SHIANG

by C. F. Iggulden

  Gabriel flexed his hands and forearms, pleased by the muscle and condition. If not for the lumps that ruined his side, it would be as good a body as the one he had known in life. Yet even as he had the thought, he realised he could not quite remember his old frame. Identity seemed linked to flesh, more powerfully than he had ever understood. Already, he had no idea if he had been shorter or taller in his previous existence. Even the memories of the grey plain were fading, though he understood he had escaped. He and the other three had been wrenched back into the world.

  He raised his face to the sunlight streaming through the glass, where the river ran beyond. Warmth touched him, true warmth, for the first time in an age. Morning had come, at last, in all its glory. He let out and drew in a long breath, delighting in every sensation.

  There was a man talking. A man who moved to block the light that washed over him. Gabriel understood most of the words, though they sounded strange to his ear, as if the speaker was from a different region. Some were mere gibberish. Without thought, Gabriel reached out and gripped the man’s neck, holding tightly enough to bring silence.

  The entire room froze, Gabriel saw. The servants revealed themselves by their cringing demeanour. The man he held was the master in that room – or he had been.

  ‘What is your name?’ Gabriel asked.

  The fellow was terrified, he could see that. He began tugging at Gabriel’s fingers, but they might as well have been cast from bronze for all the effect. Gabriel frowned a touch, then raised his arm higher, so that the man was made to stand on the tips of his toes. Lord Ran made a gurgling sound.

  ‘Be silent,’ Gabriel said. This body … no, it was more than mere muscle. He was stronger than he could believe. When he had reached for the throat, it had been like a rattlesnake striking. His eyes had barely followed his own movement, yet the tendons had not snapped, the muscles had not torn. Gabriel felt alive and aware, so that the entire world flooded in on him.

  He let the choking lord go and fell to his knees, holding his head in his hands. He could taste the air! He could smell sulphur and vinegar and, dear God, he could smell violets and river water and excrement, blended into one great pulsing hymn of life. There had been nothing on the battle plain except darkness and pain. He had bound wounds a thousand times, only to see them healed or scarred by the next morning. Yet it had not been life. A hundred years of it had not been as vivid as a single moment in that long room. It was a second chance.

  He rose to his feet once more, looking at the pale figure still trying to talk.

  ‘… Taeshin, you are very ill. Can you hear me? Do you understand what I am saying?’

  ‘You speak like a peasant,’ Gabriel said with a grin. ‘Is this Shiang? What reign is this? Who sits the jade throne?’

  He watched the man pat the air as if to calm him down. Gabriel counselled himself to be patient. He knew only one thing. He would not go back without a fight. It did not matter if this stranger spoke to him like a child or a madman. He needed to learn all he could, as quickly as he could, to protect the miracle.

  ‘King Yuan-Choji sits the throne, Taeshin, as you know. You saw him just a few days ago, do you remember?’

  ‘The Yuan? They are potters, aren’t they? Was Shiang invaded or something?’ Gabriel demanded.

  He saw a look of incomprehension cross the face of the other and tried to speak slowly.

  ‘What year is it?’

  Lord Ran looked at him in confusion and genuine fear. He answered with great care, as he could still feel the bruises on his throat. He’d heard his vertebrae creak under that grip and he had not managed to dislodge a single finger. His life had rested on the whim of another and he was still shaken by the experience.

  ‘It is the second year of Yuan-Choji, Yuan two hundred and four.’

  ‘Further back,’ Gabriel said in frustration.

  ‘The city … Shiang is said to have been founded eleven thousand years ago. Is that what you mean, Taeshin?’

  ‘Be silent,’ Gabriel said. He swallowed as he understood. If the trembling fool was correct, he had been dead a long time.

  ‘What were you doing here?’ he said suddenly. ‘These men, who are they to you?’

  ‘Are you all right? Are you hallucinating?’ Lord Ran asked.

  He stepped forward to examine Taeshin’s eyes and Gabriel slapped him with extraordinary force, far more than he had intended. The Lord of Trade sank to the floor, his eyes glazed by the impact. Gabriel spat an old curse in frustration. Denied answers, he lurched into movement around the room, looking at the wires and coming to rest at the white dust that seemed the heart of it.

  ‘This thing … what is this?’ he said to the room at large.

  The servants gaped at him, but one of them thought it best to answer a man who could strike Lord Ran in such a way.

  ‘It was the Aeris Stone,’ he said. ‘Lord Ran hoped to make greater warriors with its power. He told the king it was for healing, but he wanted enhanced knights to protect Shiang. It did not work, but the stone became dust.’

  Gabriel thought of the golden eye that had opened on a hillside. He had been drawn through, with three others. He thought too of the friends and generals he had known when he was alive. If he could bring them back, how pleased they would be.

  He could not finish the thought. The pain in his side was growing more and more insistent. He had felt an agony like it only once before – the day he had first opened his eyes on that grey plain. He grunted as flames ate into him, feeling a tear trickle down his cheek. Not all the paintings and sculpture he had witnessed in his life brought such joy as the sensation of weeping. To be alive was pleasure beyond sensation, now that he knew what lay beyond. He thought suddenly of a lemon and felt his mouth flood with saliva and pucker at the mere prospect. The sensations were simply overwhelming, but the pain was deadly. He forced himself to concentrate on it.

  He tore the shirt that covered his chest and whistled to himself at the black and shining lumps revealed. They quivered like something alive. He thought it was in time with his heart, which raced in that moment. If such foul things had reached his beating heart, he would surely die.

  The thought was a different kind of agony. He had forgotten life. To have it thrust into his hands once more – and then taken – would be its own special hell. He placed his hand on the lumps and felt something shift within him, as if his balance had changed. He frowned, closing his eyes. Warmth came to his fingers and then faded as he lost it again. It was maddening, like picking up a thread on a piece of glass. He plucked at something internal, over and over, and then suddenly he held it. Warmth flooded through his hand into his side. He opened his eyes as the servants crowded around, drawn by awe even greater than their fear. The lumps were shrinking back into the flesh. Veins appeared and disappeared as maps of purple wires, like nets coming to the surface only to sink again. Gabriel felt himself choke as something lodged in his throat and then he was vomiting, pouring acids onto the bed where he had lain.

  Lord Ran came back to consciousness and stood up. He saw Taeshin standing, panting and bare-chested, wiping his mouth with his hand. The servants were all staring at a thick, pink lump that glistened and stained the sheets of the bed with watery blood. There was no sign of the buboes on the young warrior’s skin.

  ‘How is this possible?’ Lord Ran said, forgetting the strangeness of before in his excitement.

  Gabriel ignored him. He held up his right hand in a sort of dazed wonder. The blind man had remained on his bed, his eyes hollow. Gabriel felt the warmth surge in his hand and as it became almost too hot to bear, he stepped around the bed and pressed it to the man’s face. The blind man shrieked, but it was in shock rather than pain. When Gabriel took his hand away, eyes of hazel looked back at him. The man fell back, shaking his head and blinking tears he could not shed before.

  ‘What is your name?’ Gabriel asked him.

  ‘Thomas,’ he said.

  In a daze, Gabriel stepped across to
the one-legged man, power roaring through him. He had never known such a feeling in life as in that moment. He was a god in a heartbeat, beyond life.

  He gripped the stump of the man’s leg and heard him groan. Gabriel leaned in and visualised the leg growing back, tendons and muscles wrapping around one another, bones growing like coral through the air. When he opened his eyes, a foot was still forming. He stared in wonder, then suddenly with a sense of doubt.

  The ocean that surged in him was less. He could feel it, as he might have felt an arm grow numb, or a sense of weariness. He was not a god. Whatever had brought him back was finite – and he had wasted too much of it on strangers. He pulled his hand back with a curse. The man on the bed cried out, reaching to him as a child might.

  ‘Finish the job, brother! Please.’

  The foot was indeed unfinished, without toes. It ended in a mass of tendons and veins, all coiling. As Gabriel stared, they fell limp. After a moment of stillness, they began to bleed.

  ‘I cannot risk more,’ Gabriel said. ‘Finish it yourself, if you have the strength. I have given you all I can.’

  He watched as the warrior closed his eyes and struggled to complete the work. The veins and tendons twitched half a dozen times, but they would not rise up and knit themselves into flesh, not as they had done before. Gabriel wondered if stepping first through the eye had given him more, or whether his training had made him better able to harness those forces. It did not matter. Now that he had discovered there was a limit, he would spend his coins more carefully.

  The fourth man had not struggled against the straps that bound him. Gabriel had never known his name, but there was little sign of life in the fellow who sagged on his bed.

  ‘So,’ Gabriel said. ‘One of us was blind and one lame. I had some foul thing eating at me.’ He looked to the man whose throat was still darkening with bruises. ‘And this one? Was he a leper? Where did you find him?’

  Lord Ran looked at him in quiet awe, unable to explain what had happened.

  ‘He was a drunk,’ he replied. ‘His mind is gone.’

  Gabriel peered closer, trying to remember which of his companions of the battlefield had found himself in such a pitiful carcass. As Thomas had been blind before, someone was trapped in a mind rotted almost to nothing. Gabriel shuddered. It would be its own torment, perhaps. Yet he could not spend more of what had revived him. He had already given too much.

  Gabriel cursed his excesses, though he had been drunk on life, intoxicated and made mad. He had burned too bright for a while. Yet his judgement and his control had returned.

  ‘I see. There’s nothing I can do for him now. Take us to the palace, Lord Ran,’ he said. ‘I would like to see this Yuan potter king with my own eyes.’

  ‘Taeshin?’ Lord Ran said. He still could not believe what he had witnessed, nor whether to be afraid or pleased.

  ‘Call me Gabriel,’ he replied. Gabriel felt a whisper of protest within him, as if something sat poorly in his gut. He belched into his fist. His mother had named him for an angel, he recalled. Well, he would be the Morningstar in Shiang. He would be the light returned.

  7

  Tiger

  Tellius avoided the eye of the king’s royal crier, Morbon. The man was red-faced and beady-eyed, huge of chest and with an almost pathological delight in the volume of his own voice. Lady Sallet had plucked Morbon from the markets just a year before, where his low price for fish could be heard over all the others. Morbon had been taken in and examined for some sort of magical assistance. It had turned out to be a natural talent, as was his ability to talk his way into a job. Within a month, Sallet and even royal proclamations were being read aloud on city squares and street corners by the man.

  Tellius heard Morbon had been beaten up twice on some of the narrow streets closer to the river. That explained why he went everywhere with two guards in royal livery. Yet despite Morbon’s inflated chest and sense of importance, Tellius didn’t want to hear the news that kept him hot on his heels.

  To say Tellius’ life had changed in the previous two years would have been an extraordinary understatement. While the city had suffered an attack by its own legion, led by one of the Twelve Families, an old man from the east had found the love of his life. He hadn’t even been looking. In all the bloodshed and chaos and wild magic, Lady Sallet had held his life in her hands more than once. To his surprise, she’d resisted the urge to make him disappear. She had never been one for the easy solution.

  He knew her rather better after two years than he had then. For all her tendency to push through life like a ship, Lady Sallet had been lonelier than even she had realised. In his more contemplative moments, Tellius understood that he had been as well. Men are made for partners. He had hardened himself against the world – a sadder, much colder man when he looked back. He also appreciated a fine-figured woman, there was no point denying that. It was not just a spiritual union of lonely souls. Lady Sallet had a very deep chest, his mother might have said, as if describing furniture. The truth was that Win Sallet delighted him and was part of the reason he had wrought his own changes. Though he was perhaps a little shabby in places, Tellius wore a decent tunic of dark green velvet and he was only two days clear of a razor, with white bristles barely visible.

  The city ran like a clock around the two of them, which Tellius felt in part was his doing. The new king was a quiet and obedient lad, seemingly proud of the relationship between Tellius and Aunt Sallet, as he called them. The boy Arthur had been crowned two years before, in the wreckage of civil war. There were still many in the city who believed he would grow into the seat. Tellius knew he actually would not, but that was something that would reveal itself over time. There was no hurry. The people of Darien lived with magic in their daily lives. They would accept a child golem as king once he had overseen a few more years without all hell breaking loose. Peace was the key, Tellius told the lads of the old crew, whenever they met for a beer at the Red Inn. People wanted to be left alone. Unless they were actually intent on butchering strangers with a cleaver, that was the best the king and the Twelve Families could do for most of them – to just stay out of their way.

  As an untitled companion to the head of House Sallet, Tellius was content to live well and privately, without ever troubling anyone or going hungry again. Life had rewarded him and he was not about to disappoint it by scorning the gift. At his age, one bad cold and he’d have seen his last winter anyway.

  Tellius saw Morbon had spotted him and was making his way through the visitors to the royal park, not quite in pursuit. Tellius increased his pace. He considered his daily walk around the royal park and estate grounds a chance to order his thoughts in peace. Really, the man had no right to seek him out. The fellow might have been a bullfrog for his ridiculous chest. No man should be preceded into a room by any single part of him.

  Tellius snorted to himself. Something to tell Win. Lady Sallet had a surprisingly broad sense of humour, which was just one of many unexpected things he had learned about her in their time together. A man should not be so blessed, he thought, lengthening his stride and beginning to breathe harder. Let the bastard sweat.

  ‘Master Tellius!’ he heard called behind him.

  Tellius went faster. Too much good fortune invited misfortune, though he hoped he was perhaps a little immune after so many years of misery and exile. If there was anything like balance in the world, Lady Sallet was his reward. He had told her that once. She’d laughed and proved it.

  He could hear Morbon panting like a pair of old bellows as he came up behind. Tellius felt his deeper thoughts pull apart, the threads lost. He halted, staring into the distance as the royal crier reached him and rested his hands on his knees. Morbon was pink as a salmon, which was a dish Tellius had only experienced since taking rooms on the Sallet estate. He and the lady of the house had kept a polite fiction of separate households for almost a year before he’d forgotten himself and been discovered fast asleep, laid out across her bolsters.

/>   Tellius rubbed his chin as he stared into the distance, giving Morbon time to recover his breath. The whiskers were old-man white and Win said they made him look like a vagabond. Perhaps it was time to shave once more, or more accurately to be shaved by the army of attendants who made the Sallet household run. They were very protective of their mistress, he had noticed. Perhaps that was why he did not trouble the barber too often, a man who held a long, shining razor to his favourite throat.

  ‘Master Tellius, I called out …’ Morbon broke off, appearing to need still more time.

  ‘Ah, Morbon! Were you looking for me? I had no idea. I walk out here sometimes, to watch the new palace going up. I think it will be an extraordinary building when it’s finished, don’t you?’

  The man’s colour was fading a touch, shade by shade. Tellius relented.

  ‘Is it Lady Forza again?’

  Morbon nodded, his eyes bulging.

  ‘You know, Morbon, you should walk this path each morning, at a good brisk speed. Not when I do, you understand. Earlier, much, much earlier. You’ll find you won’t puff quite as badly. You need those lungs to work, don’t you?’ In truth, Tellius was feeling a little cruel for making the man follow so far in his wake. It was not the crier’s fault that Lady Forza was so insistent.

  ‘Yes, Master Tellius. Lady Forza has refused to leave until you agree to listen to her.’

  ‘I have listened to her, Morbon. Many times. It achieves nothing.’

  The crier had regained his breath and stood taller, looking disapprovingly at the old man who had led him such a chase through the royal grounds. He knew it was deliberate.

  ‘Nonetheless, sir. Lady Sallet asked me to insist. She said she would prefer not to entertain Lady Forza quite so often and would you please treat her with some courtesy.’

  ‘Lady Forza is a daft old hen, Morbon.’