The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  She had hugged him tightly then, and he had hugged her back, even though her words did little to reassure him. The caravan had trundled with a rattle and clatter of wheels out of the staging area, with the dour ex–Sky Warden Shom Behenna bringing up the rear, his black skin a vivid contrast to Kemp's and the others’ around him. His mother had waved at him as her wagon mounted the ramp leading to the surface, then turned her eyes forward, to the long journey ahead.

  Skender returned to the Keep and finished his assignments for that week, then climbed out of his bedroom window and scaled the cliff as high as he dared without ropes or harness, relying solely on the strength of his arms and legs to hold him firm against the sun-warmed rock. He knew he was taking a risk—but why shouldn't he? If his mother was allowed to throw herself headlong into some unknown venture his father disapproved of, he didn't see why he should be any different, in his own small way.

  Five years earlier, he had stowed away on a caravan similar to hers, one headed south for the Haunted City. He had hidden in a chest until his bladder forced him out, and he, too, had thought that his adventure was going to be wonderful, that he would come back with riches and wisdom. Instead, he had seen a woman murdered in front of him and barely escaped with his mind intact from the Void Beneath.

  Ever since his return, he had had a keen appreciation of what his mother was risking every time she left him. He didn't want to lose her to the dangers of the world. He wished she could be more like his father, who seemed perfectly happy confined to the Keep, where he taught his charges in the way of the Change. Why wasn't his mother, like him, content to stay home?

  Skender told himself that he worried too much. His mother was a supremely capable Senior Surveyor. She had a good team. He climbed back down to his room after the sun had set, feeling his way by moon—and starlight. The smell of roast potatoes drifted up from the kitchens and his stomach rumbled.

  A month later, when word had come that Abi Van Haasteren and her party had been given up for dead by their caravan porters, he confronted his father and demanded that something be done to find her. He railed and ranted, expecting an argument in response. His father normally defended his mother's right to do as she willed. This time, however, all Skender received was worried agreement.

  “I am concerned, yes,” said the Mage Van Haasteren, settling heavily into a chair and resting his head on one hand. His rich red robes, trimmed with gold thread, sighed with him. “Abi normally makes contact once a day when she's away. It takes a significant amount of strength to call so far, especially among the Ruins, but she does it to ease my mind. I haven't heard from her for two days, now.”

  Skender's father stared at him with a long, lined face and helpless eyes.

  “Two days—and you didn't tell me?” Skender paced the room, needing an outlet for the vague anxiety that had just transformed into a very specific concern. “We should raise an alarm, send another party, do something!”

  “You know the Surveyor's Code, Skender. I can't ask them to break it.”

  Skender did know the Code. He could even see the sense in it. Ruins were dangerous places, filled with power from ancient times. Some of that power was inimical to humanity. If a Surveyor met with disaster inside a Ruin, sending a rescue party might see more people injured or killed. Such disasters were written off as bad luck, and those Ruins never visited again.

  But this was his mother…

  “Tell me where she went,” he demanded.

  The Mage retreated. “No. If you don't already know—and I'm certain you asked—then I will not break her confidence.”

  “Tell me,” Skender insisted, leaning over the table to confront his father nose to nose. “I'm not leaving this room until you do.”

  “And if I do tell you? What then?”

  Skender was startled by the alarm in his father's voice, but he didn't let that deter him. “You know what I'll do. And I know you want her back as badly as I do. So let's just get it over with. If we're both wrong and she turns up safe and sound tomorrow, I'll never let on.”

  The Mage had capitulated then, looking older than Skender had ever seen him. He also was trapped, pressured by law and custom and plain good sense to abandon his wife to her fate, yet hating the thought of it as much as Skender.

  “A city called Laure.”

  “Where?”

  “On the Divide.”

  His stomach clenched. “Don't tell me! She wouldn't be so stupid. Would she?”

  His father neither nodded nor shook his head. “Your mother may be many things, Skender, but stupid isn't one of them. She claimed to know what she was doing. All I could do was believe her.”

  Skender couldn't credit what he was hearing. Many dangerous things had walked the Earth since the Cataclysm and the early days of the Change. Most of them came from—or had been herded into—the Divide, a vast crack across the landscape separating the underground desert cities of the Interior from the coastal villages of the Strand. Deeper and wider than an ordinary canyon, the Divide had been made centuries ago for purposes unknown. Many people had died in the attempt to plumb its mysteries. Their ghosts, legends said, wailed in despair from the cliff faces, echoing from one side to the other. Trapped forever.

  He tore his mind from the image of his mother caught in such a trap and found himself standing in the middle of his father's chambers with his hands hanging limply at his sides. He felt as though he had woken in the middle of sleepwalking.

  His father's hand came down on his shoulder. He looked up into the Mage's face, for once not resentful of the fact that their heights weren't equal. It felt good to be towered over. He longed to be held, as though that alone would solve everything.

  “You'll need these,” his father said, pressing something cold and sharp-edged into his hand.

  He looked down at a ring of keys. “The buggy?”

  “I can't give you anything else. The Synod won't support a rescue mission; I've tried to make them, and they won't listen.”

  “But—”

  “Go now. Forget about your homework. Some things are simply more important.”

  More important than homework? That the idea had ever occurred to his father, let alone issued from his mouth, impressed on Skender just how serious the situation was. He hurried to his room, threw everything he thought he might need into a satchel, and ran to where the buggy rested in its makeshift garage. It was fully fuelled and provisioned for a long journey. The smell of fresh oil was testimony to the fact that it had recently been serviced.

  As he swung himself into the seat and started the engine, he realised that his father had been thinking of going himself.

  “I'll bring her home,” he whispered over the roaring of the motor. “Don't worry.”

  That promise had kept him going for two thousand kilometres, across desert and ancient hills, to where Laure crouched like a child playing hide-and-seek in a corner of the Divide, with only the tips of its tarnished towers peeking into view.

  “So you followed her trail to where the porters left her,” Chu said over the lip of a tiny, porcelain cup. Coffee as black and potent as any Skender had tasted left black grains on her teeth. Around them, the walled New City bustled and blustered its way through the day. Robed traders hurried back and forth along constricted alleyways, their heads wrapped in white cloth. Animals clucked, brayed, or hissed through bars, muzzles, or harnesses. Cockroaches scuttled. Spindly, four-legged creatures with curling tails scampered up drains and through windows; some of them wore embroidered vests, signalling that they were pets. The sky above, visible through rips in the canvas shade angled over them, was a faded pale blue. Laure didn't appear to have seen rain for years. The air was dry, the cobbled road beside them parched; with water strictly rationed the stink of spices was strong in the air, covering the smell of unbathed humanity.

  Behind the general hubbub, Skender could hear the wailing of the city's ruling guild of red-robed weather-workers, the yadachi, as they exhorted the wind to bring
relief. They sat on thin, vertical poles high above street level, distant from everyday concerns. Skender knew that on certain days, when significant winds blew, giant pipes caught the superheated air and turned it into notes so low they were felt as much as heard. That music was silent for the moment. The only other melody he could detect in the city's babble was the mournful lay of a duduq, a double-reeded instrument that in skilled hands could make of every note a lament.

  “Then what?”

  “She went into the Divide,” he said, “at a natural pass called the Devil's Elbow, which is protected by charms against things trying to come up, not down. They camped at the top, and that's obviously where they argued about who was going to go and who wasn't. I found signs suggesting that the porters stayed for a while after she went down the pass. Maybe they genuinely waited for her to come back; maybe they waited barely as long as was decent. Either way, they left no tracks to suggest that they went after her, or that she came back that way later.”

  “Did you go down the pass?”

  He shook his head. “Her trail was old, and I didn't know what I'd be walking into. I followed the top of the Divide instead, heading northeast along the Interior side.” Even from the relative safety of the escarpment, he had felt on edge during that daylong journey. The far side of the Divide was kilometres away, and the yawning emptiness had tugged relentlessly at him. The buggy bounced over rough ground, following a faint track that hadn't been used for decades. Every bump seemed to twist the wheels toward the Divide. He gripped the steering wheel and concentrated on keeping his heading straight.

  At the same time, he looked for any sign of his mother and her expedition on the parched valley floor, dozens of metres below. The earth was pitted and scarred down there, as though an ancient battle had churned the soil and split the bedrock in thousands of places. Dust devils and heat distortions danced in the air above gaping rents, as capricious as ghostly birds. Fleeting glints of light drew his eye to shadowy clefts, but disappeared before he could see what made them. He was reminded of descriptions of the Broken Lands, where the earth lay in endless disorder, terrain of all sorts jutting into each other like a jigsaw puzzle dropped by a giant.

  Between the rents were sheets of startlingly smooth sand dunes, white, grey, and red. Some of them were hundreds of metres long, stretching like melted caramel along the centre of the Divide. On these sheets he saw tracks that might have been made by a reckless Surveyor and her party. Nowhere else did he see a single sign of human life.

  Then he had seen Laure, the walled city, and her destination had become obvious.

  “I don't know much about your home,” he said to Chu. “Laure is mentioned only briefly in the Book of Towers. Fragments three hundred and ten to three hundred and twenty-four tell of a town sundered by a great rending of the Earth. The story goes that each of the city's two halves thought the other was responsible, and they fought for years, causing still more damage to what remained. The war was won by the northern half, and the southern half soon fell into ruin.”

  “We call it the Aad,” said Chu. “It's an old word that means ‘disease’ or ‘bad luck.’ No one goes there. It's inhabited by creatures from the Divide now.”

  Skender nodded. That matched the Book of Towers, too. “What the book doesn't say about Laure is that it rests on a cave system—I could see the openings from further up the Divide.” The geography of Laure was complex, belying the simplicity of the tale. Laure cowered in a triangular dogleg of the Divide like a mouse backed into a corner. The ground it rested on had subsided in the distant past, most probably during the Cataclysm, so that the remains of the original settlement now clung to its sloping fringes. A new city had been built in the gutted centre of the hollow, the matching piece of which rested on the far side of the Divide—the Ruin Chu had called the Aad. A steep, forbidding wall cut a stark line around the side of Laure not protected by the steep slopes of the dogleg. Massive symbols painted on the outside of the Wall added to the protection granted by the sheer mass of stone. No one knew who had built it, but without it the city would be completely exposed to the Divide.

  To the left and right of the Wall, dotting the sheer cliff faces, gaping holes led deep underground. “I think my mother was heading for them, or was forced to hide in them by something unexpected.”

  “They're not just caves,” said Chu. “There are artificial tunnels, too. I've never seen them myself, but I've heard stories. They're bigger than anything we could've made, and were full of old metal a long time ago.”

  A shiver of dread mixed with excitement rushed through him. “I don't understand how you could be a miner and not have seen them. Isn't using the old tunnels and caves the obvious thing to do if you're digging underground?”

  “Right.” Again she smiled knowingly.

  “There's something you're not telling me,” he said to her, pushing his empty cup aside and leaning over the table. “You know where my mother is, don't you?”

  Brushing an errant strand of perfectly black hair from her eyes, she also leaned forward until they were less than a hand's span apart. “I think it's time we came to an arrangement, Skender Van Haasteren,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “You say you don't have much money, but that's not a problem. We can still do business. Agree, and I'll tell you why me being a miner doesn't have anything to do with old tunnels and caves. I'll also tell you why you're probably looking in the wrong place for your mother. Okay?”

  Skender was automatically suspicious. He thought of all the material things he had brought with him: the buggy; a small amount of money; an ornate metal clasp his mother had salvaged from a burial site excavated three years earlier, which he was too afraid to wear in the city in case it was stolen. There was nothing he would willingly part with.

  On the other hand, he needed to know where his mother might be, and he found that he enjoyed the company of this strange young woman. He could live with the risk of being screwed over in order to keep her around a little longer.

  He scratched his arm where his Blood Tithe had been taken on entry into the city. The small wound itched.

  “What do you want?” he asked her.

  “Something you take completely for granted,” she said. “And if you do it right, it won't cost you a thing.”

  “What?”

  “Freedom, Skender Van Haasteren.” Her dark brown eyes were bottomless. “You're my ticket, and I'm not letting go of you until you've delivered.”

  “Through the Change, we can connect far-flung places. We reach out with our thoughts and our senses; we send our bodies along Ways from one end of the Interior to the other. But where are those thoughts, minds, and bodies when they are in transit, if not in the actual world? They are in the Void Beneath.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 242

  “We don't know exactly what happened,” said Tom, perched awkwardly on a squat driftwood chair, periodically swigging from a second bottle of clear water. The first had gone in one long draught, as though he hadn't drunk properly for days. He had removed the outer layers of his robes, exposing a knee-length sky-blue tunic that looked almost new, and taken off his leather boots. His toes were long and clenched at the sandy floor of the workshop with instinctively sensual motions.

  Shilly listened to the story of what had happened to Highson Sparre, Sal's genetic father, with acid pooling deep in her stomach.

  “This is what we do know. Highson left the Haunted City one week ago. He chartered a ferry to the town of Gunida, on the coast. The captain of the ferry remembered Highson, even though he travelled under a false name. He brought a large amount of matériel with him, so the ferryman assumed he was a trader. In Gunida, he unloaded the boxes with the help of a local by the name of Larson Maiz. Maiz was known to be a member of the underground economy, a shady type who would do anything for money.”

  “Was?” repeated Sal. “Would?”

  Shilly had noticed the ominous use of past tense, too.

  “Maiz was found dead
the next morning. He'd been killed several hours earlier, after meeting your father.”

  Sal nodded, his face closed tight as it always was when he was most upset.

  “Go on,” he said. “Tell me why you think my father killed him.”

  Tom looked startled. “We don't think that at all. That is, we don't think Maiz's death was deliberate. It was an accident, a side effect. He was unlucky, probably.”

  “Do you know where Highson is now?”

  Another shake of his head. “Those who know him best have looked, but we can't find him anywhere. He appears to have vanished.”

  Vanished. The word dropped into Shilly like a stone down a well.

  “Just tell us what you know,” she told Tom, catching Sal's eye and making sure he understood. “You've come a long way to give us this information. We won't interrupt any more. I promise.”

  Sal nodded. Tom looked relieved.

  “At the second hour of the morning, one week ago,” he said, as though he had rehearsed it many times during his long trip to Fundelry, “Gunida was woken by the sound of the world tearing open.”

  Sal listened to Tom's account with mounting alarm. A tear in the world was exactly what he had been feeling on the beach. Not an explosive event, as Tom described it, but as a growing feeling of wrongness. It seeped into him from the edges of his life and crept slowly to his heart.

  The residents of Gunida had staggered from their beds that night a week ago, terrified. The western sky was bright with light—a flickering, perfectly white glow so bright it cast shadows from chimneys, trees, and outstretched hands. A few brave souls dared to follow it to its source, thinking it lay on the outskirts of town, but it was in fact much further. Barely had the intrepid group travelled two kilometres through dense scrub and low, anonymous hills when the light went out. A thunderclap rolled across the land, shaking trees, knocking off hats, and sending dogs cowering under verandahs. A terrible silence fell in its wake.