by Sparks,Cat
“Home,” said Star.
“But you can’t leave! We need all hands to dig out the ship.”
“This ship isn’t going anywhere.” Star nodded to the broken mast, still lying across the deck, far too heavy for anyone to shift.
“But we have to—”
“Take as much food and water as you can carry and cross the sand back to the Temple of the Dish. It’s three days journey. Tell the old woman’s followers what became of her, and what she did for all of us.” Star gestured over her shoulder at the smouldering bunker’s remains. “She saved us, somehow, her and Quarrel. People ought to know the truth of it.”
Allegra made an exasperated face. “But the way between is crawling with tankers! How are we supposed to cross—”
“The tankers won’t bother you. Not now that the Blue is silenced.”
“And watch for quicksand,” added Grieve. “And polyp storms—I don’t think we’ve seen the last of those.”
Allegra took a step forward. “You can’t take that food and water,” she said coldly. “It belongs to me. Everything on this ship belongs to me. You will all do as I say, beginning with the mending of this ship.”
“Allegra, we are not your servants. We have all been through. . . what about your father. . .” Star stared long and hard at Allegra; her torn sari and the calculating gleam in her eyes.
“My father is useless. Fallow Heel is my port now and we must get home as quickly as possible. This ship—”
Grieve started laughing and shaking his head and turned his back on her. He walked to the railing, glanced over the side and stopped dead still.
“Try telling them that,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Them?”
Everybody pushed past Allegra to join Grieve and see what he was talking about. Below on the sand, a line of people were approaching, many of them armed and strong, sunlight glinting off a variety of weapons. Something about their faces wasn’t right.
Allegra started shouting, “What is going on?” She eventually looked over the side herself, then yelped at the sight of the approaching strangers. She began barking orders. Everyone responded to her call this time, scrabbling frantically to arm themselves, to prepare for the worst.
Not Star. She took one last long look at Allegra, the girl she had misguidedly called her friend, acknowledging that Nene had been right about her too, like she had been right about so many other things. Then Star headed straight for the ladder and started climbing. Grieve followed, packs slung over his shoulder.
“Dunno what you think you’re doing—there must be thirty of them, at least.” He glanced up at the sole remaining mast and its tattered sail hanging in strips. “Ship’s useless as a stronghold, there’s not enough of us—”
“Best to find out what they want,” Star said.
“But look at them—they’re savages!”
The figures approaching were covered in clay: thick brown and white streaks of it coating their limbs and faces. Ghosts, walking at a steady pace, shimmering in heat haze.
Allegra’s voice carried high on the wind above, not individual words, just the panicked tone of her instructions.
The ghost walkers came to a gradual halt. The big man standing front and centre stepped up and stabbed a tanker lance into the sand.
Star jumped down, moved forward a few paces, then stopped. There was something familiar about the way he carried himself.
No. It couldn’t be.
“Not possible,” she said, “You died. The broken Black swallowed you up!”
Nobody else said anything. Star glanced from face to face, but their expressions were impossible to read beneath layers of streaky clay.
“I fell through a crack in the world so deep I thought I was a goner,” the big man said, loud so all could hear. A voice so familiar it brought tears to Star’s eyes. “Thought I’d fallen straight through to the underworld. Close enough, as it turned out, but I ain’t dead yet and neither are they, in case that’s what you’re thinking.”
She looked beyond him, and this time began to make out other faces from the Dogwatch crew. Features and mannerisms slowly becoming familiar, despite cracked clay and grime.
“Clay keeps the sun off,” said Lucius. “A little trick I picked up on the Black some decades past. Plus, comes in handy to look like dead men when you’re walking through unfamiliar territory.”
Everything started happening at once. Star ran straight into Lucius’s arms. People, familiar and strangers alike, stepped up to slap her on the back. It didn’t matter that she had never known their names. Nothing else mattered so long as Lucius was alive and safe.
Overhead, a volley of shots fired from the tilted deck of the Razael.
“What’s with that?” said Lucius.
“Just someone I used to call my friend,” said Star.
= Seventy-seven =
Grieve hung back uncomfortably, watching Star, trying not to feel too jealous at the display of affection from her people. Strange-looking people to be sure, but kin was kin, and that big guy looked as close to her as any father he’d ever seen to their daughter.
The wind blew him snippets of what they were saying; questions about what had happened to the sky, plans to dig out the ship and patch it up, plans to take everybody back to where they belonged. Not Grieve. Tully Grieve did not belong anywhere.
He squinted at a tanker circling in the distance, the same one they’d ridden to the bunker. He didn’t want to admit it, but the thing was probably more faithful than half the dogs he’d ever owned.
He turned his back and thrust his hands into his pockets as the wind snatched and scattered the many loud and enthusiastic conversations all into one jumble, everybody talking, nobody listening, same as always.
Twilight spilled streaks of flaming pink across the returning blue sky, the colour sky was supposed to be. Temperature was dropping. A chill wind was blowing in.
There was a tap on his shoulder. Star’s cheery face, eyes shining. “You coming with me or what?”
“What kind of what?”
She smiled. “We’re gonna ride all the way home.”
That rogue tanker—she didn’t need to spell it out.
Grieve shook his head, waved his arms in front of him. “Oh no we’re not—I’m not getting back up on one of those things. Not now, not ever.”
He knew she wasn’t listening. When he looked back at the cluster of clay-streaked freaks, the big man offered him a nod and a wave in return.
“Gotta hurry,” said Star, “don’t want to be clambering up the sides of a moving tanker in the dark.”
She raised her tanker lance—the big man had placed it in her hands. A beautiful thing, etched with wards and spells and other mysteries.
“We’re not gonna . . .”
“Oh yes we are . . .”
And then they were running, with great difficulty at first, until the clogging sand thinned out and the ground became harder, crunching over rocks and bones and broken relics from centuries long dead and past, Star swinging her tanker lance in wide arcs, Grieve shaking his hair and screaming a victory cry. They’d done it, they’d actually done it: killed the beast and lived to tell the tale. And it didn’t stop there. There’d be other tales and other glories, even if they had to ride to the end of the earth and back again to find them.
= Seventy-eight =
He opened his eyes into a world pitch black; thick and heavy and smelling of concrete dust. A powerful weight pressed down upon his chest. Sharp pain stabbed his side the minute he attempted movement. There was a sudden cold, such as he had never before experienced, seeping inwards through his skin, spreading along his arms and down his spine. His fingers were ice, numb and useless. He could not feel his legs.
&
nbsp; “Tallis?”
No answer. Kian’s voice came out weak and ragged, his throat choked up with a scratchy veil of dust.
“Tallis—are you there?”
Wetness pooled beneath him, the sharp tang of blood and urine stealing the last of his heat as it left his body.
As his eyes adjusted, he began to make out crude grey shapes. Not much at first and nothing useful. A great weight had apparently collapsed on top of all their heads. The bunker had been completely destroyed. Panic seized him as he remembered the beautiful city in the valley spread below. The city of his dreams—the city he had found before his uncle—a hundred thousand beckoning lights, warm and welcoming, calling him towards his destiny. All gone now, demolished before he had even learned its name.
“Tallis!”
As the echo of his own voice faded, another sound began. A scratching and scraping, grating and thudding. Chunks of cement being cast roughly aside. A rain of sand and a blast of cold, stale air upon his face. Tallis, his cousin, come to his rescue? Or perhaps Jakome and the girl with the golden locket? Allegra, that had been her name. Allegra.
“Get me out of here!”
Help was at hand. Perhaps things were not as bad as they initially seemed? The beautiful city might have survived the earthquake too. There’d be doctors living in the valley below. Faithful Tallis and Jakome would dig him out and carry him to safety. His legs might not be too badly damaged, his lungs not punctured, his ribs just cracked, not broken.
No words came out when he tried to call to his cousin one more time. Just a rasping, gurgling from deep within his chest. But it did not matter because the space around him was brightening, inch by inch. Shapes and shadows, light and dark, broken rocks being hurled aside with superhuman strength. A burst of light haloed around the shape of a man—or something like one. Not his cousin Tallis. Something with relic arms and relic legs, no eyes, and a face of hammered steel.
And another thing, much smaller, moving lower down.
Kian still could not feel his legs, but he could tilt his head and make out clearly the outline of something spidery and slender picking over his ruined chest, poking elongated appendages inside him, injecting him with fluid, thick and warm—at first. It cooled rapidly, then was very cold, then chill, then there was nothing but ice and dust and fear and silence.
Not much but it will have to do, said a voice in his head that was not his own—not his uncle’s or his father’s, not anything or anyone familiar, not even remotely human. The last thing Kian saw before his consciousness ebbed was a single field of flat bold colour: Blue.
= Seventy-nine =
The Nisn watchtower was overcrowded, as had become the norm of late, filled with people who weren’t supposed to be there, making it difficult for Leni to do her job. Estrella from the A-Frame Hydroponic farm’s big hair was blocking her view of the Brindabella range—what little she’d ever been able to see of it. Officials from levels 77 and 84 crowded out the viewing platform. There was no point to them being there, they had no tasks assigned. Claimed they were there for “observation”—as if the watchmen rostered on weren’t capable of observing on their own.
On the up side, two of the clapped-out consoles had recently been replaced, something the crews had been petitioning about for decades, but up until then had been totally ignored, dismissed as unimportant. Then all of a sudden, overnight, it happened. Total rewiring, new comms, and a replacement bank of lights for the evening shift. Even the watchmen’s chairs had been reupholstered.
The springs still creaked though. Leni bounced back and forth in hers, hoping the sound would irritate at least one of the higher-ups, but nobody was bothered by anything taking place within the watchtower. All eyes were on the world outside, the flat red land and its wide, oppressive sky. The staging ground for a sequence of events that had shaken the fortress city to its foundation. Or so said the gossips, the seers, and the busybodies—there were always plenty of those on hand to fill in gaps between transmissions of actual information. Plenty of noise, but not much signal. That was the way things had always worked around here.
Worse thing was, she’d had to work with Bern and train a clutch of newbies up from scratch, ever since Dorse took his vows-and-veil and vanished forever into the bowels of Temple proper. A lot of Nisn people had found religion in the aftermath of the Big Melt Event, far more than could be accommodated. So far the priests weren’t turning applicants away, but the time would come, there was no way round it. Praying didn’t grow their food and keep the lights on.
Leni slouched back in her chair. So far she’d been fortunate enough to hang on to her much coveted position, which was only fair. She would have fought against them, tooth and nail, if they’d bumped her sideways after everything that had happened. Everybody wanted to be a watchman now, to spend long hours gawking at sand and clouds, even though there was rarely anything to see.
The sky had returned to its regular colour. Rads were up, but they’d always had a tendency to spike and fluctuate, affected by the mighty storms that blew in randomly from the Dead Red Heart. The storms had changed in texture and colour, Leni could tell just by looking. She didn’t need any team of pushy so-called experts bumbling around, setting up mysterious “classified” equipment, blocking her view, making it impossible for the rest of them to do their jobs.
Two days ago, in the early hours, she’d spied a caravan, thirteen wagons long as most of them tended to be. She and Bern and the new kid had stood to watch it pass. Notes were taken and photographs, estimating where it might be heading, scrutinising its people and its cargo through telescopic lenses.
Leni sniffed and brought her bouncing chair to a halt. Nobody ever gave two shits before. The Big Melt Event, that’s when everything had changed. So many rumours began to circulate. She knows at least some of it was true because she saw it happen with her own two eyes: the Last Templar setting off on foot across the lonely desert. She’d watched his hulking form diminish until the desert had swallowed him completely.
Rumour had it that one lone Templar had commandeered an army, crossed the Obsidian Sea at the head of an attack fleet built from scratch. On the far side he had confronted an ancient evil army risen from the sands and there’d been a battle, a long and bloody one, each side hurtling fireballs at the other until the Warbird had swooped down low to intervene, heating up and melting the whole lot of them with its sun-powered laser sting. When the slag cooled it had formed a new extension to the Obsidian Sea. Or something like that—the Warbird 47 had definitely engaged and fired a beam weapon from low orbit, they all knew that because they had watched it happening in real time. And Leni had watched that lone Templar embark. She’d known for certain he was a hero, she had been able to tell by the prideful way in which he carried himself.
Big-haired Estrella and her A-Frame crew had started packing up their sensory apparatus. Leni sat up straighter in the chair, made a show of fiddling with console knobs and switches until their cases were strapped up and lugged away. Finally her view of the open sand returned, unrestricted. Sands she knew to be strewn with the wreckage of fallen Angels, trampled by groups of people on the move. Big lizards too—hungry-looking, those old genmodded Komodo experiments gone wrong. Things were changing. There was no point in bunkering down and praying to exhausted, outdated gods anymore. Sooner or later the citizens of Nisn would have to make a break for it, would have to brave the outside world and make a go of it, or the outside world would leave them all behind.
= About the Author =
Cat Sparks is an Australian author, editor, anthologist, and artist. She has received a total of nineteen Aurealis and Ditmar awards, and is a graduate of the inaugural Clarion South Writers Workshop. Sparks is currently the fiction editor of Cosmos magazine while simultaneously grappling with completing a PhD on young adult climate fiction.
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Sparks,Cat, Lotus Blue
