The City of Night Neverending

by Steven Lochran

‘Qorza invited me to watch her perform her ethereon duties later. I don’t want to be too weary when the time comes,’ he explained.

  ‘But still’ – Hero wrinkled her nose – ‘a nap?’

  ‘Come on,’ Drake said, shooting Joss a wink and steering Hero to the steps. ‘Let’s get some fresh air and leave Joss to have some shut-eye with Pietro.’

  As grateful as Joss was for the peace and quiet, he was unsure if he’d actually be able to sleep. He just had too much going on in his head. Nevertheless, he crawled into his hammock and made himself comfortable. The tundra bear’s breathing proved hypnotic, and soon Joss was drifting off.

  When he woke, the cabin was almost in total darkness, his mind foggy. With no idea of how long he’d been asleep, he scrambled to his feet and went in search of the others. He found Drake on the main deck, leaning out over the railings, watching the waves crashing against the hull. The sound was so great he didn’t hear Joss approaching until they were standing next to each other, elbow to elbow.

  ‘Where’s Hero?’ asked Joss, joining Drake in admiring the view.

  ‘She was fretting about the effect the salt air would be having on her weapons, so she’s gone to find the quartermaster to barter for some blade oil. Though honestly, I think she’s feeling a touch seasick. Safe to say a sailor’s life is not for her.’ Drake levelled a concerned gaze at Joss. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine,’ Joss replied with some puzzlement. ‘Though why wouldn’t I be?’

  Drake grimaced and turned his attention to the water. The sun was bleeding across the horizon, drowning the sky with scarlet and gold. But strangely enough, amid all the burning colour, there stirred a shadow in the distance. While all the sea around it raged, the waves that broke where the shadow rested were little more than ripples. It was a curious and unsettling sight.

  Joss shuddered. ‘That’s not – is it?’ He couldn’t give voice to the thought that throbbed as painfully as a wound.

  ‘Daheed. Or where it used to stand, at least,’ Drake said. ‘I’m sorry, Joss. I didn’t mean to draw your attention to it.’

  ‘No. I’d prefer to see – I’ve always wondered …’

  The words still wouldn’t come. A lifetime’s worth of wondering was now unfolding before him so rapidly that he felt unbalanced, as tossed about as the Behemoth as it crashed onward through the waves. Joss flinched as he felt Drake touch his shoulder. It seemed as if he was considering saying something, before deciding that perhaps silence was best.

  They dined that evening beneath the stars. Onion soup was ladled out from a massive pot, which the crew mopped up with bread slathered in mammoth cheese and washed down with mulled wine. Figgy pudding was served for dessert, wrapped in cloth and still steaming. The food was simple but filling, and not at all what Joss had expected. It reminded him of the meals served back at Round Shield Ranch, and the thought was enough to start him worrying about Edgar again. Would his captors be feeding him or leaving him to starve?

  The sailors joked and laughed and told tall tales as they sat together, just as thunderfolk would do around a campfire. Even the captain joined in, seemingly happy to be dining with her crew rather than alone in her quarters. The only person missing was Qorza.

  ‘She’s a busy woman,’ the captain said when Joss asked her where the ship’s ethereon might be. ‘And she has a busy night ahead.’

  When everyone had finished their dinner, a few members of the crew fetched their instruments and began to play. Drums, accordion and fiddle whirled together in a jig, to which the rest of the crew clapped and stomped along.

  Drake offered his hand to Hero. ‘Care to dance?’ he asked.

  Joss couldn’t have been more shocked than if he’d asked her if she wanted to fly to the moon with him. Until she accepted.

  ‘But only if I lead,’ she told him as they took each other arm-in-arm and joined the jig, moving with such confidence that they could have been secretly practising this routine for weeks. Joss had never seen either of them look so happy and carefree, both of them seeming to find a moment’s reprieve from the hardships of the past few days. Even the ship’s crew looked impressed, cheering his brethren on with gusto. Ordinarily Joss would have been happy to do the same. But he was far too distracted for that.

  ‘Not in a mood for merriment, lad?’ Captain Gyver asked him, refilling her cup from the wine barrel.

  ‘Feels strange, after everything that just happened in Crescent Cove,’ he admitted.

  The captain cocked her head. ‘We dance because we live another day,’ she said. ‘It’s in dire times that you make sure to celebrate the simple things.’ She raised her cup to him in salute, then wandered off into the crowd.

  She was right, he knew. Even so, the most he could bring himself to do was tap his toe and smile vacantly. He watched the crowd as much as the dancers, hoping to spot a pair of gold glasses framing a set of amber eyes. But they remained frustratingly absent.

  Gradually, the party grew thin. Those who weren’t on duty retired below deck to sleep. Sweaty and exhausted, Drake and Hero joined Joss by the railing.

  ‘Well, I’m done for tonight,’ Drake said, draining what little liquid remained in his cup. ‘Think I’ll turn in.’

  ‘I’ll join you,’ said Hero.

  ‘What about you, Joss?’ Drake asked.

  ‘I’ll stay. Qorza will be along any moment now, I’m sure.’

  ‘Don’t wait up too long,’ Drake said, roughing up his hair the way an older brother might. ‘We still have a lot of travel ahead of us.’

  They all bade each other a good night, then left Joss to his own company. Patting down his hair, he settled in to wait. On deck, the crew went about their duties, including the lookout, who climbed up into the crow’s nest. He looked no older than Joss himself. If life had turned out differently, it could have just as easily been Joss up in that nest, watching for whatever threats the night held.

  ‘Well met by moonlight, Josiah,’ Qorza called out, startling him from his musings. She stepped from the shadows that had gathered across the deck.

  ‘You can call me Joss,’ he replied as he stood and approached her. ‘You didn’t come up for dinner?’

  ‘Too much to be done, unfortunately. I took a light meal in my cabin. Besides, I could never have worked around all that carousing. I’d have ruined the crew’s good time.’

  After seeing Qorza’s collection of instruments earlier, Joss had expected her arms to be laden with obscure and exotic tools. Instead, she wore a simple satchel over the shoulder of her oilskin coat, in which Joss glimpsed a heap of charcoal.

  ‘So.’ Her boots clicked on the timber deck as she crossed to the starboard side. ‘Let’s get started, shall we?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A HUNDRED MILLION KNIVES IN THE NIGHT

  DROPPING to her knees, Qorza used the coal to trace arcane symbols on the deck’s wooden planks. First she drew a large circle, cutting across it here and there with thin little dashes, before surrounding the circle with all manner of rune marks. It looked a lot like spriggan script, until she began to add wavy lines that flowed around the other symbols like water.

  ‘I learned how to do all this from your father,’ she said, standing up long enough to reposition herself, before starting to etch out a whole new symbol. ‘But in thinking back on it today, I realised he was still quite a young man himself so, really, we were learning together. I was learning how to be an ethereon and he was learning how to be a teacher.’

  ‘Really?’ Joss said, strangely surprised by the idea of his father having been young. He’d always loomed so large in Joss’s memory, it was hard to think of him as anything but a mythical and ageless being. Yet here was someone who’d called him friend. Already it was turning him into a mortal man of flesh and blood.

  ‘You mentioned something about my parents naming me after a fishing boat captain,’ Joss said as Qorza stood to start tracing another sigil, this one surrounded by stars.

  ‘Josia
h Eichmore,’ she replied. ‘He saved your father’s life, you know. Before the Seeker, your father crewed on a different ship. During a voyage it was hit by a severe storm and was smashed to pieces. Naveer was one of the few survivors. He and the others clung to driftwood through the night, finally swimming ashore on a tiny patch of sand that would be too generously described as a desert island. They survived there for three days, catching what fish they could with what little supplies they had at hand, until the flash of your father’s thunderbolt pendant caught the eye of a passing fishing boat captain. When Josiah Eichmore finally delivered your father home to safety, your mother was so overwhelmed with relief that she pledged there and then to name their firstborn child after him.’

  ‘Even if I was a girl?’ asked Joss, one eyebrow raised.

  ‘You’d have made a fine Josie, no doubt,’ Qorza said with a wink. Having begun her work on the starboard side of the ship, she was already halfway across the deck with almost every inch covered in markings. Even with all the questions Joss was asking her, she was impressively efficient.

  ‘What did my mother do?’ he asked her now, his curiosity growing hungrier the more it was fed. ‘If my father was an ethereon and always away at sea …’

  ‘She worked in Daheed’s Imperial Library, one of the greatest repositories of wisdom and culture that ever existed, now lost to the world.’ Qorza stopped what she was doing long enough to sigh sadly. Grabbing a new piece of coal, she continued: ‘And she was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. I remember an article she authored on the history of Kahnrani poetry. Her words were as enchanting as the writings she sought to praise.’

  ‘It was my mother who escaped with me when Daheed … when what happened to Daheed happened,’ said Joss. ‘We shared a leaky old rowboat that was missing its oars. I remember the blood she had on her dress. We reached the shore in Crescent Cove with only enough time for her to tell those gathered there my name. And then she was gone …’

  Qorza had again stopped what she was doing, staring up at Joss with a wellspring of sorrow in her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ she said.

  Joss shrugged awkwardly. ‘Nothing you did.’

  Perhaps sensing that he’d prefer not to have her staring at him, Qorza returned to her efforts. ‘I have to admit,’ she said, drawing a complex web of intersecting triangles, ‘I had been wondering what had happened, what miracle had brought you here to stand before me. I should have known that your mother’s resolve would have something to do with it. I just wish that miracle could have included her with it, and your father too if I was being greedy.’

  ‘I thought I saw them once,’ Joss said after clearing his throat of the emotion that had choked it. ‘Just recently. In Vaal. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘The Ghost City. Where the paladeros send their hopeful prentices to prove themselves,’ Qorza said. ‘A strange and vexing place is Vaal. Notoriously so.’

  Joss thought back on his time in the Ghost City, fleeting as it was, where restless spectres had stalked him through the labyrinthine streets. He thought of the confrontation he’d had with the Stitched Witch, of the arcane blood ritual she’d hoped to perform by sacrificing his life. He thought of the Witch’s menacing emissary, the masked figure known only as Thrall, who seemed to be able to shift between the shadows as if passing through an open window. That peculiar ability had allowed him to escape, and now he haunted Joss’s dreams along with the spectres of Vaal.

  Joss thought of all these things, these encounters with the unexplainable, and a chill ran up his spine. ‘We don’t talk much of the supernatural in Thunder Realm,’ he told Qorza, holding his arms tightly around his chest. ‘If it don’t eat, bite, make muck or earn a buck, it’s not worth the trouble. At least that’s what the old fieldservs say.’

  Qorza chuckled. ‘I’ve not heard that one before. Don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to use it myself.’ Her laughter petered out to be replaced by a look of seriousness. ‘You know, the world’s a big place, Josiah. Bigger than the boundaries of Thunder Realm.’

  ‘I’m coming to see that,’ Joss replied, before his attention was diverted by a curious sight glinting on the horizon. ‘What is that?’

  He pointed out to the water, where a shimmering curtain of crystal flakes filled the sky. The curtain stretched on beyond the ocean’s darkest edges, sparkling like a hundred million knives in the night.

  ‘That’s the Veil of Frost,’ Qorza said, pulling the hood of her coat up over her head. ‘I’d steel myself, if I were you.’

  The Behemoth ploughed onward, bouncing over the choppy waters. Mesmerised, Joss watched the ship’s prow pierce the curtain, the grasping tentacles of its kraken figurehead quickly engulfed by the frost. Then the rest of the ship quickly followed and the cold struck Joss like a slap across the face. It froze every exposed hair, thickened his blood, turned his teeth to chattering.

  ‘Here, take this,’ said Qorza, offering Joss a blanket. ‘I should have given you fuller warning. But then there’s nothing quite like your first time passing through the Veil. Bracing, isn’t it?’

  The only response Joss could offer was a trembling nod and a murmured thanks as he drew the blanket tight around his shoulders. It offered him little comfort at first, though gradually the heavy material warmed him and he found himself able to feel his limbs again.

  He was staggered by how different things were on this side of the Veil. Where before the sky had been a flat black slab studded with stars, it was now rippled with a dense fog. Even the surface of the water was affected, with great clouds of mist whirling about the waves.

  ‘I ne-ne-never realised …’ he stuttered. He’d heard of the Veil of Frost, of course. Knew that it divided the Northern Tundra’s eternal winter from the rest of the world. But reading about a phenomenon and experiencing it firsthand were two wildly different things.

  ‘Mainlanders rarely do,’ Qorza replied, looking entirely unbothered by the cold as she kept at her work, her coal fragmented to fine crumbs. She had almost filled the deck with her markings, which stretched from port to starboard.

  ‘Do you do this every night?’ Joss asked when he’d finally stopped shivering enough to be able to speak coherently.

  ‘Every night that we’re at sea.’ Qorza discarded the remains of her coal and replaced it with a new piece. ‘Depending on how worn away the sigils have become over the course of day, that is. Sometimes I can get away with just filling in the blanks. But not often.’

  ‘Seems exhausting.’

  ‘I prefer to think of it as absorbing,’ she said. She was just about to press the tip of her coal against the deck when she stopped and looked at Joss. ‘Would you like to do the honours and finish off the last sigil?’

  ‘What, me?’ Joss asked. ‘But I wouldn’t know what to do.’

  ‘I can guide you.’

  ‘But if I get it wrong, won’t that leave the ship unguarded?’

  ‘The longer you stand here arguing, the longer that continues to be the case. Don’t worry so much. Spellcraft runs in your blood. And if you mess it up, I’ll just start over.’

  ‘You mean the entire deck?’

  ‘That’s right. So don’t mess up,’ she said with a devilish grin. ‘Begin by drawing a circle, as round as you can make it.’

  Hesitantly, Joss took the coal from her. He had just stooped down to make his first stroke when Qorza touched her fingertips to his shoulder.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Do you hear that?’

  Joss tilted his ear to the wind. There was a sound like fireworks fizzing through the air, far off at first but growing closer. He looked up to see what resembled a swarm of falling stars speeding across the surface of the water, crisscrossing each other as they leapt and flew from wave to wave. Joss was reminded of the fireflies in the ruins of the Forgotten Order, but these lights – whatever they were – burned both brighter and colder, the sparks they cast as sharp as icicles. He was about to ask if they had anything to do with the V
eil of Frost when Qorza shouted, ‘Joss! Take cover!’

  The warning came too late. One of the spheres of cold light shot up over the ship’s railings, blinding Joss in a burst of luminescence. Then a sudden blow to the chest knocked him off his feet and into the quiet dark of nothingness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A PARTING GIFT

  A DARK sky stained with blood. A hole torn in the fabric of all things. A crimson fire burning fast and far, an unquenchable blaze. A stone mask watching with disinterest as a great black shadow ripped the world in two. All these things Joss saw, and they filled his heart with icy dread.

  ‘Joss, can you hear me?’ someone asked through the darkness. ‘Joss, are you all right?’

  He felt something tap at his face, making him wince. With great effort, he wrenched open his eyes. Qorza was crouched before him, her face full of concern.

  ‘What happened?’ Joss asked.

  ‘You were struck by a wisp,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry. They’re mostly harmless –’

  ‘Mostly harmless?’ he repeated, rubbing his chest where this wisp had hit him. His skin felt bruised and burnt, and that burning sensation now spread to his fingers.

  ‘Compared with any of the other supernatural entities that you could have been attacked by out here,’ Qorza replied.

  ‘I saw … something,’ Joss said, unsure of how to put into words the rush of sights and sounds that had flooded his head.

  ‘A wisp’s touch will often trigger visions,’ Qorza replied. ‘In fact, for as long as you bear its mark you’ll be more susceptible to the supernatural as a whole.’

  ‘Its mark?’ Joss looked down as Qorza pointed at his chest. She must have unbuttoned his shirtfront, exposing the silver starburst that now scarred the skin above his heart. ‘Muck! It’s not permanent, is it?’

  ‘It should fade. But in the meantime it would be best to wear this.’ Qorza reached into her jacket and removed a leather wristband with four small gold discs attached to it, each of them etched with the same sort of mystic symbols that she had inscribed across the deck.