The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  She told herself to take deep, even breaths and calm down. Sometimes, Tom had said, a dream is just a dream. She was taken to a seat at the front of the hall, settled down, and counted Sal's freckles to pass the time.

  “It seems clear to me,” said the Magister, perched on her throne in the centre of the hall like some twisted, arthritic crow, “that the failure here is yours, Warden Marmion. Failure to meet your Alcaide's expectations; failure to understand the nature of the thing you were sent to find; failure to safeguard your own people; failure even to keep yourself from harm…. The list is long. I open myself up to accusations of pettiness by focusing on the ways you failed to comply with the laws of this city, but it would be a failure on my part to do otherwise.”

  Her glittering green eyes scanned the accused, assembled before her. Chu, Gwil Flintham, and quartermaster had been frogmarched into the hall once the visitors took their seats. Skender's relief was palpable on seeing his friend. Shilly had waited for an audience to be led in after them, but the hearing was to be conducted entirely in private. She was glad of that, if little else.

  “No one would deny my dedication, Magister Considine,” Marmion said in reply. “Nor my determination.” His skin was like tallow, and Shilly feared he might collapse at any moment. Yet he persevered, sitting through the many witness statements and questions as though nothing could move him. “My record is not untarnished, but that can be said of many here. If I have failed, I have paid the price for it.” He raised his bandaged arm, then lowered it back into its sling. “We each have our path to follow. I ask only that you let me follow mine.”

  Shilly felt a new appreciation for the man at those words. He knew exactly what had happened to him at the base of the Wall. Skender, Shilly, and Sal had come directly between him and the objective of his mission—to destroy the Homunculus. In doing so, they had crippled him for life, yet not once had he accused them of malice or carelessness. He had simply, and silently, pushed through his irritation to some deep reserve of character she hadn't seen before.

  She, crippled in a simple car accident, had blamed Sal for weeks.

  “Do what you want to yourself,” the Magister asked. “That is your prerogative. Can I, however, in good conscience set you free to wreak havoc upon those who will next cross your path?”

  “With respect, Magister, the man'kin would have breached the Wall whether we were here or not. The flood would have come irrespective of our actions. It is not, therefore, I who brought havoc to your city. One could even argue that the greatest threat to Laure came about because of your actions, not mine.”

  The Magister's expression didn't change, but Shilly felt the air in the hall become distinctly frosty.

  “How so?”

  Marmion sighed, his weariness showing. “This charade pains me. Must I remind you of the contents of the letter I gave you, the first time we met?”

  “Of course not. I am far from senile. It contained an unsubtly worded warning from your Alcaide that trade between my city and the Strand depended entirely on his goodwill. Were he to remove it because I failed to treat his emissary with respect, we would suffer.” The Magister's fingers stroked the head of her black cane. “I endured this blackmail with more dignity than it deserved. Its efficacy has expired.”

  “Indeed.” Marmion's expression betrayed no suggestion that his bluff had been successful. The contents of the letter had truly been unknown to him, prior to that moment. “I therefore propose that we reach a new agreement. I won't tell the Alcaide—or the citizens of your city—where the goods he purchased actually came from, and you will let us leave unhindered.”

  The Magister laughed. “Let's not tangle our tongues around the truth. Pirelius was a fool, but a convenient one. You're a fool, too, if you think you can use him against me.”

  “Why not? Your puppet in the Aad, who kept you supplied with artefacts too dangerous for your own miners to retrieve or steal, was a brutal, sadistic monster. There are several people in this room who can and will testify to that effect, on both sides of the Divide.” Marmion indicated Skender's mother and her crutches, Kemp with a bandage around his throat, Skender's many bruises, and the smouldering trauma of Shom Behenna.

  “We make what alliances we can, Marmion. Laure hovers on the threshold of viability. We do not have the choices or resources you do, in more prosperous lands.”

  “That I can understand. But to abandon this ally of yours the moment he comes under threat—how does that look? You may not have caused the circumstances by which his miniature empire crumbled, but you certainly didn't help him out of them. You threw him to the flood with casual contempt.”

  “That was all he deserved. He was a monster, as you say.”

  “It's the principle that counts, Magister.”

  For the first time, the Magister's confident mien seemed to crack. She shifted awkwardly on her throne and tapped her cane on the granite at her feet. All traces of her half-smile vanished.

  “I rule by virtue of my ability,” she said, “not my popularity.”

  “Both are being tested, Magister Considine. There's no denying that the yadachi saved Laure when the aquifer beneath it drained dry. No one would gainsay you that. But you've been isolated too long, and become too comfortable apart from the world. Now, with water flowing in the Divide, Laure may no longer be so marginal. New leaders will arise with new skills. Will the city remember the one who saw it through the long drought? Or will its citizens remember only the mistakes she made as the old world transformed into the new? Will they come to view her bloodworkers as saviours, or as leeches sucking the life out of their new prosperity?”

  “Empty rhetoric, Marmion. Get to the point, if you have one.”

  “It all contributes, Magister. The world is coming to Laure, whether you want it to or not. Events here have overtaken your regime. Your substantive crime, as I see it, is to have ignored the plight of an expedition of Surveyors from Ulum. You knew Abi Van Haasteren was in trouble, and you must have suspected that your ally Pirelius was responsible. You could have intervened at any time to have her released, but you did not. You put her life and the lives of those with her in jeopardy. You even blocked me when I tried to mount a rescue expedition, for fear of your petty deal being exposed. You hid behind the Surveyor's Code like the coward you are. This is a charge that will stick when it comes before the Stone Mage Synod—which tolerates the existence of your yadachi in its territory, but does not love it. Could your authority survive such an affront? Who would trade with you then, when you treat your allies with utter disregard—even contempt? When you allow your greed to overpower all notions of decent humanity?”

  The Magister's lips had become thin white lines. “You dare,” she hissed with all the venom of a desert snake striking soft flesh. “You dare to threaten me!”

  “I do,” said Marmion, “and you know it's more than just a threat. I will accept nothing less than an immediate release from custody. In return, we will forget what's been said here and move on. You won't hear from us again. Your dirty secret will remain just that.”

  The Magister took in those seated before her. Shilly could tell what she was thinking—or imagined that she could. The Magister could silence Marmion, but there was nothing she could do about everyone else. They were too many to get rid of entirely, not without bringing down further accusations upon her. She was trapped like a scorpion in a corner. And she knew it.

  Somehow, against all the odds, Marmion had turned the tables on her.

  “Get out of my sight,” she said. “All of you.”

  “Does this mean—?” Marmion started to ask.

  “It means that I have heard everything I need to hear. Now I must deliberate. You will be advised of my judgment in due course.”

  The Magister descended from the podium and walked haughtily from the hall. The tapping of her cane was inaudible over the voices rising up from the gathering. Shilly watched her go, thinking that, for all her stubborn dignity, she looked like noth
ing so much as an old, tired woman. Mortality hung heavy around her, thicker than her black and red ceremonial robes. No stick could support her under such a weight.

  Shilly almost felt sorry for the Magister, then. Almost. She saw in the old woman a glimpse of her own future: isolated, outcast, forced to extreme lengths to survive in an obscure borderland few people acknowledged. She couldn't forgive the Magister, though, for keeping them waiting for her decision. It was one final, feeble arrow fired from battlements that had already fallen. It wouldn't change a thing in the end. Shilly would bet her good leg on it.

  Porters steered the accused outside, to the waiting vehicles. The Laureans found themselves released into house arrest along with the visitors. Chu, Gwil Flintham, and the quartermaster settled into the hostel with relish. Their previous habitation had been less than comfortable. Too close to something called the boneyard, apparently.

  The group split into subsections as soon as they arrived. The quartermaster and Abi Van Haasteren sequestered themselves in a booth under the stairs to catch up on old times. Tom and Banner pored over Engineering diagrams in the first-floor sunroom. Sal and Highson talked soberly over coffee in a quiet corner while Chu and Skender chatted with Kemp in the bar, even though Urtagh wouldn't serve them drinks until their financial status was confirmed. Shilly noted the way Skender's attention kept coming back to Chu, whether she was talking or not.

  Shilly found herself watching the disgraced Sky Warden Shom Behenna playing a dice game with Mawson. Torchlight flickered off his black, partially tattooed scalp as he rolled and counted. The tallies grew quickly, with Behenna casting the dice for Mawson since the man'kin had no hands or arms to do it himself. It quickly became apparent that Behenna stood no chance of winning at all.

  “What are you?” she asked him. “A glutton for punishment?”

  He glanced at her, and seemed to seriously consider ignoring her. In the end, good manners or something else won the day.

  “It's always like this,” he said. They were the first words Behenna had said to her—perhaps anyone—since his rescue from the Aad.

  “Man'kin are unbeatable at games of chance. They have some means of influencing the dice that I can't detect.”

  “This is untrue,” the man'kin defended himself. “A dice may roll many ways, but it stops just once. I cannot change the way it stops. All I can do is choose which way it stops.”

  “That's the same thing, isn't it?” Shilly asked.

  “I assure you it is not.”

  Behenna watched her, not Mawson, and didn't take any joy at her confusion. “I've been studying this for years, now. Man'kin see a very different picture of the world from us. In some ways it's bigger, broader; in others it's frighteningly constricted. Their lives are fixed in ways we can't imagine, with life and death set for them, and every point in between, too. But they can choose among a variety of lives at any moment. That, I think, is how they can make the dice fall the way they want them to.”

  “I am not making the dice do anything they haven't already done,” Mawson insisted.

  “It just looks that way to us.”

  Shilly thought hard to get around the concept. “Like a fork in the road. Each path is a different number on the dice. The man'kin go along them all at once, and we go along just one of them. Mawson can choose which one he's on now, with us, so it looks like he's made us take that path, somehow.”

  Behenna nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Can Mawson make other things happen, then? Could he have picked a world where the flood didn't occur?” She hesitated before adding, “Where you and Abi Van Haasteren weren't captured?”

  His wince was fleeting, but there. “No. They can only manipulate small, happenstance things, as far as I've seen. It's an interesting thought, though.”

  That was an understatement. The possibility that man'kin were pulling the strings of fate to make the world go the way they wanted it to was frightening. Just because Behenna couldn't see them doing it didn't mean that he wasn't being shown only what they wanted him to see…

  No. The idea was ridiculous, she told herself. If man'kin could choose the future, why would so many have died in the flood?

  “Roll me a six,” she told Mawson, shaking the dice in her hand and setting it free.

  It came down on four.

  “What went wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Mawson said with a bored tilt to his head. “I grow weary of your attempts to explain the perfectly obvious.”

  She patted him on the stony shoulder. “Good for you. You're not a toy, and I shouldn't treat you as one. I apologise.”

  Mawson nodded. “Thank you. And now, you see, I am exactly where I want to be.”

  Shilly laughed for the first time in what felt like days.

  Word came from the Magister as the sun was setting. Delivered through an official spokesperson, it was brief and to the point.

  “Magister Considine has considered your position and made her decision. Your liberty has been restored to you. All charges are dismissed and all privileges restored. You are free to do as you will in the city of Laure.”

  Applause greeted the announcement. Chu whooped in delight. Shilly turned to Sal, unable to believe it had all gone so smoothly. They embraced.

  There was a sting in the tail, of course. “You will be presented with a bill for damages and services accrued during your stay. The Magister insists that this be paid before your departure. Noncompliance will incur the most serious of consequences.”

  “I understand,” said Marmion from his makeshift bed in the common area. He looked weak and very tired, but his mind was alert. There was no mistaking his satisfaction with the outcome. “Please convey my—our—gratitude to the Magister. We'll be out of here as soon as is humanly possible.”

  The spokesperson bowed and left.

  “What now?” asked Skender, addressing the room in general.

  “We celebrate, of course!” Chu snapped her fingers at Urtagh. “A round of araq, double time. Our credit's good. Hurrah!”

  Marmion looked for a moment as though he might veto the order, but stayed his hand. Immediately unctuous, Urtagh passed small shot glasses around the room, and followed with a bottle of milky, foul-smelling liquid. The bar soon filled with the sound of coughing and expletives.

  Shilly put her glass aside, untouched, as Marmion called Gwil Flintham and Warden Banner to him. They helped him stand and led him from the room. Following an instinct, Shilly slipped her hand from Sal's and trailed Marmion up the stairs.

  “Can I talk with you?”

  The injured warden didn't turn to look at her. He just kept climbing slowly and painfully, one step at a time. “About what?”

  “About us.”

  “Can it wait until morning?”

  “I'd rather clear the air now,” she said. “It won't take long.”

  He acquiesced, and wearily waved her into his room after him. The low-ceilinged chamber smelled of herbs and buzzed with the Change. The proximity of water made possible many advanced healing techniques used by the Sky Wardens. Young Rosevear couldn't grow back Marmion's hand, but he could keep the wound from infection and encourage it to heal more quickly than it would otherwise.

  Marmion lay down on the bed and dismissed Banner and Gwil. The round-faced Engineer squeezed Shilly's hand briefly as she went by, perhaps in encouragement.

  “We'll be outside the door if you need us,” said Gwil to Marmion. The former city gatekeeper looked uncertain about her being there.

  “Are you his keeper now?” she asked him.

  “I'm still responsible for him,” Gwil said. “I don't want the Magister or the Alcaide accusing me of shirking my duty.”

  She raised her new stick. “You can't possibly think I'm here to finish him off. Can you?”

  Gwil reddened and backed out of the room, his lank blond hair shaking as he went.

  “That was in poor taste, Shilly.” Marmion waved with his good hand at a selection of chairs a
long the Wall. “Sit. Talk.”

  She sat, nervous now the moment she had been half-dreading, half-hoping for had arrived. It wasn't just that Marmion looked so sick, although there was no denying that. His head eased back onto a pillow as soon as he lay down; his eyes closed. His skin still had a waxy sheen to it. She didn't want to add to his burdens.

  But she could still hear Skender saying, You're in charge, on top of the Wall during the man'kin “invasion.” Maybe he had been joking; maybe he had said it just to stop her from getting into the harness. Either way, it had rung true. Was being in charge really what she wanted? Making decisions was easy when the right one was obvious. But what about when those decisions might cost the lives of people around her? What if her judgment was wrong? What if the Wall had come down, and they had all died?

  She certainly didn't feel in charge at that moment, of herself let alone anything or anyone else.

  “I can't work you out, Eisak Marmion,” she said. “You can be such a bastard at times, and it would be easiest to accept you as just that. But I keep glimpsing something else behind that front, and I'm beginning to realise what it might be.”

  “Oh, really? Do tell.”

  “It's fear.” She hesitated. “I didn't see it at first. Highson spotted it before I did.”

  “So Highson put this in your head? And you believed him, naturally, after all the nonsense he told us.”

  “It's not nonsense. You know that as well as I do. He told us the truth—and he saved your life when he could just as easily have let the Homunculus kill you. A little faith isn't too much to ask, I think.”