The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  Sal peered over the dune, alarmed by the thought that Shilly had put herself in danger. He reached out for the buried traps as the Warden turned to address the area that Shilly's voice had come from. It wasn't too late. She was far enough away not to be hurt.

  “What's the matter?” the Warden asked, his words echoing from the walls of sand. “Don't you know who I am?”

  “I know what you are. That's enough.”

  “No, it's not.” The Warden made no move, except to sag a little. “I dreamed last night that you and I were riding a ship of bone up the side of a mountain, into a cave of ice. Something dark and ancient lived there, under the ice, and it knew we were coming. It had slept for an eternity, but was waking now, and it was hungry. We had to stop it, you and I, before it ate the world.”

  Sal listened, hooked by the same odd sense of familiarity he had felt on seeing the man's face. The Warden's voice had changed while talking about the dream; it was higher pitched, and had a childlike rhythm. Sal had heard someone talk like that before, under very different circumstances.

  For the first time, Sal noted how dusty the Warden's robe was, his scuffed and worn boots.

  The name, when it came to him, was as unbelievable as it was a relief.

  “Tom?” Sal stood up on the crest of the dune. “Is that really you?”

  The Warden turned away from Shilly's hiding place to look at him. Now that Sal knew the truth, he could see the resemblance. Gone were the awkward ears and lack of height. Gone were youthful uncertainties and baby fat. In their place was a lean, almost ravenous, sense of concentration that hit Sal like a physical force as Tom's gaze fixed on him.

  The teenager Sal had last seen as a boy didn't smile. “Who else would I be?” he asked, appearing genuinely puzzled.

  A surge of relief carried Sal down the side of the dune. “It's been such a long time,” he said. “I didn't recognise you.”

  “You look the same.”

  “Thanks, I think.” Tom's equine features took on a younger cast as Sal neared him. Under the dirt, he had pimples. Sal held out his hand. Tom's grip was uncertain, fleeting.

  “What in the Strand brings you here?”

  Tom looked over his shoulder as Shilly came out of hiding. She didn't look as relieved as Sal. Favouring her weak right leg, she leaned on Lodo's latchkey in lieu of a staff.

  Tom turned back to Sal. “It's your father,” he said.

  The heat of the day vanished at those three words. “What about him?”

  “He needs your help.”

  “He sent you to find us?”

  “No.” Tom shook his head emphatically. “I came here of my own accord. No one knows.”

  Shilly looked from Sal to Tom when she joined them.

  “A cave of ice, huh?” she said. “That's not a prophetic dream; it's the sort of nonsense normal people have.”

  Tom opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. Sal could practically hear his mind working. Brilliant in the ways of the Change, Tom struggled when it came to everyday matters.

  “It will happen,” he said. “That's the way it works. I thought you'd remember, after the golem and Lodo and—”

  “Easy,” she said, a look of sadness clouding her features. “I remember. I just don't understand how it could ever be possible. I haven't seen ice in my entire life, let alone a cave of ice. The nearest mountains are half the world away, and I'm in no hurry to get there. As for hungry things wanting to eat you and me…” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Be assured that this is one fate I'll try my level best to avoid.”

  Tom didn't argue, although her answer obviously didn't reassure him.

  “Why don't you come inside?” asked Sal, indicating the bush and the entrance to the workshop behind it. The deadness over the dunes had faded; the wind had returned. “You look like you could get out of the sun for a while.”

  “Yes,” added Shilly, “I'll get you some water, make you some tea.”

  Tom nodded, but stayed where he was. “Tell me,” he asked Sal, his dark eyes very serious. “What would you have done if I hadn't been me?”

  Sal looked at the ground around them, wondering how much Tom had sensed. Woven in a thin layer just under the surface of the sand was a pattern of interlinked charms designed by Shilly and willed into potency by Sal. The charms—resembling insects with circular bodies and crosses for heads—caught light filtering through the grains above them and held it there, the pattern growing increasingly powerful with every day that passed. At a word, Sal could release the stored energy in the light-traps and send it flooding back out into the world. He didn't know how much energy, exactly, there was in the traps, but definitely more than enough to kick up a dense sandstorm, allowing Shilly and him to escape under cover. Probably enough to blow a person standing on the light-traps to pieces…There was only one way to find that out, and fortunately he had been spared such a decision this time.

  “Don't worry about us,” he said. “We know how to look after ourselves.”

  Tom's dark eyes took him in with one long glance. Sal's assurance was one thing Tom clearly understood.

  Shilly tugged Tom forward, her sun-bleached hair dancing. He allowed himself to be led up the slope of the dune, first picking up the heavy bag and draping it back over his shoulder, then dragging his leather boots through the sand.

  “Come on down,” said Shilly, waving their old friend ahead of her along the secret passage into the workshop. “Tell us everything you know.”

  “That could take days,” he said. “I've been dreaming a lot lately, and not just about you. I think Skender might be in trouble, wherever he is.”

  Shilly glanced over her shoulder at Sal. He rolled his eyes. Nothing had changed.

  “What we need to know, then. Let me get you a drink, and then you can get started.”

  Sal came last, ignoring the sensation of being watched as he closed the door behind him. The birds on the dunes were the last things he had to worry about now.

  “It is clear that the ground subsided after the Cataclysm, but before the making of the Divide, so the city endured not one but two separate and unrelated catastrophes. The first lowered the city into a depression several kilometres around, with sloping sides and a roughly flat bottom. The second split the depression and therefore the city into two sections of unequal size. The inhabitants of the larger portion took shelter behind a sturdy wall designed to keep the Divide at bay. Some speculate that the creators of the Wall were the same as the creators of the Divide, suggesting the riving of the city was accidental, and that architectural triage on a massive scale was both called for and delivered.”

  LAURE HISTORICAL SURVEY

  Skender Van Haasteren the Tenth was stuck. It wasn't the first time he had been in that situation. His home, the Keep, an ancient cliff-face refuge deep in the heart of the Interior, was riddled with secret passages and unnoticed cracks, most of which he had explored during his childhood. Only on becoming a teenager had he realised the screamingly obvious: that such illicit expeditions were a form of escape that would never lead anywhere. All they did was annoy his father.

  The one time he genuinely escaped, he had ended up on the other side of the Divide, fighting golems and worse. It had come as quite a shock that the outside world he had always dreamed of might actually be dangerous. He had gone home with a feeling of relief, his youthful rebellion out of the way nice and early. Time to settle in and do some safer work. No more adventures for him, thanks.

  But now, here he was, out in the world a second time and finding himself caught in a crack he would once have slithered through with ease, distressingly deep underground.

  I'm too big for this, he told himself as he reached for a handhold just out of reach, obviously. He was curved like a hairpin; if he could only obtain some sort of leverage, he could easily wriggle around the bend, but his fingers were flailing about like a newborn's and his feet kicked uselessly at air. He flexed his entire body, hoping to shake things up, but succeeded
only in banging his knees and scraping his spine even more. He tried twisting in a spiral fashion and brought his skull into sharp contact with stone. He saw stars.

  For the first time in years, he truly feared for his life.

  “Help!” he yelled, even though he knew it would be futile. He was deeper than few in Laure ever went, surrounded on all sides by heavy, ancient stone. Thinking him mad and possibly dangerous, the guides whose experience he had tapped had all warned him about the dangers of going down into the caves. Not one of them offered help, but nevertheless he had had to try. His mother was down here somewhere, and she needed rescuing.

  Hands gripped his ankles.

  He yelped in fright and kicked out. His foot struck something soft.

  “Hey!” came a muffled voice past the plug of his twisted body. “I'm trying to help you, you idiot!”

  “Sorry.” He forced himself to relax and let the hands clutch him again. Whoever they belonged to used their body weight to pull at his legs. Skender yelped as he shifted suddenly in the bend, losing still more skin to the rough, dry stone. His spine complained and his face was rammed hard against rock. For a moment he thought he might lose his nose.

  “Ow! Be careful.”

  “You want to stay down here forever?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then stop whining!”

  The weight dragging at his ankles dislodged him from the hairpin. He tried to grab the walls to slow himself down, but he had been taken by surprise, and so had the person pulling his legs. He shot out of the crack to freedom in a rush and they tumbled together to the floor of the cave. One flailing limb caught his rescuer solidly in the abdomen. He heard a sudden exhalation of air, then pained wheezing.

  “Bloody—hell!”

  “I'm sorry. It was an accident.” He fumbled to lift his fallen pack off the glowstone he had been holding when he became stuck. Its reservoir of stored sunlight was strong enough to make out the person who had popped him from his early grave like a cork from a bottle.

  He saw a young woman, around his age, with black hair and almond eyes. Her skin was neither white nor brown, but something in between. A dirty boot print stood out on the front of her chest.

  “That's—gratitude—for you,” she said, casting him a dark look. Wheezing, she climbed painfully to her feet and dusted herself off. She wore a faded black leather uniform that had seen better days. Patched and piecemeal, it had obviously belonged to many other people before she had acquired it; tight-fitting, with padding around the shoulders, elbows, and knees, there were two dull purple lines crossing at the front in a large X. The motif was repeated on the upper arms, in miniature.

  “I said it was an accident,” he repeated, although his mind was already moving on. “Hey, I remember your face. You were in the crowd at the coffee stall, and at the hostel.” Facts clicked belatedly into place. “You've been following me!”

  “You don't sound very glad about it,” she said, glaring at him and picking up a short, fat tube from the rough ground. Tapped once, hard, against her thigh, it emitted a beam of weak blue light that she shone into his eyes. “If I hadn't come along, you'd be another squeal closer to dying down here.”

  “But…” Although there was no denying his gratitude at being rescued, he couldn't leave it at that. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Chu. I'm a miner.”

  Understanding dawned. “So that's what you're doing down here. This is where you work. You weren't following me at all. You just heard me yelling.”

  She laughed. “You're an idiot, Skender Van Haasteren the Tenth.”

  “Huh?”

  “You have no idea how Laure works. That's why I'm following you. Someone's got to keep white folks like you out of trouble.”

  Stung by her tone, he turned away to check his robes for rips. Vivid afterimages cast by her lightstick danced across his vision. “Look, thanks for helping me, but if you're not going to tell me anything useful, don't bother sticking around. I can find my own way back.”

  He felt her staring at him, and turned to find her examining him quite seriously, all trace of mockery gone.

  “You're a strange one,” she said. “It's not just your pale skin. I watched you taking directions in the hostel last night. The place was full of people. Once the word got around that a Stone Mage with money was looking for information about the caves, every guide and scrounger in town came running.”

  “I'm not a Stone Mage,” Skender protested. “I haven't graduated yet.”

  “So? If you dress like one, people will naturally assume. I followed them out of curiosity, and there you were, listening to everything everyone was saying, taking it all in. You never asked twice; you never drew any maps. People thought you were having them on. Some of them started giving you bogus directions, trying to catch you lying, but they never did. If what they told you was inconsistent, you caught them out. It was as if you knew the way already.”

  Her intense regard made him feel uncomfortable. “I don't know the way,” he said, quite honestly. “I just have a good memory. A perfect one. Once I see or hear something, I never forget it.”

  “Really? And here I was thinking you remembered me because of my good looks.”

  The beginnings of a flush made his ears redden. “That's not what I meant—”

  She laughed again. “You're such an easy target, stone-boy. Don't you ever get teased back home?”

  He certainly did. He'd lived his entire life in a school full of older students. That his father was the headmaster didn't protect him from regular ribbing; in fact, that encouraged it.

  His defences were normally excellent, but there was something about Chu that put him off-balance. Something about her eyes, quite apart from their unusual shape. He blinked and told himself to remember what he was supposed to be doing.

  “You were at the hostel,” he said, “so you know why I'm here. My mother is missing.”

  “And you're looking for her down here.” She nodded. “That was the part you weren't very clear on. Why down here? Why the caves of Laure?”

  It was a long story, and the air in the cramped cave was beginning to grow musty.

  Skender indicated the crack behind him. “Looks like I'm not going to get much further this way. Why don't we go up and I'll tell you then? Maybe you can help me work out what to do next.”

  Her teeth were white in the light of his glowstone. “I'd better not make a habit of doing that,” she said. “You couldn't possibly afford my rates.”

  “Rates? If I could afford hired help, I wouldn't be lost down here in the first place.”

  Her laugh was rich and echoed back at them from a hundred rock faces as they began their ascent into the daylight.

  Some five weeks earlier, Abi Van Haasteren had left on her latest expedition, departing the subterranean city of Ulum with a caravan full of Surveyors, porters, camel riders, cooks, and grunts. She even had a man'kin with her for advice on esoteric matters. The stone intelligence, a high-templed man-shaped bust called Mawson, was a free agent who helped her willingly, not because he was bonded into service as many of his kind were. Still, from the position where he would ride out most of the journey, lashed firmly to the back of the leading caravan, his expression had been disdainful.

  “Dignity,” he had told Skender, his voice like the buzz of bees at a great distance, “is in short supply among the living.”

  “But you are alive,” Skender had responded, “aren't you?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Which manner?”

  “The one that matters.”

  “Is this boy bothering you?” asked a voice. Skender felt a big hand come down heavily on his shoulder. “Move along, Skender. Mawson has important cogitating to do.”

  Skender turned and looked up into a broad, pale face. Kemp was the largest person he had ever met, and albino with it, so he stood out in any crowd. A refugee from the Strand, he had taken up with the Stone Mages and was by now a regular trave
ller with Skender's mother through the Interior.

  Skender didn't respond to the good-natured ribbing. “You'll keep an eye on everyone. Won't you?”

  “An eye and an ear,” Kemp had assured him, grinning and moving off to help the baggage handlers. “Don't worry about it. We'll be back before you know it.”

  Skender had come to see them off via the space-bending Way leading from the Keep to Ulum, which allowed him to cross hundreds of kilometres in a few paces. Why his mother didn't use such means to travel to her destinations was beyond him. The charm took its toll and wasn't entirely safe, but travelling across the Interior for weeks on end had the same disadvantages. He had tried both, and knew which he preferred.

  “At least take the buggy,” he pressed her as she checked the last of the provisions to be loaded. “You know Mawson prefers to travel that way.”

  “He's the least of my concerns,” she said, lashing a crate into place with a deft knot. Her long brown hair hung to her waist in beaded strands and swung with every movement. Lines of delicate, tattooed characters framed her face and lined her arms. She was striking and mysterious, even to Skender, her son. He had inherited her hair and skin colour and his father's memory, but the height of neither.

  “What about Dad?” he pressed her. “Couldn't you at least have gone to say good-bye to him?”

  “Couldn't he have come here?” She adjusted a camel's harness a little too abruptly. It snorted and eyeballed her warningly. She sighed and turned to Skender. “Your father doesn't approve.”

  “He never does, but that doesn't stop you two getting along.”

  “Not this time,” she said. “He doesn't like where we're going, or why.”

  “Where is that again?” he asked, trying to sound casual. “I don't believe I've heard.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “If you'd heard, you'd know. And that's why you haven't heard. I'm keeping this one close to my chest, in case someone else beats me to it.” She put a hand to the rust-red material of her travelling robe where it covered her heart. “Don't worry, my Skender. We'll be okay. And when we come back, we'll have found something wonderful. Just you wait and see.”