The City of Night Neverending

by Steven Lochran

  ‘What was that?’ the changeling exclaimed while Joss spun around to use the shadowscope again.

  It was Ichor, his face a mottled shade of red as he charged from one of the derelict buildings across the plaza towards the cage. He was accompanied by a pair of guards who ran ahead of him to clear a path. Joss watched, his blood running cold, as the guards threw open the cage door and Ichor marched straight in to confront his Bladebound brethren.

  ‘Who did it?’ Ichor demanded, grabbing Edgar by the scruff of the neck and yanking him to his feet. ‘Was it you, boy? Was it you who stole from me?’

  ‘What – what do you mean?’ Edgar gasped in pain.

  ‘My keys!’ the admiral said. The words slipped from between his ruined teeth like a snake through a hole in a fence. ‘Were you the nimble-fingered muckrunner who made off with my keys? This whole island is my prison, you artless little beggar! You can no sooner escape here than you can grow gills and swim to Mraba! But then who am I to deny the existence of miracles? Mayhap we should load you onto a submersible and kick you out the hatch, see how fast you can swim. What do ye say, boy? Feeling fishy?’

  Edgar grunted, unable to speak as his face burned red and spittle flecked his chin.

  ‘Leave him alone!’ Hero shouted, and Ichor looked at her with the same wildness as a thunder lizard readying to charge. Reaching behind her back, she produced the keychain, the keys ringing in her grasp. Drake sagged at the defeat, while Edgar watched in horror. Neither of the guards needed any order to step forward. One of them struck Hero in the gut with a cudgel, doubling her over in pain, while the other snatched the keys from her.

  ‘I should have known it’d be you, y’mouthy trollop,’ Ichor said, his leather glove creaking as he squeezed Edgar’s neck even tighter. ‘I think a lesson is in order.’

  ‘You can’t! They’re only children!’ Lilia pushed forward, her protests quickly silenced by another swift strike from Ichor’s guards.

  ‘I can and will. Starting with this little runt,’ the admiral said, jerking his arm so that Edgar twisted painfully in his clutches. ‘But don’t worry, son. Your friends can come along too. Take them.’

  The guards grabbed Drake and Hero, while the admiral kept firm hold of Edgar. Together they dragged the prentices down along the Thousand Sacred Stairs and through the chanting crowd, towards Thrall, who was coming to the grand finale of his sermon.

  ‘We give this sacrifice willingly, that we might please our master and hasten his arrival into this world!’ the masked man cried out, his voice resounding across the masses gathered before him. ‘Darkness take us!’

  ‘Darkness take us all!’ the crowd responded, with many of them breaking out into cheers as they spotted the three young faces being pulled towards the vortex. Ichor went first, hauling Edgar behind him like a panicked hatchling trying to avoid the branding iron.

  ‘No, please! Stop!’ Edgar kicked and thrashed, but there was no escaping Ichor’s iron grip.

  ‘Calm yourself, boy. It will all be over soon. And then you’ll be one with the darkness.’ The admiral grabbed Edgar by the throat and pushed him out onto the very edge of the step. The tip of Edgar’s boot scraped a pebble, which was sent bouncing over into the swirling vortex below. It disintegrated like a snowflake falling into a fire pit, leaving no trace of having ever existed.

  Ichor offered one last toothy grin. ‘As you go, so goes the world.’

  And then he let go.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A SLIGHT CHANGE OF PLAN

  JOSS could only watch in horror as Ichor herded his brethren from their cage and down towards the First Step.

  ‘He’s going to throw them all into the vortex!’ Joss gasped and looked up at the changeling, whose face was creased in what looked to be resignation. ‘We have to help them!’

  ‘There’s no time, Joss. We’re too far away,’ the changeling said.

  ‘I’ll show you too far away,’ Joss said. Grabbing the crossbow from the changeling’s hands, he immediately set to loading one of the incendiary bolts. He had only just pulled the string taut when he heard a shriek from below.

  ‘No!’ He spun around to see Edgar being thrown from the step.

  ‘Darkness take us!’ Ichor roared in triumph.

  Like good little minions, the crowd all shouted in turn. ‘Darkness take us all!’

  But all Joss could hear was a high-pitched screech in his head. Edgar was gone. And if he didn’t act quickly then Drake and Hero would soon share his fate. He marched to the edge of the rooftop.

  ‘Joss, don’t –’ the changeling said, but Joss shrugged him off. Standing with one foot on the parapet he raised the crossbow, drew in a lungful of air, and bellowed as loud as he could.

  ‘Josiah Eichmore!’

  The entire camp looked up. The pyrates, the hostages, the admiral, Thrall. Drake and Hero both stared at him in shock, though the guards that flanked them on either side kept them held firmly in place.

  ‘If the darkness won’t take you, maybe this will!’ Joss shouted, and sent the crossbow bolt flying. It shot across the plaza with astounding speed, the pointed head bursting into flame only moments before impact. It struck Ichor in the shoulder, throwing him back as it set his coat ablaze. The pyrates gasped. The admiral screamed. Guards rushed to his side, tearing the coat from Ichor’s back to stamp out the flames. By the time they’d wrested the burning clothes off him and pulled the bloodied bolt from his flesh, he was staring up at Joss with wild-eyed fury.

  ‘Kill him!’ he screamed, his words almost unintelligible. ‘Kill him now!’

  The pyrates all pulled out their weapons as they charged for the building on which Joss and the changeling were standing. With their rusty green armour and grotesque helmets, they looked like a rampaging horde of monsters from the deep.

  ‘So. A slight alteration in the plan then,’ noted the changeling.

  ‘Only slight,’ Joss replied, tossing him the crossbow. ‘I’ll go for the hostages. You clear me a path.’

  ‘And how do you suggest I do that?’ the changeling asked. Already the pyrates were clamouring at the base of the building, the first wave of attackers using the handholds of the rough brickwork to scale their way upward.

  ‘You set up those explosives, didn’t you?’ Joss said as he inspected an old copper line that ran up from the street, the kind that delivered illumigram signals before receiver dishes had replaced them. He tested its strength and found that it held just as firm under his weight as the guy-wire had back in Crescent Cove.

  ‘True,’ the changeling replied, and quickly loaded another bolt into the crossbow. He paused, staring in disbelief as Joss stepped up onto the ledge of the building. ‘What are you doing?’

  Unbuckling his sword-belt, Joss threw it over the copper line and gripped it on either side.

  ‘Something stupid,’ he said, and launched himself off the building, just as the changeling let loose his arrow. The bolt struck a stack of barrels on the edge of the encampment and exploded, casting fireballs into the crowd. Joss zipped through the flames, hair lashing his face, the street rushing beneath his feet, the pyrate horde preparing its attack.

  Chaos whirled around Drake and Hero like a tempest. Ichor had been dragged to shelter by his guards and was now shrieking from beneath a tarpaulin as his personal physician tended to his wounds. While the rest of the admiral’s regiment had rushed off to either join the fray or to put out fires, Thrall had simply vanished. That left a lone pyrate to watch over Hero and Drake, his seashell chain mail hanging from his scrawny frame like a sheet on a clothesline. It clinked every time he jumped at an explosion.

  Drawing close to Hero, Drake whispered in her ear: ‘Follow my lead.’

  ‘What are you –’ she began, stopping short as Drake fell to the ground with a cry of anguish, clutching his hand.

  Startled, the pyrate guard took a tentative step forward. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

  ‘His wound – it must be infected!�
� Hero said as she rushed to Drake’s side. ‘Quick, help me get him to the physician’s tent.’

  ‘I don’t think –’ the pyrate replied uncertainly.

  ‘He’ll die if you don’t help me right now! You want to explain that to your admiral?’

  Looking all around for help and seeing that none was coming, the pyrate lurched forward. He knelt down beside Drake and was just about to inspect the wound when the two prentices jumped up to overpower him. Spinning his helmet around to obscure his vision, Hero pinned his arms to his sides while Drake wrestled the cudgel from the pyrate’s grip. Three quick smacks and the scrawny pyrate slumped unconscious with a groan.

  ‘Good job,’ Hero said, untangling herself and straightening her jacket. Looking up, she caught sight of a stack of supplies that had been left piled up along the First Step. ‘My bandolier!’

  She wasted no time in retrieving her property, leaving Drake to stare distantly at the black vortex.

  ‘Poor Edgar,’ he muttered.

  ‘Poor Edgar is right. And we’ll be next if we don’t hurry up and get out of here,’ Hero replied, tossing Drake his sword-belt with the humming knife strapped to it, then looping her bandolier around her chest.

  ‘How can you be so brusque?’ He shot her a rueful glance. ‘Don’t you care about anyone other than your damned self?’

  ‘Of course I care!’ she snapped. Drake took a half-step backward, while Hero ran a hand over her face. ‘But standing here crying about it now does us no good. First, we escape. We go help Joss. Then we mourn. It’s the only way to –’ Hero stopped. ‘Do you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’ Drake strained to listen.

  ‘Help!’ someone was faintly crying.

  ‘Hear that!’ Hero said as she rushed to peer over the edge, then burst out in a grin. ‘It’s Edgar!’ she shouted.

  Drake hastened to her side to see the young prentice clamped to the rough underside of the step, just a few scant feet from the vortex below.

  ‘Thank the liege!’ Drake sighed. ‘Edgar! Are you all right?’

  ‘Not really,’ the boy replied in a small, wavering voice.

  ‘Can you climb up?’

  ‘Not really …’ he said again.

  ‘Can you take my hand?’ Hero asked, lying on her stomach to reach out to him. Edgar grimaced as he hunkered against the rocky surface.

  ‘I know I’m repeating myself, ma’am, but –’

  ‘Not really,’ Drake concluded.

  Hero caught his gaze. ‘We need a rope,’ she said, already searching for whatever she could find that might help.

  ‘Aye, you could use a length of rope, all right. And a yardarm from which to hang!’ a voice boomed behind them. Spinning around, Drake saw how quickly Ichor’s physician had performed his work. His patient was standing bare-chested before them, a bandage wrapped tightly around his shoulder, cracked teeth bared in an animalistic snarl. Though his guards had gone to join the mob charging on Joss, he was no less dangerous for the lack of reinforcements. Not with the familiar-looking weapon he was wielding.

  ‘That’s my family’s spear,’ Drake said, cold as a tundra wind. ‘It belongs to me.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ichor replied. He hefted the Icefire spear with such ease it could have been a shaft of light rendered solid, the tip aimed at Drake’s heart. ‘I’d be happy to return it, lad. Just say where.’

  Drake drew his humming knife. The admiral merely laughed.

  ‘Lord Thrall was right. I’ve been aching for sport down here. I thought before that you were only good for breaking. But I see now how much better suited you are for dying,’ he said, spinning the spear around in his rough hands. ‘Just don’t do it too quickly now.’

  ‘I don’t intend to,’ Drake replied, holding Ichor’s gaze as Hero slipped a zamaraq from her bandolier.

  The admiral laughed again, quieter this time, and with far more menace. ‘They never do.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  AN UNCAGED MONSTER

  JOSS hit the ground running. And ducking. And rolling. The pyrates were converging on him with such speed and strength that he already knew he’d made a grave mistake. It was foolish to try taking them head on, just as the changeling had said. There were simply too many of them. His only tactic was to sprint as fast as he could, to hit and run and keep running.

  Joss could still hear Edgar’s terrified, heartbreaking scream as he’d been thrown over the side. It was enough to keep him moving forward through the fear and panic that buzzed in his head like a wounded tiger wasp. That buzz became a full-throated roar as a wave of pyrates surged towards him.

  ‘Take the devil’s eyes!’ howled a hook-handed brute at the front of the pack. Joss was now surrounded, the pyrates’ numbers too great to overcome. He could already feel the cold shadow of death settling over him, and shivered at its touch.

  But the changeling proved as true in his aim as he was in his word. With a sputtering hiss, a crossbow bolt shot past Joss’s head to strike another concealed pot.

  ‘Black and bloody depths!’ the same brute cursed in the single moment of silence that followed, before the whole camp erupted and everyone was thrown off their feet.

  Joss was caught up in the force of the explosion, flung far across the stairs to land painfully on his back, the breath knocked from him. He had no time to recover. Off-balance and gasping for air, he pulled himself up onto his feet.

  ‘Over here!’ he heard someone shouting through the ringing in his ears. He approached the nearby cage to find the hostages crowded against the bars, with one silver-haired woman gesturing emphatically at him.

  ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ she asked him, hand raised before her.

  ‘Lilia, there’s no time for that now!’ said the man beside her. ‘We need him to break us out of here, not pass a physical examination!’

  ‘Great chance he’ll have of helping us if he’s suffering from a brain haemorrhage,’ the woman, Lilia, shot back.

  ‘Three. You’re holding up three fingers,’ Joss answered in the hope of ending the argument. Lilia smiled, satisfied.

  ‘Can you get us out of here?’ her companion asked.

  Joss wished it was as easy to answer that question as Lilia’s had been. Maybe if he’d brought one of the exploding pots with him he could have blown open the bars. Hero might have had some luck in picking the lock, but there was no way of reaching her with all the pyrates that divided them. If he was going to do something, he had to do it now. Searching desperately for an idea, his mind landed at the Rakashi Revelations and the promises they’d made about a vaartan rhazh.

  ‘Stand back,’ he said, raising the Champion’s Blade high. Gripping it as tightly as he could, he brought the sword smashing down on the lock.

  Ichor moved like an uncaged monster. His every swipe and slash was delivered with lethal intensity, keeping Drake constantly on the defensive. It didn’t help that their weapons were so mismatched, with the Icefire spear easily outclassing Drake’s humming knife. The few strikes that Drake managed to parry almost broke his arm from the force alone, and the idea of getting close enough to the admiral to land a blow himself was laughable. Ichor’s constant chuckling, broken only by the occasional grunt, was testament enough to that.

  ‘Face it, boy. You have no chance of victory. Best surrender now and I promise a quick and honourable death.’

  ‘I don’t give up so easily,’ Drake huffed.

  ‘Then you’ll die screaming,’ Ichor replied with a grim smile. ‘How splendid.’

  The admiral paused, cracked his neck and backbone, before he launched at Drake with renewed strength. He rained down blow after blow, strike after strike. Drake moved as fast as he could to deflect and dodge. But he wasn’t fast enough. The tip of the Icefire spear slashed him across the hand, sending his knife hurtling.

  ‘Ah!’ he cried out in pain, clutching his hand to his chest. Ichor grinned triumphantly as he swaggered forward, pressing the spear against the flesh of Drake’s thr
oat.

  ‘Any last words?’ the admiral asked.

  ‘Just a question,’ Drake said, eyes flicking around Ichor. ‘What’s that behind you?’

  Ichor sniggered. ‘That’s weak bait. But I’ll bite. What exactly is behind me?’

  Drake didn’t answer. But Hero did.

  ‘Me,’ she said, and the admiral spun around just in time to take a zamaraq to the face, the bladed weapon burying itself in his cheek. Roaring in anguish, he let go of the Icefire spear. It clattered to the ground beside Drake, who quickly scooped it back up.

  ‘You cowards! You malformed mongrels!’ Ichor screamed as he rolled on the ground, hands wrapped tightly around his face and the weapon sticking from it. ‘I’ll have your flesh for my overcoat! You hear me? I’ll see you both flayed alive for this!’

  Hero flicked open a second zamaraq, the blade ringing between her fingers. ‘No doubt you could use the surplus skin after having your own so thoroughly punctured.’

  ‘Ignore him, we need to help Edgar,’ Drake said, gently placing his bandaged hand on hers. ‘Have you found any rope?’

  ‘No. But I’ve worked out the next best thing.’

  Collapsing the zamaraq and tucking it into the hem of her pants, Hero unbuckled her bandolier. The leather strap uncoiled from her chest, the end of it dragging across the ground as she returned to the island’s edge.

  ‘Edgar!’ she called out to the boy, whose grip looked to be weakening by the second. ‘Catch!’

  She tossed one end of the bandolier to him while holding on to the other. Though the length was just a few inches too short to reach him comfortably, it was still within grabbing distance. But Edgar wouldn’t budge.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You will,’ Hero told him.

  Hesitantly, he grasped for the strap.

  The rasp of a blade being drawn from its scabbard was followed quickly by a furious howl. It was Admiral Ichor, sword in hand and charging, ready to hack them all to pieces.