by Anthony Ryan
“I don’t know,” Sirus muttered, although he had a strong suspicion these nine starving souls were in fact all that remained of Morsvale’s population.
“Wasn’t our fault, y’know.” The listlessness in Majack’s gaze disappeared as it swung towards Sirus, his voice coloured by a plea for understanding. “There were so many. Thousands of the bastards, drakes and Spoiled. Morradin took all but a handful of the garrison to fight the corporates. We had no chance . . .”
“I know,” Sirus said, adding a note of finality to his voice. He had heard this diatribe before and knew, if left unchecked, Majack’s self-pitying rant might drag on for hours.
“A hundred rounds each, that’s all we had. Only one battery of cannon to defend a whole city . . .”
Sirus groaned and moved away, stepping carefully over the damp brickwork to where Katrya huddled on a ledge beside one of the larger pipes. She held her hand out to the water gushing from the pipe, slender fingers splayed in the cascade. “Do you think it’s clean enough to drink now?” she asked. They had perhaps a bottle and a half of wine left, their only remaining source of uncontaminated hydration.
“No.” He sat down, letting his legs dangle over the ledge and watching the water disappear into the vast blackness of the shaft. He had considered jumping several times now, but not out of any suicidal impulse. According to Simleon the shaft conveyed the water to a vast underground tunnel leading to the sea. If they survived the drop it might prove a means of escape. If they survived the drop . . .
“You’re thinking about her again, aren’t you?” Katrya asked.
Sirus fixed her with a sharp glare, a harsh reminder of her status coming to his lips. Please be good enough to remember, miss, you are but a servant in my father’s house. The words died, however, when he met her eyes, seeing the mixture of defiance and reproach. Like most of the servants in his father’s employ Katrya had taken a dim view of his embarrassing but irresistible obsession. However, he thought it strange that she should care about such things now.
“Actually no,” he said instead and nodded at the shaft. “Simleon says it’s about eighty feet to the bottom.”
“You’ll die,” she stated flatly.
“Perhaps. But I increasingly fail to see any alternative.”
She hesitated then shuffled closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder, an overly familiar action that would have been unthinkable only a few weeks before. “It’s awful quiet up there now,” she said. “Could be they’ve all gone. Moved on to Carvenport. Some of the others think so.”
Moved on. Why not? Why stay once they’ve slaughtered everyone else? The notion was almost unbearably enticing but also dangerous. Alternatives? he asked himself, the absolute gloom of the shaft filling his gaze once more.
“Your father would have at least gone to look,” Katrya said. The words were spoken softly, free of malice or judgement, but they were still enough for him to push her away and get to his feet.
“My father’s dead,” he told her, the memory of his last interrogation looming large as he stalked away. The Cadre agent sitting at the foot of his bed, shrewd eyes on his, somehow even more frightening than the men who had tortured him in that basement. “Where is she? Where would she go?” And he had no answers, save one: “Far away from me.”
In truth he remembered little of Tekela’s escape. The hours that preceded it had been full of such agony and fear his memory of it remained forever ruined. His arrest had swiftly followed Father’s demise, a half-dozen Cadre agents breaking down the door to drag him from his bed, fists and cudgels the only answer to his babbling enquiries and protestations. He woke to find himself strapped to a chair with Major Arberus staring into his face, expression hard with warning. Arberus, Sirus soon realised, was also strapped to a chair and, positioned off to Sirus’s right, so was Tekela. He remembered the expression on her doll’s face, an expression so unlike anything he had ever expected to see there: deep, unalloyed guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she’d mouthed, tears falling from her eyes. It changed then, the obsession he had chosen to call passion, the delusion that had compelled him to pen verse he knew in his heart to be terrible and make an unabashed fool of himself at every opportunity. Here she was, his one true love, just a guilt-stricken girl strapped to a chair and about to watch him die.
Their attendants were two men in leather aprons, both of middling years and undistinguished appearance, who went about their work with all the efficiency of long-serving craftsmen. They started on the major first, Sirus closing his eyes tight against the awful spectacle and Tekela’s accompanying screams. They turned their attentions to Sirus when Arberus fainted and he learned for the first time what true pain was. There were questions he couldn’t answer, demands he couldn’t meet. He knew it all to be meaningless, just another form of pressure, added theatre for Tekela’s benefit. How long it took to end he never knew, but it seemed an eternity before his heart began to slow, transformed into a softly patted drum in his chest and he became aware of his imminent departure from this world. The basement disappeared into a fugue of distant sound and vague sensation. He heard shouts and thuds at some point, the sounds of struggle and combat, but assumed it to be just a figment of his fading mind. Despite the confusion he still retained the memory of the precise moment his heart stopped. He had read of those who returned from the brink of death to tell of a bright beckoning light, but he never saw it. There was only blackness and the dreadful pregnant silence left by his absent heart-beat.
The Cadre brought him back, though it had been a close-run thing as his doctor had been happy to tell him. He was a cheerful fellow with a lilting accent Sirus recognised as coming from the northern provinces. However, there was a hardness to his gaze despite the cheeriness, and Sirus sensed he knew as much about taking life as saving it. For days they tended him, generous doses of Green and careful application of various drugs until he was as healed as he could ever expect to be and the numerous scars on his chest reduced to a faint web of interconnected lines. Sirus understood this to be only a respite. The Cadre were far from finished with him.
The man who came to question him was of diminutive height and trim build. He wore the typical, nondescript dark suit favoured by Cadre agents, though the small silver pin in his lapel set him apart. It was a plain circle adorned with a single oak leaf that matched those of the Imperial crest. Sirus had never met anyone wearing this particular emblem before but all Imperial subjects knew its meaning well enough. Agent of the Blood Cadre.
“She left you behind,” were the agent’s first words to him, delivered with a tight smile of commiseration. “Nothing like misplaced love to harden a man’s heart.”
The agent went on to ask many questions, but for reasons Sirus hadn’t yet fathomed the Cadre’s more direct methods were not visited upon him again. It could have been due to his fulsome and unhesitant co-operation, for his experience in the basement had left no lingering pretensions to useless bravery. “My father and Burgrave Artonin worked together on their own projects,” he told the agent. “I was not privy to their studies.”
“The device,” the agent insisted, leaning forward in his chair. “Surely you must know of the device? Please understand that your continued good health depends a great deal upon it.”
Nothing, Sirus thought, recalling the way his father would jealously guard those artifacts of interest to his precious circle of select scholars. I know nothing. For a time Sirus had entertained the notion that such circumspection had been for his protection, the less knowledge he possessed the less the Cadre’s interest in him. But he knew such concern was largely beyond his father’s heart. It had been simple professional secrecy. His father had happened upon something of great importance, something that might transform their understanding of this entire continent and its history. Like many a scholar, Diran Akiv Kapazin did not relish the notion of sharing credit. Sirus had only ever caught glimpses of
the thing, and indulged in a few snatched glances at his father’s notes. It remained a baffling, if enticing enigma.
“I was privy to . . . certain details,” he lied.
“Enough to reconstruct it, perhaps?” the agent enquired.
“If I . . .” He had choked then, the lies scraping over his parched tongue. The agent came to his bedside and poured a glass of water before holding it to Sirus’s lips. “If I had sufficient time,” he managed after gulping down the entire contents of the glass.
The agent stood back, lips pursed in consideration. “Time, I’m afraid, is both your enemy and mine at this juncture, young sir. You see, I was sent here by a very demanding master to secure the device. I’m sure a fellow of your intelligence can deduce to whom I refer.”
Unwilling to say it aloud, Sirus nodded.
“Very well.” The agent returned the glass to the bedside table. “I’m going to send you home, Sirus Akiv Kapazin. You will find your household largely unchanged, although sadly my colleagues felt obliged to arrest your father’s butler and he failed to survive questioning. All the papers we could find in his offices at the museum are awaiting your scholarly attentions.”
So he had gone home, finding it bare of servants save Lumilla, his father’s long-standing housekeeper, and her daughter Katrya. It seemed the Cadre’s visit had been enough to convince the others to seek employment elsewhere. He spent weeks poring over his father’s papers, compiling copious notes and drawing diagram after diagram, making only the most incremental progress. The agent came to the house several times, appearing less impressed with every visit.
“Three cogs?” he enquired, one eyebrow raised as he looked over Sirus’s latest offering, a simple but precisely rendered diagram. “After two weeks of effort, you show me three cogs.”
“They are the central components of the device,” Sirus told him, his voice imbued with as much certainty as he could muster. “Establishing their exact dimensions is key to reconstructing the entire mechanism.”
“And these dimensions are correct?”
“I believe so.” Sirus rummaged through the pile of papers on his father’s desk, unearthing a rather tattered note-book. “My father wrote in a shorthand of his own devising, so it took some time to translate his analysis. I am convinced the dimensions of these cogs is directly related to the orbits of the three moons.”
He saw the agent’s interest deepen slightly, his shrewd eyes returning to the diagram. “I suspect you may well be right, young sir. However”—he sighed and set the diagram aside—“I have a Blue-trance scheduled with our employer in a few short hours and I fear he will be far from dazzled by your achievement. I regret I must anticipate his likely instruction to encourage you to greater efforts.” He moved to the study door. “Please join me in the kitchens.”
They found Katrya scrubbing pans at the sink whilst Lumilla prepared the evening meal. Sirus had known her for most of his life, a lively woman of plump cheeks and a ready smile, a smile which froze at the sight of the agent. “Which are you least fond of?” the agent enquired, plucking a vial from his wallet and gulping down a modicum of Black.
“Please . . .” Sirus began, then choked to silence as an invisible hand clamped around his throat. Katrya began to move back from the sink then froze, limbs and torso vibrating under the unseen pressure.
“I’d hazard a guess the pretty one’s probably your favourite,” the agent went on, pulling Katrya closer, her shoes dragging over the kitchen tiles until he brought her within reach. “I always find it curious,” the agent mused, raising a hand to stroke Katrya’s cheek, “how pleasing to the eye the gutter-born can be despite such lack of breeding.”
Katrya’s mother, displaying a speed and resolution Sirus would never have suspected of her, snatched a butcher’s knife from the chopping-board and charged at the agent. He let her get close before freezing her in place, the tip of her knife quivering an inch from his face.
“It seems the choice has been made for you, young sir,” he remarked, allowing Katrya to slip from his unseen grip. She collapsed to the floor gasping, flailing hands reaching out for her mother as she was lifted off her feet.
“Now then, good woman,” the agent said, angling his head and lifting Lumilla higher, the knife falling from her hand to ring like a bell as it connected with the tiles. “I’m not a needlessly cruel fellow. So, I’ll just take an eye for today. But which one . . .”
He trailed off as a boom echoed outside, loud enough to rattle the glass in the windows. The agent’s head jerked towards the sound, a twitch of irritated alarm playing over his bland features. For several seconds nothing happened, then another boom just as loud as the first, quickly followed by two more. Despite his panic Sirus managed to recognise the sound: Cannon fire.
“How curious,” the agent said, still holding Lumilla in place as he stepped towards the window to peer out at the street. People were running, dozens of them, all casting pale, terrorised glances up at the sky. Then came a new sound, not the flat boom of cannon but something high-pitched and sufficiently piercing to provoke an ache in the ears. Sirus knew it instantly, his sole childhood visit to the Morsvale breeding pens had left an indelible impression. Drake’s call. Pen-bred drakes invariably had their vocal cords cut shortly after birth, but in the interval the infants would scream out their distress. As a child his tearful reaction had been enough to earn a judgemental cuff from his father, but now he couldn’t help regarding it as a potential deliverer, for the agent clearly had no idea what he was witnessing.
“What in the name of the Emperor’s countless shades . . . ?” he murmured, watching as more and more people fled past the window.
It was at this point that Katrya snatched the fallen butcher’s knife from the floor and plunged it deep into the agent’s back. The reaction was instantaneous and near fatal for all concerned, the agent’s reserves of Black seeming to explode in one convulsive burst. Sirus found himself hurled against the far wall, plaster cracking under the impact as he subsided to the floor. It took seconds for him to shake off the confusion, stumbling upright to find the agent on his knees and screaming, his body contorted like a circus performer as he pulled the knife from his back.
“You . . . fucking . . . little slut!” he yelled at Katrya, now lying semiconscious several feet away. The agent gave a final shout of agony as the knife came free of his back. “You vicious whore!” His voice had taken on a strangely peevish edge, like a child who had been hit for the first time. He staggered to his feet, sobbing as he fumbled for his wallet, blood covering his chin as he babbled hate-filled threats. “I’ll rip out your mother’s guts and make you eat th—”
The iron skillet made a dull sound as it connected with the back of the agent’s head, sending him to all fours, vials scattering as the wallet flew from his grip. He glanced over his shoulder at Sirus, now raising the skillet for a second blow. The agent’s brow formed a frown of aggrieved betrayal. “I . . . let you . . . go . . .” he sputtered.
“No,” Sirus replied, “you didn’t.” He brought the skillet down with all the force he could summon. Once, twice, a dozen more times until the agent’s head was a pulped ruin and his legs finally stopped twitching.
Lumilla was dead, her neck snapped by the impact with the wall. Sirus left Katrya weeping over her body and went to the window, where he saw the first full-grown wild drake in his life. The Red landed in the middle of the street, pinning an unfortunate Morsvale resident under its claws. It was at least twenty feet long from nose to tail and stood in stark contrast to the emaciated, wingless wretches from the pens; muscles bunching beneath its crimson skin and wings beating as it gave a small squawk of triumph before beginning its meal. Sirus jerked his gaze away then saw another impossible sight, more running figures but, judging by their completely unfamiliar garb, not townsfolk. One paused outside the window, a tall man dressed in what Sirus instantly recognised as hardened gr
een-leather armour near identical to an exhibit in the museum’s Native Arradsian collection. His suspicions were instantly confirmed when the man turned his head. Spoiled . . . The scaled, spine-ridged visage and yellow eyes left no doubt that the creature he beheld was a living breathing member of the deformed indigenous tribal inhabitants of this continent.
He ducked instantly, hoping the Spoiled had missed him, scuttling towards Katrya’s side and retrieving the knife on the way. “We have to go!” he told her.
So they fled through street after street of horror and chaos. Confusion reigned, drake and Spoiled killing with little or no attempt at resistance from the scant few constables and soldiers left in the city. They were just as panicked and terror-stricken as the civilians and it was obvious this attack had come with no warning.
Sirus’s first hope had been to make for the docks but the surrounding thoroughfares were choked with people all beset by the same delusion that they might find a ship to carry them away. Such a throng proved an irresistible target for the scores of Reds flying above. He dragged Katrya into a doorway as the massacre unfolded, dodging a rain of corpses and limbs. It had been her idea to make for the sewers, one they shared with a few others possessed of well-honed survival instincts. Ten at first, then nine and, as Sirus discovered when he was woken by Katrya’s soft weeping, only two.
• • •
“They took a vote,” Katrya said. “Didn’t wake you cos they knew you’d talk them out of it, I s’pose. Majack’s idea.”
“But you didn’t go with them,” Sirus said.
