Fierce Gods

by Col Buchanan

  A wound that might still kill him yet, though, for all that Shard the Dreamer had worked her magic on him, for all that it barely seemed to affect him, this shaft lodged in his brain.

  Marsh thought he should be lying on his back somewhere trying his best not to die, at least until Shard or someone else worked out a way of getting it out. No doubt his bodyguard was right. A simple sneeze or a slap on the back might be enough to kill Coya now. Every time he moved too quickly he imagined he could feel the weight of the shaft slightly putting off his head’s centre of balance.

  His wound was just about all they had to show for their journey into the Windrush, in which they’d tried to gain the aid of the forest Contrarè in the war.

  Even worse, that was hardly the extent of the bad news. Still, there was no sign of the charts either. Charts to the Isles of Sky no less, returned to Khos by the survivors of a skyship expedition sent into the Great Hush and beyond. An expedition which Coya himself, and some of his peers in the Few, had secretly arranged and supplied in hope of saving the Free Ports.

  The location of the Isles of Sky, the only known source of black powder in the world. Not to mention all those strange devices of exotica, like farcrys and Rōshun seals. The Alhazii Caliphate had grown rich over the centuries through their monopoly with the Isles and its advanced technologies, and they would do anything to stop their location from being discovered. In the past they had declared crushing embargoes against nations seeking the Isles for themselves. Threats were cast even for researching lesser alternatives to the potent black powder of the Isles, like simple sulphurous gun-powders. And the Caliphate was famed for its deep-cover spies. They had eyes everywhere.

  Yet with the surprise imperial invasion of Khos, Coya and his peers in the Few had considered the risk to be finally worth taking.

  They knew the Caliphate had no interest in conquering the world like the Mannians; only in profiting themselves by supplying both the Empire and the democras in their long and bitter war of attrition. But neither was the Caliphate interested in being conquered. If their monopoly was threatened, they would negotiate. With the charts, Coya could make them choose a side at last.

  Except the charts had gone missing before he had even gotten his hands on them. The skyship had been destroyed on its return journey from the Isles, and the survivors trapped on the other side of the Shield. When they had tried to return home during the chaos of the battle for the Shield – during General Mokabi’s all-out assault against the southern walls – people had died while others went missing, the charts along with them.

  It was enough to make a person tear their hair out in frustration.

  Coya blinked at the startling passing sight of a burning building, where people worked in lines to pass buckets of sloshing water from a well, trying to save someone’s home in this city where there were no longer enough roofs to shelter everything, so overfull was it with refugees and defenders. Soot stained their desperate faces as they worked. Fear carried in the children’s shouts and the barking of the dogs.

  For all his adult years, Coya had been fighting to keep the islands of the democras – people without rulers – safe from the threat of empire. Not only because he was the descendant of the philosopher Zeziké, spiritual father of the democras. Or because he was a League Delegate and secret member of the Few. More than anything, Coya fought to protect what had become most dear to him, these people and lands of his birthplace, the Mercian Free Ports; this chain of islands that were as diverse in their cultures as they were fascinating for their rugged landscapes, all of them flourishing in a golden age of liberty and cooperation. Even here, on Khos, where the Michinè still held sway at the limits of the democras, Coya had come to the front line to lend what aid he could. For he knew that it was here where the entire fate of the democras would be decided.

  If mighty Khos fell, breadbasket of the democras, the rest of the Free Ports would surely follow.

  ‘We need those damned charts,’ Coya Zeziké growled aloud, clenching his teeth hard.

  *

  A gust stirred the many strings of windchimes strung across the street, so that they clattered overhead as it blew along the Avenue of Lies – the main thoroughfare running north to south through the city all the way to the Mount of Truth, standing over the throat of the Lansway and the Shield. Coya was glad of the wool hat now. His bandaged head and ears were warm beneath it even in the bitter gusts. He was even gladder to be riding a zel and not hobbling around with his cane and crippled body. It could be tiring moving about at the rate of an arthritic old man.

  The Avenue was thronged with carts and soldiers hurrying towards the wall, though they were making way for the phalanx of riders escorting the lone form of the Mannian envoy headed in the opposite direction – a white-robed figure riding erect on an equally white zel.

  Further south, people lined the route to watch the Mannian priest pass by. Some screamed obscenities, others threw rocks or bits of rotten food which the Khosian riders had to deflect with their shields. Yet the envoy pretended to pay them no heed, instead giving a delicate wave in welcome as though he belonged there, as though this was to be their future.

  ‘Coya Zeziké!’ a voice called out from a passing group; Volunteers from the other Free Ports of the League, excited to see the famous Delegate and descendant of the philosopher Zeziké himself in the troubled city. Coya raised a hand towards them in acknowledgement, much like the envoy up ahead in fact, and Marsh swore aloud, picking up the pace as he forced his zel through the press. As his lifelong bodyguard, trained since a boy to protect the living blood of Zeziké, Marsh’s constant nemesis was Coya’s fame.

  ‘Relax,’ Coya told him. ‘I’m here to be seen, remember? It helps with morale.’

  Marsh was checking the buildings on either side, the windows and rooftops. ‘Aye. A lot of good you’ll be with a Diplomat’s bullet through your head.’

  ‘Please,’ protested Coya, not wanting to think of such things. The man seemed in a particularly foul mood this morning. Maybe it was just lack of sleep from the Khosian heavy guns going off all night.

  Marsh slowed to draw alongside him as they trotted up to the rickshaws tailing the procession. Sombre Michinè aristocrats sat in the backs of the rickshaws pulled along by pairs of sweaty men, their faces powdered white and their attention fixed resolutely ahead. In the foremost one Coya spotted Chonas, formidable First Minister of the Khosian Council.

  ‘Ah, Delegate Coya!’ declared the First Minister as he spotted him riding alongside. ‘Come to take part in the forthcoming talks?’

  ‘Talks?’ echoed Coya. He looked ahead to the figure of the Mannian envoy, who was still waving his hand at the people’s hostility while he grinned like some much-loved celebrity, full of teeth and bravado.

  ‘The Empire has deigned to send us a Peace Envoy, here to negotiate with the Council on matters of the siege. Once we return to the chambers we will hold a session to order. You are more than welcome to attend, of course.’

  Coya straightened a little further in his posture, as he always did in moments of anger, his crooked body momentarily forgetting the constant crippling pains it had known since birth. He called out loudly as he rode alongside the trundling wheel of the rickshaw. ‘Peace Envoy, is it, while they sit an army outside the walls?’

  It was forward of him, to speak so bluntly to the First Minister of Khos without the use of proper titles. Usually Coya ignored such nonsense, especially when it was aimed at himself, but they were in Khos here, last remaining seat of the old Mercian aristocracy.

  As though to remind him of his proper place, the companion sitting by the Minister’s side cast Coya a stony stare. Chonas though had other things on his mind.

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed the old fellow. ‘One wonders whether such ironies are intended in these titles of theirs. Or do they really believe in the righteousness of their predations?’

  ‘They make themselves believe. They tell themselves stories of how they’re saving the w
orld from itself by enslaving it.’

  Chonas said nothing, reflecting on what Coya had said. Before the revolution of the democras, the Michinè of Khos had once been rulers of the island, subservient only to their king. They were hardly strangers to such grandiose self-deceptions themselves, though Coya kept his observations to himself.

  ‘Where is the Lord Protector in all of this?’ Coya asked. ‘I don’t see him anywhere.’

  ‘Still up on the wall, I believe, discussing the defences with Tanserine. I think he disapproves.’

  ‘He isn’t the only one. What have we to gain here, talking to the enemy? They will only aim to divide us and weaken our position.’

  But Chonas waved the remark aside. It wasn’t like him to show such recklessness, and it was only then that Coya saw the fear in the First Minister’s watery old eyes. He realized the man was grasping at any straw that he could. A dangerous state of mind for times like these.

  ‘It never hurts to listen, young Coya. You of all people could learn from such advice as that.’

  A grunt of agreement sounded from Marsh at his side.

  ‘Velchum,’ Chonas said to the stiff-lipped fool sitting next to him. ‘I must speak alone with our friend here for a moment.’

  ‘Sire?’

  ‘Well hop to it then.’

  The Michinè barely masked his displeasure as he stepped off onto the cobbles.

  ‘You there!’ coughed old Chonas to the bearers pulling along the small two-wheeled cart. ‘Sing us a song if you will!’

  ‘A song, sir?’

  ‘Yes! Something stirring like one of those sea shanties from the Shoals. An extra coin for your efforts.’

  Still pulling the rickshaw, one of the bearers cleared his lungs and started heaving out a song. His voice was terrible, entirely absent of tune, yet strangely the sound was hardly at odds with the general atmosphere around them, the boisterous crowds yelling at the envoy as they made their way along the Avenue.

  They were passing the Stadium of Arms now in the centre of the city, an amphitheatre of white stone columns and arches, rising high over the commercial district around it. Soldiers from its soaring walls peered down at the passing procession, looking on in silence. On the rickshaw, Chonas leaned out over the side so he could speak more quietly with Coya.

  ‘Any news for me on those charts?’ he said beneath the driver’s awful rendition of a song.

  Coya tugged his zel even closer. ‘You’ve heard then.’

  ‘Of course I’ve heard. You’ve gone and lost them, is what I heard. It’s all the network is talking about right now.’

  ‘My dear fellow, I hardly had them to begin with, only the promise of them.’

  ‘You have no idea where they might be?’

  Coya opened his mouth then shut it again, irritated by the old Michinè’s tone, as though somehow it was Coya who was responsible for their loss.

  He took a deep breath to settle himself.

  ‘The Rōshun say the charts were in the hands of a longhunter called Cole, a Khosian, when they met up with him south of the Shield. If he lives that’s likely where they still are. Unfortunately there was no sign of him after the Rōshun re-entered the city, though admittedly everything was in chaos that night. That was the night of Mokabi’s big attack and the flooding. They’re still picking up the pieces down there, but there’s no sign of the man amongst the wounded. He could be dead. The charts might be buried under three feet of mud by now.’

  Chonas glanced back over his shoulder, checking to see that his powdered companion was still trotting along behind the rickshaw.

  ‘Or he could be alive. He could have gone rogue with those charts in his possession, trying to sell them to the highest bidder.’

  ‘Maybe. There are still too many unknowns.’

  ‘Come now. Dealing in unknowns is what we do in the Few. It is our craft, is it not?’

  For a moment Coya felt his youth in the face of the Minister’s advanced years. For all that he was twenty-seven, he was still a youngster by this man’s reckoning, who himself had been a member of the secret network known as the Few for longer than Coya had even existed; an organization that subtly guarded against concentrations of power throughout the League, and which most of his Michinè peers would have violently opposed had only they ever known of it.

  But Chonas was one of those rare Michinè who supported the goals of the democras. Which was how a member of the Khosian nobility, that last diluted vestige of aristocracy remaining in all the Mercian isles, found himself working so closely with the descendant of Zeziké, the very philosopher whose ideas had led to revolution and the toppling of that old order.

  ‘Make a guess for me,’ prompted the First Minister. ‘What is your intuition here? What are our chances of getting these charts? Are they really lost?’

  Coya shook his head.

  ‘There’s nothing to be gained in believing so. I believe they’re still out there in the hands of this man Cole, for whatever reason I don’t know. But yes, they’re still in play. They have to be.’

  ‘What do you know of this longhunter then?’

  ‘The Rōshun tell me he was Khosian by his accent. And that he had the way of a military man about him. An ex-soldier.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ grunted Chonas, chewing his false teeth together hard. ‘Just who we need to be carrying the fate of Khos in their hands. A damned bloody deserter.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nico

  ‘Khos,’ spat the voice of his father as they jogged along the road, trailing threads of breath like misty scarves. Through the sheets of rain, his father peered about at the wintry landscape revealing itself in the milky light of a new day. ‘Never thought I’d see this place again.’

  He was talking to his son once more after a night of sullen running. Pretending that Nico had never said those things outside the slave market at all.

  ‘I know the feeling,’ Nico replied, peering out from the shelter of his own dripping hood as he ran, easily matching the hard loping pace his father had been setting throughout the long night, glad that the silence was behind them.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My time with the farlander, Ash. My memories are all over the place, but I remember, when things got really bad, how I longed to be back home like never before.’

  Still his father avoided asking for more details, as though afraid of what he might hear. Not that Nico could criticize him for that. He wasn’t any better. So far he’d asked little about his father’s own life during his years abroad. He had barely even asked about Cole’s voyage with the farlander to the Isles of Sky, where they’d hoped to bring Nico back from the dead; indeed where they had achieved just that. Too strange even to think about. Too unsettling by far.

  Home, Nico repeated in his mind as though to sample its flavour.

  Somehow it felt different to him now, the Khos he had known, the Khos he had left not so long ago on the heels of a Rōshun farlander, promised to be his apprentice. Perhaps it was due to this new body that he wore, identical to his old one save that it was a copy, a replica. He was truly seeing it all through new eyes. Though more likely it was the many burnt-out cottages along the road, and the occasional corpses lying on the ground, frozen in various contortions, strangely elevated as the rain washed away the surface of snow around them. Ordinary people caught in the jaws of the Empire’s ambitions. Whole families slaughtered.

  Such passing sights struck him hard enough at the time, though much harder than he knew. Later, in the dark of nights, Nico would see the corpses again in his mind, though more freshly this time, more sharply than when he’d seen them for real – he would glimpse the children amongst them, and the babes, and a morbid melancholy would take hold of him that would fade upon waking, given long enough, but which would never entirely leave him for the rest of his life.

  For now though, emulating the hardened manner of his father, Nico bore what he saw without comment, while he was filled increasingly with a sense of death
hanging like a dread promise across his homeland; this Mannian creed of anti-life writ in corpses strewn across the snow.

  He knew the same would be in store for the people of Bar-Khos, if the city was taken. The Mannians would rape and butcher in their thousands and enslave the rest of the population; they would revel in their callousness towards those they considered lesser than themselves – the conquered, the defeated, the weak. After all, Nico had travelled to the distant imperial capital. He had seen for himself their naked cruelty, when they had burned him alive on a stake in the arena for all to watch, the very same arena that hosted the slaying of the poor and disabled for sport.

  These scum had already conquered most of the known world. They had spread their fanatical dogma of exploitation for profit, of dog-eat-dog, of the divine flesh, around the Heart of the World, and now here they had come to Khos and the democras, to stamp out the last remaining resistance to their power.

  If they were not stopped here, they never would be.

  Onwards Nico ran through the rain and the early morning light, trying to shake the dark mood from his mind.

  Last night they had raced along a road thronged with carts and travellers, rushing to reach the river crossing at Juno’s Ferry, hoping to catch up with Nico’s mother on her journey south to the slave pens of the front. By then, Juno’s Ferry had fallen to the Imperials. Those Khosian soldiers unfortunate enough not to have escaped in time had met a fate worse than death, for they had been nailed to every tree in sight. Their croaks for pity assaulted Nico and his father from all sides as they stepped off the barge amongst a crowd of camp followers, having crossed the sacred, steaming waters of the Chilos.