Ashes of the Sun

by Django Wexler

  Enough. Gyre downed the rest of his wine and got to his feet, waving off Ibb’s offer to get him another. He stalked out through the now-crowded pub, emerging into the darker, quieter tunnel outside the door with a deep feeling of relief.

  Thinking too much. You can say that again. For a moment he hesitated. He badly wanted to be back in his own bed, but fading adrenaline had left him with aching limbs and a throbbing headache. Maybe I should find a flophouse and head back in the morning.

  The door opened behind him, and Gyre turned to find Yora, hands in the pockets of her tunnel coat. She caught his look and raised an eyebrow.

  “Tired of playing host?” he said.

  “A bit.” Yora had unpinned her hair from the tight bun she kept it in on jobs, and it hung in waves down the back of her coat, gleaming in the faint torchlight like liquid gold. She ran a hand through it and sighed. “Half of them want favors, and the other half just want to tell me how they supported my father all along.”

  “Easy to say, after the fact,” Gyre said.

  “I know. If half the people who say they were with him now had been willing to stand up…” Yora shook her head, and there was a hint of pain beneath her usual stoic mask. She’d been ten when her father had died, Gyre remembered. Barely older than I was when the Order took Maya.

  “Sorry,” Gyre muttered. “Didn’t mean to stick my finger in old wounds.”

  She waved it away, then said, “Sarah’s worried about you. So’s Ibb. Usually taking down a bunch of Auxies is what cheers you up.”

  Gyre snorted. “Let me guess. They think I should come in and get roaring drunk?”

  “They mean well.” Yora stepped closer, leaning one shoulder against the rock wall. “What’s wrong, Gyre?”

  Gyre blew out a deep breath. “That Legionary was waiting for us.”

  “Raskos can’t know exactly what we were going to hit. I bet he scattered a squad across a few likely targets.”

  “Even so. He wants us badly.”

  Yora nodded. “We’re hurting him. And the best part is, he can’t go crying to the Order for help. The last thing he needs is for some centarch to start poking around.”

  That was true enough. Among the dux’s responsibilities was suppressing the trade in dhak, which in the modern Republic meant anything Elder, ghoul, or Chosen that didn’t come through the Order. Most of Deepfire’s duxes had taken advantage of their position to line their pockets with a little light smuggling, from what Gyre had read, but he suspected none had gone quite as far as Raskos Rottentooth—the man had his own warehouse. So he can’t exactly complain to the Order that his illegal shipments are going missing.

  “Right,” Gyre said. “So he’ll do what he can to stop us—Auxies, Legionaries, mercs, whatever it takes.”

  “And we’ll keep getting past them,” Yora said. “We managed tonight, didn’t we?”

  “Barely.” A week of careful planning and smooth execution had nearly been ruined by a single soldier. “But let’s say we do. Then what?”

  “Eventually, Raskos goes down,” Yora said. “He seems strong, but he’s on a narrow base, with the tunnelborn on one side, the Republic nobility on the other, and the Order looming over his shoulder. Keep shaking him, and he’ll lose his footing.”

  “And then what?” Gyre growled. “We take the city? The Republic will send a hundred Legionaries through the Gate and take it back. Or a centarch wanders through and blasts us back into our holes without breaking a sweat. We had one Legionary come after us, and that was almost too much. How are we supposed to fight back?”

  “This isn’t about taking on the whole Republic,” Yora said, her tone stiffening to anger. “This is about bringing down Rottentooth and getting justice for the tunnelborn. When the city rises and the dux falls, the Senate will negotiate.”

  Negotiate. Gyre closed his eye, breathing deep, and said nothing.

  “I know,” Yora said, after a moment. “It’s not enough for you. You want to burn the whole thing to the ground.”

  Gyre held his silence, and Yora sighed again.

  “You’re good, Gyre. There’s no one I’d rather have at my back in a fight, and no one who works harder once we have a target. The tunnelborn are starting to talk about Halfmask the way they talk about my father, and that’s worth something.”

  “Not when the centarchs come for us,” Gyre whispered.

  “Let’s focus on tomorrow.” Yora’s voice had softened again, and she patted Gyre on the shoulder. “And the next day, and the next. When we win, and Raskos has fallen, if you want to take your share of the loot and keep pushing, I certainly won’t stand in your way.” She smiled—not a false smile, but not genuine either, the practiced expression of a leader who knew how to deploy it to encourage the troops. “Until then, I hope you’ll stay by my side.”

  “Of course,” Gyre said. He pushed away from the wall. “Like I told Sarah. Just thinking too much.”

  “You should—”

  Gyre raised his only eyebrow. “Get roaring drunk?”

  “I was going to say ‘get some rest,’” Yora said.

  “Probably a better plan,” Gyre muttered. He pulled his coat a little tighter around his shoulders. “Send for me when you’ve got the next target.”

  “You know I will,” Yora said. “Good luck, Halfmask.”

  “There you are,” said Lynnia Sharptongue from the seat in front of her worktop. She didn’t look up from whatever she was mixing. “I was starting to wonder if Raskos’ idiots had finally caught up with you.”

  “Not yet,” Gyre said, pulling the basement door closed behind him. It led directly into a forgotten tunnel, which made coming and going convenient. “But it was a near thing.”

  “Someday you’re going to run out of luck,” Lynnia said. “I’ve been telling Yora that for years. Not that anyone listens to me, mind.”

  “Good to see you, too,” Gyre muttered.

  The basement was lit by more glowstones, safer than fire around alchemical compounds, which meant everything was tinged blue. By that pallid light, Gyre could make out a large room, with a long, scarred granite worktop along two opposite walls, both covered in a menagerie of glassware, boxes, and iron devices with cranks and toothed wheels that looked like instruments of torture. Lynnia sat on a swiveling chair, working a tiny grindstone with one hand and peering at the results through a loupe. When she looked up, her eye was grossly magnified by the lens, pupil dark and enormous.

  Gyre had no idea how old Lynnia Sharptongue really was, only that she’d been a fixture in Deepfire longer than anyone could remember. She didn’t look ancient so much as weathered, her skin wrinkled and spotted, her curly black hair hacked off short. She wore an eclectic collection of tattered dresses, sometimes several at a time, with protective leather gear thrown over the top. Given the tendency of the things she worked with to explode or catch fire, it was a sensible choice.

  As far as the Republic’s tax collectors knew, Lynnia was a respectable spinster, drawing a modest income from family wealth invested in a Deepfire merchant combine. This allowed her to keep a well-appointed brick house in the West Central district, comfortably close to the Pit and far from the chill of the tunnels. It had a ground floor and an upper story, both of which went almost entirely unused. Lynnia spent her days in the basement, mixing, grinding, and very carefully burning the strange substances the ghouls had left behind and turning them into all manner of alchemical cleverness.

  This was highly illegal, of course, but that didn’t seem to bother Lynnia, any more than the risk of blowing herself up did. At her age, she always said, she welcomed any sort of excitement.

  “Everyone’s fine, incidentally,” Gyre said. “Thank you for asking.”

  Lynnia waved as though that was of little importance. She flipped her loupe out of the way and peered at Gyre. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “The new stunner,” she said, barely able to contain her glee. “How did it work?”

 
“Well enough,” Gyre said. “It got the thickheads hunkered down just like we wanted, and knocked the Auxies sprawling.”

  “Did you find a use for the other one?”

  “Tossed right in a Legionary’s face,” Gyre said. “It just about slowed her down, but that’s about it.”

  “The glass in those helmets shifts in response to light. Cuts out glare. I bet she’ll have a headache, though.”

  “Good to know we can mildly inconvenience our enemies, at least.”

  “If you want to take down Legionaries, I’m going to need more to work with than glow dust and black drip,” Lynnia said. “A bit of ignition oil, some drive stems—”

  Gyre held up a hand. “Take it up with Sarah. She’s going through what we got from the carriage. Right now, I’m about five minutes from falling over.”

  “Get yourself upstairs quick, then.” Lynnia spun her chair back to the worktop. “Chosen know I can’t carry you.”

  Gyre edged past her, pushing through the narrow lane down the center of the basement not occupied by alchemical glassware or general detritus. He’d reached the narrow stairway at the far end of the room when Lynnia looked up again.

  “There was a delivery for you this afternoon,” she said. “One of your mysterious friends. It’s on the front table.”

  Gyre paused for a moment, then continued upstairs. The main floor was furnished much more conventionally than the basement workshop and was distressingly neat and tidy. Gyre shuffled over to the second-floor stairs, exhaustion growing in him with every step, and nearly forgot to pick up the envelope waiting for him on the front table. It was cheap paper, bulging and sealed in wax with the stamp of one of his usual couriers. Gyre put it in his coat pocket and went upstairs.

  His bedroom was as ordinary as the rest of the house. Gyre made a point of not keeping anything incriminating here that he couldn’t grab in a hurry on his way out, to make sure Lynnia could deny everything if Raskos ever tracked him this far. Even after three years, therefore, the place bore few traces of his personality—just some of his respectable clothes in a dusty wardrobe and a map of the city pinned up over the small desk. Gyre shrugged out of his coat and let it fall, the mask in his pocket hitting the floorboards with a metallic clunk. Then he flopped into bed and closed his eye.

  Plaguefire. He rolled over and looked down at his coat. The end of the envelope stuck out of his pocket. It’s probably a lot of nothing, just like last week. And the week before. But there was always a chance…

  Sleep first. I can be disappointed in the morning.

  He closed his eye again and took a deep breath. A moment later he was sitting up on the edge of the bed, swearing irritably as he broke the wax seal. He pulled out a few folded scraps of paper, along with another, smaller envelope.

  Each torn sheet bore a few lines of hurried script, written in several different hands.

  Doran Hardskull and his crew returned from the deep tunnels south of southwest. One man lost to plaguespawn. Recovered one antique armored suit, one blaster rifle, assorted trinkets.

  Hina of Asclo back from looking for her sister. Found the body, died from a fall, but couldn’t recover. No plaguespawn activities.

  Carolinus Redeye brought in a wagonload of debris from the dig at Gaston’s Fork. Some unidentified arcana that may be of interest.

  And more, all in that vein. Gyre flipped through one after another, then tossed them aside.

  He’d made the decision when he was eight years old. Lying in bed, skin slick with fever sweat, the gash where his left eye had been swollen and leaking pus. His father had cared for him. His mother, he’d learned later, hadn’t been able to look at him without weeping.

  Even at eight, he’d understood what had happened and what had to be done. If the Twilight Order could do this—if they could reach into his quiet, peaceful farm, unbidden, and destroy his family’s happiness in an afternoon—then the Order could not be allowed to exist. It was that simple.

  Only, of course, it wasn’t. People fought the Order—or the forces of the Republic, which amounted to the same thing—all the time. Bandits, rebels, smugglers, dhakim cultists. None of them amounted to anything, no more than mites on a warbird. How could they? The Auxiliaries were ordinary men, even the Legionaries were only soldiers kitted out in Chosen relics, but the centarchs were something else entirely. They had deiat behind them, the fire of creation, and nothing could stand against that. And the power was inborn—if you didn’t have it, no amount of wishing or training would ever let you wield a haken.

  When he was twelve, he’d left home. He’d done what he had to do—been a thief, a bandit, a whore, a spy. Always working his way north, in the mountains, toward Deepfire. He’d come chasing a pair of rumors. The first was that in Deepfire, even after the failure of Kaidan Hiddenedge’s rebellion, there were people who stood up and fought back against the authority of the Republic. The second was that there were wonders still to be found in the tunnels under the Shattered Peaks, ruins so deep that even the Order had never cleaned them out, where the lost power of the ghouls still waited. The only power that had ever been able to stand up to deiat, the power to topple the Order itself.

  He’d made the difficult journey through the mountains, and it had nearly killed him. The master of the caravan he’d joined had dumped him on Lynnia’s doorstep in a delirious fever. Once he’d recovered and gotten his bearings, it hadn’t taken long to discover that the first rumor was true enough. Yora’s crew was always in need of steady hands who were willing to take risks and do what was needed, and he’d done well.

  As for the second rumor, Gyre had plowed his cut from the jobs they pulled into a network of eyes and ears, keeping track of scavenger gossip and notable comings and goings. In three years, it had brought him plenty of wild speculation, but never anything solid. There were ghoul arcana out there, and Chosen weapons, lying broken and forgotten in the dark—enough to make a few scavengers rich, but nothing that could accomplish what Gyre wanted. Nothing that could challenge the Order.

  So he scouted targets for Yora, stole Raskos’ ill-gotten gains, and waited.

  With a sigh, he set the pages aside and picked up the second envelope, breaking another thin wax seal. The paper was considerably better quality, and it was written in a clean, educated hand. There were only a few lines.

  Halfmask, it began. That made Gyre take a bit more notice. His agents didn’t know his real identity, of course, but most of them didn’t even know they were working for the mysterious rebel. That someone else had figured it out was worrisome. His brow creased as he read on.

  I have been following your activity with interest, and I think we can help each other. I’d like to meet, if you have no objection. Come to the Smoking Wreckage tomorrow night and order the Katre ’49. I’ll find you.

  That was curious enough that it took him a few moments longer to notice the signature. When he read it, Gyre went very still.

  Doomseeker.

  Chapter 3

  Another problem with a city built inside an indestructible wall, Maya thought. Traffic jams.

  At Bastion’s main gate, four streets merged into one messy thoroughfare, each contributing its load of vehicles and anxious, unhappy animals to the congestion. Whenever the line moved and a space opened up, drivers and teams jostled for position, trading insults and a variety of grunts and squawks. Loadbirds glared at one another and puffed out their feathers, thickheads exchanged clicks and hisses, and a pair of long-horned woodbreakers had to be kept from taking big bites out of the next cart in line. Pedestrians filtered through the mix, and enterprising locals sold food and water from trays.

  “I thought,” Marn said from his position in the back of the cart, “we were staying another week. You said we could look for those dumplings I like.”

  “Would you shut up about the dumplings?” Maya hissed.

  “Plans change,” Jaedia said, with a serenity Maya could only aspire to.

  “But why?” Marn said, secure i
n the knowledge that Maya was not allowed to actually set him on fire.

  “There’ll be dumplings at the Forge,” Maya said.

  “Not the same kind. At the Forge they make everything with lake shrimp. It’s gross.” He shifted in the back of the wagon, trying to find a comfortable position on the pile of blankets and rolled-up tents. “If you killed Hollis, why are we in such a hurry?”

  “Maybe shout about that a little louder,” Maya said. “I’m not sure every Auxiliary in the city heard you.”

  Marn rolled his eyes. In fairness, Maya had to admit that the sound from the various impatient animals did a good job of drowning out casual conversation. But there were Auxiliaries everywhere, distinctive in their round metal caps, carrying spears and shouting at carters who got out of line, and the three of them were trying to remain inconspicuous. Up ahead, at the gate itself—thankfully not far now—a half dozen of the soldiers were stamping papers and asking questions.

  The truth was, Jaedia’s sudden decision to return to the Forge bothered Maya, too, though for different reasons. Her mentor spent as little time in the Order’s great mountain fortress as she could manage, and they’d made only a half dozen visits in the last five years. For her to drop everything and go to consult with Baselanthus indicated that their encounter with Hollis had shaken Jaedia more than she let on.

  A lumber wagon pulled by a pair of unruly thickheads finally rumbled away, and they were at the front of the queue. Jaedia clicked her tongue, and the loadbirds stepped forward a few paces. Four Auxies started poking around the back of the wagon, while another pair came up to speak to Maya and Jaedia on the bench. The one on Jaedia’s side, looking bored, scanned the papers she offered him. The other, a youth about Maya’s age with a face badly savaged by acne, gave her a frankly appraising look and a leering grin.

  Maya gritted her teeth and, with an effort, kept her hand from going to her haken. It would be nice to teach this lecher-in-training a sharp lesson—by heating his codpiece until it burned, say—but while Jaedia might have managed such a focused application of deiat, Maya was still just as likely to incinerate the boy by accident. That would not help them remain inconspicuous.