THE IRON SHIP
First published 2015 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-84997-911-5
Copyright © 2015 K. M. McKinley
Cover art by Alejandro Colucci
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
PROLOGUE
The Darkling Triumphant
BETWEEN THE LANDS of the Hundred Kingdoms and the senescent empire of Ocerzerkiya lay the Red Expanse. A desert of convoluted stone and fine, shifting sand, it had proved insurmountable in all the long ages of men upon the world. Out on the brilliant sea, generations of sailors passed by on floatstone ships, but though they passed within bowshot of the cliffs, the interior remained a mystery to them. A place of death. The Skull Coast, the sailors called it.
To their wisdom they turned their backs, for the land’s face deceived. On the clifftops plants grew in great abundance, flower fields telling lies of water, of which there was none, for the plants teased moisture from the sea mists with thorny fingers. There was not the meanest stream for a hundred leagues. The rare fruits of the bushes were poisonous. Rangy beasts hunted this maquis, and stranger things still clambered ashore with the fogs to gorge upon them. Besides, any fool could see from the landward edge—for only fools approached it—that the thickets gave out quickly. Within a mile of the cliff edge the verdant strip stopped. Beyond it sand grains whispered over each other with no root nor branch to constrain them for hundreds of miles.
On the ocean side a sea chasm fronted the Red Expanse, so deep that only the drying of the seas would reveal the cliffs’ feet, whose red stone stretched from northern horizon to southern without break. Not a cove or a strand dented them. There was nowhere to land should any captain have been foolhardy enough to wish to do so. None were; the Red Expanse was a deadly land of harsh beauty and manifold dangers.
But it had not always been so.
Wind caressed worn stones that lay in lines of unnatural straightness, if only there were human eyes present to see. Sand ran into depressions that would have revealed themselves as stone lined channels if only they had been asked. Tussocks of razored grass grew upon tumbled masonry. The gridded remains of rooms hid beneath the thorns. Surfaces of roads, wider and finer than any in the Hundred, lay concealed beneath shrouds of gravel.
And there were other, stranger things. Obelisks of volcanic glass. Machine skeletons of rustless metal large enough to rival the Brodning Colossi. Riven temples of cyclopean scale and peculiar geometries tucked forgotten into dry canyons. Nothing there was whole. All was broken in times so incomprehensibly distant they had passed from myth.
In the gymnasia of Perus, philosophs, sophists, magi and magisters crawled toward an understanding of the history of the world, and yet they were in ignorance of this trove of relics upon the Hundred’s northern border. There were a few bold visionaries, eccentric figures, that maintained that the Red Expanse was not as it appeared. But they were ridiculed, and those who ventured there to prove their case never returned. The greedy eyes of archaeologists remained intent on different soil.
So it was that the existence of the Iron Fane remained secret, along with all the other secrets jealously hoarded by the sand.
A LONE FIGURE, robed head to foot in heavy red cloth, trekked through ungentle fields. Her face was shrouded against biting flies. Her feet and legs were wrapped tightly. Even so, her robes and wrappings were cut through to the skin by thorn and grass. The heat was punishing, she was burdened; her robes were wet with her sweat. In her left hand she carried a tall staff of black wood that she did not require to walk. Under her right arm was a large book, onerously heavy, bound in cloth matching that of her costume. She had carried it a long way. The sun was at her back, merciless already this early in the morning. To her left a field of flowers bobbed in a hot wind, white petals blinking over yellow hearts. They climbed a slope that ended abruptly in cobalt blue sky. There was no slope on the far side. A sheer drop a thousand feet straight to the sea waited there. She could not hear the waves.
To the right of her path the flowers persisted for a dozen yards, giving way to a scant margin of wiry grass two yards wide. Past that, the sands of the interior took hold. The slope of the hill high over the path saw a rallying of vegetation, a band where the fogs curled back on themselves and reared defiantly, before they were defeated once and for all by the desert. On the other side the Red Expanse took on the aspect most assumed of it; trackless, sandy, gnarled with brooding crags. A red desert on one hand, a blue one on the other, a thin ribbon of green to divide them. At the centre of the ribbon, a path. At the end of the path, the Iron Fane.
She was the fane’s lone pilgrim, and its only priestess. Adamanka Shrane was her name.
Close to her journey’s end, Shrane walked quickly. Her legs bled from dozens of shallow cuts. Sand chafed the delicate spaces between her toes. There were blisters on her heels. She put her hurts from her mind and hurried. She was nearly there.
The path curved around a rock face worn into strange contortions by the wind. Her heart leapt at this familiar landmark. Past the crag the path sloped down toward a low bluff. From her vantage she could see in the stone the entrance to the fane, visible as a rectangle of absolute blackness. A natural cave, squared by inhuman hands at the dawn of time, or so the book told her. Shrane had faith, and believed everything that was written in the book.
She walked faster, barely restraining herself from breaking into a run. There was no one to see, but there is a proper form to all things and that included her approach. Her heart quickened. The cave offered more than comfort and renewal, although she would find both within. It was a home from which she was exiled.
Steps with perfect square edges led to the door. Coolness enveloped her as she passed under its lintel. She stopped a moment to enjoy the absence of the sun.
She went inside.
A deep and placid pool filled a third of the cave. Tangled bones crowded the pool’s brim and shone dully on its bed, for the water was death to anything but the faithful, and that meant in these sad times Shrane and Shrane alone. More animal bones, these neatly stacked in piles, stretched back into the gloom. A path led through these bone piles to a second doorway closed by a slab of black metal. That Shrane would open soon, and enter. But not yet.
Stepping toward the pool, her reflection came tentatively to greet her. Glimmer lights twinkled in the water, filling her hair with stars. She stared at herself a long while, at the wrinkles and the grey twists in her hair. How old she had become.
She unwrapped herself without haste. Thirst tortured her, but she must maintain her dignity. Her leg wrappings came away first, then her head scarf. She shucked off her outer robe. Each piece’s removal had an accompanying prayer. This was duly voiced as she removed her vest and underwear, revealing coppery skin that, away from her lined face and hands, was still smooth. The robes had not saved her entirely from the sun, and she was patched with sunburn at the throat, face, hands and feet. She glanced over her shoulder at an echo deeper in the cave. There was something inhuman in the balance of her features. Her skin had an uncommon sheen to it. Her eyes glinted too brightly. A briefly impressed unease to those who saw her. When they looked again, she was a woman in her middle years, tired and travelworn. No less and no mor
e.
She shut her eyes, held her arms out wide, palms forward. Speaking prayers she had learned as a child, she stepped into the water. Circular ripples painted themselves in light on the ceiling as her body broke the surface.
A little gasp escaped her. The cold soothed her injured feet, killed the burn in her skin. The sensation brought a smile to her lips, but she did not cease her prayer. She continued down the steps until the water reached her chin, then ducked her head under it. The still surface of the pool slid closed over her head, and she was gone among the bones.
Seconds passed. She burst back through the surface. Her eyes snapped open in an unlined face. She opened her mouth wide and shouted, showing white, young teeth. She ran her hands over her hair newly dark, cupped firm breasts and shivered. She licked at the water running from her face, salty with her sweat. She took a deep breath, ducked and emerged again, then sucked at the water’s surface directly. The cracks in her lips closed. The blisters on her feet shrank. The last wrinkles smoothed themselves from her skin.
The first ritual done, she laughed with pleasure and bathed leisurely in the pool.
When Shrane stepped out she was refreshed and cleansed and renewed. The scratches on her legs had closed. Her other wounds had likewise disappeared. All signs of hurt and exhaustion had departed her, for she had grown young. She gazed a long time at herself in pleasure. Moving more easily now, she chose a rib bone from the skeleton of a hyena on the edge of the pool and took it to the cairn nearest the water, her cairn. Carefully selecting a spot, she slid the rib home. In this way she honoured the creatures whose lives had been stolen so that she might restore hers. There were over one hundred bones in her cairn. She remembered placing every one. A few more visits to the pool and it would be as large and dense as those of her mothers’, centuries dead. This troubled her. The pool’s effects did not work forever, and every journey brought the possibility it would be her last.
Shrane washed her clothes, took them outside and left them to dry on rocks away from the cave mouth. The heat on her skin made her shudder, but her delight was born of higher emotion, the joy all religious feel upon experiencing the divine.
She returned to the cave still unclad. There she took up her staff and book, wrapped tightly in its cloth. She waited a moment for her eyes to readjust to the darkness before approaching the black door.
There was a small cavity in the stone in front of the door. Into this she slid the ferrule at the base of her staff. The near-silent click of it going home echoed through the cave. She twisted it in her hand and muttered certain ancient words no one understood. The plain wood warmed in her hand. Patterns of firelight turned around it. Firefly motes spun in the air.
The water of the pool rippled. The door drew back into the wall, a squealing groan of metal boomed through the cave. The air beyond was colder than that of the outer cave and smelled so strongly of iron it tasted of blood. Shrane’s breath plumed, and she went forward unhesitatingly.
Stairs wound down into a grotto. The walls were rippled by rock formations laid down in wetter days, and beyond the carved steps the cave had been left as nature made it.
The glow of Shrane’s staff sent the rock forms into flickering life. Once this had unnerved her. No longer.
She rounded the final curve in the stair, and the light of her staff fell upon an artefact alien to the stone; a statue, ten feet tall and massive across the shoulders. Anthropoid in shape, it depicted no man. The arms were too long, the legs too widely set, the head blocky and disproportionate. What features it once possessed were mysterious, scabbed over with flakes of rust, but there was a suggestion of a jutting jaw and brow. Orange oxides streaked the floor on which it stood. Four-fingered hands were clenched in fists. It stood in a half crouch, as if it had attempted to rise at great cost in effort only to fail, the head bowed in final defeat. She did not know how old the statue was. The contents of the book she carried were thirty centuries old, the statue and rituals it described were older. The book gave no date for the statue’s creation.
Shrane slotted her staff into a hole in the floor. By the patterned light of its magic, she put the book before the statue, knelt, and bowed her head like the statue’s. In this posture of obeisance, she unwrapped the book.
The original book was written in the waning days of Old Maceriya. Her predecessor, her mother, told her what she had was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Pages of fine vellum bound in soft leather, each illuminated with designs that disturbed the eye, and dense with esoteric diagrams.
One day, she would choose her successor. Only she was permitted to read it until then. Some of the oldest passages told that the Iron Priestess had once been one of many, and that men had come here also. There was no portentous myth written in the book that told her, but there were many odd things gathered together between its covers. She had gleaned this impression from the prescriptions for rituals no longer observed, and from dry financial records of gifts to a church no one remembered. Whatever the truth of it, her creed had always been a secretive one. For generations there had only been a handful of adherents, then a few, then one. Adamanka Shrane was the last.
She whispered words awkward as pebbles in her mouth. She ran her fingertips over the seventy-four relevant pages in the book. Once done, she drew a small flint knife from the book’s spine and cut her left forefinger tip with it. A perfect bead of dark blood welled there. Glints of yellow sparkled in it. Not all of it was light reflected from her staff.
“I am the iron wife. I await your return,” she said as she stood, careful to keep her finger elevated in front of her. “As my mothers waited, so I wait. In my blood flows your blood. Blood calls to blood. I wait.” She smeared blood on the statue as high as she could reach, below the sternum. “Lords of ancient ages, usurped masters, titans betrayed by gods, I honour you. I await you.” A stain barely perceptible lingered a moment on the corroded surface. Was it gone into the metal, or did her eyes trick her and did the powdery oxide coating the statue simply suck the wetness from it? She had never decided. She brought her forefinger to her mouth, and licked off the mixture of blood and rust that stained it.
She concluded her rites and genuflected to the statue. She had performed the ritual one hundred times before, and its actions came to her automatically. She came here trembling with excitement, her eagerness building with every step she took north toward the Red Expanse, but once the ritual was begun her ardour dimmed. Long living in hope, she no longer believed it was her who would receive the sign. For years she had watched the statue for hours after the rite. Latterly she had concluded her task without conscious thought and gone from the fane quickly.
She flipped through the book to the pages toward the end. Hundreds of tally boxes filled the last third of the book, fifty to a page, each stamped with a bloody fingerprint. Ten pages from the end she found the next empty box and pressed her finger down hard onto it, leaving a smeared oval of blood. She blew upon it until it had dried, and shut the book. The hollows of the statue’s eyes glowered down at her in silence. The sense of divine immanence that energised her upon her journey inevitably gave way to disappointment. Her god did not show himself. He never did.
She felt the cold of the cave now. The staff’s light faded. She wondered how long this could go on. One of her successors would die unexpectedly, or give up. It was a certainty. A matter of time.
Eager to depart before her staff-glow went out, she hurried for the steps. The last light was dimming to an ember glow when a scrape troubled the cave. Metal upon metal, sly in the thickening dark.
Shrane spun on her heel. Her eyes narrowed as she peered into the rapidly dimming cave. She saw better than most in the dark, but the night under the earth cannot be pierced by mortal eyes no matter how keen. A slam of her staff on the floor made it flare brightly once more. To do so caused knots in her stomach and the grip of age to tighten on the bones within her youthful-seeming skin. Such power as hers was limited, and dearly paid for.
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br /> Her heart pounded. Her neck throbbed with the strength of her pulse. Her throat thickened. “Has the one arrived whom I await?” The ritual question; one she thought she would never ask.
The statue remained still. The flickering glow of her staff picked out hard lines and previously unseen details. She saw shapes in it she had not seen before. Did its form appear sharper? It had not moved.
Her long years of vigilance had not prepared her for this. Fear tainted her exultation.
“Have you come? Have you finally come?” she asked, abandoning the cant as she approached.
She looked up into its great and formless face. “Am I no longer alone?” she whispered. She held her breath. Nothing. Her shoulders slumped. She took a step backwards. Something crunched under her heel. She lifted her foot. A flake of rust as big as her hand lay in three pieces, broken by her tread. A sick feeling of sacrilege welled up in her. This could only have come from the statue. It had fallen, that was what caused the noise. Her disappointment redoubled.
A tremendous grinding hit her. She staggered back, ears ringing. A wash of heat boiled off the statue. Rust flakes exploded off it as it moved, singeing her skin. She screamed. The statue juddered into life, standing tall over her as it attained its full height. Coals burned deep in hollow sockets. The statue lifted its fist before its face, arms shaking with effort, shedding rust. The hand burst open, a violent flower, more rust pattering from it. The metal beneath gleamed. It stared at its fingers and worked them wonderingly, a creature given fingers which had never before had them, but somehow remembered their possession.
“You have come!” Shrane cried, and dropped to her knees.
The statue’s head swivelled, predator-swift. To a screeching of metal it stepped forward off its plinth.
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