by Col Buchanan
*
‘Nico,’ someone gasped in his face, close enough that their breath caused his eyelashes to flutter apart.
It was his father, Cole, crouching over him in the hazy light of dawn.
Nico groaned. His whole head felt swollen. His eyes were puffed into squints. He lay next to the collapsed and blackened ruins of the chee house; a mound of rubble still smouldering with small fires. Wounded people were scattered all around him.
‘I’m all right,’ he managed to gasp, taking in the brightening sky that hung above his father’s concerned expression.
‘Can you move?’ asked another voice, and Nico blinked in surprise as he saw Aléas squatting by his side.
The young Rōshun’s face was badly bruised, and his clothes hung in tatters from his lean frame. Yet he was alive!
‘I don’t know.’ Nico shifted on the cloak he lay upon. He was stiff and sore all over, covered in cuts and abrasions, but he didn’t think that anything was broken. Burns covered his arms, and he hissed when he moved them. ‘It hurts. Give me a moment.’
Across from him, the ragged form of Sky In His Eyes was sitting on a slope of rubble chewing at a strip of jerky, his skin blackened with soot, his head tilted back to the sunlight as though he bathed in it.
Gulls were circling up there, crying out to each other with their raucous calls.
‘Why is it so quiet?’ Nico asked. ‘I can’t hear any fighting.’
‘Come and see,’ answered his father with gleaming eyes, and offered him a hand.
*
In a world of ruins they staggered through the light of a new day. Four faces whitened by dust and ash, their bloodshot eyes blinking at each other with the dull incomprehension that they were somehow still alive.
Around them the dead lay everywhere they looked. A carpet of corpses covered the street and what remained of the barricade, defenders and Imperials alike lying frozen, grotesquely, in every possible position. Nico covered his nose and mouth, almost gagging from the stench.
A roar of silence raged in his ears, the pounding sounds of the battle gone now. Even the gusting Arcwinds had faded so that the day was eerily still.
‘The Mannians started sounding the retreat about an hour ago,’ said his father, limping along as he used his rifle as a crutch. ‘They pulled back just as the barricades were falling all along the line, then called for a ceasefire. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.’
‘What do you think it means?’
‘The charts to the Isles,’ suggested Cole. ‘Maybe the plan worked after all.’
Nico shook his head, dumbfounded.
He really didn’t know what to say. He was too numb inside for thoughts or feelings.
Stopping in the middle of the street, Nico gazed towards the barricade and the high tide of imperial infantry lying across its crest, remembering the action of the long night he had just survived. The shells raining down with their terrifying randomness, blowing craters out of the street. Citizens fighting desperately with anything that came to hand. Nico attacking the young General Romano himself and hacking off his leg. The Widowmakers storming the chee house before it was blown to pieces.
Madness, he thought, shaking his head.
How did any of us survive?
‘I thought you were all dead back there.’
‘So did we,’ said Aléas.
‘Maybe we are dead,’ said Sky In His Eyes, staring dazed towards the sun.
When Nico clambered up the barricade to the top, he looked out at the empty squares and streets beyond, blackened and ruined. A few fires were still burning, but the Mannians were gone.
He trod back down to join the others, shaking his head.
‘Son!’ cried out a voice, and Nico looked up to see his mother hurrying along the street towards him.
Her embrace nearly knocked him from his feet. Reese shook in his arms as she sobbed with relief, and the heat of her emotions was enough to overwhelm Nico’s numbness so that finally he felt something; suddenly felt everything.
For a spell they simply stood there holding on tightly, their tears spilling down each other’s necks. And then she noticed Cole standing close by, and she drew him into their embrace too, mother, father and son.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Coya
Was it really over, Coya wondered?
Or was he dreaming, perhaps, still lying in his bed imagining that they had won the war, imagining that the Mannians were withdrawing from the city under threat of an Alhazii embargo?
He was shaking with exhaustion, though his body rang with elation too.
‘So what happens now?’ asked the woman by his side, the blackskinned Visitor from the sky who called herself Ocean.
She towered above him, where they stood on the parapet of the seawall not far from the inkworks, watching the columns of smoke still rising across Bar-Khos into the clear blue sky. Khosian horns of mourning were calling out from the Stadium of Arms, which had been retaken this morning by General Tanserine and his forces while the Imperials retreated through the northern gates, leaving behind them a city burned and blackened, and untold thousands dead.
‘Now?’ he said. ‘Now the Mannians have five days to free all of their captives and vacate the island, or Zanzahar will cut off their black powder.’
‘They’ve agreed to just pack up and leave?’
The woman’s accent was lyrical, her voice husky.
‘Yes, such is their bind. We’re even shipping some of their forces to the southern continent. At least that way we can make sure they’re not taking any loot or slaves with them.’
Sure enough, from the parapet of the seawall, they could see the many Mercian ships out there in the Lesser Bay of Squalls, already picking up the first imperial forces from the beaches near the delta of the Chilos, to ferry them south across the bay.
Coya stared with red-raw eyes. He was shattered after all they had just been through, yet his head was still racing too fast for sleep. For long hours he’d been sitting next to a farcry negotiating with the Caliphate in Zanzahar, hammering them down until they agreed, at least, to enforce this ceasefire and imperial withdrawal; all in return for keeping the charts to the Isles a secret.
How much further support could be wrangled from the Caliphate was a matter of conjecture. But for now, it didn’t matter.
The Free Ports had won!
Coya took a deep breath and steadied himself against a crenellation, his other hand trembling on the grip of his cane.
‘You okay?’ asked Ocean.
‘Kush, I feel like weeping. Weeping from the sheer release of it all. What a time it has been. So many good people gone. Yet we did it. We actually did it.’
The Visitor was studying him closely, as though he was the most interesting thing to see here – not the smoking cityscape, not the ships in the bay, but Coya, bent over his cane ready to drop.
‘You look just like him, you know.’
‘Who?’
‘Zeziké, your famous ancestor.’
‘Oh?’
‘Back on Sholos, some like to say he was one of our own. There is a likeness on record that’s supposed to be him. And it’s true, you both look the same.’
‘I’ve heard of such things. Rumours and vague hints. What else do you know about him, if I may ask?’
Ocean shrugged in her tight skinsuit. There was something poking out from one of her hip pockets, he saw – a little striped rat, twitching its whiskers at the air.
‘Not a lot,’ she admitted. ‘Some say he was the youngest person ever to attempt the crossing between our worlds. They say he was an eleven-year-old boy when he made it here to Erēs. After the landing, he found himself in the Free Ports in the middle of a siege, just like I did here.’
‘You know, I’d mostly written it all off as myth. Until right now, talking to one of you in the flesh.’
Coya’s ancestor, Zeziké, had lived more than three hundred years ago in the time of the Squabbling States. In his yo
uth, Zeziké had indeed lived for six years during the siege of Al-Coros. The experience had defined the young Zeziké, who one day would become the famed Mercian philosopher and the inspiration for the democras. He had written about his siege years in many of his later works.
Well, Coya supposed – wherever his ancestor had really come from, here or the distant moon – Zeziké had known what it was to live under siege. And not briefly, either, like Coya in Bar-Khos. But for six long years, starving and under threat for most of that time.
Before Zeziké had died in old age, he had written how all of life was a siege. All of life was a struggle to remain free. Always you were under attack by forces beyond your control – people sick with power trying to enslave you, while time itself wore away at your strength, and bad fortune and the spite of others bore down on your spirit.
You had to stand up every day, every little way, for your liberty, because the moment you stopped doing so, you started losing it.
Life was an endless struggle, he was saying. One that made many people embittered and hardened, even cruel. The secret was to go the other way, Zeziké believed. To open up your heart to the suffering of others. To be kind. To be mindful. To find your own happiness anyway, learning how to rejoice in the midst of it all, knowing everything to be a desperate dream.
It sounded like a kind of madness, Coya had once believed. How could you rejoice like that in the midst of a siege; in the midst of constant pressures to submit?
Now, though, he understood.
Coya Zeziké gazed westwards, towards the rest of the Free Ports beyond the horizon. He longed to be home already, home in far Minos with his wife.
‘Hell of a city,’ Ocean said in her thick accent. ‘I only wish I had a chance to see it under better circumstances.’
The tall woman looked up at the winter sun, warm in their faces, then towards the two moons setting in the west, staring hard at the pale blue one, her home of Sholos. A place she would never see again.
She wrapped her arms about herself, surveying the horizon of this strange new world that was now her home. Coya sensed a subtle, primal fear vibrating through her.
‘So. Are you ready to tell me why you’re here yet?’
A shadow crossed her pensive expression. A rare cloud was passing over the sun just then, and Coya shivered. Casually, Ocean swept a hand over their heads so that suddenly the air formed into a kind of vague translucent lens right above them, a lens that refracted the cloud and the gulls and caused the sun to brighten, so that the air around them grew hotter.
‘You’re a Dreamer, then?’ he asked her.
‘In a way.’
She had said very little so far. From the secret records of the Few, Coya knew that the people of Sholos maintained a kind of quarantine around the world of Erēs, both physical and cultural. These Visitors were not meant to be here. They had breached that quarantine. Though even then, the Visitors gave very little information away to the rare natives they confided in, as though still bound by some ethical directive.
‘Ocean?’
She was staring at the far moon again, as though taking a measure of how much she should say.
‘In your tongue, my kind would be called God Killers.’
Coya almost smiled at the grandeur of the title. ‘I did not think there were any gods left to kill,’ he quipped.
But the woman was deadly serious, and she stared down at Coya as though in pity at his ignorance; perhaps even in envy.
‘Surely you have heard of the Hidden Ones?’
Coya stirred.
The Hidden Ones were some mythical old gods from thousands of years in the past. They were said to have secretly controlled entire civilizations from behind the scenes, evil puppet-masters able to assume any form. Until, that was, they had been driven out in some war of the ancients – a conflict that had almost sundered the world.
‘On Sholos we share the same stories. Though sometimes we call the Hidden Ones the Eaters of the Light.’
‘You’re not going to tell me they’re real, are you?’
Ocean sighed loudly and looked down at the brooding city. Her tall frame swayed on her feet, her big mass of hair ruffling in the merest of breezes. He waited for her to speak, cosy under the lens of air, the bright sunlight striking glints across her dark features as she gazed across Bar-Khos.
‘This war you’ve just had here with the Empire of Mann. It’s nothing, trust me, compared to what is to come.’
Her tone sent a chill running through him.
‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘What I’m trying to tell you, blood of Zeziké, is what you asked to know. Why I’m here.’
And Ocean pinned him with her deep black eyes that knew so much more than he ever would, and she said:
‘Frankly, I’ve come to save your world.’
CHAPTER FIFTY
Dreamer
The Dreamer Shard had seen miracles spill from her fingertips. Wonders that shook the foundations of her understanding.
As a disembodied spirit she had flown so high that the blue sky had turned to a starry blackness over the sphere of the planet, until the shield that quarantined Erēs had barred her from going even higher. She had communed with dimensional beings in the spaces between the real and unreal, and glimpsed visions of futures that came true.
Yet still the Dreamer ranked these last few days amongst the many marvels of her life. This last-moment reversal of their fortunes; Bar-Khos reprieved along with the rest of the Free Ports.
As she walked across the grassy field of the inkworks, Shard observed the haze still hanging over the silent city. Nothing stirred save for the odd skyship in the air. The ceasefire was holding, two days after she had gotten through to the Alhazii Caliphate aided by the powerful moondust, bearing news of how the democras held the Caliphate’s most vital secret in their hands.
And just like that, it was over.
There remained, of course, a mountain of work still to be done; further negotiations with the Alhazii, while the remaining imperial forces on the island were ferried to the southern continent. Not to mention the reconstruction of a battered city. But Shard was glad to be leaving all of that in the capable hands of others. She was going home, as much as she had any home these days, to her precious Academy in Salina.
As she walked towards the waiting skud, Shard was so happy at the prospect that a tumble of ice crystals were falling from the hem of her cloak, leaving a glittering swathe in her wake. A little playfulness on a Dreamer’s behalf, on this day of her departure.
‘I really wish you would stay a while longer,’ said Coya as he walked slowly by her side. ‘I might still need you here.’
Shard sighed to herself. She had only just helped to save Bar-Khos and the Free Ports from defeat in the war. Not to mention finally removing that crossbow bolt from Coya’s brain, and repairing what damage she could.
Yet still he asked her for more.
‘We’ve won, Coya. All is well. Besides, I’ll be a lot more use to you back at the Academy. I can do more from there than I can here.’
‘But still.’
She had taken another tiny speck of moondust earlier, just enough so she could maintain a warming glyph around herself without effort. It was heightening every sense that she had.
‘You smell that?’ she said, sniffing the air.
‘Smells like it always does.’
‘Yes, like death. I’m going home to my life, Coya!’
He wished to be going home himself, she saw. Coya would be lonely here in the city.
‘How long are you staying behind here?’
‘Who knows? Until the Caliph’s negotiation team from Zanzahar arrive, and we hammer out a deal. And now there’s this business with the Visitor to contend with. She’s still bereft of any details, but she wants to enlist the aid of the Few.’
‘They must be watching, somehow, from up there, to know so much about us.’
‘Yes. A strange thought.’
‘I will. I think she’ll be leaving the Free Ports soon. She seems in something of a hurry.’
Coya stopped, his eyes squinting in the sun. ‘Well then, I’ll say goodbye here. I don’t think I have many more footsteps left in me today.’
‘Of course. And don’t worry. I’ll make a trip over to Minos when I get back. Let Rechelle know that you’re well, and headed back soon.’
‘Yes, please do.’
Shard looked at her friend in the brilliant daylight, every detail leaping out as the moondust whispered through her blood. Coya was quietly ecstatic, for all that he needed to lie down for a few days; for all that the impressions of what he’d seen here had etched new lines in his youthful complexion; for all that she was leaving him on his own.
‘Good work, Coya,’ she told him sincerely.
‘And you, Walks With Herself.’
They grasped hands for a moment, partial saviours of a city, the spiral scars on their palms burning together. When Shard turned to walk away, she had left a handful of ice crystals in her friend’s palm, sparkling like a pile of crushed diamonds; indeed like moondust itself.
‘Look after that supercargo for me!’ he called after her, referring to the Mannian High Priest they had captured, Kira dul Dubois, who Shard was taking back to Salina.
‘Oh, I will!’
On the deck of the waiting skyboat, the surviving Rōshun were waiting along the rail in their dark, patchwork robes. Around them shone an aura visible to Shard’s eye, pulsing with deep purples nearest to their bodies, and sky blues further out; the men satisfied with themselves and this vendetta they had brought upon the Empire here, even though they had lost a third of their number. In brooding silence, they watched the captured Mannian priest, Kira, being escorted through the open hull door by a pair of Red Guards, the old crone bound in chaincuffs.
Her aura was like a seething black storm.
Curl was waiting too up there on the small deck, standing at the prow looking north towards the city. The young woman had decided to take Shard up on her offer of coming back to the Academy with her unborn child. Yet there was a sadness about her. A sense that she was leaving something behind here, something unresolved.
