The Chasing Graves Trilogy Box Set

by Ben Galley

  At least the fear kept her mind off the pain. Her head throbbed chronically. Her knuckles were raw and hot where she had tumbled. Her face was still a mass of cuts and bruises, and now it was pasted in grit. Her throat felt like a desert cave.

  ‘Get ’er up!’ There it was: the shout she had been dreading.

  Sunlight blinded her as a silhouette dragged the cloth from her face. She was seized by the bonds around her wrists and waist. She scraped along the scorching black sand, finding new pains with every tug.

  Blinking hard, she tried to get her bearings. The day was cloudless. The tall stones around them looked like glass chambers filled with a dark smoke. In her dizziness, she swore she saw their surfaces moving.

  Krona was sitting astride a black horse, a sword across her lap and fresh ash on her face. She was still wearing Nilith’s leather jacket. The rest of the Ghouls were spread out behind her on their own horses: big burly mountain creatures. A few sat atop green scarab beetles, each as tall as the stallions. Their pockmarked carapaces shone in the light, and where the sun caught an edge, the green took on a rainbow hue like oil on a puddle. The insects burbled away to themselves behind their gnarled mouths and pincers.

  Anoish still had Farazar’s body on his back, and was tethered beside a man with a thick bandage around one side of his head. At the back of the group, a train of little ghosts glowed faintly in the sunlight. Half of them wore rough smocks; the rest were naked. One tall ghost stood at their end, looking as doleful as his charges. Farazar.

  Krona poked Nilith with her riding whip. ‘Recognise this?’ She dangled a copper coin on a chain from her dirty fingers. ‘I should thank you, eh? It’ll save me some silver at the Nyxwell!’

  Nilith snarled and struggled as best she could. It amounted to a great deal of wheezing and more pain.

  ‘Tie her up, eh?’

  Rough rope was thrust between her wrists and tied to a horse and rider. She looked up to find a grim man with one white eye nodding at her.

  ‘I want to be at Abatwe by sunset, understand?’ Krona shouted to her gang. In the light, Nilith could see there were almost thirty of them.

  A dull moan rose and fell, like a bored wind.

  ‘Away!’

  The Ghouls moved off and Nilith was yanked into a stumbling walk. She felt like a jellyfish stranded on the Whitewash Beaches, all wobbly and transparent. She found a rhythm and an angle that hurt the least, and by the time they started to climb to the crater’s lip, she felt almost alive again.

  Nilith didn’t know whether it was the beldam’s good luck or the dead gods smiling, but she thanked both repeatedly for the blessing that Krona hadn’t taken her life. For a moment, she thought about trading it to be rid of the pain, but the notion was fleeting, followed swiftly by a shudder. The Krass in her cursed such an idea. Hers were a stubborn people. It was one of the reasons the Arc had yet to swallow her lands. It was a place where old traditions and customs lived on. Where religion was not a madness. Where nobles were born of silver and family, not the number of dead they owned. It was a place where if something was started, it was finished. She would not give up. Not yet.

  As the Ghouls made it over the edge of the crater, Nilith looked down at their zig-zag path and the country far below it. The Duneplains looked foreign compared to the Long Sands they had left behind.

  Orange, green and silver-blue; the spread of sand held no single colour from the Firespar to the horizon. Where the dunes didn’t reign, scrubland and white salt flats stretched for miles. Dark flecks of nomad caravans, soultrains and flocks of ostriches kicked up plumes of dust. At the bottom of the Firespar’s slopes, where the foothills gradually turned to sand, a small town had made camp over a thin black scratch in the desert. Faint roads led away from the town in various directions. They were quick to fade into the ever-changing terrains of the Duneplains.

  Where the sky met the earth, there was a smudge. It could have been cloud or heat-haze, but Nilith saw it as Araxes. It must have been the city, or the Outsprawls at the very least, but the more she squinted and strained, the more her head pounded.

  The rope tugged at her and she jolted forwards, almost falling.

  ‘Keep fucking moving,’ grunted the rider, spitting something black at her feet.

  The morning passed much the same way, with her falling behind and being sharply tugged along. As the hours passed and the path stretched, the tugging became more frequent, until she was almost being dragged rather than walked.

  She could have cheered when Krona called for a stop and for water to be passed around. Nilith was given just a sip, but to her it felt like plunging her face into an ocean. She swilled the water around her dusty mouth, soaking the grit out of the cuts and cracks.

  The rest was short-lived, but it sustained her for the next few hours of descent. The mountain’s shoulder kept most of the heat at bay until late morning, when the fiery orb conquered the spires of the volcano.

  The northern slopes were more cratered, as if the rock beneath had either sunk or had blown forth towards the distant sea. By the look of the huge pockmarked and smoke-black boulders that decorated the slopes, the latter was more likely. The Firespar had an old reputation for violence.

  Her minder was silent throughout the journey. Every now and again Krona would leer over her shoulder at Nilith and say something to the milky-eyed man in a foreign tongue. He would only reply in grunts. No words.

  Nilith held her silence. She didn’t imagine she would be able to speak. Her face was still swollen from her beating and her tumble from the horse. She wondered how long she had before the mess became infected.

  By noon, the path was following a curving route down the hollow of the northern slope. The going was kinder here, and Nilith could lean back to let her heels slide in the charcoal gravel. It was a chance to half-close her eyes, fade into the monotony of walking, and regain her strength.

  Step by step, the landscape rose up to meet them, and the ground regained a more horizontal angle. The mountain’s slopes flared for miles, similar to the brim of a witch’s hat in an old Krass fairy tale. Gradually, the ground turned to folds, looking like black dough mashed up by some enormous child. Nilith had to scramble over the great creases of rock with her hands tied. Here and there, where bubbles hid, the horses’ hooves punctured the stone with a puff of black dust. They barely twitched; they seemed built for this landscape. Anoish was more careful.

  ‘Lost your fight, eh?’ asked Krona, interrupting Nilith’s thoughts.

  It took a while to make her mouth work. Her words were malformed, rusty. ‘No. Just biding my time, thank you.’ Escape was a word that had been stuck in her mind all morning.

  ‘What fuckin’ time? We’re not far from Abatwe now, eh? I’ll see you sold by sunset.’

  Nilith ignored her. No threats or witticisms came to mind, which was unusual for her. She blamed the heat.

  ‘They’ll have to fix up your face. But I’ll tell them I found you like that, eh?’

  Nilith eyed the sword on the woman’s lap. It had a knack of catching the sunlight, and had been flashing at her all day. She wondered where her scimitar had got to, and which of these degenerates had it hanging from their belt.

  On and on, Krona brayed. ‘I reckon fifty gems for you. Forty-five if I’m feelin’ generous. I bet forty for your ghost, seeing how fresh and undamaged he is, eh?’

  ‘Not much to share around your crew.’

  ‘You forget the other ba’at. Little ghosts, eh? They’ll fetch a high price in Belish.’

  ‘Despicable.’

  ‘Is it so? I call it fair.’

  ‘Murdering children? How is that fair?’

  ‘We only murdered some. The rest we found in a burnt orphanage, near-dead from sun and swelterflux. Seemed a shame to let the creatures suffer. This is giving them a chance to live on.’

  ‘As slaves, and it is no life. It is a half-life.’

  ‘You citykind might call them shades, but it means the same as ba�
�at. As slave. That’s what the dead gods left for us, eh? It is our lot in life.’

  ‘Only because the city and the emperor say it is.’

  Krona turned and nodded to Nilith’s minder. He gave her a sharp smack around the ear, making her stumble. Her halter rubbed a strip of skin from her wrists.

  ‘Enough, eh? No politics in the desert. Sand shifts too quickly.’

  Nilith said no more and got on with the business of trudging.

  The Arctians say the desert teaches each person a different lesson. If she had learned anything so far, it was that she was no longer as young as she thought she was. This gruelling quest had proved that in the first week. At least today she had an excuse; she had been beaten half to death by a desert psychopath, after all. Desperate times make desperate minds, and a desperate mind will always dig up more problems in its search for hopelessness. Hopelessness is the only way to be completely free from responsibility. Age was not the issue here. This was about the ill wills of unscrupulous folk. Wherever there are no laws, or no strength to uphold them, lawlessness will flourish. Evil will abound, she thought. It was a simple and universal truth, and in its inexorability, chilling.

  Abatwe started as a pale smear in the distance. Within a few hours of toil, it became a sprawl of dome-shaped houses and a great wooden structure built over the crack that ran through the countryside. The Ghouls followed it, but kept at a respectful distance. Nilith could only see a dark rift and heard no trickle of water over the scuff of hooves and jolting of her bones, but she knew the Nyx when she saw it.

  The adobe houses rose out of the ground like barnacles stranded at high tide. She could tell they had once been a dazzling white, but the sand and wind had eaten at their facades, tanning them grey and orange. A few of the larger buildings sported limp banners on bent poles, marking taverns and shops. A few motley guards and sellswords watched on from archways, wise enough not to make a challenge to Krona and her crew.

  Despite its size and dilapidation, Abatwe seemed to be a hub of business. The spectrum of cloths and colours in the streets could have told her that alone. Though the sun was starting to sink, trade was still proceeding at stalls and in small squares between the buildings. People in dusty smocks and cotton rags browsed merchants’ tables full of sparkles, colours or billowing smoke. Nilith tasted spices and meat in the air, and her stomach twisted in jealousy.

  Krona halted her Ghouls by a fence of bone-white wood and chose four to accompany her. Anoish, Farazar and the train of little ghosts were brought up and Nilith was tied at their end. The horse nuzzled at her as he moved past, and she ran a hand over his nose. The rat man cracked his switch, cutting a red line across the beast’s flank.

  ‘Nuff of that!’

  Nilith cupped a hand to her ear, nodding at his grimy bandages. ‘Pardon?’

  He blew spit through puffed cheeks and puckered lips. ‘Lucky you’re bein’ sold, you cunt. I’d have carved bits off—’

  Krona clapped her hands. ‘Enough, Habad! You had your chance to wet your cock and she bit your ear off. Stay quiet if you want to come along, eh?’

  She led them deep into the town, to the fervent bustle of a central bazaar. The Ghouls were immediately mobbed by buyers and sellers. Nilith was pawed and poked at. Pipe smoke was blown in her face. People tapped at her arms and chattered prices in languages she had never heard. Anoish whinnied behind her as unsolicited inspections were made. She bared her teeth and hissed.

  Krona raised her sword and rested it on her shoulder. A space around her small convoy immediately opened up, and they moved on unbothered.

  It turned out they were headed for the wooden structure poised over the river-cut rift. It was a simple thing, little more than a tall frame hung with thick curtains. They didn’t form a solid ring, but were spaced around so that corridors opened up at specific angles. At their centre, there looked to be a well dug into the rift, and a stone font decorated with a mosaic of smashed pottery. Figures in robes stood around it. A Nyxwell.

  A soulmarket sat before it, like a wedge between the town and the structure. The tents of caravans and soultrains were camped around the edges of the space. At the edge of the Nyxwell, there was a large hut roofed with palm fronds. Hooded figures waited around the smoke of a small brazier. Chains dangled from their belts. A bald man in a leather jerkin sat on a stool, heating up a variety of brands. Around the hut, a score of tables had been placed in a semicircle. Some looked official, while others were being used as footstools for slumbering soultraders. A handful of unsold ghosts and town guards slumped about, looking the paragons of boredom.

  Krona chose one of the shabbier traders. With a mighty roar, she upended the table and the man that sat behind it. He landed in the dust, blinking hard and wiping drool from his chin. He froze when a sword buried itself in the table a few inches from his face.

  ‘I think you’re done for the day, eh? Move the fuck on.’

  The trader scurried away, his felt hat clamped to his head.

  Krona kicked the table upright, and after an impressive jump, stood atop it.

  ‘Listen up!’ she yelled over the chatter of idle business. ‘I got a dozen fresh ba’at here. None of them older than twelve. Got me a perfect shade with a body ready to bind. Got a young desert steed. And I got a live one, too. Middle-aged, needs a bit of care but that’s how we found her. Do I have any takers?’

  Her men toured the crowds, knocking shoulders with the other traders and their hired muscle. To reinforce her point, Krona wrenched her sword free, and let it hang by her meaty thigh. ‘Like I said, any takers?’

  A few men and a woman shuffled forwards, tentatively eyeing the stock. Krona smiled. She hit the floor with a crunch and began to charm her customers by poking each ghost and making up some imaginary merits.

  ‘She’s good at sewing. This one can play the arghul. He lights a fine fire, eh?’

  The buyers regarded Nilith with wrinkled faces. She stared back at them with hate in her eyes.

  ‘This one was found beaten on the slopes of the Spar. Got into a bit of trouble, didn’t you, eh?’ Krona patted Nilith cheerily on the arm. ‘She’s a good cook or would make a good guard. Failing that, a mistress, eh, men?’ She chuckled. ‘All she’d need is a bit of water and salve. Maybe a dip in the Well if you have the gems. That shade there is a friend of hers, too. The unbound one. Some sort of lover’s disagreement, I suspect, but they’d work well as a pair.’

  The buyers hummed and smacked their lips. The woman came forwards to stare at Farazar’s wounds, and when he shied away, a copper switch lashed him. As Farazar seethed, Krona took them aside to barter, leaving her goods and Ghouls to camp up beside the table.

  Now that Habad’s wily eyes were distracted by the crowds, Nilith immediately put her mind to escaping. She sidled up to Anoish. His bonds were double-tied, but if she couldn’t free herself, she could at least free him, and maybe drag her and the body with him. It took some fumbling and breathless cursing, but in the end she untethered him from Habad’s ride.

  ‘Shh.’ She ran her hands down his flanks. ‘Easy. Not yet.’

  In an effort to get closer to Farazar, Nilith made a show of finding a place to sit. One of the Ghouls spied her, and with a click of his fingers, she sat.

  ‘Farazar!’ she hissed, a little louder than she’d have liked. He shot her a sly look and she cocked her head. He drifted towards her, coming to rest within reach.

  ‘My ropes. They’re not copper thread.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me,’ he said, unmoving. Several white lines scored the vapours of his naked back.

  ‘You helped me before. You can do it again. Now untie my ropes!’

  ‘Because I…’ Farazar flapped his mouth. ‘Because…’

  Nilith rolled her eyes. Even that made her head pound. ‘It’s either stay here and get bound and sold to someone like that, or come with me.’

  Farazar scowled. She saw his eyes slip to the woman who had come to stare at him: a dark-eyed and seve
re-faced nomad woman wrapped in dusty yellow cloth. ‘You will just bind me later.’

  ‘At least with me there’ll be a later.’

  Blue teeth gnawing at blue lips. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s now or not at all. I refuse to let them bind you. And I will not be branded.’ Nilith bared her teeth, letting him see her frustration. ‘Ropes, damn it!’

  He fumbled worse than she, still unpractised with his hands, but he got the job done all the same, and just in time. Krona was returning with her arms around two buyers. One, the nomad woman, was shown to the train of waist-high ghosts, while an obese man was pointed towards Nilith and Farazar. The man’s eyes roved over every inch of them. His mouldy tongue flicked out, a lizard tasting the air. Nilith clutched the stray ends of rope in her fists, making it look as if she was still tied.

  ‘Want him as your new master, Farazar?’ she muttered.

  ‘You drive a hard bargain, Master Gleeb,’ Krona was saying. ‘But I’ll relent. Let’s fix her up and then you can decide. Be cheaper than a binding, given the rise in Nyxwater prices, eh?’

  Krona hauled Nilith up by the scruff of the neck and marched her towards the structure. A man in a grey robe, a Nyxite by her guess, met them at the steps to the font. Nilith struggled fiercely, expecting a quick knife to the back of the skull and a dunk in the water. Perhaps this man preferred his slaves alive after all.

  ‘What will it be?’ asked the Nyxite.

  Krona surprised her. ‘Healing.’

  Struggling no less at the word, Nilith was pushed up the steps and shown to the font, lined with an array of assorted pottery shards. They looked like panes of coloured sugar, arranged to show only a thin white line of grout. Below her feet, between the gaps in the wood, the rift of rock widened to reveal a dark and oily pool of Nyxwater. It was shallower than she would have expected, almost dry. There was even a rickety ladder leading down to it. Beyond the pool, the water dribbled away into another pool.