As they plodded through the streets they soon found that those who had vanished from the streets of Villiren were a varied range of individuals. Jeryd had numerous bereaved families to interview, but he was especially keen on locating any similarities to the disappearance of the missing Night Guard soldier. By concentrating on that, the probabilities of discovering him or what had happened to him were greater.
Some of the houses in the city showed evidence of extreme poverty; hastily built constructions with no flair for design. People were crowded into cuboid rooms that adjoined exactly similar rooms – in buildings run up because they were claimed to be the future in modernity and clean living. This was progress, Lutto had declared, as he pocketed their rent money, but somewhere over the course of the years the soul of the entire street had died.
Thus he persevered: family after family, door after door, face after face.
Jeryd knew, without understanding how, that some of the missing were never going to be found again. He saw the homes that they’d vanished from, and there was something about these decrepit places that suggested they were probably better off now, wherever they were.
Jeryd was surveying lives that no one in authority had ever bothered to check on. Lives that had capsized years ago: women who looked constantly on the verge of tears, men beyond desperation, young girls holding younger girls he hoped weren’t their own, the elderly afflicted with diseases he didn’t know how to describe. Forgotten people rotting inside their homes, conscious that they were not wanted in the city proper. Jeryd knew he could have been the first investigator to ask these families about the person who had vanished from their existence. Mothers who had lost their eldest children, on whom they depended. Husbands who had lost their wives of thirty years. Families of children with no parents.
You will find them, won’t you? You will help us?
Many said they couldn’t find a job, yet couldn’t survive out in the ice. Some claimed the portreeve had crippled or bribed the unions, and encouraged such an influx of cheap tribal labour that it meant they were paid next to nothing. Some described how he had issued regular pamphlets declaring that benefits had to be limited to pay for the cost of mounting a defence against the threat of attack from the north – which was merely a variation on earlier years when he said the money was needed to fund preparations against terror attacks from the tribes of Varltung. Thus Lutto created an air of danger to keep these people in their place.
If these families knew that a war was imminent, they didn’t show it.
How can you destroy people who are already broken?
But he and Nanzi found out one crucially interesting fact: those who had disappeared in larger numbers were the citizens with better-quality jobs – traders and tavern owners and smiths. Jeryd was frustrated with how the Inquisition could have overlooked such reports.
They strode from the houses back to the Inquisition headquarters in the ambience of the falling snow.
‘It’s not a pretty picture, is it?’ Jeryd’s mood had been so contemplative, he had momentarily forgotten Nanzi was next to him. He supposed today’s task had not been easy on her.
‘I had no idea how bad things were in this city,’ she confessed. ‘It doesn’t look like we can do much for them though, does it?’
‘The good investigator’, Jeryd replied, ‘always has choices before him, even when it seems there are none. He instinctively knows what’s right. He knows he has the option to do something.’
‘Sounds as if you’re the only good investigator left,’ Nanzi remarked.
‘I feel like I’m holding the fort all by myself.’
*
Another long day till his legs ached and sentences were drying up in his throat. After Nanzi departed for the night, he sat and contemplated the day’s findings in his chamber, a cup of tea in one hand, a biscuit in the other.
Patterns materialized.
Give or take half an hour’s walk, the majority of disappearances had taken place between the Ancient Quarter and the seafront, or concentrated in Deeping, around the Citadel and the barracks.
Jeryd brooded on these facts, as if tuning in to their importance.
What was special about the types of citizens who resided there? He had to also consider whether they had been murdered by some careful killer operating stealthily, or if perhaps prosperous men and women were walking out on their families because of the threat of war.
The red sun having set early this far north, he deliberated the subject for some time while in darkness.
*
Another whisper, someone calling out a name, one that wasn’t his. Night-time now, and once more Jeryd was lying in his bed. His gold-starred red breeches hung on the back of a chair as if mocking him. He’d been reading a history book he found on the shelf, the kind of dry information he needed to take his mind off things.
Marysa had kept herself busy by hunting for all the libraries. Not one central depository, they were spread across the city in small bohemian enclaves, some no more than front rooms or attic spaces. Her current area of research involved antique architecture. The Boreal Archipelago was littered with the remains of structures of dubious purpose, edifices that had been reduced to nothing more than crippled aesthetics, though there was little of the old stuff to be found in Villiren. She hoped to find herself employment from history tuition, but few people seemed interested.
And tonight she had recently returned from one of her first classes in some obscure technique of personal combat. Garish advertising leaflets constantly made their way around the city, promising methods of safety amidst the gang violence. He himself could never keep up with them: there was always a new technique to be learned: a punch or a jab that would defeat all others.
The ultimate fighting moves! The killer system! Women, defend yourselves against gang tyranny!
Currently she was out of the room making them some more tea, when suddenly he heard a voice that might or might not have been merely the wind; he couldn’t be certain.
The second time, it spoke a name, for sure.
When he opened the window to investigate, the area outside was quiet. No one walked the narrow, lacklustre streets. Was it possible he was being spied upon?
TEN
Malum was enjoying a card game with JC and a choleric trader called Gall, who was bleeding Sota and Lordil coins across the table. Malum didn’t need the money, just liked to win, although sometimes he wished that these types didn’t let their fear of him get in the way of a good game. Gall did a little work for the Black Eyed Dog mineral franchise, and some said that he dealt in slaves, though Malum had never seen much evidence of that.
There was a glass of blood to one side, from which he took a swig, savouring the metallic taste. Down here, none of this gang made any effort to hide what they were. In one corner of the room, watching the door, was Múndi, a tribal kid no older than ten who’d become orphaned after the rest of his tribe was slaughtered by Imperial soldiers. He normally sauntered around with a spurious arrogance, carrying his machete with casual ease.
Múndi stepped aside as two of the youngest recruits came clambering in to the rear of the dimly lit bar, and Malum studied the two youths from behind his mask. They were both blond: Jodil the chunky one, while Din was skinny. Fourteen and fifteen years old respectively, they wore thigh-length leather coats and the same brand of paduasoy hooded jumper that Malum had bought for them on their initiation. Annoyingly, they kept wearing crude home-made fangs to blend in with the fully ordained members of the Bloods, but Malum didn’t discourage their enthusiasm.
They now seemed nervous, each shifting his weight from foot to foot, hands buried deep in their pockets. He liked the kids. There was a deep sense of loyalty in them, which derived from the fact that they’d both lost their fathers to the sea and didn’t have much else in the way of family. They had drifted, he had caught them and nurtured them. A lot of young recruits came to him that way.
Malum slung down his cards as JC stood t
o berate the two for disrupting the game.
Malum placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Leave it, it’s fine.’ He gestured for JC to sit back down again in his seat. Then, to the kids, ‘What’s wrong?’
Jodil, the thickset one, spoke through the pauses in his breathing. ‘We lost Deeb. We was down by the boneyard. To keep watch to see if any of those dicks from the Screams was being brought in there this morning after that fight. Then Deeb tried it on with these two weird old men. And . . . And . . .’
‘Slow down.’ Malum moved over to them both and placed a paternal arm around each shoulder. ‘Sit, and speak a little more clearly.’ Soothing tones, close body contact: the things these young street-warriors most needed right now. Malum glared at the fat trader until the man picked up what was left of his coins and slunk out of the bar. The young Bloods took their seats.
‘Now’ – Malum leaned forward across the table, his arms folded, seeking eye contact – ‘what happened to Deeb?’
‘Dead,’ Din murmured.
‘He’s gotta be,’ Jodil agreed.
Malum pondered their body language. ‘You don’t seem convinced.’
‘Those two old men,’ Jodil continued, ‘they was fucking around with these graves. There was one that was already open.’
‘Criminal’s grave?’ JC offered.
‘They all are at the boneyard,’ Malum grunted. Anyone who broke the law was buried, not burned, so that their souls remained trapped within the city: an imprisonment during the afterlife.
‘Whatever,’ Jodil continued. ‘Deeb went over to see what was going on and he started calling them all sorts of names.’
‘Why?’
‘You know what he’s like. He’s a dick. Gives them all this attitude.’
‘The men, what did they do? Did you get a good look?’
‘One was bald,’ Din said, ‘but we didn’t get a proper look at the other. They was wearing too many layers – all dark shades.’
‘And what did they do with Deeb?’
‘They grabbed him by the neck, snapped it just like that, and threw him in the grave.’
Malum gestured for them to go on.
‘Then there was a flash of something. Cultists, we reckoned at the time. Then Deeb was lifted up out of the grave by three of the things that was already in them.’
‘What, the corpses?’
The youths both nodded.
‘What were you two doing at the time?’
‘We shouted something but we couldn’t move. It’s as if there was some sort of wall between us. We swear we tried to get to him. We tried to throw rocks over it, but only a few managed to get near them. Even that small crossbow of mine wouldn’t shatter it.’
Malum nodded. ‘Then what happened?’
‘Deeb looked dead. He shouldn’t have been able to move. His neck was broken and his head was hanging at an angle. His eyes was closed, too. The things to one side of him were really decayed. They looked like melted men with their skin peeling off. The three of them came towards us and that’s when we legged it back here and didn’t stop. We could hear them men laughing at us as we left the boneyard.’
Everyone waited for Malum’s next words to fill the painful silence, but no one made eye contact.
He had heard about these sorts of situations before, but they tended to amount to just rumours, fanciful stories designed to intimidate others, yet he’d recently heard about something similar happening on Jokull, with dead people walking across the tundra, but that was too far away to concern him.
Knowing what it was likely to have been, he eventually declared, ‘Cultist necromancers. That’s what they sound like. In the boneyard, raising the dead, killing one of our gang members.’
‘What shall we do?’ asked the skinny youth, hunching his shoulders, retreating into himself. ‘Could go back again, see if they return?’
Malum stood up, stretched his legs. ‘The Bloods, we’re family remember. If one of us goes down, I go down with him. We respect and support each other. But dealing with necromancers, well . . . that’s something way out of what we normally have to contend with.’
None of them would be equipped to fight people like that. He had a pact with a few cultists, a deal arranged to make their lives more comfortable in exchange for a little help, but he didn’t think that they were worth wasting on a power his own guys wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Necromancers were rare even in the weird and fucked-up world of cultists. His decision now would be to do nothing, but he would promote these youths up a level for at least trying to fight off a necromancer to help their already dead friend.
ELEVEN
‘Lady Rika, you want to say a little prayer, or something?’ Randur muttered. ‘Might make the snow stop.’
He gazed out across the treeless plain, at a stolen glimpse of sunlight – at skies turning the colour of a rusted sword, providing the only distraction from the same bleakness they had travelled through for so long now. Pterodettes circled terns that circled pterodettes in avoidance manoeuvres. In such vast open skies there was nowhere to hide.
‘From the sound of your voice,’ Rika said, ‘I assume you are having some fun at my expense, Randur.’ Her black cloak rippled in the breeze, revealing an ornate medallion attached to the robe underneath, a reminder of the wealth she and her sister were once used to.
‘Not much, if I’m honest,’ Randur replied, catching a wry smile from Denlin.
Randur leaned on his sword as they sheltered from the constant snow under the porch of an old farmhouse. The building hadn’t been lived in for years, but it was somewhere. Psychologically, points like this were essential havens on their map. Thirty days now, and most of them spent icy wet. Thirty days on the run from Villjamur.
They were fugitives, no less; he’d stolen these girls from certain death and angered an entire empire in the process, and to say he was now feeling paranoid was an understatement. On a rickety boat that lurched and lunged amid choppy waters, they’d skimmed north along the coast of Jokull, under nothing but empty skies and sea spray. They avoided ice sheets near Kullrún, then travelled south with mordantly cold winds chasing behind them, before landing with more luck than skill on the east coast of Folke the previous night.
Yet they were barely at the halfway point of their route. Villiren, a city located at the end of the next island north, was their target destination – though it seemed a world away.
Still, at least we’re out of the fucking freezing water.
Folke: Randur’s homeland. He knew it well, so was aware of the dangers to be encountered anywhere away from the major towns. Looking out across a snow-blasted landscape, with nothing ahead but biting wind, with only a few provisions and having not seen another person in days, the success of their journey seemed improbable at best. Patches of exposed land near the coast were so inhospitable that only moss and lichen could survive, but the territory itself was familiar enough to provide him with reassurance on a deep level that he wasn’t really aware of.
Denlin briefed their companions, now that they were further inland. The old man’s age and experience were useful out here, but Denlin now seemed to have an opinion on everything. ‘Girls from a fancy background who have lost everything – money, family and whatever. You two are nobodies, now, right? What are you?’
‘Nobodies,’ they mumbled, sounding as if they had been berated for some petty misdemeanour, not fighting for survival in a deleterious landscape. Both were garbed in featureless brown furs, hoods flipped up for protection, travelling bags at their feet. Rika’s once-elegant hair was now lank and dishevelled, leaving black tendrils clinging to her face. Unlike Randur’s partner Eir – her hair was shorter, scruffier, her face more gently rounded than Rika’s, but otherwise almost identical in appearance. This similarity gave Randur some concern – that he might make some inappropriate suggestion to the wrong sister, maybe slap the wrong behind. And get his face slapped back. Two times he had come close, two times he caught a fine detail at the last mome
nt in time to make him stop.
‘Because if you’re somebody, you get your arse kicked,’ Denlin declared. ‘No, you get the crap thieved from your arse.’
‘Does he have to be so crude?’ Eir asked.
‘It grows on you,’ Randur grunted.
‘Seen a lot, lad. I’m a man of the world, me.’ Denlin faced him with this new-found authority, and this sense of command added a little dignity to his age-sagged face. His forest-green cloak, ex-military, was annoyingly clean, probably an old soldier’s habit. When Randur had first met the old man, he could barely keep himself clean, could barely gather together enough money to buy himself a meal in the rancid taverns of Villjamur. Randur no longer hated being the best dressed, even out in the middle of nowhere, under these big island skies.
‘This ain’t the time to be nice and kind,’ Denlin said. ‘You got to speak the language of the wild.’
A movement in the distance.
‘Well, using that same language,’ Randur interrupted him, ‘how do you say “There’s a caravan of militants over there, and they’re heading our way”?’
The old man turned to observe the approaching group. ‘Good point, lad. Bugger.’
A horse-drawn caravan crested the hill, with a red symbol painted on its side: a crude image of an eagle on fire. Randur knew it to signify one of the rebel groups that cropped up now and then across the Empire, a crew of rascals that he’d encountered once before on Folke. They called for freedom from Jamur power, and refused to pay their taxes, but still managed to defile the good name of anarchism. You would hear about them cruising from town to town, seducing girls who were impressed with their half-baked philosophies stolen from others, more thrilled at outraging their elders’ feelings than engaging in revolutionary activities. These young men liked to challenge others to fights, but it was only machismo, nothing more than posturing in taverns.
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