The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  Skender waited for an answer, but none came. Sal's breathing became slower and more regular. He was already asleep.

  “Right,” Skender said to himself. “No point in sticking around, then.”

  Leaving the bottle of water by his friend's side, he steeled himself to explore the eerie and potentially Homunculus-infested Ruin. Outside, he took a moment to note every detail of the location of their hiding place; good as his memory was, he knew it would be difficult finding his way back in the dark. The cliff obscured a fair proportion of the night sky, including the moon. It was hard to see even the ground beneath his feet.

  He set out slowly and cautiously, picking his way through the rubble with exaggerated care. It wouldn't do to trip and twist his ankle. He had no clear destination in mind, and gravitated to the central watchtower by default. As the largest extant structure, it was the obvious place for someone to hide, although being the obvious place rendered it the least likely to contain anything hidden. Still, Skender reasoned, he had to start somewhere. Who knew what he would stumble over along the way?

  It seemed to take him forever to navigate the cramped, littered streets, even though they gradually became less buckled. The buildings around him stood taller and firmer. He tried to keep the sound of his footfalls to a minimum, but they echoed back at him with crystalline, startling clarity. He froze at the slightest noise, listening for footsteps other than his own. All he heard was the pounding of his heart and the faint whispering of wind across jagged stone.

  As the tower grew taller over him, he imagined dark faces staring at him from its round windows, and the ghosts of the Haunted City came, unwelcome, to his mind. Those bodiless spirits were confined forever to their ancient towers, able to escape only with the assistance of people on the outside—people like Shilly, and Sal's mother, who invariably paid a terrible price for their effort.

  He shuddered, remembering the Homunculus at its most horrific, its four arms extended to attack Marmion and its face a writhing mass of eyes, mouths, and noses. The image had been easy to keep at bay during daylight hours, but the darkness encouraged it. Every time he turned, he expected to see that hideous visage about to leap on him.

  A disease; bad luck; inhabited by creatures of the Divide…

  Finally he stood at the base of the tower. Ten storeys high and broad enough to park several buggies, it seemed much larger than the natural cliff behind it. A single rectangular entranceway, twice his height and width, gaped open to the night air. If there had ever been doors, they were long gone. Skender tracked delicate carvings along the lintel—vines, perhaps, or snakes—but couldn't see well enough to make them out.

  He still possessed a very faint sense of the Change. The heart of the sink couldn't be the tower, for otherwise no potential would remain at all. With a feeling of invading a tomb, he walked nervously into the shadow of the tower's interior and looked around.

  No lights burned within, and it took his eyes a long time to adjust. There was no sign of occupation by human or animal or anything else. A rotting spiral staircase led up to the next floor and down to a basement. Skender was unwilling to explore in either direction, for the moment. There were other places to look before he would be forced to such extremes of courage. There could be anything in the depths beneath the tower—a mausoleum, perhaps, lined with bodies he couldn't see, only touch—and the upper floors could be structurally unsound.

  He ventured as far as he dared into the suffocating blackness, then hurried out into the cool night air and took several deep breaths.

  From far across the black gulf of the Divide, the navigation light at the top of Observation Tower winked at him over Laure's protective Wall. The previous night, when he had soared over the city lights for the first time, seemed weeks ago. He longed to be in his bed in the hostel with the sheet over his head. His belly ached for a decent meal.

  Stone clicked against stone in the darkness, away to his right. He held his breath and retreated into the doorway. It could have been perfectly innocent, but he intended to take no chances. The night was thickening around him. Anything could be stirring.

  He saw nothing and the sound wasn't repeated. But his stomach rumbled again, drawing his attention to the fact that the night smelled different. The faintest hint of smoke tainted the crisp night air.

  Where there was smoke, Skender told himself, there had to be something to burn. And he had seen barely a stick in his exploration of the Divide. Whatever was burning must have been brought into the Aad, and the thing that had brought it was probably nearby.

  He followed his nose away from the tower. The source of the smell proved difficult to trace. Sometimes he felt he was getting closer only to lose the smell entirely down a side street. Other times, when it faded almost to vanishing and he was on the point of giving up, it came heavily on the breeze from another alley or archway.

  His nose led him to the western edge of the city, on the far side from where he and Sal had arrived. The smell was definitely stronger, although its source remained hidden. It wasn't wood smoke, he thought, or tobacco; coal, perhaps, or another solid fuel. His gut tied itself in knots at a faint tang of frying that joined with the smoke in the air. Meat and toast! If the growling of his stomach didn't alert every Homunculus and man'kin for a dozen kilometres, he would be amazed.

  Then, distantly, came the sound of voices. He slowed to a creeping pace as he approached the ruins of a building jutting from the base of the cliff. The door and windows were open to the night air, so he could tell that no one was inside, but his nose and ears insisted that both the fire and people lay within. Barely daring to breathe, he inched through the main door and tiptoed along the entranceway. Debris crunched under his feet, and he shushed it nervously. The voices grew louder as he explored deeper into the house where it bit into the cliff face. There, next to a room that must once have been a kitchen but was now stale and empty, he found an enormous ballroom. Or so it seemed to him, with little more than a glimmer of starlight and faint echoes to measure its extent by. Parts of the ceiling had fallen in; rubble lay everywhere. In the shadows on the far wall, he made out four wide fireplaces, each as large as his bedroom in the Keep.

  Three of them had collapsed. The fourth was the source of the smoke. The fire wasn't, however, burning on the cold grate. Both the voices and the smoke were coming from above him. Skender stood in the fireplace and looked up. Far over his head, the chimney kinked suddenly to the left. Yellow light flickered.

  The lyrics to a bawdy song about a tavern girl called One-Legged Meg echoed incongruously down the chimney. The singer didn't sound like the Homunculus. Faint jeers accompanied the tune. Someone barked a command and the song ceased midchorus.

  There were people in the Aad. Skender knew he should go back to Sal, but one last thing held him back. At the top, opposite the hole through which the light issued, he made out a hook similar to the one at the top of the cliff. That explained how people came and went through the fireplace—but, once again, any attempt by him to go up there was stymied. If he and Sal could find or make a rope of some kind, he thought, they might be able to throw a loop over the hook and haul themselves up.

  He turned to go, and heard a noise echo through the empty ballroom. It sounded like a footstep.

  Time to get out of here, he told himself, creeping from the fireplace with steps so soft he felt he was floating on air.

  “You make noise enough to shift the bones of the dead!” boomed a voice out of the darkness.

  His fright was so great he actually squeaked.

  The voice laughed. “That's it, my lad. Hold perfectly still. You've seen enough of the city for one night, I think.”

  Skender smelled someone large and male coming out of the darkness, arms spread wide to capture him. His paralysis broke. He ducked and ran for the door, feet scrabbling on dirt. His would-be captor laughed again but made no move to follow. Only as Skender reached the door did he realise why.

  A foot kicked out of the darkness a
nd tripped him before he sensed a second person waiting for him. He fell heavily and skidded across the floor, into a wall. Stars exploded behind his eyes. He tried weakly to right himself and to run but was too slow and stunned. Strong hands went over his mouth and under his left armpit. With a grunt of effort, his captor lifted him up and carried him away.

  “In cultures where blood is valued, the dead are frequently drained of fluids before interment. The liquid remains are preserved in perpetuity by any means available: in ornate vials, sacred ponds, vaselike reliquaries, or even private lakes; or, where water is not readily available, the remains may be carefully dried and placed in urns, for even dust retains a measure of potency.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 28:9

  “Flash your headlamps,” said Chu, leaning over Banner's shoulder as they approached the city Wall. “That way they'll know we're not ghosts.”

  The vast expanse of stone threw the sound of snarling engines back at them as the convoy approached. Surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs and the Wall ahead, she was already feeling closed in. The renewed threat of the man'kin—a second wave coming in from the east—lent the situation an urgency that was alarmingly real. If the Laureans didn't let them through in time, they would be caught between sentient rocks and a very hard place.

  The warden followed Chu's suggestion. The lower lines of giant charms reinforcing the Wall's mighty stone blocks stood out sharply when the light returned. Giant circles overlapped squares and triangles with bold, thick strokes in a variety of colours, combining to form a single, sprawling pattern. She could see where other, now faded, signs had once done the same job but been painted over down the years. Their intricacies appealed to her.

  Far above her, at the summit of the enormous stone edifice, a light flashed back.

  “Well, that's a start,” Chu said. She didn't sound especially relieved. They had tried attracting the attention of flyers far above, but Shilly couldn't tell how successful they had been. The closer Chu got to the city, the more nervous she became. “Keep going, right up to the base of the Wall, and let's see what they do.”

  “Is there a chance they won't let us in at all?” asked Banner.

  “A small one,” Chu admitted. “It's not as if people come this way very often. At all, actually; the usual entrance is on the far side of the city. I don't know what they'll make of us.”

  “Great,” said the warden. “You could've told us this before we left.”

  “It didn't seem relevant. Given time, I'm sure we can convince them.”

  Shilly glanced behind her, unable to make out the man'kin on their tail through the headlights of the buses. Time was something they definitely didn't have much of.

  The buggy bounced over a series of deep ruts in the baked-hard earth then skidded to a halt in front of the Wall. A cloud of dust enveloped them as Banner swept the beams of the headlights across the impeccable stonework. Mighty grey slabs formed a vertical, mortarless barrier that curved for a hundred metres on either side. It seemed to bulge inward, but Chu assured her that it looked the same on the far side. The Wall was thickest, therefore, where it met the sides of the Divide, and thinner—relatively speaking—in the middle. She wondered if it was hollow. The top was too far away to make out in the darkness.

  “Over there,” said Tom, pointing, the first to notice the gate. Banner accelerated for it, jerking Shilly back into her seat. The gate was an unprepossessing metal hatch three metres square with hinges that looked strong enough to withstand the end of the world. A circle with an X through it stood out in faded red paint.

  Red, thought Shilly: the colour of ancient deserts and Stone Mages. The colour of blood.

  A shiver of apprehension went through her at the thought of the Blood Tithe.

  Chu jumped out of the buggy as soon as it came to a halt. Tom and Banner weren't far behind. Shilly limped stiffly after them, squinting in the brightness of the headlights focused on the forbidding portal.

  Chu banged on it. “Open up!” she cried. “Let us in!”

  There was no immediate reply from within.

  “Hello? I know you're listening. We haven't got all night!”

  The two buses chugged to a halt behind them, adding yet more light and dust to the scene.

  “What's going on?” asked Marmion, jogging up to them. “Why isn't the gate open?”

  “Give them a moment,” said Chu, shifting from foot to foot. “Someone must be on duty. They might have forgotten how to—”

  “STATE YOUR NAME,” boomed a voice from the hatch. Tom, who had been examining the hinges closely, jumped backwards into Shilly. She barely kept her balance.

  “My name is Chu Milang,” said Chu with a pained expression. The voice from the other side of the hatch was loud enough to physically hurt.

  “WHO? SAY THAT AGAIN.”

  “Stop shouting! I'm Chu Milang and I'm a miner. Check with the Magister if you don't believe me.”

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT THERE?” asked the voice at a slightly reduced volume. It seemed to be coming from the hatch itself.

  “Trying to get in. What do you think I'm doing? Open the door and let us through!”

  “I DON'T HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO DO THAT.”

  “Who does?”

  “MY SUPERVISOR'S ON HER WAY DOWN. YOU NEED TO TALK TO HER.”

  “Listen to me,” growled Marmion, elbowing his way through the crush. “I'm not going to stand here arguing over who has the authority to do what and who doesn't. My name is Sky Warden Eisak Marmion and I am on the business of the Alcaide. If you don't open this door right now, there will be consequences. Do you understand?”

  “I UNDERSTAND, SIR, BUT THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES IF I DO OPEN IT.”

  “You're not likely to be flattened by several hundred tons of stone. Open this door immediately or you'll have our deaths on your conscience!”

  Nothing happened for a moment. Shilly assumed that the gatekeeper had gone for advice. She could clearly picture him: a young, inexperienced functionary given a forgotten responsibility in order to keep him out of the way. He might have had his feet up on a desk somewhere, dreaming of promotion; he might even have been literally dreaming when their call came through. The promotion he desired probably hinged on what he did next, just as their lives did.

  “I think I can open it,” whispered Tom to Marmion.

  “Give him a moment,” said the warden in a loud voice. “I'm sure he'll see sense.”

  Ancient metal bolts clunked deep within the Wall. A faint layer of rust shook from the hatch. With a deep groaning sound, it swung open towards them. Shilly hopped out of the way as it picked up speed and slammed into the stone beside her. The crashing sound it made echoed for a full ten seconds.

  “Right,” said Marmion, his mood taking on a self-satisfied edge, “let's get out of harm's way.”

  The small crowd scattered. Rather than walk back to the buggy, Shilly stayed where she was, with Marmion. The open hatchway revealed a tunnel leading through the base of the mighty Wall. It was easily wide enough to accept the three vehicles, and they roared through without fanfare. Marmion waved Shilly ahead of him once the last bus was past, and then he followed.

  The Divide looked very dark without headlights to illuminate it. Shilly, looking back the way they had come, could barely make out the man'kin and the cloud they were kicking up. But she could hear their cries of frustration and anger.

  “Okay, you can close the hatch now,” Marmion called to the gatekeeper.

  “WHAT DID YOU SAY? IT'S HARD TO HEAR YOU FROM THE—”

  “Just close it!” he yelled.

  The heavy metal door creaked and swung solidly home. The boom seemed even louder in the close confines of the tunnel than it had outside.

  “WAIT THERE,” said the gatekeeper through the ringing in Shilly's ears. “DON'T GO ANY FURTHER.”

  The smell of burnt alcohol was thick in Shilly's nostrils. Marmion overtook her without a glance as she limped along the corridor.
It led to a large antechamber lit by a faded orange glowstone anchored in the high ceiling. That more than anything reminded Shilly that she was no longer in the Strand. She had crossed the Divide and entered the Interior for the second time in her life.

  Highson Sparre lay still and unresponsive in the back of the second bus. She wondered what he would think when he woke up and found himself on the other side of the world.

  “Chu!” The young flyer's head snapped up at the whip of command in Marmion's voice. He pointed at the far side of the room. “This road must lead somewhere. Take us. We're in your hands.”

  Chu looked as though she would rather have anything in her hands than Marmion and his demands. “Aren't we supposed to wait here?”

  A barrage of heavy blows rained on the hatch behind them. Marmion glanced at the tunnel, then turned back to Chu. “Do you know if that door can withstand the combined weight of a hundred man'kin or more?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, neither do I,” he said. “I'm not waiting here to find out.”

  “Hang on,” said Shilly, looking around at the gathered wardens. “Where's Kail?”

  “He stayed behind,” said Marmion.

  “What?” An image of Kail being squashed by the tide of man'kin flashed horribly through her mind.

  “He got off when we stopped on the Fool's Run, after the first attack. I ordered him to track Sal and Skender while we went on ahead.”

  “He didn't mention that to me.”

  A suspicious look crossed Marmion's face. “Should he have?”

  She turned away, face burning. Kail hadn't betrayed her, she told herself; he simply had to obey Marmion's orders.

  “No,” she said, already wondering what chance she had of convincing Marmion to go to the Aad without Kail to back her up.

  “Good. Now, no more talking.” His voice echoed dully in the large chamber as he addressed the group as a whole. “Let's be on our way. Chu, over to you.”

  He inclined his head to the young flyer and hurried back to his bus.