The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  “I still dream of drowning,” said Sal.

  “Sometimes,” said Tom with a shrug, “a dream is just a dream.”

  By the dimmed light, the route was difficult to make out. Tom drove slowly, skirting wide cracks that led to their left into the depths of the giant canyon. They passed four hides in various stages of assembly. More than one warden was sleeping while the others worked on the construction of the hides, intending to swap roles later.

  Tom kept a close eye on the odometer. When they reached the required distance, they chose a hollow in which to park the buggy. Shilly tied the canvas over the buggy while Sal and Tom worked on the hide's framework.

  The night was cold and quiet. With the black emptiness of the Divide at her back, seeming to watch her, and the memory of the mysterious black crescent in the sky still strong in her mind, she worked as quickly as her stiff leg would allow.

  With barely an hour left before dawn, their hide was ready. Tom took both headlights off the buggy and turned them down to mere glimmers. The three of them assumed crouched positions behind the low, dirt-coloured shield and settled back to wait. They were right on the lip of the escarpment, tucked behind the first of several rough steps leading down to a very long fall. The chances of taking a tumble were small, but Shilly was acutely aware of the drop so close at hand. Whether she would feel better or worse at dawn, with the awesome expanse of the Divide revealed, she didn't know.

  “So how does this work?” she asked, producing the glass sphere from her pocket. It was as wide as her palm and perfectly clear. She could see through it without distortion.

  “You hold it like this,” said Tom, taking it from her and gripping it tightly between both hands, one on top of the other, “and you twist.” He mimed the motion. “All the balls will glow in response. Each of us has a unique colour. Marmion and the others will know if we're the ones who sound the alarm.”

  “Assuming the Change is working when we try it,” said Sal.

  “That's what these are for.” Tom gave the globe back to Shilly, and picked up one of the two flares Marmion had assigned them. “These couldn't be easier. You just break the seal on one end and point it at the sky. You might want to cover your eyes while you do it.”

  Shilly was in no hurry to test the theory. “I don't suppose Marmion told you who has been assigned what colours for the spheres.”

  Tom and Sal shook their heads.

  “Of course not.” She sighed and leaned against the dirt and rock. “He wouldn't want us to know who else got lucky. That would make too much sense.”

  “I could go and ask,” said Tom, already moving to stand up.

  Sal grabbed the back of his robe before he could take a step. “Don't worry about it. I'm sure we'll hear if something happens.”

  Shilly thought of the scream Larson Maiz had let out when the Homunculus had frightened him to death, and hoped the rest of the night would go undisturbed.

  Dawn came, daubing the world with yellow and orange hues. The Divide gaped behind the hides, achingly ancient, scarred by the relentless passage of time and weather. There was no sense to be found in its geography. Deep creases pockmarked its steep sides. Strange, wandering gullies traced almost-legible lines across its edge-most floor, where water running down the cliff faces during monsoon rains pooled and spread. Its heart was cracked and parched. Relentless winds carried red sand in waves over features that could have been ruins, or just slabs of tilted, baked clay, broken by unknown forces in the distant past. Dunes taller than a house made their way down the centre of the great rift valley, their stately progress measured in decades.

  Heat haze made details dance crazily in the distance. Sal saw movement everywhere he looked. He turned his back on the view, interested in neither illusions nor the Wall and towers of Laure. He failed to make the connection between the dots circling those towers and the thing Shilly had seen in the night. He had more important things to consider.

  If Kail was right, his real father was approaching. That possibility—and his conversation with Banner about the Divide and the man he had thought was his father—brought back numerous memories. He knew of Highson's existence and the truth about his parentage just a few weeks before meeting the stranger who claimed him as a son. Their first encounters had been terse and full of unspoken emotion. Sal had never been able to see Highson as more than the focus of his loss and grief, of his anger and frustration, until on a dark night in the Haunted City, when every hope seemed lost, a subtle transformation took place, and Highson Sparre suddenly became a real person.

  “You'll never win, Sal,” he had said that night. “You can hate me as much as you like, but you'll never defeat me. Do you really think you could, with all the might of the Conclave and the Alcaide and the Strand itself behind me?” The words were burned into Sal's mind, so tightly bound up in anger and grief that he could never possibly forget them. “You can try to escape again if you want to, and I have no doubt you'll find another way, in time, with similar consequences. But you'll never truly succeed. I will always haunt you, as long as you live. As you burn out in a blaze of something that might have been glory but ends up stifled and turned back on itself in frustration, you'll remember this moment, and you'll wish you'd listened.”

  Sal's real father had stared down at him crouched on a cobbled street, his gut aching and his mouth burning with bile.

  “Hear me out, or die fighting me. For that is surely what will happen. The decision is yours.”

  “All right,” Sal had said, knowing that Highson was the haunted one, not Sal. “Let's finish this. Tell me what you want me to hear and get out of my way.”

  Something like relief appeared in his real father's face, mixed with fear. The resemblance between them was slight, but their voices were identical. So was their stubbornness.

  “I didn't kill your mother. I loved her.”

  “You keep saying that—”

  “Because it's true, Sal. She was so easy to love: so beautiful, so full of life. When she said she wanted to leave me, I was grief-stricken. I'll admit that I didn't know what to do. I had hoped that she would come to feel the same about me, in time, but her betrayal made me see that this would never happen. I couldn't live with a woman who was in love with my friend's journeyman, no matter how discreetly we maintained our affairs. But how could I let her go when her family and mine forbade the divorce?”

  “So you hunted her down when she escaped, and you dragged her off against her will. You're not telling me anything I don't already know.”

  “How do you know it was me?”

  “What? Of course it was you!”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Lodo said you led the sweep across the Strand when they first escaped. He was there, he said, when it happened.”

  “That's right; he was. And what else? Did Dafis tell you anything about me?”

  “He said that you took my mother from me.”

  “Unless he actually saw me do it, how could he be so certain?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “All the difference in the world, Sal, because it wasn't me. It was my aunt. The Syndic.”

  “So? That's the same thing.”

  “It's not. Don't be an idiot, Sal! Think!” Sal remembered the urgency and hurt in Highson's voice. It transfixed him, kept him listening when every instinct had screamed that he was being lied to again. “Seirian and Dafis loved each other, as much as I loved Seirian. I could see that clearly. They were determined to be together despite the ruling of everyone involved. Such defiance was destined to cause trouble. It was always going to end in disaster, whichever way it went. I decided that I wouldn't contribute to it. I wouldn't put her through hell on my account. My happiness was secondary to hers.

  “I heard about their plan to escape. They had friends who stole a buggy and planned to smuggle them out of the city on a supply ferry. I aided them without them knowing, using my contacts to make sure they weren't seen at either end. I hel
ped them, Sal. I didn't get in their way. The search party: yes, I led that—but I had to in order to hide my complicity in their escape. I did everything I could to lose the scent. I let them get away. I allowed them a life together.

  “Or so I thought. That should have been the end of it. I didn't reckon on the power of revenge. My aunt was humiliated by the whole affair; that I had lost the taste for politics only rubbed salt in the wound. She maintained the chase, and she succeeded where I had deliberately failed. She snatched Seirian from the man you call your father, and robbed you of a mother. She brought back to me the woman I loved—the woman I had hoped never to see again, although I longed for her with all my heart.

  “You can probably guess the rest. Returned against her will, Seirian never believed that I willingly let her go, although I think she knew at the end how I felt for her. Seirian's death was a tragic accident I would happily give anything to undo, including my own life. She died alone, with neither the man she loved nor her child by her side. My part in that tragedy wasn't as great as the Syndic's, but guilt still consumes me. I am trying to atone for it now, Sal, if you'll only let me.”

  Stunned by the revelation, by the pain he saw naked before him, Sal could only say, “I don't believe you.”

  “Still? What do I have to do to convince you?”

  “If it was true, you'd let me go.”

  “Exactly.”

  And he had. He had helped him and Shilly escape the Syndic and hide in Fundelry, where they could live their lives together in peace.

  “It's stupid, I know,” Highson had said. “You're my chance to redeem myself. If I can't—couldn't save your mother, then I can at least save you.”

  But that wasn't all his real father had told him that night. The rest of it ached in him like a wound—like the Divide ached behind him in the vast brown land. A part of him had never come to terms with the revelations and rifts in his life five years earlier, and he was afraid to probe too deeply into that torn and empty space. Who knew what had festered in there all this time? Who knew what new surprises might emerge?

  After years of solitude and a wild race across the Strand, Sal was about to come face to face with Highson Sparre again, and with Highson's other dangerous creation…

  Shilly shifted into a more comfortable position beside him, her dark skin soaking up the sunlight. At some point in the dawn light she had doodled in the dirt a fair representation of Kail and Marmion arguing nose to nose; Marmion's wispy hair became a prideful comb-over and Kail's nose possessed a menacing angle Sal had never noticed before. Tom was obeying orders with single-minded determination, but Shilly was clearly bored, and Sal had quickly grown tired of staying alert. He was relying more on the Change than his material senses to tell him if something was approaching.

  Flies stirred, bothering him only when they crawled across his mouth. What they fed on so close to the Divide he didn't know—or want to know—but as long as they didn't bite him, he could tolerate their presence. They appeared to be the only living thing for dozens of kilometres, although Sal knew that wasn't true. Even the deepest desert was full of life; sometimes dormant, like seeds waiting to blossom into flowers after monsoonal rain, but often as active as anywhere else. Hunters hunted; prey fled; scavengers prowled the grey areas in between. The Change flowed through them all.

  The Change told him what he needed to know.

  He felt the same as he had on the beach, only three days earlier. Something was on its way. The earth shuddered at its step, and the air recoiled from its skin. What it was, he didn't know, but there was no avoiding it—or the person accompanying it.

  A nagging sense of familiarity touched him. He raised himself up onto his elbows and peered through the slit in the hide. Low brown clouds billowed to the northeast. A lone squiggle danced on the horizon; he couldn't decide if it was a dead tree warped by heat haze or someone walking towards them across the desolate landscape.

  The feeling of imminence grew stronger. He reached out to touch Shilly, and she shivered wordlessly. She felt it, too, through him. It didn't feel like Highson as Sal remembered him, but time had passed and the strange Change-eating effects of the Homunculus could have interfered with his signature. There was no one else who knew Sal for hundreds of kilometres. It had to be him.

  The anticipation became acute; he felt as though a twisting cord was about to snap inside him. He tensed, ready to spring in any direction, and didn't take his eyes off the landscape.

  A bird wheeled high above the stony ground, circling gracefully in the rippling air. It caught his gaze and held it. He wished he could soar over the earth like that. It would, he thought, certainly make looking for the Homunculus that much easier.

  When the bird suddenly twisted in midair and dropped like a stone, he realised his mistake. It wasn't a bird, and it wasn't his father he had been sensing.

  With a cry of alarm, he leapt to his feet and burst out from cover.

  “All life is composed of three basic elements—flesh, mind, and the Change—balanced to varying degrees and in varying ways. Humans consist of minds that live in bodies of flesh; golems are minds composed of the Change. We use the Change to alter the world; golems and other creatures use vessels of flesh to become part of the world, to wreak their havoc and mayhem upon us.”

  MASTER WARDEN RISA ATILDE: NOTES TOWARD A UNIFIED CURRICULUM

  He'd had better days, Skender thought. The previous night, after a landing he preferred not to remember, and a shot of araq that was even worse, he and Chu had quickly parted. There had, however, been the tiniest of hesitations at the hostel as she left. He had frozen solid while saying goodnight, thinking that she might be waiting for him to kiss her. And part of him had wanted to. The exhilaration of flying together was still thrilling through him, even in his exhausted state. His heart pounded.

  But he had never kissed anyone before and didn't know what to do. What if he had misjudged the moment? What if she wanted nothing more from him than a chance to get her licence back? What if she thought he was nothing but a geeky kid?

  The moment was gone as soon as it came. She wished him sweet dreams, inscrutable as ever, and he had kicked himself all the way upstairs to his room.

  Over the araq, Chu had extracted a promise that he would meet her at the launch tower half an hour before dawn. Urtagh the landlord pounding on Skender's door at the appointed hour showed him just how much faith she had in his promises. But that was fair enough, he thought, as he'd been dreaming of the Keep's winding corridors at the time, and probably would have slept all day given the chance. He had leapt into his clothes and run to the tower, pausing only to wash his face and clean his teeth. His hair simply wouldn't flatten, no matter how he tried.

  She had been waiting on the second platform with the wing extended, looking exactly as he had last seen her, minus the bags under her eyes. The last vestiges of sleep fell from him.

  “Do you ever wash that uniform?”

  “Are you ever on time?”

  Her crotchetiness made him wonder if he'd imagined her hesitation the previous night. “I presume you have the licence.”

  “Of course.” She waved the tattered-looking envelope. “Let's get it on you and into the air.”

  She had showed him how to apply the charm, letting the black skinlike sheath slide against chest and throat. It did the rest of the work, melting onto him like chocolate into hot milk. Again he experienced a strange blindness as the licence interfered with his normal sight. Then his eyes had cleared and the wind had returned.

  It was strange, he thought. When taking off the licence the previous evening, it had come as a relief to see the world properly again, and overnight he had almost forgotten what it was like to see the city and its atmosphere as intertwined things, one wrapped around the other. As soon as the charm took root, however, the new sense it provided felt as natural as breathing. He was a creature of the air again.

  They had strapped each other in and moved stiffly to the edge of the platform
. Skender's muscles ached from the previous night's exhaustion, and the thought of more exercise wasn't a pleasant one, but his mother was out there somewhere, lost in the Divide, and he had to find her.

  They launched in unison out into the crisp dawn light, accompanied by a yadachi's wailing exhortation for rain. The winds of the morning were turbulent and fresh. His cheeks instantly numbed in the cold, but the growing strength of the sunlight soon thawed them. Together, with his eyes and her skill, they negotiated the towers of the city and swooped over the Wall into the giant canyon.

  It was very different during the day. Skender couldn't decide if the vastness of the Divide increased or decreased with the ability to see it, and if he was more scared or less. It was difficult to grasp the size of it. Hanging over its jumbled middle, either side was blurry and indistinct.

  “Where do you want to start looking?” Chu asked him, all business.

  Skender hadn't truly appreciated just how big a task he was taking on. He could discern nothing in the ravaged landscape to indicate where his mother might have gone.

  “The Aad,” he said, clutching at the only clue he had. “You said there were tunnels under the other half of the city. Let's try there first. Maybe we'll see some sign of their passage.”

  “Maybe.” She tilted the wing and they tacked against a steady stream of air to approach the Ruin from the north. The sky seemed infinite above and around them. He was hanging over an enormous bowl with a V-shaped crack in it. The arms of the V diverged southwards, ahead of him, into the hazy distance.

  “What are they?” he asked, pointing at a white line on the very limits of visibility.

  “The Hanging Mountains,” she said. “My family came from there, generations ago. They say people there fly all the time, gliding from tree to tree on wings made of spider web. Balloon-cities hang tethered from the branches, swaying in the breeze. Fog forests hide in the mist, only fully visible at noon.”