The Chasing Graves Trilogy Box Set

by Ben Galley

  Farazar began to undo some of the ropes binding his body to the beetle’s carapace, getting ready to push it into the first scrap of Nyxwater he could find. His corpse began to squelch, bouncing with the creature’s canter. Even then, in that moment, hand hovering over the wrappings, Farazar wondered what his old self looked like after several weeks under the hot sun. He didn’t dare to look.

  He could see a handful of Nyxites now, milling between the buildings with candles in their hands. He could hear the music of some flute, wailing over the bustle of a nearby night bazaar. There was less than a quarter mile to go now. The rift was a stone’s throw away, arcing towards him as though heading off the chase. He bit his lip as hard as his formless teeth allowed, straining to go faster.

  ‘I need copper! Copper, Nyxites!’ he bellowed.

  None of the robed bastards moved, merely exchanging concerned looks. Farazar looked about for guards or sellswords, but there were none to be seen.

  There came a hiss and a sudden thud, and the beetle came crashing to the earth. Farazar tumbled over its spiny head and into the dust with a cry. Without bones to break or a brain to stun, he wasted no time in sprinting back to the collapsed insect. A thick triggerbow bolt protruded from a gap in its carapace.

  ‘Gah!’ he grunted. ‘It’s your fault for not having a thicker shell!’ The beetle burbled away woefully as Farazar dragged his body from its back and began to haul it towards the rift.

  Farazar pushed all the strength he had into his hands and feet. The sand slipped beneath his bare soles, but the body moved, and quickly too. He heaved and he heaved, trying to ignore the approaching rumble of hooves and wheels.

  ‘I need a copper coin! Help me!’ he yelled again. A few Nyxites were coming forwards, tentatively. They were not looking at him, but at the wagon racing after him.

  ‘Fuck you, then!’ Farazar cursed, wild eyes turning to the Nyx and locking there. Only a score of yards remained. Sand scraped beneath the body; the strain was unbearable. Ten yards. His glow turned white as he screeched with the effort. Now five. The Nyxites began to scarper behind their building.

  ‘So be it!’ Farazar roared. ‘So be it! No binding tonight, you fetid bastards!’

  He slumped to a heap at the edge of the rift and threw everything he had behind his body. It teetered on the edge of the black-stained rock.

  ‘YAH!’ he cried, shoving once more as hooves and skidding wagon wheels sprayed him with sand. He felt the pull of the earth take his corpse as strong, inhuman arms grabbed him by the shoulders. He was dragged backward, but he did not care; his body would momentarily be in the Nyx, and he would soon be gone from this place.

  Farazar looked around with a grin, trying to find Nilith before he was whisked into the ether. He wanted to see the shame and failure etched into her face.

  Instead, he met a bulbous lump of grey skin with no eyes and a maw filled with glowing fangs. He realised then what held him in its grasp. The monster’s jaws were already wide and poised to sink into his shoulder, which they did with relish.

  He screamed as the pain ran through him. Black veins spread from where the fangs sank in. Glee turned to terror and Farazar began to thrash. It only made the pain worse, but somehow he found time to wonder whether he’d made a mistake in choosing the afterlife. It was turning out to be a severe disappointment.

  ‘Desist!’ somebody shouted. There came the snap of a switch. ‘Not food!’

  The monster let go, slithering back on a legless body and whining horribly. Farazar was left to sprawl on the sand and clutch at his shoulder and clench his ghostly teeth. The black veins receded, replaced with burning white lines. Some of his vapours were missing from a ragged patch around his shoulder, where bite marks still glowed.

  Seething, he reached out towards the Nyx but only managed to claw at the sand. What’s wrong? Why am I not in the afterlife?

  ‘A fine attempt, shade, but you are out of luck,’ said a voice, and Farazar looked up to find a resplendent-looking man in a wide-brimmed hat standing over him. He was pointing at the shallow rift. ‘Go on, after you.’

  Under the man’s watchful eye, Farazar crawled forwards until he could peer into the Nyx. Instead of a pool or river of oily waters, he found only ink-stained rock. At the bottom of the rift, a dozen feet down, he spotted his body lying curled like a fat grub, dry as the stone around it. He understood now why the Nyxites were peeking out from behind their adobe walls. There had been no help to give.

  Farazar’s fist met the sand with a puff, and his forehead quickly followed. Disappointment was a sour draught. ‘Where has it gone?’ he mumbled against the earth as the man bound his hands with black rope. Judging by its weight, it had a copper core. ‘It can’t have just gone!’

  ‘Haven’t you heard, half-life? Nyx has all but dried up in the Sprawls.’

  ‘Lies!’

  ‘Truly. They say the city’s not too far behind, despite the emperor increasing the price of Nyxwater. Shipments out from the city are too slow or too expensive for the folk in these parts.’

  ‘Why?’ came a familiar voice. Farazar looked up to see Nilith’s face pressing against the thick bars of the cage atop the wagon. Still alive, which was a deep shame. One of her hands was hidden within her coat. He was irritated to see her healed, with new clothes on her back, and apart from the trace of worry in her eyes, fairly well rested. He inwardly cursed her.

  ‘Why do they say the Nyx is drying up?’ she asked.

  The man shrugged. ‘Unclear. The Nyxites are clueless. I believe the Cons—’

  ‘One gods damned moment, peasant! Who the fuck are you to interfere with my dealings?’ Farazar demanded as he was veritably carried to the wagon. The monster slithered alongside like a loyal snake, grey tongue lolling hungrily over its fangs. ‘I have a right to my freedom!’

  ‘I, shade, am Chaser Jobey of the Consortium—’

  ‘And a right inconvenient shit,’ muttered Nilith.

  Jobey spared a moment to whack her fingers from the bars with his switch, but she was too quick. ‘As I was saying, I am here to reclaim your debt.’

  ‘What damn debt? Speak, man!’

  Jobey looked a little put out by Farazar’s regal tone. ‘The toll to pass through the Kal Duat mine. Your debt has been set at your life. Seeing as that is already taken, your servitude will suffice. Freedom is no longer your right, I’m afraid.’

  Farazar raised his chin, glaring fiercely as he was hitched by his bonds to Nilith’s side of the cage. The creature was shepherded into the other side, behind the partition of bars. ‘It was this woman’s fault, not mine! Do you expect a shade to be responsible for his owner’s actions?’

  ‘You deplorable twat,’ came the hiss from behind him.

  Jobey moved to the rift with a hook attached to a rope. Within moments, he was hauling up the body and dragging it across the sand. ‘Seeing as you fled this woman and this body is not yet bound, I can only assume you are nobody’s property yet. Therefore you can be held responsible. You shall belong to the Consortium, and soon.’

  ‘How dare you! I demand to know who this Consortium of yours thinks it is!’

  Nilith had more words for them. ‘A hive of inconvenient shits.’

  Jobey whacked the bars again. He seemed a man short of temper. ‘As I have already told your companion, shade, the Consortium are a group of businessmen, and exceptional ones at that. The Chamber of Trade thinks itself the power behind business in the Arc, but in fact that belongs to the Consortium. Hence you would do well to respect them.’

  ‘That’s why we have never heard of them, is it?’ muttered Nilith.

  The chaser occupied himself by dumping Farazar’s body onto the wagon’s rear. He craned his neck as far away from the bundle as possible, mouth at a severe downward angle. He clamped a scented napkin to his face as soon as a hand was free. ‘It’s the wise businessman who knows the benefits of confidentiality. Privacy. You have no right to know the Consortium’s dealings.’

&nbs
p; ‘And you have no right to levy spurious tolls! Only the emperor makes such rules, and he has not granted you any such permission!’ Farazar barked at him.

  Jobey gave him a sour yet smug look as he mounted the wagon’s seat. ‘Your woman said the same, and I shall tell you what I told her. The emperor has no care for this city. Only his wars. His own empress has fled, and his daughter has enough trouble with the city spiralling into havoc. That is why we save the royal family the trouble of passing decrees, and do as we please. And why not, when it was the last emperor who sold the Consortium the land in the first place, decades ago?

  ‘We are not some measly market traders hawking yesterday’s fish, shade. Why, where do you think the stone for the city’s towers and high-roads comes from? Consortium quarries. Or the grain in Araxes’ grain stores? Belish crops on Consortium wagons, sold to the Chamber of Trade. Or whose ships carry in furs and jewels for tors and tals? The Consortium’s. If the emperor ever came out of his Sanctuary, he would learn that this empire consists of more than just the city of Araxes.’ Jobey cocked his head then, as if trying to place a memory. ‘I must say, you look rather familiar to me,’ he said to Farazar.

  Farazar narrowed his eyes. His bonds shook with the frustration and outrage running through him. His desires counted for nothing since his death. It was infuriating. A soul, at its heart, was nothing but desire. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, Chaser Jobey. Both you and your Consortium!’

  The wagon lurched forwards without care for Farazar’s threats, heading parallel to the Outsprawl’s edge and away from the curious looks of the Nyxites. No sooner had the wheels started moving than Nilith prodded him in the back and whispered in his ear.

  ‘There’s always comfort in knowing you were right, at least. You did tell me you’d see me in Araxes,’ she snickered.

  Farazar snarled as he hunched away from her, arms lashed and taut behind him. He stared at the empty Nyxwell until it was lost behind a dune, wishing death on this putrid man and his monster, on his Consortium, and on the wife who had brought all of this upon him. The wife sitting beside him in a cage, clutching her arm to her belly, looking sorrier than he had ever seen her.

  At least that was some comfort.

  Chapter 2

  The Outsprawls

  How does the Arc control its borders? I’ll tell you how. Ghosts. A fucking million of them, armed and armoured, spread between my islands and Araxes’ coast. They never need food, water, rest, or medicine. That is why nobody challenges Emperor Farazar’s lands, and why I cannot invade. My only tactic is to outlast his ghostly hordes, let them smash themselves against my copper gates, and wait for the Arctian Empire to rot from within.

  From Scatter Prince Phylar’s diary, dated year 999

  Grit crunched between her teeth and in the cracks of her dried tongue. She tried to pull more air into her lungs, but her jaw seemed locked in place. Her swollen eyes were cemented shut by sand and sun-baked blood.

  Heles couldn’t feel the rest of her body at all.

  Panic forced her eyes open. Such a small and simple movement, and yet it took all she had. Bright sunlight surged into her throbbing eyes, and she retched.

  Only then did she feel her body: afire in a hundred places as she convulsed, spewing up nothing but bloody water, and fuck all of it. It still threatened to drown her if she didn’t move or tilt her head. Heles rolled herself between hurls, and chewed sand to keep her stomach still. If ribs could speak, hers would have been screeching in agony. Her legs were still numb, and she listened for a kick of sand as she tried muscles she had known for decades. To her relief, there was a gentle scuff; barely more than a twitch, but enough to know her spine wasn’t broken, and that something bound her knees.

  Though the sun blinded her, it was having a warming effect. Her pain had been so vicious she had not noticed she was cold. Freezing cold, in fact. She lay there for a moment, wondering how a single body could ache so much and not be dead.

  Heles looked around, noting the sand’s rosy glow and the dew on a nearby spur of butchered cactus. Its maroon, finger-like branches and scattered pale fruit, not dissimilar to eyeballs, shone with it. Somebody had wanted it out of their path. She knew how it felt.

  No.

  Only palms and flowers sprouted in Araxes. Crimson rhipsa usually grew where desert met city. Heles twitched at the realisation.

  Breathing heavily, and ingesting copious handfuls of grit into her lungs, she forced her head up so she could survey her blurry surroundings.

  Closing one eye showed her an adobe wall with a barred window. With a painful twist of her head, Heles saw a white cottage half-swallowed by a small dune. Between her and it lay another body. Just a dark lump, but somehow she knew it. Her heart began to stir some more.

  Heles angled her head to see rippling sand leading off into the endless desert. Too pained to move, she put her ears to use. There was a ringing in one of them, and a persistent thumping in her head, but besides that, she heard the buzzing of insects, the sizzling of dew and the rumble of a distant city.

  The Outsprawls. They’ve dumped me in the fucking Sprawls.

  She attempted to move, but something bound her arms as well as her legs. Heles looked down, eyes bulging at the sackcloth that was wrapped around her. She began to writhe. Spittle foaming at her mouth, she heaved herself into a roll. She screamed when she turned over, feeling broken bones crunch in her wrist and smacking her split forehead against the sand.

  Twice more she rolled, until the sackcloth had loosened enough for her bruised fingers to claw at the earth. Spitting what grit and vomit she could scrape from her mouth with her swollen tongue, Heles sprawled beneath the sky and let the sun warm her, perchance even heal her. She needed to feel something other than pain, and the roasting heat was in abundance. It let her know she was alive.

  Despite her agony, she drifted in and out of consciousness until the sun scaled to its zenith. When Heles could stoke herself into action, she pushed herself from the sand with her good arm. Her skin was hot, burned in the places that were split or not used to sun. New wounds announced themselves with shocks of pain or vicious twinges. She poked at them, taking note of each.

  Her right wrist was broken, and the skin around the suspicious-looking lump was a blue bordering on black. Purple and red patches covered the rest of her body. At least three ribs were broken. Her left knee was aflame. One eye was almost swollen shut, and at some point in the fight, her lips had clashed with her teeth and come off the worse. Two of the aforementioned teeth were absent. There was a gash on her forehead, and Heles couldn’t decide whether it was grit or skull fragments she could feel in the wound. In any case, it had finished its bleeding, but not before painting her face crimson. She could feel it flaking under her fingertips, and they came away dark. It was probably why they had assumed her dead, but why she hadn’t been bound and sold already was beyond her.

  It took far too much time, but Heles got to her knees. Her scrutiniser’s robes had been ripped and torn to the point of shreds, but the black cloth and silver lining were still recognisable. Scrutinisers were not loved any more in the Sprawls than they were in the city’s core. With a grimace, she pulled at the threads of her uniform until it had fallen to the sand, then she heaved up the sackcloth and wore it as a makeshift cloak.

  In a shambling crawl, she reached the nearby body. Her suspicions were proven true once the ragged black cloak had been torn away. It was Jym, jaw and nose caved in and teeth all gone, but Heles still recognised his eyes, all wide and wild. They were a snapshot of his emotions the moment of his death: dread and panic.

  She thumped his chest several times, cursing him breathlessly until her aching throat formed a word out of spit and sand. ‘Stupid!’

  Heles fell back onto her arse, panting while she regained enough strength for standing. She had no doubt in her mind what task lay before her: return to the city. That was the only logical thing to do. Chamberlain Rebene had to be informed precisely what Horix
had done. What she had under her garden. The scrutiniser in Heles could already see the links forming between Horix and Temsa. Their ruthlessness, secrecy, and plotting…

  She stood, but kept her eyes on Jym as she rose. Horix had made a mistake in killing a proctor of the Chamber, but she had made a bigger mistake leaving a scrutiniser alive. She should have had the guards kick Heles’ face in, too.

  Using her good hand, Heles seized his heavy foot and, with much stumbling and lung-burning effort, dragged Jym’s corpse towards a nearby drift of sand. With a shard of pottery she found in the shade, she gave him the best burial she could offer, dragging the sand over the broken body until it was hidden. At least there, on the very edge of the city, Jym’s shade would have a better chance of hiding out until the Tenets dragged him to the afterlife.

  Heles stumbled in the direction of the distant towers, eying every nook and cranny of the tumbledown buildings about her, flinching every time the hot breeze moaned over curved rooftops. A few empty shacks of palm-wood and broken crates sat in gaps between houses. These were the hovels of those almost at the very bottom of Araxes’ social pyramid. It was still better than indenturement.

  Few belongings remained inside the shells of buildings. Only gaudy graffiti and poles decorated with ceramic skulls. Crossed bones had been painted over door frames; a macabre welcome for any visitor. A few houses even had steps supported by clay skulls that grinned at the street.

  Death held a mighty sway out on the edges of Araxes. Pickings were fewer, but the profits were huge. Binding had become more than a commerce to those of the Outsprawls. It had become a definition of life, something almost to be worshipped.

  Heles kept her blurry, throbbing gaze fixed on the soaring core of the city, many miles north. The distance made her legs want to crumble, but she chastised them and dragged them on regardless. Weakness was a product of fear, and she refused to be afraid.

  A lone yellow tower watched over the local sprawl of adobe and sand. It was a circular construction, decorated with rings of red stone. She heard a clanging emanating from its walls, and began to tread, or rather shuffle, quietly. She was in no mood nor shape to deal with any soulstealers or would-be chancers. Her soul was her own, and needed in the city.