Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  Clay flinched as the air spun into a fine mist around him. “Is there water inside?” he asked over the rushing noise.

  Moog brushed his fingers over the steering orbs and nodded enthusiastically. “Of course!” He began to explain about hydro-gyres and something called cyclic pitch, but Clay had already stopped listening. They had drifted clear of the cave mouth and were climbing skyward. It was a few moments before Clay’s stomach reluctantly decided to join him in the air.

  He glanced over at Gabriel, who was standing at the rail and staring westward.

  Hang on, Rose, Clay thought. For whatever it’s worth, we’re on our way.

  “Let’s say you find Gabe’s brat,” supposed Kallorek, who was slouched on the steps leading up to the foredeck. “Say you make it across the Heartwyld—which you won’t—and somehow get past the Horde into Castia—which doesn’t seem likely—and Rose is still alive—which she probably ain’t. What then? What’s your plan, Slowhand?”

  The booker had been ranting all afternoon. Moog and the revenant were in quiet conversation near the prow. Gabriel was taking a turn as pilot, which basically involved not touching anything at all, and Ganelon had long since laughed himself to sleep in the master suite below. Matrick was below as well, probably drinking, and so Clay, who was watching the sun set from the starboard rail, was the only one within earshot.

  He weighed a few responses to the booker’s question and finally settled on one among many in his vast repertoire of shrugs.

  Kallorek scoffed. “You don’t have one, do you? Well let me save you the trouble: Rose is fucked, you hear me? And when you find her you’ll be just as fucked as she.”

  Clay said nothing. They passed through a wisp of cloud and the sail crackled with silver light.

  “There’s still time, Slowhand. Time to wise up and turn this boat around. Give Gabe a little bump on the head, convince Moog it’s for the best. That old bugger hangs on your every word, you know. And put that bloody zombie back in a box where he belongs. The other two are out till morning—we could be back in Conthas before sunrise, and you a rich man.”

  Kallorek’s a snake, Clay reminded himself. He’ll hiss and hiss in your ear until what was once incomprehensible suddenly seems like a damn fine idea.

  “I’m not the type to hold a grudge,” the booker lied. “And I like you guys. I really do. You practically made me. I was a small-time hustler before Saga. Take me home, Clay, and what’s done is done. Water under the bridge. Whaddaya say?”

  “You’ll be home soon enough,” Clay said. “We’ll leave you just outside the forest. You’ll have a two-day walk, maybe three, then you’ll be back in Conthas, safe and sound.”

  “The edge of the Wyld is barely safer than the Wyld itself,” Kallorek complained. “Something kicked the centaur tribes into a frenzy—they’re bloody everywhere these days. I’ll be lucky not to end up on a horseman’s spit with a fucking apple in my mouth. And besides, you know how much it cost me to make this thing skyworthy?” He waved a hand at the ship around them. “Too damned much to have you ass-rats take it sightseeing into wyvern territory. Do you see a ballista on board? A lob tosser? Any weapons at all? This boat ain’t cut out for crossing the Wyld! You’ll be a duck in a shark pond out there!”

  “Don’t you mean pool?”

  Kal’s face went the colour of a plum gone rotten. “Ha ha fucking ha,” he grated. “We’ll see who’s laughing when you and yours are buried in a pile of slag.”

  Clay employed another shrug, subtly different from the one preceding it.

  The booker shook his head, shifting uncomfortably in his restraints. After a while he started up again, but with a different tack.

  “I wasn’t kidding about Larkspur, you know. I’ve met her a few times. Even tried to lure her back into the mercenary game, but I’d might as well have asked a wolf to eat a head of lettuce. She’s a killer, that one. She has a taste for blood, and the faster you run the hungrier she gets. I could manage that for you. I could buy her off, or at least pay her enough to say Matrick was dead and gone. Think about it, Slowhand. I’m the only chance you’ve got.”

  Clay just stared out over the rail, squinting his eyes against the sun’s molten glare. The Carnal Court, due to its size and in spite of its four tidal engines, was a great deal slower than Vanguard’s Old Glory. They were flying due south for the time being, skirting the Wyld’s edge. Come morning they would veer west and make a straight line for Castia.

  Kallorek kept on, relentless. “Okay, best-case scenario: You find the girl and you somehow manage to rescue her. You’d might as well stay in Castia and become faithful citizens of the gods-forsaken Republic then, cause there’ll be nothin’ left for you here. I’ll destroy everything you leave behind.”

  He pitched his voice so the wizard could hear him. “Hey Moog, you know what’s left of your shitty little tower? Nothing! Just rubble and ruin. I burnt all your books, and I killed all your stupid animals. I even ate one of the bastards. You know what’s delicious? Tiny elephant! That’s right, I ate your tiny fucking elephant, Moog! Do you hear me? You’ve got nothing but the clothes on your back, you pillow-biting little rat.”

  “Careful,” Clay warned, but Kallorek went on anyway.

  “Tell you what: I’ll double the price on Matty’s head. I’ll drag him to Brycliffe myself and slit his fucking throat on the castle steps. And Ganelon? He’s headed straight back to the Quarry, but this time I’ll bury him so deep the basilisks won’t even find him for fear of the dark. Oh, and I’ve got special plans for Valery. She’s trying to get clean, you know, but I’ll put an end to that. I’ll ply her with so much scratch she’ll look like a whore’s bedpost! She’ll be a mindless junkie until the day it kills her.”

  “Kal …” Clay broke in.

  “And you, Slowhand—”

  “ … don’t.”

  “—I’ll burn your whole world away. You think Coverdale has a centaur problem? It’ll have a razed to the fucking ground problem. I’ll trash whatever hovel you call home and give your wife to my guards for sport.”

  Clay left the rail, started toward him.

  “And that little daughter of yours … what did you say her name was? Tally? I think I’ll keep her for myself. Teach her a few things you never could.”

  Kallorek chortled wickedly. He was peering down at his own fat stomach, and so yelped in surprise when Clay’s shadow fell over him. The booker closed his eyes and raised his chin, ready for the punch he assumed was coming.

  But Clay Cooper didn’t punch men who threatened his wife—or his little girl, for that matter.

  What he did do was grab them by the collar, haul them to their feet, take three long strides to gain momentum, and then hurl them headlong over the skyship’s rail. Kallorek, too surprised to even scream, disappeared into dark oblivion.

  Afterward Clay just stood there, chest heaving, blood pounding in his head like a slavemaster’s drum. His hands were trembling, so he gripped the moonstone railing to keep them still. Even the greenest branch could only bend so far, and when Kallorek started into his family something in him had just … snapped.

  The monster, he knew. Not gone. Never gone, it would seem. Just … dormant.

  His senses returned at the sound of clapping. Moog and Kit were applauding him. The wizard was smiling broadly, while the ghoul wore a grimace likely meant as a grin.

  Gabriel appeared at his side, peering overboard into the empty dark. “What the hell just happened?” he asked.

  Clay opened his mouth to explain, but closed it, for fear that rage would hoarsen his voice. Instead, he shrugged.

  There was a pall above the forest each morning, a grimy black mist that reeked of decay and tasted like ash on the tongue. Most days it dissolved by noon, and Clay would gaze out over the grey ocean of sullen, sinister trees that stretched to every horizon. Come evening the sun burned like a pyre in the west, and soon after the stars would gather to mourn its passing, glistening like tearful eyes, someti
mes falling.

  On the second day they passed through a patch of violet cloud that reeked of decay and left their flesh cold and wet. Matrick went down with a fever and insisted that copious amounts of Kaskar whiskey were the only cure. Kit, who claimed he’d once done a stint as a battlefield physician, corroborated this. The others were justly skeptical, but Matty awoke the next morning with nothing but his usual hangover.

  Twice in the first few days they caught sight of something trailing them, but whatever it was vanished before it could be identified. Clay found himself weighing whether he’d rather Lastleaf or Larkspur attack them up here. His preference varied by the hour, at least until he remembered what that wyvern matriarch had done to Obolon Han.

  Despite the extravagant apartments below, the band spent the majority of their time on deck. Gabe’s eyes were fixed ahead, always ahead, while those who had crossed paths with Larkspur back in Conthas cast wary glances behind.

  They pointed out landmarks to one another as they passed overhead. There were the ruins of Turnstone Keep, where bands had met to trade news and tell stories, and where Saga, along with Vanguard and the Night Roosters, had turned back a small army of Ferals after a three-night siege. The only casualty had been their bard, whose name Clay couldn’t remember, who was killed by an arrow as he urinated through a gap in the crenellations.

  Ganelon nodded down at the remains of Brookstrider, a walking tree even more massive than Blackheart (from whom Clay had carved the wood for his beloved shield). No one knew who or what had killed Brookstrider, but his moss-shrouded corpse was surrounded by the remains of several dozen smaller treants, prompting some to wonder if he’d been the victim of, as Moog had dubbed it, arboreacide: the murder of trees by other trees.

  And there was the crater in which they’d happened upon the body of something none of them recognized, a gelatinous mass of throbbing sacks and tentacled limbs that looked as though it belonged in the ocean depths rather than the middle of a poison forest. They’d assumed it was dead, and Matrick had set about poking it with a stick. It wasn’t dead after all, and they’d had to cut Matrick out of its stomach when it finally was.

  By the third evening, as the six of them lay sprawled on couches they’d hauled up from the apartments below, Clay discovered his mood perceptively lightening. The sense of dread he’d been harbouring since … well, since the night Gabriel showed up on his doorstep, was slowly starting to ebb. After all, they’d managed to reunite Saga, reclaim Vellichor, elude their bounty hunters, survive a chimera, and escape the destruction of the Maxithon. And to top it all off, they’d lucked into their very own skyship.

  To have traversed the Heartwyld on foot would have taken months, if they’d made it at all, and it would have been a terrible, treacherous slog through a nightmare landscape teeming with horrors hell-bent on killing them. It would have meant spending night after sleepless night on the hard ground, fearing the snap of every twig, the whisper of every falling, fetid leaf, listening as the dark itself breathed and hissed around them.

  And from what Clay had heard the Heartwyld was as dangerous now as it had ever been. Too many bands were taking the easy way out: mopping up on the arena floor and sleeping in taverns every night. Too few mercs were willing to explore this dank cave or check out that haunted ruin, and only the bravest among them were willing to risk the Wyld.

  But no matter: They were flying. And despite the legitimate concerns of Barret and his bandmates, the journey so far had proven mercifully uneventful. Perhaps they’d get really lucky, Clay imagined, and skip the forest, soar over the mountains, catch the Horde unawares and dip into Castia long enough to find and rescue Rose, then return home to find all this bounty business blown over.

  Hell, thought Clay, I solved half our problems by tossing Kal overboard. Maybe they could invite Lilith on a “friendly cruise” and do the same to her when they got back.

  A soft strumming drew Clay out of his head. Kit had retrieved that bizarre-looking instrument of his and was using his grey-green fingers to pluck a soft, stirring music from its web of silver strings.

  “What is that thing anyway?” asked Moog. The wizard had discovered a small library below and was currently leafing his way through a book called Unicorns: Beware the Horn. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Nor will you again, my friend,” said Kit. There was a note of melancholy in his reedy voice. “Batingtings are so rare as to make skyships seem as common as copper coins.”

  It occurred to Clay that, if given several hours with which to mull it over, he would be hard-pressed to think of a dumber name for anything than batingting.

  “A batingting?” Moog closed his book, leaning to examine the cumbersome octagonal instrument resting in Kit’s lap. “I thought they’d all been destroyed when the Dominion fell.”

  “Here we go,” sighed Ganelon, drawing a laugh from everyone except the wizard and Kit.

  “As did I,” said the ghoul. “I found this beauty among Kallorek’s many artifacts and decided to relieve him of it.”

  “Fascinating!” said Moog.

  “Is it, though?” Clay loaded his voice with as much sarcasm as it could bear.

  The wizard, unfazed, pressed on. “How many strings does it have?”

  “Twenty-six to a side, one hundred and four in total.” Kit pulled a few scintillating notes from it as he said so. “It’s unlikely anyone alive today knows the secret of their making, and I daresay I may be the only ghoul in the world capable of playing one.”

  “Let’s have a song,” said Matrick, who Clay thought had been the one flying the ship. It turned out nobody was, though that didn’t seem to matter much anyway, since the thing essentially flew itself. “You’re supposed to be our bard, ain’t ya?”

  “A song it is, then,” said Kit. He looked from face to face, and then closed his eyes, swaying like a riverside reed. “Let me see, let me see. Ah.” His eyes snapped open. His fingers fluttered and the bones in his wrists popped as he flexed them. He strummed a few disparate notes, hands dancing like spiders upon that eight-sided web, before a melody emerged, flitting like a bird into the warm evening air.

  And then, in a scratchy, lilting, remarkably pleasant-sounding voice, he sang.

  Moog bobbed his head to the tune. Matrick’s fingers drummed along on his belly, while Ganelon watched the revenant’s roving hands as though mesmerized. Gabriel, as he did so often of late, turned his gaze to the west, toward Castia. And Clay, as was his habit, looked behind them, toward home.

  Kit’s song, as the best songs did, told a familiar story in a simple, striking way. He sang of Grandual’s gods, the Holy Tetrea, and of the Summer Lord’s battle against a spirit of utter darkness. Victorious, he banished it to the heavens, where it watches and waits for time to unravel, its million eyes twinkling in the unfathomable dark.

  He sang of the Summer Lord’s wife, a goddess of compassion and surpassing beauty, who bore him two children. The first of these was Vail, the Autumn Son, but the boy’s spirit was spiteful and sickly, and his Father shunned him. Next the Mother gave birth to Glif, the Spring Maiden, though in doing so she perished.

  Clay realized partway through the song that Kit was now singing in an altogether different tongue. He knew enough druic to recognize the language, but the words themselves were shapeless, formless, as delicate and deliciously random as the petals of flowers grazed in the dark.

  Still, he knew how the story ended.

  Vail, who men now called the Heathen for the hatred he bore his father, gave his own life so that his mother might be reborn. Death, however, had changed her. The fruit of her compassion withered to harsh austerity. Her beauty grew cold and terrible, if no less lovely.

  And so went the cycle, turning and turning upon itself until the end of days, as autumn’s death gave rise to winter, and winter gave birth to spring.

  The last, lingering notes of Kit’s song shivered into the evening air. Ganelon, Clay saw, was snoring softly. Moog and Matrick
wore wistful grins; the wizard’s eyes were shimmering with unwept tears.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Just beautiful.”

  And it was, of course—even more so for having been rendered in a lost tongue and given music by an instrument that was, very likely, the only one of its kind remaining in the world. Even so, Clay had long suspected the story was just that: a story. A means of making sense of an all too senseless world. It couldn’t be true—not all of it, anyway. It was simply too incredible to believe.

  But then again, he supposed, a little embellishment was so often the difference between a good story and a great one.

  The following morning they spotted something in the sky ahead. Clay’s first thought was that Lastleaf had discovered their plan to rescue Rose and had flown to intercept them. He squinted, fearing to see the flap of draconic wings, but whatever it was moved far too slow to be the druin’s fearsome matriarch.

  “It’s a skyship,” announced Gabriel. “It’s changing course, coming toward us.”

  Ganelon slipped his axe off his back. The weapon’s whispers filled the air around him. “Might be pirates,” he said.

  Clay chuckled. “Right. Sky pirates?”

  The warrior shrugged. “Why not?”

  Clay could think of several reasons why not, but he gripped the cool haft of the hammer at his waist, just in case.

  His fears were unfounded. The ship, which appeared to belong to another band, was just passing by for a look. She was bigger than the Old Glory, but not by much. The words Lucky Seven had been painted on her belly, but the seven had been crossed out, as had the six below it. The word five was scrawled underneath, but Clay only spotted four people at the rail and wondered silently if the ship was due for another paint job.

  They’d been attacked, it looked like. Their skyship’s front sail was mangled, though it looked like they’d rigged it to remain functional. One of its two tidal engines was inoperable. Its rings, Clay recalled Moog mentioning, were made of pure duramantium, and so could not be broken, but they’d been knocked askew somehow.