The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  “What are you doing here? Haven't you ever heard of the Surveyor's Code?”

  “Are you saying you don't want to be rescued?”

  “I'm not saying that at all.” Kemp thrust an arm through the metal grid separating them. “I just don't think you're in much of a position to make it happen.”

  Skender rose unsteadily to return Kemp's clasp. Kemp's hand was broad and very strong. Skender could see scrapes and cuts where he must have tried to free himself, to no avail. No amount of rough bluster could hide the intense worry in the albino's pale-as-glass eyes.

  After dumping him, dazed, in the dungeon with their other prisoners, Skender's captors had left him alone. It was easy to see why they wouldn't worry about him escaping. The dungeon had only one exit and no vents, the latter explaining its powerful smell. Two flickering gas lamps cast shadows that danced and writhed across the walls. There were ten cages, each secure enough to hold a full-sized man'kin, but only five were definitely occupied. The metal bars surrounding Skender on three sides were crosshatched and thick. The fourth side was a wall of solid stone, as were the floor and ceiling. The other cages currently contained Skender's mother, Kemp, and one other of her companions—the disgraced Sky Warden Shom Behenna, also unconscious. A stone bust that might have been Mawson leaned against the bars next to his mother, but the Change-sink enfolding the town had turned him back into dead stone. The rear of one of the corner cages was shrouded in darkness. Skender couldn't tell if it was empty or not.

  His mother hadn't moved since his arrival.

  “Is she all right?”

  Kemp's worried look deepened. “At first they thought Behenna was in charge, but she owned up after the first beating they gave him. The bastards. They're going easier on her, but it's all relative. I don't know how much more of this she can take.”

  Skender couldn't believe what he was hearing. Beatings?

  “Do you mean she might…?” He couldn't finish the sentence.

  “Either that,” Kemp said, “or she'll just tell them what they want to hear and take what comes next. They won't believe we're ordinary Surveyors. They think we're here to steal something from them.”

  Skender thought of his mother's mysterious mission. “Are you?”

  “Of course not. We didn't even know they existed until they ambushed us a week ago.” Kemp looked defeated and haggard. His pale skin was dirty and his colourless hair lank. He slumped heavily against the stone wall of the cell and sank down into a sitting position. “The leader is a prick called Pirelius. You don't want to get on his bad side. When Behenna tried to stand up for your mother, four days ago, they stopped feeding him. They smack him around occasionally, for the fun of it.”

  Skender looked at where the ex-Warden lay in his cage, two along from his. Shom Behenna had shaved his head and begun tattooing it in the style of a Surveyor. He, too, wasn't moving.

  “I do what I can to distract them,” said Kemp, “but they're not falling for it. They know that making me watch is just as bad as an actual beating. Worse, even. They probably know your mum won't talk but are hoping I might. If that doesn't work, they might try the other way around, with someone else. They're certain to, once they work out who you are.”

  A river of ice-cold water flooded through Skender's gut at the thought that he might be tortured to make his mother confess to something she wasn't guilty of.

  “We have to get out of here,” he hissed.

  “Tell me something I don't know.” Kemp rolled his eyes and nodded at the cage in shadow. “If the thing in there can't escape, I don't know how we can.”

  Skender turned to stare at the corner cage. The chill in his veins only intensified as he realised what it contained.

  “They brought it in a few hours before you,” Kemp explained. “Strangest thing I've ever seen.”

  “Was it awake?”

  “If it was, it wasn't moving. Not at first. It crawled into the shadows an hour or so ago.”

  “Have you tried talking to it?”

  “I don't know if it can talk.”

  Skender thought of Tom's warning. Find the Homunculus, and you'll find your mother. If you don't, you'll never see her again. Tom had been right on that score. Unfortunately, he hadn't said anything about being unable to escape afterwards.

  “It was talking just fine the last time I saw it.”

  He stuck one arm through the bars toward the corner cage, and waved it.

  “Hey,” he called. “Hey, you! You said you've met me before. Come out and talk to me, since we're such good buddies. We've got to get out of here!”

  Kemp shushed him. “Keep it down. They don't like it if we make too much noise.”

  “Don't they? Well, let's see them do something about it. Hey!” He whistled piercingly through two fingers. “Come out where I can see you and tell me who you are!”

  Something stirred at the very rear of the cage. That's it, thought Skender, as if he was talking to a nervous dog. There's a good boy. I won't hurt you.

  “What's all this racket?” snarled a rough voice from the doorway. Skender withdrew his arm as a surprisingly small man in leather pants strode into view. His moustaches hung in thin rattails, as did the fringe of hair above his neck and ears. His skin was a piebald mix of colours under a dense desert tan. Instead of tattoos, a mess of scars stretched up each arm and down his chest.

  “Eh?” Bulging eyes took in Skender as the man bent to pick up a long, wooden stick from the centre of the room. “The new pet raising a ruckus, is it?”

  Skender backed away as the stick came up and pointed at him through the crosshatched bars. It was easily three metres long with a split and splintered tip. He didn't want to think about the stains.

  “Leave him alone, you freak,” said Kemp.

  “That's fine coming from you, whiteskin,” Rattails jeered. “Shut up while I teach this young rabbit to behave.”

  “If you hit him, you'll regret it!”

  “Don't worry. You'll get yours, if you keep that up.”

  Rattails slipped the business end of the stick through the bars and rammed it forward, catching Skender hard on the shoulder. The blow was surprisingly powerful and painful. It knocked him spinning off his feet.

  “Are you going to be a good rabbit?” Rattails withdrew the stick and leered through the bars. “Or do I have to poke you again?”

  Skender blinked back tears of pain and humiliation. Rattails was just dying for him to talk back. Given the slightest excuse, he would beat Skender to a bloody pulp.

  “Pick on someone your own size,” said Kemp from the cage next door.

  “That's not the way it works, whiteskin.” Rattails raised the stick. “You should know that by now.”

  Skender thought of Chu saying: I can fight my own battles.

  He clambered to his feet, wincing as he moved his shoulder.

  “Ah, good. I like a moving target.”

  “That must be something of a novelty,” said Skender, “given your breath. Most of your prisoners must keel over as soon as you come into the room.”

  Rattails shifted his grip on the stick. His nostrils flared. Skender flinched as the stick jabbed at him again, aimed this time for his unprotected abdomen.

  The blow never fell. Kemp lunged through the bars of his cell and caught the stick in one hand. With a defiant roar, he used his superior weight and the bars between them as a fulcrum to lever the other end out of Rattails's hands. Before their jailer could snatch it back, he slid it out of reach and snapped it clean in two.

  “Hey!” Rattails glared at them both as Kemp slipped Skender half of the broken stick through the bars joining their cages. The albino hefted it like a spear and tested its jagged end.

  “Want to try to take it from me?”

  Rattails shook his head. “Rabbit thinks it's clever. Thinks it's got spirit.” A slow, cruel sneer spread across the face of their jailer. “I'll leave you two for Pirelius. I'm sure he'll have something to say about this, when he gets
back.”

  Rattails ran out of the dungeon with a sadistic leer. The scars down his back flexed like molten wax.

  “Well, that showed him.” Kemp threw the stick to the ground and sagged back against the wall. His words were brave, but his body language couldn't lie. Skender took no comfort at all from the heavy shaft of wood in his hands. As good as the defiant gesture had felt, they were still on the wrong side of the bars.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  Kemp shrugged. “Now's the time to tell me you didn't come here alone, that there's an army of Mages out there just waiting to attack.”

  Skender thought of Sal sleeping off his exhaustion in an empty building in the Aad. “Not exactly.” And if his mother couldn't find a way to penetrate the Change-sink shrouding the Aad, he had little chance of succeeding. “I think we'll have to see what happens.”

  Skender glanced at the corner cell, but the Homunculus had gone back to hiding in the shadows.

  “As relics of the past go, belief in god and the afterlife is perhaps the most quaint. They serve merely as distractions from the truth we all must accept: that this world and this life is all we have. Calling vinegar wine does not make it taste any better; such lies alter nothing and benefit no one at all.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 28:22

  Barely had Shilly fallen asleep, it seemed, when she was being shaken awake by a hand at her shoulder. She sat up, startled, unsure for a moment where she was.

  “Shilly,” said a voice she recognised as belonging to Warden Banner. “It's Sal's father. He's conscious.”

  It all came back to her then. She was in the hostel room she shared with two female wardens. They had checked into the Black Galah not long after meeting with the Magister. Instead of discussing their plans then and there, Marmion had ordered them all to bed. No one had argued. The drive to Laure had been long and exhausting and it didn't seem like anything else would happen that night.

  She hurriedly dressed. “Did Marmion call for me?”

  “No, but I knew you'd want to be there.” The dumpy warden put a finger to her lips and handed Shilly her walking stick. “Third door on the right. I wouldn't bother knocking.”

  Shilly hurried out of the room. The Black Galah wasn't a classy establishment by any stretch of the imagination, but it was sufficient to the wardens’ needs. The landlord, a swarthy, bottom-heavy man called Urtagh, had cleared the building to make room for the expedition and found parking spaces for the buggy and two buses. Skender's room was a tiny attic space at the end of one of the halls; Chu had said goodnight and disappeared into it immediately. Shilly was on the other side of the building, near the two communal bathrooms. The sound of pipes chugging through the night might ordinarily have kept her awake—after the endless quiet of the underground workshop in Fundelry—but exhaustion had quickly won out.

  She reached the door Banner had indicated. It wasn't locked. She could hear voices on the other side: Marmion's, insistent and demanding, and another that sounded exactly like Sal's. Her heart leapt to her throat.

  This was her chance to find out what manner of creature Highson had brought into the world. Ghost, golem, or something even worse?

  After a single deep breath, she lifted the latch and plunged inside.

  “What is the meaning—?” Marmion sank back into his seat on seeing who it was. “Of course. Wild camels couldn't keep you away.”

  She ignored him. “Hello, Highson,” she said to the man on the bed in the centre of the tiny room.

  Highson Sparre lifted his head. He wasn't a tall man, but he had a powerful presence. Even in a weakened state, wearing nothing but a soiled vest that was unlaced to his midsection and a sheet to cover his legs, he dominated the room. He had honey-coloured skin and hair that had once been pure black but was now mostly grey. Time had left his face lined with grief and determination. On seeing her, he reached out with one hand.

  “Shilly.” His voice was ragged but there was no denying the welcome in it.

  She took his hand and clutched it to her chest. Tears surprised her, and she held them back with difficulty. He looked so old.

  “Sal, too?” he asked.

  “He's off with Skender, otherwise he'd have been here now.”

  “You shouldn't have come,” he said, shaking his head. “You're putting yourselves in danger.”

  “You can talk,” she said, ignoring Marmion's mute frostiness. The warden sat on the far side of the bed, torcless and dishevelled. The wisps of his hair hung askew over one ear. Like Shilly, he had obviously been woken from a deep sleep.

  “You will talk, Warden Sparre,” he said, indicating that Shilly should pull up the remaining chair. “Do you see what your actions have done? This isn't just about you. One person is already dead. The next one might be a great deal more important to you than some Gunidan lowlife. Understand?”

  Highson put a hand over his eyes. Not to shade them, Shilly realised; the lantern flame on his bedside table was barely bright enough to cast a shadow. He was hiding tears of his own. A wave of grief radiated from him so powerfully that Shilly felt the strength give out in her bad leg. She sat down, feeling breathless and abruptly unsure that she wanted to know what had reduced Sal's father to such a state.

  “I'm not going to pretend,” he said with wavering voice, “that I can justify my actions. I know what I've done, who I've hurt. That's exactly why I'm here. In my own way, I'm trying to undo the hurt I've caused in the past. I was trying to make things better.”

  Marmion made an unsympathetic noise but didn't interrupt. Shilly held her walking stick tightly between her knees as Highson Sparre unburdened himself.

  “It started five years ago, when you were tricked by the ghost in the Haunted City.” Highson addressed Shilly, not Marmion. His eyes were sunken. “That was the first time we ever suspected that Sal's mother didn't die of natural causes. Seirian was a determined woman and she was trying to escape. A ghost tricked her into thinking it could help her. When she realised that she had been deceived and tried to stop the ghost from breaking free, the effort drained her dry. Her mind was lost into the Void Beneath, and her body slowly wasted away.”

  Shilly listened with her heart pounding hard. She remembered the ghastly visage of her own ghost as it had burst out of a silver mirror, embodied thanks to her ignorant efforts. It would have killed her as casually as squashing a bug once it had no need of her; but for Sal's cousin Aron she would be dead now, and many others with her.

  “What does this have to do with the Homunculus?” Marmion asked.

  “Patience.” Highson raised a hand. “I'll get there. First I need to tell you how it felt to know that the woman I loved had been murdered. If I had seen it coming and taken the appropriate steps, her death might have been avoided. I know she didn't love me the way she loved Dafis, but that wasn't the point. Her life had been ruined and her last hope of happiness snatched from her. That was worse, in a way, than losing her in the first place.

  “And there was more to come. Skender, Sal, and Kemp were trapped in the Void Beneath. Skender returned with stories about minds surviving in the Void. Lost Minds. People who end up in the Void don't die right away, it seems; they linger as long as their memories last. Only when they've forgotten who they are do they fade away forever. This was radical stuff. No one had caught a glimpse of the Lost Minds before. But it had the ring of truth—and Skender is a Van Haasteren, after all. If anyone was going to remember the truth, it would be him.”

  Minds surviving in the Void, Shilly echoed to herself. She had never heard anything about this before.

  “You believe the word of a troublemaking child,” said Marmion, “when it flies in the face of everything we know?”

  “What do we know, Eisak? Precious little.”

  “We call it a Void for a reason.”

  “Perhaps the wrong reason: there's an emptiness where knowledge remains to be found. If you don't believe me, follow it up with Master Warden Atilde or the Surveyor Iniga, w
ho also heard Skender's story. Or you can allow me to continue and let events speak for themselves.”

  Marmion didn't back down from the challenge, but he did indicate that Highson should go on.

  “The most important thing Skender told me was that someone helped them escape from the other Lost Minds. That person had forgotten her name, but she remembered losing a son. Skender thought it was Sal's mother. He told me, in effect, that Seirian might still be alive in the Void.”

  Shilly stared at him. Hearing a river of grief underlying his words, she began to see, then, where the story was going.

  “You tried to bring her back,” she said.

  “For five years—five awful years spent noting every reference to the Void I could find and hoping she wouldn't fade away before I came to her. There are dozens of ways into the Void, but no reliable ways out. Obviously there was no point me being trapped in there as well, although in the end I had to balance risk against effectiveness. Each time I tried to find her, I took a chance I might not come back.”

  “Each time?” asked Marmion. “How many times did you perform this dreadful experiment?”

  “Nine: five trial runs to make sure I was doing it right; four for real on the night itself. I returned intact each time, but with no memory of what had happened within the Void; every last trace had been naturally erased. I might have found Seirian, or nothing at all. There was only one way to tell.”

  “And that was to bring her out with you,” said Shilly, marvelling at the audacity and obsession that had led Highson to such extremes. Trawling the Void for a lost love—especially one who didn't reciprocate that love—was an unbearable kind of torture, and a work of magnificent madness, both. If it had worked, it would have offered hope for anyone who had lost friends or relatives in Change-related accidents. That it obviously hadn't worked only made it more tragic.

  “Her body was long dead,” Highson explained. “Her mind would need a vessel if it was to survive in this world. Some Stone Mages use the empty-minded as shells to save them travelling across the Interior, but there was no way that I could morally or logistically pursue that course. Seirian didn't have the training required; I couldn't very well steal a body and force her to take it; and who was I to put an innocent, if absent, person through such straits? I had to find another way around the problem.