Ashes of the Sun

by Django Wexler

  Ultimately, however, the point was moot. Kit pulled up short, her hands groping sideways along another blank wall. Dead end.

  “Well,” she said. “Ideas?”

  Gyre flicked his firelighter again, throwing sparks across the stone, looking desperately for a way out that wasn’t there. The murmur of approaching voices echoed off the rock.

  “How many shots left in that blaster?”

  Cloth rustled as she shrugged. “Maybe half a dozen.”

  “That might get us back to the junction. After that…”

  “Hang on,” she said. “Let me have the firelighter.”

  He found her hand, pushed the little device into it. Reflected torchlight was growing behind them as she flicked sparks into the air.

  “There’s a room,” she hissed.

  “What?”

  “Come on.” She grabbed his hand and yanked him forward. “In here.”

  Blind again, he felt rock close on both sides. Kit, ahead of him, turned and pulled him forward, sliding into a niche just across from her. The space didn’t qualify as a room, or even a closet—it was just a sideways cut in the rock, about as deep as a man and taller than Gyre, but so narrow that he and Kit were wedged practically in one another’s faces.

  “Can they see us?” Gyre said, as quietly as he could.

  “I fucking hope not,” Kit said. “Because if they catch us in here, we’re not exactly going to be able to fight our way out.”

  That was true, Gyre reflected. He couldn’t even reach his blades without elbowing her in the stomach, and any attempt to draw them would have badly injured somebody. The deadly Halfmask, discovered jammed into a ghoul’s old closet. Maybe they’ll laugh so hard we can get away.

  The voices were getting closer. Gyre closed his eyes and tried to hold still. Kit’s breath tickled his cheek, warm and distracting.

  “Another dead end, sir,” a woman’s voice said.

  “Chosen fucking defend,” a man answered. “All right. Wait here. I’ll go back to the filiarch for orders.”

  Two sets of footsteps receded for a few moments. Then one stopped and the other continued. Gyre opened his eyes and saw the glow of a torch not far away.

  “Just one stayed behind.” Kit’s voice was a quiet breath. “I can probably kill her before she calls for help.”

  “No,” Gyre mouthed. “He said filiarch. That means Legionaries.”

  “The dux only has a couple of squads of Legionaries.”

  “He only needs one to kill us.” Gyre swallowed. “Stay quiet.”

  Time passed, in silent and excruciating slowness. Kit shifted her weight, brushing against him in the process. He gritted his teeth.

  “We could fuck,” she whispered. “If you’re bored.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Not the most comfortable position, I admit, but there’s something about trying to keep quiet. Knowing that if you gasp too loud you’re definitely going to die.” Her hand brushed against his cheek, playing over the silver mask. “No?”

  “Please be quiet.”

  Her other palm pressed against the front of his trousers. “Aha. I knew you’d be into it.”

  “Kit—” He cut the word off in a strangled gasp at the sound of approaching footsteps.

  “Head back up,” the man’s voice said. “We’ll hold the junction until we’ve secured the area.”

  “Yes, sir,” the woman barked. Then, mercifully, both sets of boots headed back up the corridor.

  Kit tweaked him through his trousers. “Missed your shot, Halfmask.”

  Before he could warn her, she wriggled past him, pushing out of the niche. Gyre took a few quick breaths and followed.

  “What the plagued fuck—” he began.

  “Oh, relax.” Kit was still invisible, but he could hear the grin. “Just breaking the tension.”

  “You really are insane, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve been told that before. You’re the one who wants to go to the Tomb.” She flicked the firelighter, outlining herself in a brief shower of sparks. “You think we can get past them?”

  Gyre ordered her to stay put and padded back up toward the junction, moving with the smooth silence of long practice. Well before he got there, he could see the light of more torches. Risking a peek around the last corner, he saw at least a half dozen shadowy figures, and one who gleamed in a rainbow of iridescent colors. Legionary. There was something insectoid about the faceless unmetal armor. The man—or woman; there was no way to tell—carried a short sword on their hip and a blaster rifle slung over their shoulder. Gyre swore silently and eased back down the corridor.

  Kit was where he’d left her, for a wonder. She answered his quiet call with a flick of the firelighter.

  “They’re still at the junction. Auxies and a Legionary,” he said. “We’re not going to get past them. We’ll have to wait.”

  “So we wait.” Kit sighed. That prospect seemed to disturb her more than the idea of fighting their way out. “Until they get tired and go home.”

  “Or decide to come double-check.”

  He heard the rasp as she slid down the rock wall. “And not even anything to read in the meantime.”

  “We could—”

  “Very funny,” she snapped.

  Gyre sat down beside her, his back to the wall. “You’re not good at waiting, are you?”

  “Nope.” He heard the firelighter clicking, open and closed. “Clock’s ticking, you know?”

  “What clock?”

  “You know. The clock.”

  “On life, you mean?” Gyre shrugged. “Given your line of work, is getting old really something that worries you?”

  “You have to plan for the best case, right?” She flicked the firelighter again.

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Nineteen.” She cocked her head by the light of the sparks. “Maybe twenty by now? I haven’t been keeping track.”

  There was a long silence. Gyre stared into the darkness, the firelighter’s sparks dying away. He went to scratch his scar, was blocked by the mask, and shifted uncomfortably.

  “Tell me a story, then,” Kit said.

  “A story?”

  “Something about your life.”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Gyre said. “A story for a story.”

  “I suppose that’s fair.” Cloth shuffled as Kit stretched. “You want me to go first?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “What do you want to hear about?” She paused. “Not the Tomb. Not until we’re finished.”

  Gyre made a face. I suppose that was inevitable. “Did you really know the… other Doomseeker? Where did you get the name?”

  She grunted as though he’d struck her. “Suppose I should have expected that.”

  “If you don’t want to trade—”

  “It’s fine.” She paused. “It’s just a little hard to look back, sometimes.”

  “It can’t have been that long ago.”

  “I was fifteen, maybe.” She shifted against the rock. “I got… some bad news. I was living in Grace at the time, and I marched down to the tavern and signed up with the scariest scavenger expedition I could find. The real madmen, who go out way past where anyone else has gone, hoping for a big score. A virgin tunnel, or a piece of skyship. There were eight of us when we left. Three came back.”

  She was quiet a moment. “There was a boy I liked. Not even a scavenger; he just kept the thickheads from running loose. I don’t think he knew how dangerous the run was. Stupid, pretty boy. I let him crawl into my bedroll, and a week later a plaguespawn the size of a cart peeled his face off.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gyre said quietly.

  “Wasn’t my fault,” Kit said. “But it felt like it. We got out with a decent haul, and I blew the whole thing on drink and whores in about a week. Then I went back out with another team. Down into the tunnels under Crackskull Peak. Came back with four busted ribs and a broken arm, plus a new blaster. Waited until it heal
ed, then went out again. You get the idea.

  “After a while I guess I was kind of a legend.” She gave a short laugh. “They were calling me Doomseeker, and I didn’t mind. Bought me a lot of drinks. You’d think they wouldn’t want me on their crews. Every run I went on went bad, one way or another. I kept waiting for my luck to run out.”

  “Why?” Gyre said.

  “That’s another story. You only get one.” He could hear her grinning again. “About a year after this started, I was in one of my drinking and fucking phases, and a guy comes to see me. Old guy, which is rare enough, because there aren’t that many old scavengers. He sits down and tells me that he’s heard I was using his name. Doomseeker.”

  “Really?” Gyre leaned forward. “The original?”

  “No idea. But going by the way old-timers treated him, he could have been. I was a little drunk, so I told him if he wanted to fight, we could fight. He said that wasn’t how he preferred to handle things. He just wanted to make sure I was worthy. I tell you, I almost shot him just for saying that. But he pulled out a deck of cards and sat down.

  “I mostly gambled as another way to lose money as quickly as possible. We played a few rounds, back and forth, up and down. I’m just throwing in whatever I can, and he’s starting to look disappointed. I finally get a really good draw, and I throw everything I have in the pot, and he looks at me real quiet and says, ‘I bet my life.’

  “‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I ask him.

  “‘If you win, you can take me out back and shoot me. If I win, I can do the same to you. Real stakes.’ And he leans forward, and I get the feeling this is what he wanted from the start.”

  “You called?” Gyre said.

  “Of course I called.” Kit snorted. “I’d been betting my life every time I went down into the tunnels. What’s one more time? But he starts flipping up the last draw, one card at a time, and none of them help me. When he gets to the last one, he asks me if I want to keep going. I look him in the eye and tell him I do. He grins at me.

  “And then he gets up and walks away. Leaves a whole stack of thalers on the table.” She flicked the firelighter again, another cloud of sparks shimmering in the darkness. “I looked at his cards. He had me cold. I guess he found out what he wanted to know.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  Kit nodded in the dying light. “I tracked him down, obviously. Told him if he’d folded, then he owed me his life. He thought that was funny. But he taught me… a few things.” She shook her head as the last of the sparks died. “That’s another story, too.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “As far as I know,” Kit said. “But now it’s my turn.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “The obvious,” she said. When he didn’t answer for a moment, she heaved a sigh. “What happened to your eye, idiot.”

  “My eye?” Gyre’s scar itched under the mask. “What about it?”

  “I saw you at the Smoking Wreckage, remember? You don’t have to play dumb.”

  “Right.” He tapped one finger on the blank silver eye just above his empty socket. “Okay.”

  “Well?”

  He cleared his throat. “I was eight years old. My parents were vulpi farmers—”

  “If it turns out you lost it in a farming accident or something, I get another story.”

  “Relax,” Gyre said with a slight smile. It quickly faded as the memory played itself out in his mind. “My sister was five. Maya. She was fearless, smart. You would have liked her. But she was always getting sick, and doctors were no help.”

  “Did she die?”

  “For someone who wanted a story, you’re not a very good listener.”

  “I told you,” Kit said. “Clock’s ticking. Get on with it.”

  “One day in the summer, a centarch turned up at our door. His name was Va’aht Thousandcuts, and he told my parents he was here to take Maya away to the Order. She was getting sick because she had the potential to be a centarch herself.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Me either. But who were we to talk back to the Twilight Order? My parents were just going to let him take her, but I didn’t want to. So when Va’aht wasn’t looking, I jammed my knife in his leg. I thought I might be able to grab Maya and run, I guess.”

  “I take it it didn’t work.”

  “Of course not. My parents were screaming, but Va’aht wouldn’t listen. He took my eye as punishment.” The scar gave a dull throb. “Then he took my sister, too. I never saw her again.”

  There was another pause.

  “You hate them, don’t you?” Kit asked after a while.

  “I hate them,” Gyre said. His voice was surprisingly calm.

  “So that’s why you work with Yora? To hurt the Order?”

  “It’s… more than that.” Gyre drew his knees against his chest. “I hurt them, but it’s not enough. It’s not just about me. The Order is…” He shook his head in the darkness. This was the part that he had a hard time expressing. “They’re the past. The Chosen ruled over humanity for who knows how many centuries, and then when they were dying they built this thing to keep us on the path they wanted.”

  “The Order defends the Republic against plaguespawn and dhakim,” Kit said mildly.

  “Because they’re the ones with the power,” Gyre said. “They decide what’s sanctioned arcana and what’s dhak. They tell us what power we’re allowed to have. And just coincidentally, anything that might be able to challenge them, to do without them, isn’t allowed.” He swallowed. “Maybe we needed them once, after the war and the Plague. But now…”

  “So you want to go to the Tomb,” Kit said.

  “The ghouls challenged the Chosen,” Gyre said. “If there’s anything left in the world that can stand up to the Order, that’s where it’ll be.”

  He shifted awkwardly. He hadn’t meant to be so honest, to tip his hand. But he felt like, of all the people he’d talked to, Kit might truly understand. Something drove her there, didn’t it?

  “I worry,” Kit said, “that you’re going to be disappointed.”

  “I don’t care,” Gyre said. “I have to get there. I have to try.”

  “So you can rescue your sister?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Gyre muttered. “If the Order saved her, then she’s been living with them since she was five years old. They’ve had plenty of time to get their hooks into her. By now I’m sure she’s as bad as Va’aht.” He took a deep breath. “Nothing’s going to fix my family. I just don’t want them to break anyone else’s.”

  There was another long pause, then a shuffling of cloth. After a moment, Gyre felt Kit’s hand, her fingers twining through his. She gave him a comforting squeeze.

  “It’s a good story,” she said. Once again, she was close enough that her breath tickled his cheek.

  “Sorry,” Gyre said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Tell the truth?”

  He smiled faintly. “Something like that.”

  “It’s not something you should regret.” She pulled away. “I’m going to check if those sentries are still waiting for us.”

  Gyre nodded, pointlessly. Kit’s footsteps padded away, vanishing quickly into the shadows and stillness.

  It felt like an eternity before they left the tunnels.

  Kit had come back to report that the Legionary was still in place, so they settled in for another round of waiting. This time, she’d volunteered a story about traveling with a scavenger band who’d had their mounts and packs stolen, which turned extremely bawdy very quickly. Gyre was laughing by the time she narrated her triumphant return to town, naked but swaggering, her embarrassed companions scuttling along in her wake.

  “Is any of that true?” he said when she was finished.

  “Some of it. Probably,” Kit said. “The good parts.”

  Topping that would have been difficult, but fortunately they were interrupted by the sound of the Auxies moving o
ut in a storm of shouted orders and recriminations. They waited a few minutes after silence fell, then crept along quietly just in case someone was playing games with them. But the soldiers had really gone. They must not like sitting around these tunnels any more than we do.

  “Chalk one up for plan B,” he muttered to himself as they climbed out of the depths.

  “Hmm?” Kit said, leaning on his shoulder from behind.

  “Nothing.” He shook his head. “Hopefully Yora found a way out, too.”

  “Hopefully,” Kit agreed, but there was a flat sound to the word that Gyre didn’t like. “What now?”

  “We should stay together until we hear something,” Gyre said. “Unless things have gone very wrong, we should be safe at my place.”

  “Oooh.” She leaned closer. “Does this mean you trust me now?”

  “I’m fairly sure you’re not working for Raskos, at least.”

  “Do I get to know your real name?”

  “It’s Gyre,” Gyre said after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Gyre.” Kit grinned mischievously. “And where do you live, Gyre?”

  He took her, back out through the noisome tunnel-slums, past the more respectable district close to the entrance, and finally into the open air via the trapdoor in the old stable. When they reached Lynnia’s, Gyre made Kit wait while he circled the building, trying to spot any lookouts. When he was satisfied, they went in through the basement door.

  The alchemist was waiting, as Gyre had expected. She spun in her swivel chair to face him as he came in, then froze at the sight of Kit behind him.

  “Sorry,” Gyre said. “I couldn’t think of a good way to warn you.”

  “Warn me?” Lynnia crossed her arms. “Where the plaguing fuck have you been? Nobody knew anything!”

  “You heard about the ambush?” Gyre said.

  She nodded sourly. “I knew they’d find that place eventually.”

  “Your back door worked nicely,” Gyre said. “But we got stuck hiding in the tunnels when the Auxies came after us. It took this long to get away from them.”

  “And what is she doing here?” Lynnia turned to Kit. “I assume this is your mysterious benefactor.”