The Skyfall Era Trilogy: Books 1-3

by Matt Larkin

  “We met at Astral Shore,” Mahesa said. He turned to Rangguwani. “I heard you turned pirate. Wasn’t sure I believed it.”

  The man nodded, then opened the door to the cabin. A little too neat for a pirate’s cabin. Charts pinned to the wall, lockers stowed—even his berth was in order. Shouldn’t pirates be messy?

  “After Chandi betrayed my brother and Malin killed him as a lunatic, my House fell on hard times. Very hard. Stupid as it sounds, people start to wonder if lunacy runs in the family. As if we don’t all know what causes it. Not that I’m convinced Anusapati was a lunatic.”

  Ratna leaned against the door. “He was.” Chandi hadn’t said much of the encounter, but she’d said enough.

  “Some say your father was a lunatic, too.”

  Ratna pushed away from the wall, standing right beneath Rangguwani’s nose, hands on her hips. “My father was murdered by Malin. The bastard betrayed us all.”

  Rangguwani was smiling, damn him. “So I heard.”

  “He did let us live,” Mahesa said. “That’s something.”

  Rangguwani sat on his desk, folded his arms across his chest. “And what will you do with it? Run back to Ketu? A zealot, possibly a lunatic himself. A fool hurling cyclones like javelins. Try to fight Malin by yourselves? The Macan Gadungan would destroy you.”

  Mahesa shrugged. “What do you suggest?”

  “Join me. Help us unite the Lunars. Ketu is a fool and Malin is a monster. Or perhaps the other way around. But you, the War King’s daughter, you could give us all a new future. Bring peace back to the Moon Scions and Macan Gadungan. Maybe even restore peace with the Solars.”

  Right. Peace with the Solars who allowed Kala to take Revati. Peace with the Macan Gadungan who slaughtered the people of Bukit. “No. I’m done with this. All I want is to find my daughter. Let politics attend to itself. We need to make it somewhere safe, away from the eyes of Malin’s forces.” She hesitated. “And Ketu’s. Let them kill each other, I don’t care.”

  Mahesa’s hand found hers. “Please, Ratna, listen to Rangguwani. This isn’t going to go away just because you want it to. If we don’t make peace, it’ll just go on and on.”

  She jerked her hand away. “Let it. They took Revati away from me. And no one cared. No one.”

  “I care,” Mahesa said.

  “Then do something about it.”

  The boy sighed, then nodded. “Maybe Puradvipa. Malin’s forces were mostly driven out. I don’t think Ketu’s will be looking for us. I know a place they wouldn’t find us, anyway.”

  Rangguwani rose from the desk, drifted toward the window. “You’re a selfish child. So caught up in your problems you don’t see the world burn around you. Maybe you don’t see all three dynasties rotting under their own corruption. Maybe you don’t care.”

  How dare he? Ratna snatched a book off Rangguwani’s desk and chucked it at the hull beside him. “What makes you think you know me? What makes you think you can understand the pain of a mother who lost her daughter?”

  She backed away from his glare. Perhaps antagonizing the pirate on his own ship was a bad idea.

  “What I understand is that thousands of mothers have lost children because of the actions of your father. I held out the vain hope you were a better person than he was, that you might try, in some small way, to make up for the evil Rahu unleashed.”

  “No! I’m done trying to clean up Ketu’s and Malin’s mess. Bukit is burning! The Isles are burning, and no one is looking for my daughter. Well I will.”

  Mahesa sighed and stepped between them. He looked over at Ratna a moment, watched her face. She shook her head at him, then he turned back to the pirate. “Please, Rangguwani, take us to Puradvipa.”

  “Why should I do anything for you?”

  “Friendship. Plus, you’d spite Malin the chance to recapture us.”

  “I thought you said he let you live?”

  Mahesa grinned.

  Rangguwani shook his head, his eyes sad. “As you wish. There’s always profit around Puradvipa.” He turned to Ratna. “But you will regret this.”

  Ratna sneered. They didn’t understand. Politics, wars, all of it was ash. Ratna had tried to save the Lunar Empire from tearing itself apart at the seams, and still, everyone seemed determined to shred her work. And why not, it was the chaos that had lost her Revati in the first place. Well, let the chaos attend to itself. She’d do anything to find her daughter.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

  Few defenders remained free in Bukit. Some had escaped into the rainforest or the wetlands. Many of those would fall prey to the Macan Gadungan or the Buaya Jadian. Malaria, starvation, or quicksand would claim others.

  Malin didn’t concern himself with the handful that might survive all that. They would be too few to pose a threat any time soon.

  Most of the rest had surrendered. Only a few had holed up in the Hill Palace. Rahu’s palace. Ketu’s palace. Or Kenya’s before them.

  “We can move in any time,” Pohaci said. “Or did you want to lead the way?”

  This place had housed monsters that had destroyed the Lunar Empire. Rahu had started the Fourth War, breaking centuries of peace. He’d forced them into the Fifth War, too. He’d created the Jadian, but instead of granting them glory for their nature, he’d made them virtual slaves.

  And this place had housed it all. How had Malin ever found this place comfortable? Or even tolerable?

  “Burn it.”

  “It’s the finest palace in Bukit,” she said. “We should seize it.”

  “Kasusthali was the greatest architectural achievement in the Skyfall Isles. It still burned. This place is just a reminder of what was. We’ll build something better. Burn it.”

  Pohaci shrugged. “As you wish.”

  She and several of the Macan Gadungan set torches at the base of the palace, threw them in windows, on the roof. It was the dry season. It didn’t take long for the blaze to light up the night sky.

  Some fled the burning building. Those that surrendered were taken to the others of their kind.

  He hoped Ratna hadn’t tried to sneak back inside. The thought surprised him. He still didn’t want her dead. And she had been stubborn enough to try to dig in here, resist the inevitable change he brought.

  “It’s done,” Pohaci said. “Bukit is ours.”

  Malin nodded.

  He turned his back on the dwindling blaze and headed for the throng of Moon Scions and their soldiers. Prisoners. What on Chandra’s dark side would he do with hundreds of prisoners?

  “People of Bukit,” he said. He did not raise his voice, but it carried through the night. All others fell silent.

  He gazed over his captured foes. Smartest to kill them. But he couldn’t build his new world like that. The hatred, the resentment, the blood would never end. They would cry for vengeance as fiercely as any Macan Gadungan. Demand it from him.

  He knew he’d never win all of these people to his cause. Still, if he won even a small portion, it would be a start. He was not Rahu. He was not Ketu.

  “Civilians will resume their normal lives.” Rahu had tried to make Malin a monster. But Malin was a man. Not a beast. “The warriors among you may swear loyalty to me. Those that will not do so will be imprisoned until Ketu has been dealt with and the threat to our new Lunar Empire is eliminated. Until all have seen that we have built something to last.”

  “Malin,” Pohaci said. She indicated one of the Moon Scions with her gaze. “That one threw me in the hole. Him and three others. After they broke my arm beating me with a toyak.”

  Malin glanced at the girl at his side. She might look a bit like Chandi, but she wasn’t Chandi. Hatred, bloodlust burned through her eyes. Oh yes, the Macan Gadungan understood vengeance. It was in their training, in their very souls.

  It might cost him. But Malin would not deny her.

  He pointed at the man she indicated. “Bring him.”

  Two of his Macan Gadungan grabbed the man by his sho
ulders. Dragged him forward despite his struggles. They forced the man to his knees before Malin.

  “Moon Scions have a tradition of duels,” he said. “One on one. Tradition gets broken from time to time. Sometimes it needs to be broken.” He’d broken it when he saved Chandi from Anusapati, not far from where the man now knelt. “Four Moon Scions attacking one unarmed woman is more than breaking tradition. It’s a situation requiring redress. What better way to redress than to let the woman face her attackers one on one?”

  He looked at Pohaci. She nodded, then retrieved a toyak from the pile of weapons they had disarmed from these men. She tossed it at the man’s feet.

  Her ekor pari arced through the air in a hypnotic spiral. The edges of the rope whip caught the firelight.

  The Moon Scion looked at her, then at the toyak. He sneered.

  When he didn’t move to take it, the ekor pari slashed off part of his earlobe. “Fight me,” Pohaci said. “Or die from a thousand stings.”

  The man grabbed the club. With his Blessings, he was fast. Maybe faster than her. She fell back under his assault. But with each step she cracked her stingray tail, opening gashes along the Moon Scion’s arms and legs.

  His rage made him careless. He overextended. The ekor pari tore a red streak across his cheek. Wailing, he dropped the toyak and fell, hands clutching his face.

  Eyes on Pohaci, Malin extended a hand toward the fallen man.

  “Take him to the Bowels. I believe there’s a vacant hole a werecrocodile once occupied.”

  Malin nodded to his Macan Gadungan. The weretigers dragged the man away. Pohaci’s superhuman constitution allowed her to survive that cesspit. The Moon Scion’s wounds would surely fester in there, leaving him an awful death.

  “Next.”

  Pohaci indicated the next man. Not even a Moon Scion, as far as Malin knew.

  “Please,” the soldier begged. “I was only following Rahu’s orders.”

  Malin nodded. “Don’t worry. The Macan Gadungan are only following mine.”

  He watched Pohaci visit her justice on each of the four men who had beaten her and left her to die. In a way, he felt for them. He had followed Rahu’s orders, too. Done things he wished he hadn’t. But then, he’d had to pay for his mistakes, too.

  Pohaci found him, later, sitting on his porch, watching the sunrise. The Hill Palace had burned to embers. His people had watched to make sure the fire couldn’t spread.

  “Am I a monster?” she asked.

  Malin studied her sweet face, so incongruent with the woman who had savaged those men.

  “We are what they have made us. No, I don’t think either of us is a monster.”

  But Ratna thought him a monster. He had sacked his own city. He had burned and slaughtered and allowed Pohaci her vengeance.

  “Get some sleep,” he said. “You’ll still have these questions tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY

  In a dozen years, Ratna doubted she could identify all the animals they encountered in the rainforest. Probably couldn’t identify the animals making all those sounds, either. Frogs, insects, macaques, and Chandra-knew-what-else chirped, chattered, and buzzed day and night.

  “How much farther?” she asked again.

  “I’m not sure,” Mahesa said. “I only came here the one time. Empu Bahula hid his refuge deep so no one would find it. Including us. Of course, that means we’ll be safe there, too.”

  “If we find it.”

  “I found it once.”

  A trio of parrots watched her as she passed under the branch they perched on. Annoying as the rainforest was, she could see the beauty Malin found in it.

  Damn the tiger. She didn’t want to think of him. “Will Empu Bahula be there waiting for us?” Mahesa only grunted. “Did you kill him?” His father had killed Ratna’s mother. She wouldn’t shed any tears for another dead Solar.

  Mahesa paused at a stream. He pointed upstream, at a waterfall, grinning like an idiot.

  Ratna knelt to refill her waterskin and wash her face. “Well?” she said when she rose.

  The boy knelt where she had been. “He won’t be returning.” He too washed his face, and flung water over his wily hair. “You remember the waterfall by that lake?”

  How could she forget? Little Mahesa had convinced Chandi to jump over the fall, at least a thirty-foot drop. He’d jumped himself, as soon as she’d surfaced.

  “Come on, come on,” they’d called to her. Waved her to them, as they swam in the lake.

  She called them fools, said they were lucky they hadn’t broken their necks. The truth was, looking over the fall with her legs trembling, she’d panicked.

  “You know, you were right, it was foolish,” Chandi had said later.

  Mahesa had grinned and nodded.

  That they’d tried to spare her feelings when she had seen the joy on their faces almost made it harder. Why hadn’t she jumped? Now, eight years later, falling in a lake didn’t seem so terrible.

  Ratna had let fear stop her too many times. Never again. She would never back away from the cliff again. Maybe taking Mahesa to her bed was the beginning of a new Ratna.

  “What happened when you came here before?”

  Mahesa hefted his satchel and continued onward. Ratna had to hustle to catch up, then she slipped her hand into his good one.

  “He wasn’t going to just give me the book. He warned me, even, how dangerous it was. The fear in his eyes, when he knew what I’d come for …”

  So Mahesa had killed Empu Baradah’s son to get it back. She squeezed his hand. It was easy to say she didn’t care. Easy.

  “I think something terrible must have happened, all those years ago,” Mahesa said, later. “Malin said your mother released a leyak from the underworld.”

  So the Macan Gadungan claimed. “I’m not doing anything with leyaks.”

  The sun had almost set when they came to the glade. The house didn’t look like much, but it would be better than sleeping in the rainforest again. Stilts raised it about six feet in the air, like a house on lowland Swarnadvipa. Vines had overgrown the stilts and a congregation of butterflies had settled on the roof, covering the otherwise simple design in a rainbow canopy.

  The wooden ladder leading up to the porch creaked under her weight as she climbed. She brushed aside a sheet covering the doorway, sending clouds of dust into the air. She had to wave her hand in front of her face and stifle a cough. Several chests and footlockers sat against one wall. The main room housed a low table and not much else.

  “Why would the Ministry force one of their people to live like this?”

  Mahesa shrugged. “Not sure they forced him at all. I cracked two chests before I found the book. The place held all kinds of odd things. There was a treatise on the gods of El-Hind and Serendib. They follow ours, but a lot of others, too.”

  Ratna didn’t care what the Serendibians did. The only one she’d met had been that captain who had brought her to Kasusthali. Whatever his name was. Charming enough, but of no consequence.

  She blew the dust from the table and opened her book on it.

  Mahesa sighed. “I’ll fix us something to eat.”

  Ratna nodded without looking up. She’d had precious little time to peruse the book in the rainforest. Wouldn’t have wanted to risk it getting wet, even had she had the time.

  She flipped through the pages, noting the strange Glyphs that covered many of them. She tried to memorize a few, but they wouldn’t settle in her mind. They’d be there, while she looked at them. But if she tried to bring one to mind moments later, some aspect of it would be off.

  A spirit is most attuned to its own name, her mother had written. Though many spirits may take little interest in our realm, the sound of their name quickly draws their attention.

  “I found some bananas.”

  Ratna jerked at Mahesa’s voice. Hadn’t he just left?

  “I can try to hunt for some meat tomorrow. I wanted to find more than this, but it’s a
lready getting dark.”

  Ratna glanced at the fading light outside. No wonder her eyes hurt, after staring at the book for so long. Her head, too.

  “I’m not hungry.” She knew she should be, she’d walked all day with nothing but fruit and nuts and water. But the idea of food left her stomach unsettled. She waved away the banana he tried to offer her.

  The book called to her. Revati was in that book. Her daughter’s location. She rummaged in the bedroom until she found a candle. With that lit, she resumed her study of the book.

  “Ratna,” Mahesa said, “we’ve been friends a long time.”

  She grunted. Her mother’s hand spoke of the underworld, of the power of the ancestor spirits sent there. The dead know the secrets of life, and the secrets of beyond. Almost any question has an answer, if one knows how to ask it, and of which spirit to inquire.

  “What I mean is, we know each other well. Very well, given what happened in Bukit. I mean, what we did. That night. So I was wondering if you had given thought to our future. We could have a future, you know.”

  Ratna glanced up from the book at him. “Mahesa, can we talk about this later?”

  She turned back to the pages. The ghosts of the underworld had knowledge that transcended mortal understanding. Almost any question has an answer.

  Ratna kept reading.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE

  Nineteen ships landed on Astral Shore. Almost as many as had come to take the Temple from the Solars five years ago. Malin’s navy had left the wreckage of Ketu’s in its wake. It seemed the priest didn’t have precise enough control to risk throwing a cyclone up around his own ships.

  Malin waved his army onward. The Macan Gadungan surged forward, charging Ketu’s soldiers. Ketu’s Moon Scions walked among those soldiers, but Malin’s own Moon Scions would hunt them down.

  Pohaci whipped her ekor pari in an arc, but his raised hand held her and the other Buaya Jadian back. “Check the wreckage of the ships. Make sure there are no survivors. Then keep watch to ensure none of his forces escape this day.”