Fierce Gods

by Col Buchanan

  Still the blue moon kept falling through the sky to the west. It was the first time Nico had thought of the old Rōshun in days, since sensing the farlander’s death in the breaths of the wind and the intuitions of his heart.

  He grimaced, not liking the memory. Not liking the thought that Ash might have been right. That insanity could be infectious, passed on from one to another until whole nations could become insane.

  Yet what was that at the front of the noisy yard, if not a validation of Ash’s words – that block of wood perched alone in the rain, with a woman, a young woman, shivering, naked and chained, standing atop it?

  Looking at her again, Nico fought an urge to rush over and cover her with his sodden coat, and to help her away from this cruel place with what dignity remained to her. But instead he stayed rooted to the ground, still ruled by his reason. Just another dripping figure amongst many.

  Smoke and steam hung in the air, trapped by the sheets of canvas stretched taut above the heads of the gathered people. Many smoked from wooden sookahs wrapped around their forearms, taking the occasional puff from stems at their wrists; an affectation common in imperial Q’os, he recalled, one borrowed from the Alhazii. Others took snorts of firesnuff or drank strong spirits. They seemed warm enough with the press of so many bodies. Yet the front of the yard, where the wooden block stood alone, had been left open to the elements, as though these dealers and buyers in slaves liked it that way, having these captives exposed beyond even their sudden, shameful nakedness, standing there in the rain.

  It was another way of breaking them, he supposed. Another way of stripping the captives of their remaining spirit, of rendering them something lesser than human.

  Destroy a soul, rang the old Alhazii saying in his mind, and you destroy a whole cosmos forever.

  If this wasn’t insanity then he didn’t know what was. In the charged atmosphere beneath the dripping canvas they were bidding on the woman with the same calm methodology as a cattle auction, clusters of people sniffing and clearing their throats in the damp air, faces clammy from excitement. Amongst them stood the craziest of all, a few white-robed priests of Mann. Wherever they moved the crowd parted in fear before them, their shaven heads gleaming with oil and their faces covered in silver piercings, surveying all with a cool appraisal, masters of their world.

  Nico exhaled the fear from his muscles with a long and steamy breath. He was glad to be off to the side here, out of the stifling press where faces had loomed like impersonations of the living. Dabbing at his forehead with a dry hand, the young man took in the little silver-haired sea monkey where it was chained to a drum, beating out with webbed hands a fast and skipping heartbeat to the shivers and quakes of the naked woman on the block.

  White smoke was drifting over the creature and into the rest of the space, cast from a row of incense burners and the beating fan of a young boy. Its stench cloyed at the back of Nico’s throat, made him feel light-headed and reckless within his tingling skin. Something narcotic that loosened the senses. If the bidding was anything to go by, the smoke was having a similar effect on everyone else, their voices pattering faster and faster as the buyers worked themselves into a fervour.

  Up there on the block, the Khosian woman sputtered in the freezing downpour and tried to wipe her face clear of rain, huddling and shivering in her irons before their hardened stares. She could be no older than he was, eighteen or so years of age, and the sight of her exposed body pulled strings within his own. But then he saw the misery in her face again, and all such desires fled him.

  She’s brave, Nico thought, seeing how she held back her tears.

  They didn’t seem to see her standing there though. Not a daughter. Not a sister. Not the river of life running through her. Only something to be purchased and subdued. Once again Nico fought an impulse to save her.

  Where are you? he needed to know, casting about for his mother or his father. Disgusted with it all he looked away again, over the bubbling surface of the lake, where sure enough he struck upon something beautiful, just as Ash had said so: twin moons riding now across the morning sky, flanked by breaks in the clouds.

  He blinked his tired eyes, spotting something else in the sky now, a flicker of fire coming closer. A pair of skyships, locked in a dogfight, cannons growling and spitting flames, sweeping out above the lake. Nico watched as an explosion rocked the hull of the nearest vessel, lighting the underside of its great canopy of gas. He spotted a Khosian flag flying as the skyship turned away sharply, and sped with its thrusters blazing towards the south, trailing smoke and fire. Headed back towards Bar-Khos on the coast, he thought, the last line in the sand, where even now the majority of the Imperial Expeditionary Force was approaching the city walls.

  No one seemed to be paying the air battle any mind. It was a world within a world here, this gloomy space beneath the canvas, lit here and there by a flaring lantern.

  Faster still came the beats of the drum while the bidding intensified. The boy with the fan was yanking on the sea monkey’s chain to make it drum faster, and waving the fan faster too to waft more of the narcotic incense into their midst. The smoke was starting to get to him.

  Someone jeered in the crowd, shouting something at the naked woman. One of the slavers was slapping her flank with a cane to get her to turn around.

  ‘Hey!’ Nico shouted with his blood boiling over at last, though his voice was lost in the noisy bray of the crowd. ‘Hey!’ he yelled again, but then a hand grasped his coat fiercely from behind and yanked him backwards, kept on tugging him all the way to the rear of the crowd then clear of them entirely, until he was out from beneath the shelter of the awnings, and getting wetter.

  ‘What are you playing at, you want to get us caught here?’

  Cole’s heavily scarred features scowled at him from beneath his wide-brimmed hat.

  ‘Did you find anything?’ Nico hissed back at his father, his voice near drowned by the downpour.

  Cole nodded, wiping the scowl from his face. Behind him a tarpaulin flapped in the background, revealing the buildings of Tume through the sheets of rain, the Khosian city floating on its island of lakeweed.

  ‘They had a red-headed woman here yesterday,’ answered Cole. ‘Sounds like she was a handful too.’

  ‘Where is she then?’ he shouted back, before casting about for a sign of his mother, looking again for a sight of her red hair in the far cages. Again his father grabbed a bundle of his coat in his fist.

  ‘She’s already been sold,’ he growled with pain in his eyes, though his words sounded strangely flat as he spoke, as though detachment was the only way he could utter them. ‘She was bought by a pimp yesterday, and taken south with a dozen others as pleasure slaves for the front.’

  For a moment Nico shut his eyes and focused on his breathing, just like Ash had once taught him. It was all he had just then to master his sudden, impotent rage.

  ‘They’re taking her to Bar-Khos?’ sounded his strangled voice in his ears.

  ‘Right back where we started. Your mother’s taking us on a big circle. We need to leave now.’

  In a way he should hardly be surprised. This whole awful nightmare ride through the occupied Reach had been a wild fling of the dice from the beginning, borne on a desperate hopelessness that neither of them had yet to admit.

  In their haste they had run both their zels into the ground. And now they would have to hurry south again, back towards the front lines of the war, in the hope of saving her before she reached the imperial forces besieging the city.

  ‘This is your fault,’ Nico spat, rounding on his father, unable to hold it back any longer, and he felt himself stepping over a line that could not be recrossed.

  ‘My fault? How is this my fault?’

  A curious sensation, standing off to his father like that, chest to chest, shaking with anger. Cole’s own cheeks flared red but Nico only glared back at him, past caring, wanting it this way.

  ‘Yes, your fault for running out on us. Your f
ault for making us fend for ourselves in the midst of a war. That’s why we’re both standing here now, isn’t it, because you’re a coward who ran away?’

  His words struck a ringing silence.

  Somehow he expected his father to lose his temper, even to strike him, like he had that one time before, years ago, on the night before Cole had left. Indeed he hoped for it, so that this time he could have the satisfaction of striking him back. But it seemed that Nico hardly knew this scarred man any more. For his father only turned and walked away through the pouring rain, head down.

  ‘Sure, walk away,’ Nico yelled after his back, wanting to drive the knife home. ‘You know it’s true. If she dies it’s on you, all of it’s on you!’

  And then he clamped his mouth shut, realizing he couldn’t take back the words.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  High Priest

  It was growing light on the Mount of Truth, a new day rising. Far below Kira dul Dubois, the streets of Bar-Khos were already filling with activity and muted noise: street markets going up, refugees rising from their alleyway shanties, couriers galloping past jams of carts, soldiers marching for the northern wall. The first puffs of smoke rose from the city’s many chimneys. Bells rang out and dogs barked at low-flying skyships patrolling overhead.

  Such a strange and thrilling feeling to be standing there just then, the Mannian High Priest thought to herself with a sly satisfaction.

  To be here on this hill on the southernmost limits of the enemy city, surrounded by a population who would tear her limb from limb if they discovered who she was; even as the Imperial Expeditionary Force amassed before their northern wall in the newest chapter of the siege.

  What a thrill, Kira thought, to be so close to the Bar-Khosian Ministry of War too – that brick building standing on the hill’s broad crown above her. Headquarters of the Lord Protector himself, General Creed, and the Bar-Khosian defences.

  Kira barely noticed the stiff sea breeze tugging at her cloak and hat, causing the trees of the hill’s parkland to thrash their branches like angry sticks. Despite the weakness of her ancient body, the disguised priest stood impervious to the gusts and the frigid air. It was nothing like the winter they were going through back home in the imperial capital of Q’os, where ice and snow had locked the great metropolis in their grip for months. Nothing, too, for a Mannian priest hardened by years of regular Purgings.

  She had heard of the Mount of Truth from her people’s ten-year-long siege against the Shield – a hill that stood on the southern edge of the city, affording a view over the mighty southern walls that rose one in front of the other, boxed in on either side by smaller seawalls. From here, in the thin light of early morning, Kira could see how the surviving walls of the Shield stretched across the Lansway, that narrow bridge of land connecting the island of Khos with the southern continent – one of the few remaining frontiers of the Empire.

  Just beyond the ruins of the furthest walls, just beyond a flood of dull seawater that covered a good portion of the Lansway, lights glimmered from what remained of the besieging imperial forces here in the south. Forces hunkered down around the rubble after ten long years of siege had ended in calamity.

  By all accounts it was a mess down there. Even now they were fishing bodies out of the flood waters.

  A reported two hundred thousand mercenaries had gathered on the isthmus as winter had closed in, drawn by General Mokabi’s call of riches and plunder if only they would storm the walls of the Shield once and for all. But once again the Khosians had shown themselves to be as wily as they were stubborn in the defence of their homeland. Just as they had lost their foremost wall to Mokabi’s unstoppable forces, they had sprung a trap against his insanely huge army, flooding a section of the Lansway with seawater right in the middle of the assault. Tens of thousands of mercenaries had drowned as the sea had rushed in at them.

  A hundred thousand, some were even claiming.

  And General Mokabi himself, ex-Archgeneral of Mann, had fallen too, his corpse found mangled and broken by the side of a road. Murdered like a common soldier in the night; Mokabi, hero of the Empire, conqueror of the southern continent and architect of this latest invasion of the island.

  Rōshun had been responsible, her people were reporting. The very same order of assassins who had waged vendetta against her grandson, Kirkus, next in line for the throne, until they’d killed him. The same order of assassins supposedly wiped out by an imperial commando raid that she herself had initiated in retaliation.

  Yet here they were again, these assassins, these Rōshun, wreaking their revenge by joining the Khosians against the Empire. No doubt they were behind the nightly assassinations of officers that had been happening in the forces to the south, and would no doubt start occurring within the imperial forces now gathering across the northern plain.

  Kira found herself glancing about with a sudden paranoia, as though silent killers might be closing in on her position. But it was only her heightened nerves at play, she knew, the jumpiness of an infiltrator lurking in disguise amongst an enemy people. For all her bravado, Kira had been this way since first arriving in the city over a week ago, brought here under the cover of darkness on a small skyboat to the sanctuary of their rented cliff-top mansion.

  Her stomach would curdle at the thought of being captured by the enemy. Yet in a different way she would relish these fears, welcoming the fact that they drew her from her depression, made her feel alive once again. So alive in fact that she had insisted on coming out on this dawn walk to the Mount of Truth, even though it had involved a ride in a covered cart across the city.

  Only her trusty Diplomat and bodyguard, Quito, had accompanied the High Priest up the sloping paths of the hill. Quito lurked nearby against a tree trunk, his head turned in the opposite direction. The bald-headed man was gazing northwards towards the smaller, singular northern wall of the city; no doubt taking in the plain beyond filled with the hazy smoke of imperial camp fires, where a dark smudge was the thousands of infantry marching in from the north-east.

  Noisy cannon fire was being exchanged between the two sides this morning. The Expeditionary Force had managed to dig in some heavy guns, and were finally returning fire on the city. Knocking on the front door, as it were.

  From the vantage of the Khosians, the situation must look dire indeed. Their northern wall was nothing like the giants down in the Shield. If a single one of its gates was to fall, the imperial forces had a chance of storming the city.

  Yet Kira knew the situation was not so straightforward as that.

  The success of this invasion had always been reliant upon Mokabi attacking hard from the south at the same time, putting the city’s defenders under enough pressure that the Imperial Expeditionary Force to the north could break through the single wall there, and take the city from behind. But Mokabi had been late to launch his attacks on the Shield, and with the Lansway now flooded and the general dead, the southern campaign was stalled.

  Now the Imperial Expeditionary Force was alone in this endeavour, and without hope of further reinforcements while the sea route from the island was blockaded. Its supply lines back to the Empire were stretched to near breaking, since everything had to be brought in by air. They were largely scavenging what food they could from the Khosian countryside.

  Even worse, the imperial force itself was commanded by two generals who openly loathed each other, and had only recently been locked in a petty civil war for control: Archgeneral Sparus, the Little Eagle, and the younger General Romano, the new prime contender for the Empire’s throne.

  Really, it was all hanging on a knife edge. Yet still the imperial army was expected to take this fortress city of Bar-Khos by itself – with a little help from Kira on the inside – before the crippling elements of winter ate them alive.

  These damned Khosians were a frustrating breed, and surprising too in their temerity. Up on the interior of the island, on the plateau of the Reach, their phalanxes had attacked at night, cutting t
hrough the vastly larger Imperial Expeditionary Force like wolves attacking a startled herd. And they had almost broken that herd, after its leader, Sasheen, the Holy Matriarch of Mann – Kira’s very own daughter – had been slain.

  Slain by one of her own, in fact. By a Diplomat, an imperial assassin, charged by Kira to do the unthinkable, to kill her own daughter in the event that the Holy Matriarch should try to flee from battle – something no war leader of the Empire could ever be allowed to do. Something Kira had never believed her daughter would do.

  Sasheen.

  Her pride. Her flawed jewel.

  Kira felt a chill of emotion washing through her, a bleak dread like no other. Suddenly the thrill of her situation was gone, and in its place was nothing but the awful vacuum of loss.

  She had never known such loneliness as struck her now, two thousand laqs from home, her closest family gone.

  Where are you, Sosay? she thought, calling out to her old friend and accomplice. Sosay had been her one and only true friend in life, tighter than a sister since childhood, when they had run wild together through the streets of Q’os.

  But Kira had killed Sosay too, years after the Mannian coup when they had risen high within the ranks of the order. She’d murdered her with a knife to the heart one night for her lack of devotion to the faith, and for Kira’s own bitter jealousies.

  Is there anything left of you watching over me? Spitting at me for what I did? Well, look at me now!

  In a roar the breeze gusted even harder, making the living world seem larger all around her.

  I’m lonely, Sosay.

  So stupidly, wretchedly lonely.

  Kira shuddered, ashamed at such wistful thinking. As a true devotee of Mann, the High Priest knew that there was nothing beyond the moment of death. Her old friend Sosay was bones and dust and memories in her head.

  Such loneliness though! That was real enough, and she could feel it unravelling her inner composure, bringing a smattering of tears to her eyes.