The elder sister’s smile vanished, and her face darkened with anger as her falcon rose and shrieked. Meanwhile the younger sister’s horse sniffed, whinnied, and bucked. The invisible wanderer did not understand the animals’ behavior, but it worried him. The elder sister said, “Our mother sided with me in our dispute over Xembala.”
“And her word carried great weight,” said the younger sister, grabbing the reins. “Nevertheless, my husband is the Grand Khan. He agreed you were justified in your actions, arranging trade with the Xembalans rather than conquest. But nonetheless you undercut me.”
“It was you who subverted my mission.”
“Calm, calm, Aughatai,” said the younger sister to the horse, but Innocence thought the words were equally meant for the elder. “Hunt down this Innocence Gaunt for me, Steelfox. I know you mean to inform his parents, whom you lent your inventor ibn Zakwan and your shaman Northwing. I do not wish you to break your word. Tell them. But surely a Karvak princess will be a more formidable huntress than a pair of lunatics from the world’s edge. Join my invasion of Kantenjord. And bring Innocence to me, that I might honor the chosen of the Heavenwalls.”
“Control him, you mean.”
“And if that is the price of peace between us? One boy’s future in exchange for your rightful, unblemished place in our father’s empire?”
The elder sister, Steelfox, did not reply.
Jewelwolf’s horse was snorting and shaking now. It lurched toward the spot where the unseen wanderer felt himself to be. He began to shiver.
“Aughatai, what has gotten into you!” cried Jewelwolf. “What do you see?”
The horse got loose and charged the invisible boy. Soldiers shouted.
Cairn! he tried to shout. Help—
So you see, “Askelad,” came the voice of the Chooser, you can’t escape the burden of your name, nor your power. I leave you with a riddle. It may have practical value one day. If you should meet your future self, what is the most important question you can ask?
And in his straw bed in the Bladed Isles, Innocence Gaunt woke with a start.
CHAPTER 1
MECHANISMS
“Imago Bone! You’ve gone too far this time!”
“You speak to one, Persimmon Gaunt, who’s stolen a bath from a pond beside the Forbidden City! Who’s claimed a treasure map from the mummies of the Desert of Hungry Shadows! Who has a book overdue from the Goblin Library! You speak to me of too far?”
“Fine! You disable the bronze automatons!”
“You are doing far better at that than I ever could. And meanwhile I have a most interesting ancient artifact to ponder—”
“Get up here, Bone!”
“Of course! You and the alchemical fire are most persuasive. . . .”
The thief Imago Bone nonetheless found it difficult to abandon the marvelous view. He dangled by a rope from Haytham ibn Zakwan’s balloon, seeing the snowy moonlit expanse of the city of Amberhorn in a way he never had before. Certainly not earlier this evening when he and the explorer Liron Flint had been skulking through its alleys and across its rooftops to reach the great domed Basilica of the Logos. Nor when they’d raced through the Aisle of Illuminations, with its enchanted icons with golden eyes ready to entrance, terrify, or burn unwelcome visitors. Least of all when they’d scrambled out the great bell tower of the basilica, with stolen treasures in Bone’s sack.
Now the basilica—and the hippodrome, and the forum, and the Epiphanic Baths—shrank below him, engulfed by thousands of square-shaped, dark-roofed abodes, by the waters of the Midnight Sea, and by the snowfall so kindly arranged by the shaman Northwing.
Oh, yes, and by the gouts of fiery liquid spewed by bronze statues in the city center.
Bone knew the Amberhornish prided themselves on their vomitoriums, but he hadn’t known they’d turned their own sky into one. That last blast was close enough to warm his face. Best to scramble up. Flint had wisely disappeared inside already.
Stuffing his chief treasure into his bag (where his minor treasures already lay) Bone scurried up the rope into the capacious gondola of the balloon, fashioned to resemble a nomadic tent, or ger. As he did so an arrow sang out through the flap as Persimmon Gaunt shot back at an automaton. There was dull concussion far below and a louder clang as the bronze construct toppled.
“I knew those fire-gems from Anoka were worth the price,” she told him as he tumbled inside. “They’re tricky to attach. But one shot through the mouth, and it interacts nicely with the caustic blood of those things.”
“I concede. Hopefully this will recover the dent in our finances.”
“Hmph. If we survive this. Welcome back, Bone.”
“A pleasure to be home, Gaunt.”
Blazing light flared outside the ger once again, complement to the magical fire in the brazier inside, and Bone got a fresh look at “home.” Cozy would have been a charitable way of describing the crowded gondola, especially with seven people aboard. The framework was bamboo, encased in a shell of felt. The brazier, inscribed with arcane symbols, lay at the center beneath a gap in the ceiling. Supernatural flame danced upward from the brazier from time to time, its light glinting upon the various implements and supplies hanging from the ceiling—pots, pans, spyglasses, sextants, maps, dried meats and fruits, water-flasks, flatbreads, herbs, tea, and the like. Underfoot, around the edges, were things it would be more awkward to find falling upon you—knives, swords, axes, bottles of wine. At the edges, too, were curtains one could pull to create a fragile sense of privacy.
A fresh blast, and Bone had a fleeting wish for that privacy, for he thought the illumination complemented his wife’s tangle of auburn hair over tanned skin, her fierce gaze, and the tattoo upon her right cheek, a rose caught in a spider’s web. She wore a blue deel, a long-sleeved coat of the nomadic Karvaks. She looked almost like a Karvak herself in that moment, magic sword (thankfully) in a sheath on her back, bow in her hands, her whole being focused on bringing down another foe. She was ever-changing. And ever Gaunt.
“I suggest, man,” said the fellow readying an arrow on the opposite side of the opening from Gaunt, “you stop staring at your wife and show us what you’ve found.” The wandering monk known to Bone as Mad Katta glanced his way. Bone was never sure if Katta actually saw him or not. The black-robed, umber-skinned Eastern holy man was blind—Bone didn’t doubt it—but he possessed the power to perceive evil. The worse Bone got, in theory, the better chance Katta had to notice him. Katta had never actually said Bone was perceptible to him, but every time the monk turned his way, the thief wondered. And just now he’d robbed a church. . . .
Katta turned back to the open air, cocked his head, and loosed an arrow. A clang rewarded him. “Alas,” he said, “I didn’t connect with the thing’s maw.”
“So you can see them?” Bone asked.
“No,” Katta said, “they’re merely very loud. They’re unthinking constructs, not evil.” He turned to Bone and smiled. “Unlike some humans.”
“Um,” said Bone.
“Hey! Stop letting him tease you, Bone,” a new voice cut in. “If you’re done fooling around, how about you show us this thing that’ll save our asses.”
That was Snow Pine, former bandit of Qiangguo, student of the Eastern philosophy of the Forest, warrior, widow, and—tone aside—friend. Her piercing brown-eyed gaze turned away, with a swish of dark hair, for she was busy cutting loose sandbag ballasts from mountings at the gondola’s bamboo-ringed portholes. “You too, Liron,” she said, glancing at the tall treasure hunter who lay gasping on the bamboo deck of the gondola. “You boys had a big night on the town, but if we catch fire—”
“All right, all right!” Liron Flint was up at once. He joined Snow Pine in cutting loose more sandbags. “It’s just a new experience to me—plundering the living,” Flint said, stealing a kiss from her. “Invigorating!”
“Watch out,” Snow Pine said. “Bone’s rubbing off on you. Maybe, Gaunt, it’s a mistake to let our m
en off the leash.”
“Come now,” Bone said, fumbling through his treasure sack, looking for the magic lamp. “Flint helped plan this! Haytham wanted the lamp, but stealing the Antilektron Mechanism was Flint’s idea. Aha!” Bone pulled out a dented, tarnished brass oil lamp.
“I’ll admit to a fascination with the device,” Flint said, glancing at Bone’s open bag and the corroded bronze assemblage of gears within. “It was as though a voice whispered in my ear, saying, ‘Take the thing. Its destiny lies with you.’”
“I hear that voice often,” Bone said.
“This one was very specific,” Flint said, “like a muse, a young woman . . .”
“Excuse me?” said Snow Pine.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now!” Flint said, patting the ancient machinery. “We have it! We so often think our ancestors more primitive than we, yet time and again their works belie this. The Mechanism shows how the ancient folk of the Midnight Sea could calculate the motions of the stars, without relying on gods or magic.”
Gaunt called out, still firing arrows, “I see why it’s interesting to Flint, and why it will be valuable to the clockwork masters of Loomsberg. But, Bone, you said the owners had no idea of either artifact’s value! So why are we about to burn alive?”
“Well,” Bone confessed, as he grabbed a cloth and rubbed at the lamp. “I might have nabbed a golden goblet or two, some coins of the imperial past, a pearl necklace with an impressive dolphin motif. . . .”
“Ye gods, Bone, just because you can steal a thing . . .”
“Funds, Gaunt! We will need portable wealth if we’re to brave the mad North. They are not much for banknotes there.”
“And I need portable patience to brave the mad Bone,” Gaunt said. “Not to mention altitude. Bad enough if they hit the ger, but if they catch the envelope, we’re going to have an interesting time.”
“Bone,” said Katta, putting down his bow and rising, a set of metal charms jingling around his neck, “how about I consider that lamp?” The thief passed him the lamp and the cloth. “Yes,” Katta said. “I’m sensing something within the metal. A presence. Powerful. A bit evil.” He polished the lamp in a graceful, methodical way. It irked Bone that Katta made even cleaning seem mystical. “Ah.”
As if on cue, an inhuman voice keened through the lamp’s metal. The words were in the tongue of Mirabad, which Bone could recognize but not understand.
Now a sixth person in the ger spoke up. He was a tall, brown man in a white robe and an orange, two-wrap turban, with thick mustachios that seemed almost as lively as his voice. He answered the lamp in kind. Bone was only able to make out the balloon’s inventor’s announcement of his own name, Haytham ibn Zakwan ibn Rihab.
“Yes!” rang out the voice of the lamp. “Yes, O ibn Zakwan! Your humble efrit, Haboob of the Hundred Horrors, can speak in whatever tongue you wish, be it the musical speech of Mirabad or the uncouth babble of the Eldshore. He can speak in the language of fishes or of birds. He knows the speech of the Leviathan Lords of aeons past, and of the otterwights of the opposite face of the Earthe. He has heard the songs of the Iron Moths and the poetry the stars whisper to each other when men believe they sleep.”
“Ha!” snarled the seventh human in the gondola. “Has he heard the dying screams of people plunging into an ocean? Or of them burning alive? Either fate is close at hand.” The speaker was a person of Mad Katta’s ethnicity, though worlds apart in temperament—forceful where he was affable, practical where he was philosophical. An unadorned face glared from a hooded, furred hunter’s coat. The only decoration that the shaman Northwing indulged was a set of metal charms similar to Katta’s. In bearing Northwing seemed male to Bone, yet he knew Northwing was physically female. At first glance it was easy to assume the two were bickering lovers, yet each preferred their own sex for bedmates. Well, the world was complicated, gods knew. Beyond all that, Northwing would declare no gender at all, something Bone gathered was a tradition for shamans of this sort. He-she-they (or just Northwing) condescended to Katta, who’d given up being a shaman to become a wandering monk. Katta didn’t seem to take it personally. Northwing looked down on everyone.
“The suncrow feather,” the shaman said, “is nearly extinguished, and thanks to Gaunt’s poor haggling it’s our last! I’m keeping us aloft by lashing the winds against us, but it won’t work for long! If the fire-blasts unleashed by Bone’s harebrained scheme don’t get us, the ocean will.”
“Excuse me,” Bone said, “it was also Flint and ibn Zakwan’s harebrained scheme.”
The shaman ignored him, as did the efrit. “How can Haboob of the Harrowing Howls help you, O dulcet-toned one?”
“Keep us aloft!” Northwing said.
“Ah, but you see, such an act will require that Haboob be released from his imprisonment, that he may gather his full powers from the aether. Now, the standard contract since time immemorial is for three requests, which I encourage you to word carefully. . . .”
Gaunt called out, still shooting arrows, “I can help you word it, Haytham! But it had better be fast.”
Haytham smiled. “Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary. Katta, could you drop the lamp into the brazier?”
“The brazier?” asked Katta. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“At this altitude, my friend, wisdom is a relative concept,” Haytham said. “Please proceed.”
“Wait!” the efrit called from the lamp. “What do you mean to do?”
The deed was done. The magic lamp tumbled and clanked into the magical brazier, to contact the eldritch fire. The lamp began to glow with the redness of newly forged metal.
“Do you seek to thwart the traditional contract by applying torture?” boomed the efrit. “Have you fallen from the ways of the Testifier of the All-Now?”
“Have you not, O efrit?” Haytham asked.
“Long ago did I learn religion and bend my knee, or the bodiless entity equivalent! My titles, such as Haboob of the Horrid Howls, were obtained in ancient times. I would be better known as Haboob the Herald of Hilarity, but I have been unable to demonstrate my change of heart, trapped as I was in this rapidly heating lamp.”
“So, too, am I a devotee of the Testifier and his holy book,” Haytham said. “I will not torture, nor cheat, nor do violence save at the most urgent need. I am a man of knowledge, and that scholarship has led me to you. Hear me, O efrit, primal creature of the universe! I sent my friends to Amberhorn to find you, for I believe we can help each other. I ask for no wishes, but a year of simple service. Your lamp is now within a brazier that empowers this flying craft. It is currently fueled by a magical feather that is nearly consumed. In the past it was empowered by demons, but it has developed a flaw that allows an intelligent entity to escape. And in truth I do not wish to treat with demons any longer. But if you consent to power my Al-Saqr for one year, I will release you from the lamp.”
“To be trapped within a brazier?”
“Ah, but from the brazier you can perceive all that we perceive, from high above the ground. You will see many far places, O Haboob. Surely that is better than your dark hovel. But! If you prefer, we will drop you again among the Amberhornish, in whose basilica you languished as a curiosity.”
“Your offer intrigues me. Very well, man of knowledge! I consent. One year.”
Even as the efrit spoke, Gaunt shouted, “The envelope—I think they’ve hit it!”
“It’ll catch fire!” Snow Pine said.
Haytham snatched an iron poker and jabbed at the lamp’s lid. “I release you, Haboob.”
What rose from the brazier struck Bone as the most dignified and majestic pillar of smoke the world over. It rose nearly the full height of the ger, and tendrils of it tickled the opening overhead. The top of the smoke column gave an impression of wind-blown curly hair. Below that, persistent eddies in the cloud suggested a wise yet imperious face. Extensions of the cloud farther down implied two folded arms, and a curving tendril sketched a sheathed scimi
tar. The hem of a sooty robe seemed to flutter at the level of the brazier’s rim.
Blazing eyes like torchlit rubies narrowed, as the efrit Haboob faced them all. “It seems my engagement with you may be shorter than expected, for my contract will not survive your death, O wise Haytham ibn Zakwan.”
“Bone,” Haytham said, “do what you can with the fire. Haboob, you will not harm him or anyone in this crew.”
“As you wish,” said the efrit, as Bone grabbed a waterskin from the ceiling and shimmied up a rope to the roof opening. Although nearing fifty, Haytham’s voice normally had an eager, boyish quality. But not where the safety of his balloon was concerned. In such matters he was as stern as any sea-captain. Bone never considered doing anything but heading out to brave wind, fire, and the potential of a precipitous fall.
“Snow Pine,” he heard Haytham saying, “The scroll. I need Walking Stick . . .”
Just as Bone was leaving the ger, Bone saw Snow Pine pull a rolled-up landscape painting of the Far East from her Karvak deel. She bowed her head against it, her lips murmuring.
But he did not have time to watch the result. Now he was on the gondola’s roof, grabbing a rope leading to the gas envelope. The gas in question was merely hot air, not some exotic concoction from Haytham’s experiments (which was good, since he’d seen such gases explode) but an envelope fire was still perilous, as it could ruin the canvas beyond repair.
What was burning so far was a tiny stretch of rope and a bamboo fastening, so Bone had hopes of quenching it. A few more inches . . . he twined himself with his legs, opened the flask, and splashed. But at the last moment a fresh spark hit the balloon, the constructs’ aim perhaps enhanced by the bright spot already there. His aim thrown off, Bone failed to extinguish the first small fire, and a second tiny light appeared upon the canvas itself.
Desperately he removed his deel and smothered the first fire, but he could not reach the second.
A blur of motion passed him.
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