by Ben Galley
‘So this… this is what you’ve been hiding from the world…’ I whispered.
The widow flashed me a look of pure delight. Her brand of it, at least. It was a mad, wolfish thing.
The contraption was huge, filling the cavern to the roof. At its base was a ship’s hull, its silvery planks full of uneven portholes and gaps that showed metal ribs beneath. Spikes of iron bristled on the hull’s prow, like an adolescent’s beard. A word was splayed across it in black paint: VENGEANCE. Spars poked downwards like insectile protrusions, holding the construction steady against its scaffolding. Leather-wrapped palms on poles clung to its sides. They looked suspiciously like oars to me. Bulging from the top of the hull was a great patchwork balloon of writhing fabric; red, gold and blue. It had a waxed sheen to it, full of heavy stitching and daubs of pitch. It looked like the bulged neck of a humongous – and very ill – toad.
I heard bubbling and hissing somewhere in the wavering shadows of the cavern. I looked up to see wooden rafters, where more ghosts perched like roosting pigeons. Thick cogs spoke of something mechanical, but I couldn’t tell what. One ghost was dangling from a rope, patching a section of the balloon where a thin trail of steam or smoke escaped. The ghost-light caught the gleam of a ceiling made of iron bars and wooden planks.
‘What the fuck is it, Horix?’ I asked, finally finding my voice.
A soldier’s shout stole my chance for an answer.
‘They’re trying to reach the rear of the tower!’ came the holler.
Horix shrugged as she led us up a ramp, perhaps the same one I had cowered under before Kalid had seized me and dragged me to the sarcophagus. Who knew this monstrous creation had been lingering above me?
A line of ghosts occupied one side of the ramp. Several looked expectantly at the widow as she walked past, but were ignored completely. One ghost I recognised very well indeed. He was unmistakeable.
‘Kon,’ I whispered as I walked past.
At first the crumpled ghost looked pleased to see me, and then he saw the false white feather on my breast, and his eyes fell to my feet. I had nothing to say, and no time to say it. It was a poor goodbye.
The ramp walked us up to a doorway in the hull of the colossal machine. I watched with horror as its rough floor seemed to sag beneath the weight of Yamak, and the gap between it and the ramp widened marginally. I flinched away from it.
‘Is it… floating?’ Pointy asked, as aghast as I was. His pommel was open-mouthed.
‘What is this sorcery?’ I asked again, louder this time. I knew I sounded like a dullard peasant. I gawped like one too. Even in this world of bound ghosts and talking swords, this still had the capacity to shock me.
‘The Chamber of Thinking call it “science”, Caltro. I wouldn’t have expected you to be so skittish,’ said Horix as she marched inwards and took her place on a chair overlooking a wide porthole in the bow.
I thought I had a right to be skittish, when asked to board a floating ship. And yet, I had no choice in the matter. I had elected to follow my coin, and besides, the guards muscled me through its doorway before I could make a complaint.
I felt the craft wavering below me as I stared about at its boat-like interior, made of planks or crisscross panels. Its iron ribs were supported by skinny wooden beams. There seemed to be a deck above, accessed by a ladder. Some sort of commotion was going on up there, but I couldn’t tell what kind. Shadow pervaded where my glow couldn’t reach.
I threw up my hands. ‘Now what?’
My answer came in the form of a soldier pushing me into a corner. I waited in silence while the rest of the soldiers filed aboard, taking their places about the hull, treading the stairs, and thumping on the boards over my head. Through the many gaps, I could see them slumping against the beams, breathing quiet sighs of relief. I wasn’t convinced enough of our safety to share their emotion.
Light came in the form of fifty shades, marched in through the door by the last soldiers. The innards of the hull shone blue. They spared me a sour glance as they passed me, heading to grasp the palm-wood oars on the deck above. I vaguely recognised one or two but that was all. No Kon in sight. Horix was abandoning him, and all her other shades besides. Her vaults. Even many of her soldiers. She was sacrificing everything for this machine.
There came shouts for more of something I didn’t recognise the name of – something with gift or lift in it – and there was a strange sensation as the craft pushed at my heels. There was another cry of warning from high above us. A shudder coursed through the machine.
‘Release her!’ came the widow’s shrill order, and I heard the great cogs above us begin to turn with ponderous clanks. I realised then what the machinery in the roof had been for. It was pointless, but I tried to hold a breath anyway.
‘Charge, you fucking hounds!’ Temsa bellowed at his soldiers, spit plastering his face as he followed their charge over the bricks they’d battered out of the way. This was not how he had predicted this night turning out, but he was determined to right it. An empress-in-waiting was watching.
Temsa’s cane stabbed at the rubble. His leg ached, prickling his hips and back with needles, but he pressed on, turning the pain into anger. He thought of Horix’s white-haired head and its scowling face, dangling from his bloody grip. Perhaps he’d fashion it into a tankard, something to remind guests of the price of trying to beat him.
Horix’s gardens were paltry, and the soldiers found just a patch of earth between them and a stout but small door. No brave and foolish guards stood ready in defence. They were alone against the tower.
‘Bring up the ram!’ Temsa ordered. He stood by the walls, wary of the shadows between the scattered palms and shrubs to his left. Danib stood nearby, glowing white through the gaping rent in his breastplate. One arm hung limper than the other. His huge sword dragged in the mist-wreathed dust.
Something grumbled in the earth beneath them. Temsa felt it running through his talons. Ani seemed to feel it too. She looked to him, and they shared a blank look.
A puff of dust raced across the ground, splitting the garden with a dark line. Sand fell away, as if pouring down a giant hourglass. The ground was edging apart in two halves, creating a rectangular pit. Several soldiers lost their footing to the gap, crying out as the space opened beneath their feet. They clawed at the sand as they slipped.
‘Back! Back!’ Ani roared at the others.
The men were slow, heavy with confusion. As the gap yawned wider, showing a black void beneath the earth, half a dozen lost their grip and tumbled inwards with piteous cries. They were short-lived, and Temsa’s confusion grew. He whirled around to stare at the royal entourage, waiting back in the courtyard. He could see the ice in Sisine’s eyes even from a distance, as damning as a falling icicle.
‘Horix! What is this farce?’ Temsa cried. ‘Triggermen! Fire into that pit!’
A few bodies came forward, bows waggling at the darkness. But the shifting ground made their feet skittish. Arrows sailed high and wide. A few of Horix’s soldiers had appeared on balconies, and were taking pot-shots at them with short bows. Soldiers were soon scattering for cover.
There came a resounding bang as the pit found its boundaries, taking up practically all of the dusty space between the garden walls.
Temsa heard the cries rise from below, cut off suddenly. Then it appeared. An arc of red and gold cloth, swollen and puffed, rose up above the dust without a sound. One of his men was clinging to it, whimpering as he slowly slid from its curves and landed with a bang somewhere far below.
The patchwork cloth bulged into a huge, misshapen balloon, rising further and further until it forced Temsa’s head back, making his neck crunch. Clinging to the balloon’s underside was the bottom half of a small wooden ship, clinker-built and complete with keel and rudder. Silence fell across the garden as the soldiers gawped at the bizarre contraption.
No sooner had it come into view did Temsa see a porthole, and the triggerbow poking from it. He spared not a
shout, throwing himself behind Danib as the bolt was loosed. Stone chips sprayed as it met the wall behind him.
Another flurry of bolts followed, peppering his men. More bodies tumbled into the pit, their wails now prolonged and each ending in a crash.
‘Do something, Temsa!’ shrieked Sisine, now standing beside them, mouth agape in horror at the sight of the machine effortlessly plying the air, defying the gods themselves. Palm frond and feather oars made the craft spin as it climbed into the mist.
Temsa cursed as a bolt clanged off his talons. He shoved Danib in the back. ‘You heard her. Fucking do something!’ he cursed.
With a grunt, Danib hefted his sword. Holding it over his shoulder, he took a step, stretched backwards, and then threw the blade like an axe. Torchlight ran along its steel, making it seem almost liquid. Mist spiralled in the weapon’s path. A panicked shout came from behind one of the portholes, only to be silenced as the sword struck the ship’s hull, just below where the wood met canvas. With an almighty crack, it was buried up to the hilt.
Temsa watched Horix’s craft list to the right and veer madly around the pillar of a building. Over the strangled sounds of pain and confusion, he heard a faint reptilian hiss coming from the craft, and the cries of, “Leak!” behind the silver wood hull.
Before the craft was swallowed by the haze, Temsa saw a flash of blue standing at a dark doorway in its side. A figure stood by him: shorter, more crooked, cowl thrown back and face frozen in a victorious smile. He could see it clearly in the cold glow of the shade at her side. Even at that distance, Temsa could tell that smile was not for him. Though Caltro’s gaze bored into him, Horix’s did not. Her gaze ran past him, reserved for the empress-in-waiting who stood shaking with rage nearby.
As resoundingly as a door shutting, the flying contraption vanished into the night. The awkward silence soured quickly. Temsa looked to Sisine. Her face was flushed with blood. With a bark of an order, Sisine and her entourage about-faced and made for the broken gates. She had no words for Temsa but a strangled, ‘Tomorrow.’
Temsa watched her leave, analysing her sour expression. As a man who prided himself on reducing people to blubbering, bleeding wrecks, he liked to think he could recognise fear when he saw it. He witnessed it then, in the empress-in-waiting’s face.
Sisine looked as though she had seen a ghost.
Sisine was a hurricane of gold and turquoise. The soldiers struggled to keep up with her, wincing at the vehemence of her cursing. As she snatched her silk train from the blood-soaked stones, Sisine glared at the street beyond, where gawkers had gathered, and chancers already tugged at the fresh bodies in the hope of claiming a soul. Some saw her and prostrated themselves in the damp sand. Others were too occupied with trying to raise their social status.
Before the soldiers guided her back to her armoured carriage, Sisine spied a glimpse of red standing amongst the crowd. She saw one of the Cult sisters standing in the same alleyway she had lurked in, watching, waiting. The sister had a group of cloaked and armoured shades at her back; Sisine could see their muted glow painting the mist blue. There were living standing with them, too, wearing proctors’ and scrutinisers’ garb. Chamber and Cult, standing side by side, and both against her. They wore confused expressions upon seeing all the royal tabards lying blood-stained and punctured, and the empress-in-waiting wading through a street full of corpses.
Sisine locked eyes with the dead sister. Unlike the others around her, the shade’s face was unreadable. Sisine clenched her jaw, raised her chin to the appropriate royal height, and gave her a silent promise of another death.
As she walked, her golden sandal slipped upon something that looked suspiciously like stray entrails, and her ankle betrayed her. She flopped sideways, but was saved from falling by a cold grip on her arm. Etane righted her, and she immediately swatted him away, cutting a white mark across his cheek with her ring.
Sisine snarled, the pain in her ankle lending her viciousness. ‘How dare you touch me, shade?’ Sisine looked around as she tried not to hobble, daring her soldiers to look at her. Through their golden shields, she saw some bow their heads in muted chuckles.
‘Back to the Piercer!’ Sisine barked, her mind bursting with flying contraptions and old faces.
Chapter 9
The Hunted
Soulblades were a short-lived intersection between Nyxite binding magic and blacksmithing. Interminably difficult to accomplish, and vexingly inconsistent, the practice of binding souls into weapons of war was a step too far for deadbinding. Madness seemed to follow most blades like a stench. Very few were worth their silver, or the risks of keeping one, and so they were shunned, and fell from fashion, forgotten to all but collectors of antiques and master swordsmen.
From ‘The General’s Handbook’, a Chamber of Military Might publication
‘I tell you, I recognise this woman,’ Pointy said again.
‘So you keep saying,’ I muttered from one side of my mouth. ‘Saying it over and over doesn’t make it any more useful to our situation.’
Our situation was poor, that was for certain. There was a frantic racket above me as soldiers tried to mend the holes and keep the fabric from sputtering open. An “envelope”, I’d heard them call it. With its red paint, I imagined it more of a ruptured heart, pissing away lifeblood over the city.
I leaned forwards, peeking at the city below us through the dark doorway. The mist was merciful; it kept our real height above the ground a mystery, obscuring much of the streets. The occasional black rooftop rushed beneath. They were getting more common now, and not just towers threatening to scrape us from the sky. I felt the craft veer at an order, and saw the spiky tower of a pyramid sail past the hull.
Horix’s screeching could be heard over all the sounds of panic. ‘Height, curse it! We need height! Turn her around!’
Respect and formality had the tendency to dwindle under situations of pressure. This was no different. The men working the levers and wheels in the craft’s nose yelled back at her.
‘We’re trying!’
‘We need more of the gas!’
I wondered if I too should be afraid, but I knew unless I fell into a copper mangle, height posed no threat to me, or any ghost aboard. They still rowed the air as if it should have, though. I heard the whoosh, whoosh of their palm and feather oars, making the craft lurch up and down, or yaw to the side. More than one living soul aboard had decorated the boards with vomit during our short flight.
I was just impressed they’d managed to keep the Vengeance in the air so long. An hour, I guessed; maybe more, since Danib had speared us like a floeshark. I was just happy to be ignored, and wonder how long this strange journey would last.
That didn’t stop me watching the widow like an eagle watches a nest of rabbits. I couldn’t see my coin but I could almost feel its presence, tugging at me. Perhaps that was just my lust for it, but in any case, I had found myself creeping from my spot, only to squat down again as the soldiers rushed about. Nobody stood guard. I looked out of the doorway again, and contemplated falling.
‘Now?’ Pointy asked, sensing my thoughts.
‘Higher, damn it!’ Horix yelled. ‘And turn around! The Piercer is behind us!’
There it was. The depth of Horix’s madness. Or genius. I had yet to decide. I realised her ambition, at least. It seemed Temsa and Sisine weren’t the only one with the emperor’s Sanctuary in their sights. Horix had simply decided on taking a far, far different route to the throne. Part of me was impressed. The other parts were shocked.
Once more, my numb backside left my seat. Sliding the sword through the belt of the smock, I shuffled forwards, looking anywhere but the widow to belie my intentions. Her cowl was turned away from me, fixed on the window in the inverted bow. I looked too, and saw the early morning spread before me: just a blurry canvas of dark mists and shapes below, speckled with yellow and blue. Spires poked through the mist like needles through a blanket of wool. Dawn was still some time away, b
ut its light had begun to rise and paint the night with pipe-smoke grey.
The stocky tower of a storage house loomed ahead, and all eyes had turned upon it. Shouts drowned out my uneven stumbling and unbidden yelp as the Vengeance lurched again. A clang sounded as one of the spars struck a minaret.
‘More height!’ Horix yelled.
‘It won’t climb, Tal!’ replied one of the men at the controls.
I crept forwards until I hovered behind the widow, craning my neck to see hers, and my coin on her breast. My thief’s hands already twitched with anticipation, fingers gracing thumbs.
There. My half-coin. I saw the tantalising glint of copper dangling from a chain. Horix yelled another order as I reached, too clumsy in my eagerness. I had never been a good pickpocket. The craft swung to the left and my hand thwacked her cowl. I cursed myself as she turned, lightning fast for her age, so much so that I thought her neck might snap there and then, and save me the trouble.
But no. I was met with eyes like two flint daggers, and a resounding backhand from the new colonel. I was sent spinning to the floor, my cheek shivering with white fire. Horix was already standing over me when I raised my head. I saw my coin then, free of her hand, and a desperate rage took me. I ripped Pointy from my belt, slicing it in two in the process, and swung for the widow’s neck. It was the most murderous action I had ever taken, and I even had time to gawp in surprise as I watched the obsidian blade cut through the air.
Air was all the blade touched. Reverberations ran though my hand as Omshin kicked the flat of the blade, just above the hilt, and sent Pointy clattering from my grasp. Another kick came to my face, and knocked my skull back against the wood.
‘Treachery from all sides,’ Horix was muttering, picking her way over me, ensuring her skirts came nowhere near my cold blue skin. She bent to pick up Pointy between two fingers and held him over me. I wondered how she had the time for such torture while her precious Vengeance looked to be moments from crashing. As it turned out, she didn’t. The widow was simply reading the hieroglyphs along the soulblade.
