Empire of Sky
Gabrielle S. Awe
Copyright © 2020 Gabrielle S. Awe
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9798648019461
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Cover design by: CK Book Cover Designs
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
CHAPTER 1
Blood really sticks to your hands.
They told me all about it during my training but I didn’t really get it until now; it runs red down the sink, fading to pink and washing away down the drain with the cold water and soap but it’s still on my hands, sunk into the whorls and cracks and calluses of fingers trained to draw a bow or hold a garrotte or sink a knife into a mark’s neck.
The eldest Master walks in and sees me scrubbing my hands, sees me watching the blood swirl, and his lips press together as he turns off the taps and takes a cloth and wraps my hands.
“Stop, Alinya,” he says gently, in that way the Masters have, the gentle firmness of a river that shapes the earth around it. He guides me to my cot and sits with me, holds the cloth around my hands.
“It will stain,” I say, and try to pull my fingers away. “I can’t get the blood off.”
“Shh,” he soothes me. “There is no blood, child; if you wash any harder the only blood will be your own.”
He opens the cloth and shows me; it is still white. My hands are clean but chapped; the soft cloth catches on my skin and I can see no blood but I can still feel it, just as I felt my too-sharp knife slicing into the neck of a merchant who’d been cheating the Queen of her tax.
This wasn’t my first time enforcing the Queen’s law, but it was my first time using the knife, and I didn’t much like it. The merchant woke at the end, and moved; my cut wasn’t clean and the blood spurted onto my hand. I shudder, thinking of the hot splash; I would rather use anything but the knife again.
“Poison is cleaner,” I tell the Master, and he inclines his head in partial agreement.
“In some ways and in some times poison is good, but you must be ready to use the knife; you must be ready to use anything.”
I nod, ever agreeable, but inside I know I will not use the knife again; when I finish the trials, I can use whatever method I want. I try anyway.
“It is good for the hand to choose the tool that fits it best,” I tell the Master, and he purses his lips.
“The skilled hand uses the tool that is best for the work.” He takes the cloth from me, a sign he is not pleased with my small rebellion, and stands.
“This should be a happy day,” he says, the gentle river again in his voice. “You have had the trial of the three silent deaths; it is time for your final trial, and then you will be one of us. Tomorrow, come to the Hall of the Gods when the moons rise, and you will get your final assignment.”
Tomorrow. Only one day to ready myself; one more day and I’d be one of them, one with the men who’d taken me from my parents and raised me to be like this. To be like them.
The eldest Master pauses at the door and looks at me with his killer’s eyes, the color as dark and unreadable as a pool of water on a moonless night.
“You are lucky, Alinya; lucky we rescued you from poverty and drudgery and took you in. This is a good life; better than dying in the magic fields or fading away in the mines. The work we do is important; we hold the Empire together. We enforce the will of the gods.”
He closes the door behind him. I stare at my hands and wonder how much blood will be on them before I die. It’s funny; I’m the killer, but this last trial feels more like a death sentence.
And so I try to sleep, on my last night before the last trial. I lay on the cot and rub my hands and I wait for the gods to tell me something, but they don’t. They never do.
After a night of restless sleep and empty dreams I wake to a day that feels fraught with waiting. It stretches ahead of me, empty; I have nowhere to be and nothing I have to do before the three moons rise. I don’t know what to do with myself so I make my way to an empty exercise room and practice with the sticks, lunging and whirling, twisting the sticks in the air, until I am out of breath, sweating, and at least a little distracted.
I wipe off the sweat with one of the soft cloths the masters have everywhere, bleached thin and rough, catching on my skin, pulling on my own rough edges. It isn’t until I’ve showered and eaten the bland porridge that makes up most of my meals that I finally decide what I want to do; I still have most of the day ahead of me, and I am too antsy to study, too distracted to meditate, and have too much on the line tonight to risk doing anything too physical, so I put a street cloak on over my guild leathers and head outside to the Bazaar.
I am not allowed to ever seek out or speak with my family, a condition of the vows they forced me to take, so I am careful of my route lest I pass my old neighborhood. The Masters know how to ensure obedience; the punishment for breaking a rule, a rule important enough to include in the vows, is death. Not mine, though; mine would be a price I would willingly pay. No, the price of disobedience would be the death of my family, one at a time. After all, the Masters tell me, I am meant to be one of the Hands of the Gods; my life is worth more than theirs; my obedience is priceless.
This is what they have told me, so I keep my hood up and go the long way round to the Bazaar, and I hurry in my silent slippered feet until I reach the gates carved in stone and drift into the perpetual twilight of the market of the city below, hidden in the shadow of Hinshalla; the great City that floats in the sky above us. The City of Sky.
You would think the gloom would be ugly and in places it is, but not in this place. We are on the eastern edge of the City above and we can see the light of the suns on the horizon and the water of the great falls above us drifts down as mist in the Bazaar; we have our own fog and drizzle in the twilight darkness, and it always looks here as if the suns are just about to rise.
This is a lie, of course. The suns will never rise on the city below; their light belongs to those who live above, on the great island floating in the sky, the royals and the nobles and the richest merchants, the ones who rule the Empire, while those of us who serve live in our strange darkness. Only our homes, my Guild house, and the inside of the factories and warehouses have light, and not much at that.
Outside, in the streets of the city below, my Guild and I are at home, creatures who work in darkness, our cloaks blending in the deep shadow that covers us. Here in the bazaar the fog and mist seem to glow and I can almost imagine I am in one of the magical places of the elder tales; fairy forests, the Winter City. Somewhere that isn’t here.
I am jostled by others shopping at the Bazaar; they bump my elbow, my hip. A small hand tries to slide into my empty pockets and I slap it away. I do not have money to spend here; it would not hurt to let the pickpocket find the nothing that I carry in there, but I want the little urchin to know that I know, so that he can be more careful and perhaps survive to see his face sprout hairs. If he wants to live to puberty he will need to be better at the slide of the hand into pockets, pouches, and wallets.
And he doesn’t need to find what I might be carrying on me instead of money. The tools of my trade are not for children - unless, of course, the child is me.
Most here are hurrying but for once I am not; time is the only thing I am here to kill. I snif
f the air and smell roasting meat, which sets my stomach to growling. The Masters insist the porridge and bland food are enough to sustain me but I do not believe they know much about being a teenage girl; their own years of growth are behind them, and I lick my lips at the thought of meat wrapped in a pita, or a spicy tamale.
Meat is expensive unless you don’t care what kind it is. There are small, scuttling creatures that live in the sewers and warehouses and live on scraps, and there are those who do not mind living off of them in turn. I pass a stall with small bits of meat wrapped around skewers and I suspect I know what they are but it doesn’t stop me from wanting them. Sometimes the illusion of something good is good enough, at least in this world.
I don’t let myself dream of a different one. The world is what it is.
Not everyone in the city below carries coin so most stalls accept barter. My empty pockets won’t help with that and I start to wonder why I came to see things that I can’t afford, but then the mist touches my face and a path clears in front of me and I see the glowing Bazaar and the light on the horizon and am reminded again of the strange beauty here, the most beautiful thing in my life, and I settle, wanting to enjoy this before my last trial, before my initiation, before a door closes behind me forever.
They have not told me how I will change; how I will be changed. I have seen how the Priests are ageless and dry, as if something vital has left them. Maybe it has. The only things I really own are those that I carry inside me, and I do not want to give them up; as I think this I realize I am afraid. I haven’t felt fear in so long.
A noise in the Bazaar wakes me. I have been wandering, lost in my mind, a bad habit for an assassin, and I try to straighten, to focus, but it is only a group of boys. They are standing at a liquor stall and from their red eyes and loosened clothing they look like it is not their first stop of the day; they look as if they have not just started drinking but have been out since last night, maybe even the night before as well.
Their clothes are rich, jeweled velvets poorly hidden under drab cloaks. I see rings on hands, straight teeth, and I can guess that these are rich nobles who have made the trip from the City above to slum down here with us. I don’t want any part of this; I don’t want anything to do with these drunk nobles who are sure to cause trouble just by being in the wrong place.
Sure enough, the young urchin who tried to slip my pocket earlier is circling around them; I see older, tougher thieves as well, drawn to the nobles as sure as a rat to a fresh corpse, their hardened eyes and too-casual slouching a dead giveaway. I catch the urchin’s eye and I give him a small frown to warn him off, and then I signal him with my right hand.
He hesitates and then backs off. I don’t know why I care about him, but I do. I do not want him dying here. I want him to grow up free, to have the life I might have had. I can do nothing for the others, though. They will not heed me; they will not know or care that I am with the Guild. Most of the people here think we are another myth; why would the Gods need assassins, when everyone down here dies young anyway?
I don’t want this to be my problem but I can see what’s about to happen and I know it will be bloody. The nobles are drunk but they are not the soft, easy marks the thieves take them for; they have swords and knives under those bland cloaks, and they are a group. The boys sneaking up on them are not trained, not used to working together; there will be a fight. Blood will leak into the small alleys and aisles of the Bazaar; a thief will die, maybe one of the nobles as well.
I don’t want to care if a noble dies. They are here to find trouble, and trouble is about to find them in return; they deserve what they get. It is what will happen after that concerns me; after all, the price for disobedience is death. There will be a purge, of one kind or another. Either the Queen’s guards will sweep the Bazaar, killing indiscriminately, or the Gods will speak and we will be sent to pick off the thieves, these young women and men. They will suffer, their families will suffer, and I do not want to kill any more of my people, especially not for taking such shiny and obvious bait. I don’t want their blood on my hands, too.
So I circle closer, one eye on the thieves as I watch the nobles and I work my way close to the tallest one, the one with the careless eyes and the finest clothes and that smirk that says he’s going to get what he wants, and I pretend to trip and stumble into him. I catch myself on his cloak and I yank it aside as I fall to the ground, and without looking at anyone I flash the thieves’ sign for a trap as I land. I’ve been taught to take a fall and it barely hurts, it’s fine. As the young nobleman leans down - for he is younger than I thought, he is barely older than my own 17 years - I look around, feigning embarrassment, and I see the thieves and troublemakers backing off. They won’t risk it.
His friends, all of them clean and shiny with wealth and glowing skin from living in the City where the sun kisses them during the day, laugh and clap his shoulder as he helps me up. His eyes lock on mine and I feel a chill; he is drunk but suspicious, not angry as I’d expected.
“Looks like we’ve caught ourselves a street urchin,” he says, and I stand and brush myself off. I start edging away from him.
“Apologies,” I murmur. His friends feel their pockets, letting everyone know exactly where their money is kept as they look to see if it’s still there, but he does not. He looks curious for a moment, a moment that lingers between us, and then shrugs.
“I’m sure it was an accident,” he replies, his eyes already moving on to the drink someone is handing him. His voice is both haughty and smooth and I bristle at the kindness, at the entitlement I hear in it. This is someone used to owning the right to the space around him. It is so unlike those of us born in the city below; we scrabble to rent the ground we walk; we are slaves who do not have the right to food or a place to live unless we meet our quotas for the month. That is how I lived, before the Masters took me, this is how I still live, just in a different way; dependent on the approval of the Masters. The difference in our worlds hits me hard and for the first time all day I remember why I want to do the trials; I don’t care what comes after. I want to become one of the Masters, so I too can own the space around me.
But I will never have the same rights as this noble boy who can travel at will between our city and his. The portals are expensive, controlled by the Queen’s wizards and the Gods; I may never live to see the City above. Right now all I can care about is living to see the final Trial tonight, leaving this life, the reminders of my slavery, even the Bazaar behind me; so I make my escape, but I can’t help turning back around when his voice, that haughty voice, calls out.
“Girl,” he says, and tosses me a coin. I catch it in the air and turn it over; it has a familiar face on it, the Prince of the Air, and the young nobleman and his friends laugh as I tuck it into a pocket. “For your trouble.” I can hear his sneer as I disappear into the twilight mist of the Bazaar.
CHAPTER 2
Just before moonsrise I make my way to the Hall of the Gods. My kit is packed, everything I need stashed away in pockets and hidden pouches in my soft leathers. I hope not to use my knives but they are sharp and ready, always waiting to taste blood.
The Master is waiting for me at the end of the great Hall, at the base of the steps that lead up to the dais. The other Masters line the Hall, heads bowed, faces covered with bulging blank masks, honoring the God of Assassins. On the wall behind the dais loom the images of the Joker and the Priestess of the Sky; he, tall and faceless, feet never touching the ground, holding his staff; she in her robes and the gold markings on her face, the sign that she is blessed by the gods. He is holding one of her hands and her other hand reaches for his staff. Her face is blank; she is his Hand, she is his Will made real on our world. And we are hers.
The Master waits for me and I come up to where he stands, my eyes steady. His eyes are searching mine, looking for something. I show him the steadiness of my will. I am ready for my last Trial. He looks past my eyes; he looks for any tell, any sign, a twitch of the lip
, a tic in the cheek. I show him nothing, my face as empty as the masks the other Masters wear. I am ready for this. I have to be. Finally he nods and hands me a marker, a spelled chip of bone indicating a patron; a commission from the Priestess of the Sky.
I take it, the bone chip chilling my fingers. It is so cold, a reminder of the finality of the death we bring. I turn it over and have to fight to keep myself steady, steady as a pool of flat water; the face is the same one I saw on the coin earlier today. The Prince of the Air.
This can’t be a coincidence.
I tilt my head at the Master, wanting to be sure. He nods again.
“This is a great honor, Alinya; your initiation will be one for the legends. Only the greatest of our order are tasked with a royal commission. I know you will do it justice; I know you will show him the honor he deserves.”
Never does he say that I will be killing the Prince. Never does he speak of death. We give honor to those who have lost theirs. In this way we keep the balance; we maintain the covenant with the gods.
He doesn’t say anything else and I break the chip between my fingers, binding myself to this commission. I cannot back out now. I will prevail in this Trial, or I will be ended by the same pitiless eyes that watch me accept the commission. The pieces of the chip fade away after I break it, a small magic, but one that stays with me.
The Master hands me a map of the City above and gives me my instructions; his hands are as cold as the bone chip, his fingers chilled by the death he carries with him. In front of them all I ash my face and wind my scarf around my hair, already mourning even as I prepare. The Prince of the Air deserves a quick death, just like anyone else; just like any other mark.
I do not know if he defied the Priestess of the Sky or committed some secret crime or just pissed off a god, but I will take his life and honor his death all the same without knowing. As my first teacher told me, it is not our place to be judge or jury, it is our place to carry out the gods’ will. And I need this final Trial; I need to kill this Prince so I, too, can be one of the Masters; never again powerless and afraid. I will leave my name behind and only be called Master.
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