Contents
Title Page
Book & Copyright Information
Dedication
Maps
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Acknowledgements
About the Author
© Catherine Egan, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Edited by Laura Peetoom
Designed by Jamie Olson
Typeset and produced by Susan Buck
Maps created by Jonathan Service
Produced in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Egan, Catherine, 1976-
The unmaking / Catherine Egan.
(Last days of Tian Di ; book 2)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55050-559-7 (pbk.). –ISBN 978-1-55050-560-3 (pdf). –
ISBN 978-1-55050-744-7 (epub). –ISBN 978-1-55050-745-4 (mobi)
I. Title. II. Series: Egan, Catherine, 1976- . Last days of Tian
Di ; book 2.
PS8609.G34U55 2013 jC813'.6 C2013-903654-7
C2013-903655-5
Library of Congress Control Number 2013940632
Available in Canada from: Coteau Books, 2517 Victoria Avenue, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada S4P 0T2
www.coteaubooks.com
Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
for
Meredith Egan & Lucy Liberato
as they come into their own powers
Chapter
~1~
Abimbola Broom was worried. He rarely had cause to worry and was finding it most uncomfortable. He looked out the window of the car at the dark, wet streets flashing by. It had been raining for days now and the weather matched his mood. His driver, Miles, took the corner hard, turning onto Victory Avenue, and the long black car roared up the hill to Abimbola’s estate. Only when the car pulled up at his front door did Abimbola stir from his anxious reverie. Neglecting to say goodbye to Miles, who was standing in the downpour to open the car door for him, he trotted up the front steps holding his briefcase over his head to keep off the rain.
Abimbola fumbled with his keys and opened the front door. Most of the house was dark but there was a light coming from the Visitor’s Parlor. There, Abimbola’s wife, Nekane, was sitting in the most comfortable chair and reading a book. This irritated him unduly. It seemed all she ever did lately was read romances and he didn’t see why she had to do it in the most elegant room in the house. Nekane got up to greet him. As always he was struck by how beautiful she was. Having her at his side had been one of his greatest joys once, and it had been easy in those days to delight her with expensive gifts and exotic vacations. She had seemed to admire him then, to enjoy having a powerful and influential man as her husband. But over the years she had grown cool, indifferent. The kiss she placed on his cheek was dry and perfunctory. He despised the groveling unhappiness her disinterest caused him and this made him treat her cruelly.
“Are the girls asleep?” he asked, glancing disapprovingly at the book she had left open on her chair.
“Yes,” she answered, adding pointedly, “It’s late.”
It was an invitation to quarrel but he was too beset by other anxieties to engage with her tonight. Without another word, he turned and went up the broad, carpeted stairs to his study. He had forgotten to eat supper and was quite hungry. He would call the maid and have her bring him a drink and something to eat.
Abimbola’s study overlooked the city of Kalla, the great capital of Central Di Shang. Tonight it was a maze of lights hunched against the November rain. He used to look out over the city in triumph, a self-made king in this kingless republic. But the more you have, Abimbola thought glumly, the more you have to lose. Abimbola’s father had become wildly rich in the early years of the long war, selling fake charms supposed to protect the wearer against Magic. “One man’s tragedy is another man’s opportunity,” his father had been wont to say. The lesson was not lost on young Abimbola, who started up a newspaper, peddling horrifying, apocalyptic stories of the havoc wreaked by the Xia Sorceress, her inhuman allies and the treacherous Scarpathians. He outsold all his competitors easily. Within a decade, he owned most of the major news outlets and TV stations in the Republic, as well as stock in a great many other businesses. His finances and multiple businesses were run by people who were eminently competent and, more importantly, terrified of him. Abimbola inflicted anxiety and fear on others as a matter of course. He was not used to experiencing them himself.
Another peculiar feature of great wealth, Abimbola thought, was that the more one had, the more one seemed to need. The things Abimbola considered necessities expanded as fast as his tabloid empire – the estate with its swimming pool and tennis courts, the extravagant parties and vacations, the fleet of sleek, aggressive cars, the private jet, his second and third homes on the coast and the 100-foot yacht he never used. For Abimbola, there was no such thing as enough. He depended heavily on his investments but did not like to gamble. He liked to know exactly what he could expect. He liked to know things that no one else knew. To the rest of the world, Abimbola’s financial decisions seemed prescient. He was lauded for unerring instinct. But it was not instinct that told himwhen to buy or sell stock. It was the Cra.
For obvious reasons, the Cra were among the most hated of the beings that had ever crossed over from Tian Xia. While many of them remained in Tian Xia feeding off small animals, the bolder among them refused to be denied their natural prey, the human infant. They came to Di Shang and raided hospitals, orphanages, undefended villages. Since the end of the war, however, the military had become increasingly skilled at hunting them down. The situation became desperate for the Cra.
Though neither their Magic nor their physical strength was very great, the Cra did have particular skills that were useful to Abimbola. They could fly. They were swift and stealthy. They were adept in basic spells, particularly the enchantment of objects and hypnotism. In other words, they were ideal spies and thieves. The exchange of services was simple. Abimbola controlled information. To a certain extent, the news in the Republic was what he said it was. If an attack by the Cra was not in the news, there was no public outrage, hence no government funding, hence no military counter-strike. He kept the Cra out of the news as much as possible and funded several fake orphanages and a fraudulent adoption service in Huir-Kosta, through which he provided the
Cra with a relatively steady supply of unwanted babies.
The Cra repaid him royally. They soared, dark shadows down gleaming hallways, enchanting sophisticated alarm systems, charming open locks and safes, hypnotizing guards. They brought Abimbola the most secret information of the most powerful companies in the Republic. He knew where to invest, when to sell. If the company was corrupt, bribery was a simple matter. For years it had been the perfect partnership and Abimbola had come to depend on it absolutely. Doing honest business was no longer possible. But now something was going wrong. Something or someone was decimating the Cra.
It was not the Special Forces. They would be trumpeting the news to all Di Shang if it were. It was not the Mancers either – the Cra were not being banished, they were being killed, sometimes one at a time, sometimes in large groups. Their numbers were dwindling and fewer and fewer among them were crossing over for fear of this new, mysterious enemy. The Cra had demanded that Abimbola, with the vast resources he commanded, discover who was hunting them down and put a stop to it. It was an ultimatum – until he found and destroyed their enemy, business as usual would not resume. Abimbola had a number of high-stakes deals hanging in the balance at the moment and could not afford to make any decisions without the information only the Cra could provide. He had been stalling for weeks now and had uncovered nothing. He had only the terrified rumours that were spreading among the Cra to go on. Some believed it was a bereft mother whose grief had transmogrified her into a vengeful witch. Some said she rode a giant raptor. Others said it was a dragon; still others said a gryphon. It was whispered that she had a dagger carved from the claw of a dragon, but Abimbola discounted this outright, knowing full well that dragon claws, being harder than any other substance in the worlds and also impervious to heat, could not be carved. Some claimed it was the Shang Sorceress, but others insisted that they had delivered this very girl into the hands of the Xia Sorceress more than two years ago and that, in any case, she had been but a powerless child.
Abimbola’s stomach rumbled and he remembered that he should eat. He turned away from the window and went to his desk to pick up the phone and call the maid. As he did so, a shadow stepped out of the opposite wall and said a single word in a strange language.
He tried to scream. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. He tried to reach for his phone and found he could not move. Abimbola Broom had never before in his life had cause to feel truly afraid, but he was afraid now.
“You should be happy, aye,” said a young, female voice. “You were just wondering how you would find me and here I am.”
She came closer. He could see her face now, a brown, beaky little face under a mass of disorderly curls. Why, she was not even a grown-up! She was a girl of no more than fourteen or fifteen. Her hair and clothes were wet, as if she had recently been out in the rain. She was dressed quite ordinarily for a girl her age, in a pair of slim trousers, laced black boots and a long winter coat, perhaps dark green, although it was difficult to tell in the unlit room. She wore a shard of white crystal around her neck. She did not appear frightening until she reached into the coat and drew out a dark blade the length of her forearm.
“You’re wrong that it’s impossible to carve something from a dragon’s claw, by the way,” she said. “There are mystical ways of moulding even something as hard as this, if you know a great deal about Magic and a great deal about dragons. I dinnay know much about either, as it happens, but I know someone who does.”
Abimbola could not breathe or think. His mind was a roaring black cavern. He was going to be murdered, he understood that perfectly, and had not imagined himself capable of the terror he was now experiencing.
“I’m nay going to kill you,” the girl said impatiently. “Though you dinnay deserve any better. But Di Shang has its own kind of justice for men like you. I’m going to hand you over.”
Free of the fear of death and given a moment to recover from it, Abimbola’s mind began to race. There was nothing that could be proved against him, nothing at all.
“Lah, you’re wrong there,” said the girl, circling him with her awful black blade pointing towards him at all times. “You may be able to mix a messy little potion of invisibility and creep around unseen to your meetings with the Cra, but there are more kinds of Seeing than you can imagine. You dinnay know much about Magic, of course, so I’ll share a few facts with you. For example, did you know that I could touch your coat and discover its entire history? Everywhere you’ve been, everything you’ve done while wearing that coat – I can find out about it with a simple spell. I could do the same thing with your shoes or your briefcase or your wife’s diamond necklace. Then there’s the Vindensphere, which you’ve never heard of, but which could be used to show a judge everything you’ve been up to for the last eight or nine years. Of course, I’m nay going to go marching into a court of law to testify against you. I think one of the Emmisariae of the Mancers would be better suited for that, lah. Nobody would question what a Mancer said. And yes, the Mancers know about you, and yes, they want to see you prosecuted and convicted for the murder of innocent children, and yes, I am the one who has been hunting down the Cra. My name is Eliza.”
Abimbola Broom was dizzy. Whatever invisible force had been holding him immobile lifted suddenly and his knees folded beneath him. He crashed to the floor and found his voice.
“My children,” he managed to say. “I have two daughters. Without me, what will become of them?”
Eliza’s face clouded over. “I dinnay know. I’m very sorry that they will grow up without a father and that they will have to be so ashamed of you. But I cannay undo the things you’ve done.”
“I beg of you,” he said, “I will find a way to...atone. I have given a great deal of money to charities, you can see the receipts in my desk, thousands of –”
Eliza interrupted him with a brief command and once again his voice was gone.
“I cannay listen to you,” she said, disgusted. She put away her dagger and unlooped a coil of slender brown rope from her belt. She uttered brief commands and as she did so he found himself getting to his feet and putting his hands behind his back for her to bind. She bound his feet as well. The cord did not feel tight and it did not look strong but he could not move his limbs where it bound him.
“That’s better, aye,” she said. “Now I dinnay have to concentrate on keeping you still.”
She strode to the window and threw it open. The rain was thunderous now, crashing down onto the city.
“Charlie!” she called. A giant winged creature swooped past the window and Abimbola gave a little scream. Eliza tugged the rope that bound him and he skidded to the window. She was about to push him out into the dark when there was a tap at his door. He looked down at Eliza, wide-eyed, and she looked back at him, her expression impassive. The door opened, revealing Nekane, silhouetted by the light of the hallway behind her. She had come, simmering with resentment, to say goodnight and a few other things, the exact wording of which she had been working on all evening with the unread book open on her lap. But her face changed now. She stared at the young girl at the window and her husband, bound fast.
“Nekane,” said Abimbola desperately. He wanted to shout for help, he wanted to tell her to do something, to stop the girl, but what came out of his mouth was what he least expected – “Forgive me.”
Then Eliza gave him a swift push and he tipped out the window. Something hard and bony closed around him, stopping his fall. When he dared to open his eyes he found himself looking at the powerful chest of a gryphon that had caught him in its talons. Eliza jumped out the window onto the gryphon’s back and they soared off over the drenched, shimmering city. If Abimbola had been able to see into his study as they flew away, he would have realized that the expression on his wife’s face was one of unmistakable relief.
~~~
In spite of the rain Eliza enjoyed flying over the city, its countless lights swimming beneath her like phosphorescence in the sea. She was terrib
ly pleased with herself for having captured Abimbola. Charlie had drawn her attention to the Cra’s unusual activities months ago and had taken the guise of one to discover whom they were working for. When he told Eliza about the arrangement they had with a wealthy businessman, she had hardly believed it. How could a man be responsible for organizing such slaughters? She didn’t understand it and she didn’t much want to. She would hand him over to the Mancers and they would deal with everything from there. Of course, she wasn’t foolish enough to think they would be pleased with her. But who were they to argue, when she had been out doing what they had neglected to do for years?
Abimbola, nearly crushed by the gryphon’s grip, had begun to gibber with fear. Eliza slipped upside-down towards him, hooking her leg over the gryphon’s neck and getting a firm grip on its foreleg with one hand. She stuck a piece of the rope in Abimbola’s mouth to still his tongue, then pulled herself back upright with her leg. They left Kalla behind them, flying south across the Interior Provinces. Cities were scattered below like twinkling pools of light in the vast darkness of the plains. She was soaked through but exhilarated, she and the gryphon one in their joy of flight. Only the bound man was not enjoying the journey. Dawn glimmered on the horizon as the lush plains dried out into stony, unforested gullies and ridges. Further south was the Great Sand Sea, home of the Sorma, her father’s people. She could go that way and deliver this man to their care to be sent on a spirit-quest and have the poison taken from his soul. It would be better for him. If he survived, he would be whole. But she wasn’t interested in what was best for him. She wanted him to be punished, not healed. They flew over the great river Noxoni, a brown torrent with a swathe of green on either side of it, and the gryphon veered west.
Less than an hour later, on the ragged lip of a vast canyon, the Citadel of the Mancers came into view. The Citadel formed a square with towers at every corner enclosing the grounds, which were startlingly green in contrast to the arid world outside. The Inner Sanctum loomed at the centre, a giant white dome. As the gryphon swooped down towards it, Eliza began to mutter under her breath, requesting entry in the Language of First Days. She could feel, as always, the slight surprise and annoyance that came in response to her request. They didn’t like the way she came and went, as she was well aware. But they always let her in.
The Unmaking: The Last Days of Tian Di, Book Two Page 1