Anthony Ryan

  The Greens seemed to vanish when the rest of the fleet resumed fire with their cannon, those attempting to haul themselves up the hulls slipping back into the water. Hilemore could see numerous drake corpses bobbing on the surface and knew that in daylight the entire harbour would now be stained a deep crimson. It would probably burn to the touch too, he thought, pondering the grimly amusing notion that, with product now so scarce, he had inadvertently created a vast pool of wealth.

  “Sir,” Talmant called from the tower, Hilemore looking up to see him pointing to the eastern rim of the crater. “Some sort of commotion.”

  Hilemore raised his glass, blinking in alarm as a bright plume of flame occluded the eyepiece. When he looked again he was confronted with the sight of a Red drake clambering down from the ruined wall. It launched itself forward and landed amidst a group of defenders on a near by roof-top, jaw snapping and tail lashing as it cut them to pieces in a matter of seconds. Flames flooded the view once more and Hilemore lowered the glass to see dozens of dark shapes crawling down from the wall and into the town, fire erupting every time one reached the outer houses.

  They were supposed to attack from the air, he thought, a hard ball of guilt-ridden despair building in his gut, fed by the certain knowledge of being outgeneralled. The Greens were just a distraction.

  “Mr. Talmant!” he called up to the tower. “Get to the Superior and tell Mr. Steelfine to load standard shell and concentrate fire on the eastern rim of the crater. Spread the word to the other ships to do the same.”

  “Aye, sir!” Talmant snapped off a salute and swiftly descended the tower steps before sprinting off along the battlement.

  Hilemore drew his pistol, casting his gaze around at the Wash Lane Volunteers before it fell on Jillett. “I believe, miss,” he said, “it’s time for you to drink some product.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Lizanne

  There is no such thing as a fair fight, one of Lizanne’s instructors had told her years ago. Just the fight you win and the fight you lose.

  Given that he hadn’t taken advantage of the opportunity to tie her up or maim her whilst in the trance Mr. Lockbar, she assumed for reasons of professional pride, had apparently decided he wanted a fair fight. It was a singular miscalculation.

  She side-stepped his blade, ducking as she did so and feeling the sting of its edge nick her ear. She stiffened the fingers of her left hand into a spear-point and jabbed it into his wrist before he could draw the knife back, hitting the nerve required to loosen his grip and allow the weapon to fall. The momentary distraction would have been enough to dodge away, perhaps make it to the window, but the image of Makario slumped over the pianola’s dripping keys banished such considerations. Instead she pressed herself to him, wrapping her legs about his waist and one arm around his neck in a strange parody of a lover’s passionate embrace. But she had no love to offer Mr. Lockbar.

  He tried to choke down his scream as she drew back her free arm and jammed her thumb into his eye, digging deep whilst simultaneously clamping her teeth onto his nose. She worried at it with terrier-like energy, blood flooding her mouth, her thumb digging ever deeper. They careened about the room in a mad waltz, Lockbar’s scream finally escaping his throat. He hammered at her, fists like balls of iron as they pummelled her back and head. Lizanne barely felt it, putting all her strength into her limbs and her jaw, feeling a fierce exultant satisfaction as her teeth met and her thumb made a wet pop as it sank deeper into his eye-socket.

  Lockbar howled in mingled rage and pain, charging forward to slam her into the wall, once then twice. With Green in her veins she might have been able to withstand it, but not now. Her legs lost their grip with the third slam, Lockbar tearing himself free of her. Too stunned to stand she could only slide down the wall and watch him stagger about, clutching his ruined face.

  “Bitch,” he cursed in a high-pitched gasp, sounding like a child nursing a playground injury. The notion made Lizanne laugh, something to which Mr. Lockbar took understandable exception. “Dead . . .” he gasped, casting about with his one good eye until it alighted on his knife. “Fucking kill you . . .” He snatched the weapon from the floor, turning back to Lizanne. “Make you eat your own guts . . .”

  Lizanne tried to get up but found her limbs unwilling to co-operate. Things might have gone very badly if Tinkerer hadn’t sat up in bed, unhooked himself from his saline bottle and thrown it at Lockbar. It was a well-aimed throw, the bottle shattering on the side of Lockbar’s head and making him stagger in confusion as blood seeped into his remaining eye. Lizanne willed all the strength she could into her limbs, bracing her back against the wall as she pushed herself upright. Seeing Lockbar scrape the blood from his eye she dived onto Tinkerer, grasping him tight and rolling both of them clear of the bed just before Lockbar’s knife sank into the mattress.

  “Fucking kill you!” he roared, heaving the bed aside as they scrambled away. He lowered himself in preparation for a final, murderous charge, then the door exploded.

  Lockbar whirled amidst a shower of shattered wood, lashing out with his knife as he shielded his face, but the knife met only air as he continued to slash . . . then froze. He stood there in mid-slash, pierced all over with splinters and blood streaming from his vanished nose and empty eye-socket.

  “What do you want done?” Morva asked Lizanne, stepping through the remnants of the shattered door.

  Lizanne disentangled herself from Tinkerer, helping him to his feet before turning her attention to Makario. The musician’s head lay on the pianola’s keyboard at an angle, almost as if he were resting. His eyes were open and Lizanne found his skin icy as she reached out to lay a hand on his cheek. The cut to his neck was deep and even now blood was still dripping onto the keys.

  “Don’t kill him,” she told Morva, turning and moving to stand close to Mr. Lockbar. She peered into his remaining eye, wide and wet. “We still have a great deal to talk about.”

  * * *

  • • •

  She didn’t ask questions, lacking the inclination and the skills for a proper interrogation which was a task best left in expert hands. Instead she had the iron works cleared, giving the workers a much-needed morning off, whilst Mr. Lockbar was suspended in chains above the huge smelting bowl filled with ingots which in turn sat above the sliding doors on top of the furnace.

  Morva had offered to help but Lizanne sent her away, stoking the furnace herself, taking her time as she shovelled coke into the oven and ignited the kerosene-fuelled engine that worked the bellows. Lockbar hung in silence for the first ten minutes, blood leaking through the bandages on his face, applied none too gently by one of Dr. Weygrand’s orderlies. Lizanne was keen to ensure he didn’t bleed to death.

  After a quarter of an hour Lockbar began to fidget, chains jangling as he jerked his body, but still refused to speak. Lizanne checked the temperature on the smelter’s gauge, and, finding it at the required level, opened the furnace doors. Lockbar’s fidgeting turned into desperate struggles at the sudden blast of heat, the first words emerging from his bandaged face as Lizanne climbed the scaffold to watch the smoke rising from the ingots in the bowl.

  “We . . .” he said in his strange nasal rasp. “We are in the same business.”

  Lizanne angled her head, watching the ingots on top shift as those on the bottom began to melt. Despite the heat she somehow contrived to feel cold, her face frozen and her hands numb as they settled onto the scaffolding. Makario’s music played in her head, or rather the music he had spent his life rediscovering. She made a mental note to ensure all his papers were properly catalogued and secured then closed her eyes, remembering that first time she had heard him play back in the Miner’s Repose. Even in the midst of the worst place on earth, there had been something magical about it. A jarring note interrupted her reverie and she realised Lockbar was speaking again.

  “. . . not so different.” She opened her eye
s to find him attempting to angle his body towards her, striving to meet her gaze. “We are guilty of similar sins, I suspect.” He grunted the words out, Lizanne seeing sweat bathing his skin as more smoke rose from the bowl. She could see the first flecks of molten metal bubbling up between the as yet unmelted ingots at the top. “So, I ask you,” Lockbar went on, “would you consider this a fitting end? Would you not deserve some courtesy?”

  He had managed to contort himself sufficiently to meet her gaze, his one good eye gleaming amidst the mask of bandages. Lizanne felt no reluctance in meeting his gaze, nor any in looking away. She said nothing, watching the iron melt and realising with a pang of deep regret that she had never learned Makario’s full name. She could hear Lockbar continuing to babble out entreaties but none of it captured her attention until he began to bargain.

  “I bribed a bosun on one of the pirate ships to smuggle me here,” he said, his eye flicking between her and the now-almost-melted contents of the bowl. “I can give you his name.”

  Seeing the last ingot subside into the bright orange soup, Lizanne moved to the length of chain hanging near by. It ran through a series of pulleys from which Lockbar had been suspended and required only minimal exertion to shift him about.

  “Arshav and Ethilda!” Lockbar went on, shouting now. “I know where they are. They left the Seven Walls! As you must have guessed. But I know where they went.”

  Lizanne hauled on the chain, tilting Lockbar’s body so that his feet pointed towards the bubbling contents of the bowl.

  “North!” Lockbar screamed, legs flailing as a splash of molten iron escaped the bowl. “They went north, intending to treat with the Corvantine rebels. I was to join them in Corvus.”

  Lizanne’s hands paused on the chain, lips pursed as she considered the information. “Yes,” she said, “I thought they might.” Then she began to haul on the chain once more, lowering him towards the bowl.

  “Lizanne!” Her father stood at the top of the ladder, breathless from the run that had brought him here and staring at her in appalled dismay. “What are you doing?”

  “The ironworkers tell me it won’t spoil the output,” she said, continuing to haul on the chain.

  “Stop that!” He rushed from the ladder, reaching out to grasp her hands. She grimaced in annoyance and tried to jerk her hands free but he held on. “This is not justice,” he said. “Justice requires a court and judge.”

  “I’m not sure the world has a use for such things any more, Father,” she said, inclining her head at Lockbar. “Now there are only people like him, and me.”

  He gazed down at her with the expression of a man seeing a baffling stranger for the first time. “What did they do to you?” he murmured, releasing her hands to cup her face. “What did they turn you into?”

  “What did you think they would make of me, Father?” she asked. “When you let them take me, what did you think I would become? You must have known I was Blessed even before the Blood-lot. A clever man like you would have made sure to discover his daughter’s true nature, would he not?”

  Professor Lethridge lowered his gaze, giving a fractional nod.

  “And yet you let them take me.”

  “It was the law.” She saw him wince in the knowledge that he had spoken a lie. A clever man like him could have hidden her, perhaps even taken her far away, where the Syndicate would never find her. “I thought it for the best,” he said, meeting her gaze once more. “Academy-educated Blood-blessed enjoy great privilege, have rewarding careers. What could I offer you? A lifetime tinkering with novelties with barely a scrip to rub together. I didn’t know . . .” His hands gripped her face more tightly and he leaned closer, whispering, “I didn’t know what they would do to you. If I had I would never have allowed it.”

  She felt her purpose slip away then, her body seeming to sag as the need for retribution faded into simple grief and loss. “I am such a disappointment then?” she asked him.

  “No.” He pulled her close. “No, you are what you have always been. A very frightening but wonderful surprise.”

  And Lizanne Lethridge held her father tight and wept for the first time in many years.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mr. Lockbar was executed by firing squad the next morning. His trial had been brief but as thorough as they could make it. Madame Hakugen sat as judge whilst Captain Trumane acted as prosecuting counsel. Ensign Tollver took on the role of defending counsel and displayed an impressive gift for inventive argument. Employing a fine set of rhetorical skills, the young officer contended that Mr. Lockbar’s actions, terrible as they were, had been committed in a location lacking anything that could be called established legal process, or even a canon of recognised law. Therefore, they were not technically illegal. Madame Hakugen, however, ruled in favour of Captain Trumane’s argument that the charter of the Mount Works Manufacturing Company had been constituted on the same basis as Ironship Syndicate law, a law that prohibited murder and mandated the death penalty for convicted offenders.

  The firing squad consisted of riflemen from the Viable Opportunity, though there had been numerous volunteers from the ranks of the workers. Dr. Weygrand had been popular and many had also appreciated the nights when Makario would consent to play a tune or two once the shifts had ended. Lockbar was marched to the end of a pier at high tide whereupon he refused a blindfold and faced his executioners as they levelled their rifles in response to Trumane’s order. Lizanne had heard how it was common for a few shots to go astray on such occasions, thanks to the natural human aversion to killing. If so, it was not the case with Mr. Lockbar. Every bullet fired slammed home into his chest, sending him tumbling from the pier into the waters of Blaska Sound.

  “Too bad about Arshav and Ethilda,” Alzar Lokaras said as Lizanne accompanied him back to his ship. “They’re probably a hundred miles away by now. And forget what Lockbar told you about their heading north, too many Blues. My guess is they’ll head for the Cape of Souls and then make their way up the east Corvantine coast. Either that or strike out for Dalcia, if they’ve got the fuel. You could send your flying contraptions after them . . .”

  “We have a war to fight,” Lizanne interrupted. “Other concerns will have to wait. The Firefly made a reconnaissance flight yesterday, it seems the White forces are less than twenty miles from the passes.”

  He nodded and they halted at the foot of the gangway to his ship. “The Blood-blessed will be put ashore this evening, those that were willing. Seems the Blessing isn’t a cure for cowardice.”

  Cowardice? Lizanne wondered. Or wisdom? In times like these perhaps there’s no difference. “This operation is only a delaying tactic,” she told him. “Even if every aspect succeeds the main battles are still to come. We need fighters, as many as you can gather and transport to the peninsular in the time remaining.”

  He gave a small nod, a frown of consternation on his brow. “Wish they’d obliged us with a sea battle. Ethilda wasn’t right about much, but she was about Varestians never being fond of fighting on land. It’s how the Corvantines beat us.”

  “A clever enemy never does what you expect. And our enemy is aggravatingly clever.” She gave him a formal nod and turned to go.

  “My niece,” he said, making her pause. “You’ll be taking her with you?”

  “Of course,” Lizanne told him.

  There was a guardedness to his gaze, his voice clipped to ensure it betrayed no emotion. “Be smart to have a few Blood-blessed in reserve, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not if this is going to work. And I doubt I could make her stay behind if I wanted to.”

  Alzar gritted his teeth as he went on, eyes averted. “She’s the last Blood-blessed left to the Lokaras line, even though she’s not truly of our blood.”

  “The Blessing might not be a cure for cowardice,” Lizanne told him, “but apparently being part of your line is.” Alza
r nodded but didn’t move, Lizanne swallowing a weary sigh at the sight of him struggling to find a way of asking for a favour in a manner that didn’t chafe his pride. “She’ll remain on the Typhoon,” she told him. “As a rear guard. With any luck she’ll be clear of danger for much of the operation.”

  Alzar let out a grunt of apparent satisfaction, still not looking at her as he turned and made his way up the gang-plank without a word of farewell.

  She returned to the town, making her way to the administrative building and forcing herself to return the greetings she received along the way. Grief should have been a familiar sensation by now, and she had hoped such familiarity would have calloused her heart against fresh pain. But it transpired that she had no such callous and the pain, fresh and very raw, made her less inclined towards conventional civility. Even so, she maintained as friendly a demeanour as she could when greeting her employees, though she was thankful that their apparently genuine respect was coloured by a certain wariness, even fear. They saw what I did to Mr. Lockbar, she knew. And what I wanted to do to him.

  “I don’t mind waiting if she’s busy,” she told Madame Hakugen’s secretary upon entering the outer foyer of her office. The girl immediately blanched and scurried to the office door, opening it wide after a whispered enquiry with the occupant.