by Col Buchanan
Ah, it was starting to make sense.
In the ongoing war between the Empire and the Free Ports, it was common knowledge that the neutral Alhazii Caliphate wished to preserve the present balance of power, for their profits in black powder remained sky high so long as they supplied both sides in the conflict. Which was why they maintained trade with the embattled islands of the democras, helping them to survive against the Empire’s ever tightening grip; maintaining the status quo without becoming embroiled in the war themselves.
But Coya was hoping to change that stance, using the leverage of the Isles of Sky and the knowledge of their location.
No wonder the man was so fearful of the Falcon falling into Alhazii hands and the Free Ports being implicated. An embargo of black powder could ensue, and that would mean the rapid end of the democras.
‘I hope the risk is worth it,’ Ash rumbled.
‘Great rewards must demand great risks. With detailed charts to the Isles we can negotiate with the Caliphate for more aid against the Empire. If they threaten embargo we can threaten to sell the location to the highest bidder. We can tip the Alhazii into taking more of a side in this war, more of a risk. At the very least, it’s a chance for us.’
‘Yes. I can see that.’
‘You are fine with this then?’
‘If it helps the people of the Free Ports, I am all for it.’
Coya’s breathing was loud over the silence that befell them. He was staring at the wall paintings again, fascinated by what he saw.
‘There is more riding on this than the fate of the Free Ports,’ he said.
‘How so?’
‘The Empire of Mann threatens our entire world, Ash. Their greed is a void like no other. More than death it is anti-life. Unless we stop them here, the Mannian creed of the divine self will turn all cultures into their own through conquest and the promise of plenty, and their greed will go on to strip the entire planet.
‘I have seen it in my nightmares, Ash. Great pulsing hive cities covering the globe and sucking the life from it, and all the civilized peoples believing themselves to be separate from the world and each other, so they are as malleable as cattle in their master’s hands. If the Mannians win here they will carry on victorious until they have ravaged Erēs to the bone, and then the entire world will burn.’
With a sniff, Ash swayed back from the wall. He had noticed before how Coya tended to speak with a subtle inflection of fear whenever he mentioned the Empire. No wonder, when he understood their nature so precisely.
To travel the Empire extensively, as Ash had done, was to see such things in a state of acceleration. Fences and stone walls cutting through previously open ranges. Hills of sterile white bones where once there had been herds of plenty. Waterways discoloured with poison for the sake of quick harvests of fish. Endless laqs of singular, pest-prone crops where the soil grew salty through over-irrigation, or was swept away as dust for lack of tree roots, never to be restored. Mountains with their flanks blown off for coal or precious metals. Much of the great forests of the heartlands felled to stumps and memories. Species after species going extinct as their habitats were destroyed.
People grew affluent from the race to fully exploit the land, some much more than others and many not at all, and all the while the world about their lives grew ever more poor and enclosed.
It was enough to cast the mind far ahead as Coya seemed to have done, and imagine where all of it was heading.
Maybe they really had come from the stars, he reflected now, staring at the image of a vessel descending from the sky. Maybe they had even devoured their old world and this was their final act of desperation, sending out ships to seed another.
‘Make it fast, Ash. We need those charts to the Isles. If we are to save it all we must stop the Empire here in its tracks!’
CHAPTER FIVE
The Black Stuff
The Dreamer Shard was dreading what was coming next, but she pressed on regardless, barging into the house with the storm winds chasing her inside.
From their oval worktable her two frightened rooks turned to blink their surprise, then blinked again when she banged the door shut behind her.
The wind was howling down the chimneys of her eyrie, rattling the panes of watery glass in the window frames and a few tiles that had been loosened on the high roof arching overhead. In the crisscrossing draughts an Alhazii desert-canvas swayed on a wall next to some Contrarè vine writing, while the pages of open notebooks ruffled on tables filled with the miscellanea of Shard’s work: exotics from the Isles of Sky and vials of stimulants, relaxants, entrancers. Her ears still ringing from the fading crashes of thunder, Shard could barely hear what the younger men were saying to her, babbling in their eager fright.
Ignoring them both, the Dreamer approached Sholene on the opposite side of the worktable, where the young woman still sat connected to her farcry. The object squatted before her on the table, breathing lightly; a living egg-shaped mass of flesh and veins and nerve tissue the size of a wooden pail, still glistening wet from a recent dousing in the feeding tank. One of its fleshy connection cables was held in her grasp as though she was in silent communication with someone on a distant farcry, or simply rooking them – eavesdropping on a conversation, stealing into their memories, playing them in some other way.
But no, the girl’s eyes were partly open. Sholene gazed as though oblivious to the outer world.
Shard checked that she was still breathing, and carefully took her pulse.
‘What was she working on?’ she asked of her two surviving rooks now watching over her shoulder.
‘Rooking a Mannian farcry in Sheaf,’ Remedy said, talking over the howls of the wind.
‘Claimed she was listening in on General Mokabi,’ Blame added with a shrug. ‘We thought she was joking.’
Shard grunted. She snapped her fingers before the girl’s face, but there was nothing there.
‘Get juiced up, the both of you. We’re going in.’
*
They were up for it, even Blame – a young man who had only joined her team in the previous week, chosen from the many student rooks of the Academy because most of all he was good at what he did, but also because he was startlingly attractive.
Both were eager young rooks obsessed with the artificial reality that was the Black Dream – just as Shard had once been – even as they remained keenly aware of the dangers of their craft. How could they not, when one of their own sat there with her mind blown away? It was the storm outside that had really spooked them, Shard realized now as she watched them eagerly clutch the fleshy connections in their grips, take dabs of rush oil to quicken their minds, before closing their eyes to settle into the Black.
Shard had no need for the farcrys that sat before them on the table. Beneath her embroidered vest, pressed against the second skin of the glimmersuit, hung a living belt she had purchased from a Zanzahar exotics smuggler for the price of a Dreamer’s miracle in return. It had been smuggled from the Isles of Sky themselves where their foreign sale was prohibited, or so the blackmarketeer had claimed: a portable farcry that could be worn and used anywhere at any time.
Without fuss she took to a seat and closed her eyes, and after a few moments felt her mind sinking downwards, and then she was in.
*
Seat of Wisdom, meant the name Cheōs. The renowned Academy of Salina was perched high on the slopes of the Painted Mountain, where it had been founded centuries ago as a place of intellectual training for the young sons of the Michinè, those families of aristocracy who had once ruled across the islands. In Cheōs, these young men had been taught the importance of competition, titles and costumed pageantry, and most of all how to lead rather than follow.
Within its walls, Zeziké himself, famed philosopher and spiritual father to the democras, had once taught his persuasive style of rhetoric to the fresh-faced young nobles in attendance, hoping to breathe some air into the status quo of the islands’ many royal and merchant f
amilies from within. But eventually Zeziké had been cast out for his ever more obvious polemic. Even his name had been banned within its walls.
Now, ironically, a statue of the man stood before the front entrance of Cheōs, for in the following centuries his imagined democras had indeed flourished into life, thanks to the revolution, and a different spirit had filled the halls of the Academy, one of open learning for all.
Ever since then, other Academies had been blooming into existence across the Free Ports, closely following the lead set by the newly dynamic Cheōs, including its shift into the field of exotics, those living materials bought from the fabled Isles of Sky through the monopoly of the Zanzahar Guildsmen. As a rising movement, one which created all manner of unexpected boons for the Free Ports, the most surprising developments of all had come only recently, and from the students themselves.
With the decade-long war against the Empire setting a keener edge to all their lives, the students had turned their time and initiative towards finding new and unexpected ways of using those exotic materials they were daily instructed in. Most crucially of all, they had begun to spend more time playing with the communications device known as a farcry, which offered access to other farcrys through a medium that had long remained a mystery, the Black Dream.
*
Stars shone in a field as black as the night sky, though instead of suns they were distant farcrys, entire constellations of them set against a firmament smeared with the faintest of colours. Even now Shards’s pulse quickened at the sight of it. Next to her roared the white glows of the rooks’ three farcrys, their surfaces alive like colourless suns in miniature. Movement caught her eye: two orbs emerging from them to join her disembodied form, beating slowly like hearts.
Weightlessness. An experience Shard could never take for granted. Dolphins must feel this way. Soaring birds. People falling far to their deaths.
Slowly, Shard spun in place, taking in the far Horizon, a band of pale and tangled lines like bird scratchings across a slate, belting the entirety of obsidian space. Her mind was crystal, and she saw everything in the sharpest of detail as clear as an eagle’s gaze.
Somewhere back in that other dream of the waking world, the Dreamer’s features relaxed as though she was home.
Sholene, she willed in her mind. Moon!
Faraway, a star pulsed brightly.
You see it?
Yes, came the responses of her two rooks.
We jumping in? asked the younger rook Blame.
Not a chance. We’ll fly there and approach from a distance. Enable your cloaking suites and follow my lead.
Even now it still thrilled to venture out across this open vastness. Outwards the trio sped, streaking across the Black leaving trails of light in their wakes, accelerating ever faster until the nearest stars began to shift and take on colours, while behind, they left a tiny constellation of suns that were at first their own farcrys, then all of those of the Academy, then all the farcrys in the Free Ports; an archipelago of stars hanging there in the Black.
What are we thinking here, a Mirror? came Remedy’s voice, as cool as he always was when nearing a threat.
Unless someone has thought of a new way to scramble a person’s mind.
I hope it’s something new, said Blame eagerly, tactlessly.
Across empty space they flew with the stars drifting by on every side. Far to the left passed the constellation of the Alhazii Caliphate, arrayed around a tight cluster that was their capital city of Zanzahar. Directly ahead, growing larger now, spanned a reef of stars that was the southern continent under Mannian occupation, the odd light streaking between one pin-point to another.
Other movements flickered out there in the Black, the ghost-light of old trails still slowly fading; a matter of days sometimes to fully fade away, weeks even. Shard called up her suite of defensive glyphs and willed all but two of them into life. Her cloak was the last thing she activated, and she watched as Remedy and Blame did likewise, their light dimming to almost full translucence.
Together they fell towards the reef of stars and the pulsing Mannian farcry where Sholene was located; the port city of Sheaf in northern Pathia. The city closest to the besieged Shield of Bar-Khos.
As they decelerated, Shard activated a sniffer and sent the faint ball of light ahead of them to take a look. It found nothing but the nearing farcry itself and the hovering presence of Sholene. The girl’s orb was beating as delicately as her pulse.
They stopped and scanned the area, close enough to see Sholene hanging like a moon around the Mannian farcry, still seeing nothing out of place.
Hang back, Shard told her two rooks as she dived down to Sholene.
*
Seven years ago, Shard had come to the Academy of Salina to find herself in the midst of a quickening revolution. In those early days of rooking, the Academy’s only ageing farcry had been used for practice sessions or for conferences between the Observers of different Academies; a bulbous living thing squatting under a dusty cloth upon a table, breathing lightly. In secret, through trial and error, the students had learned how to take covert cuttings from the priceless device, and from those cuttings how to germinate their very own rudimentary farcrys.
Back then the results from the cuttings, grown without notice alongside sanctioned experiments in the tanks, were small and delicate things which barely breathed, though they had been alive – just enough – to project the students into the dimensions of the Black Dream.
The visual definition had been dreadful. So low it was like flying through a fog. But the replicas allowed them to play in the Black Dream with limitless freedom, and most of all that was the key to their ensuing success.
From the students’ official lessons of the farcry, they had known how there were established methods of manipulation within the Black Dream, traditional ways to operate and find your way around. It was a mutual communications device after all. But with practice, they discovered there were fewer limitations to these methods than they had been taught, that there were ways to nudge and influence what you could do by using creative visualizations of the mind and efforts of will, much as Shard was later able to manipulate reality as a Dreamer, though in the Great Dream – the waking world itself.
Within the Black Dream of the farcrys, the students had been doing things that no one had ever heard of or even considered before, overcoming the limitations of their sickly replicas with endless patience, youthful cunning, and strong doses of stimulants to quicken their minds.
The simple trick of secretly listening in on another farcry was passed on in the back circles of their daily lectures and consciousness lessons. Soon the first River had been discovered in the Black. Ghosts were seen in the hinterlands of its dark expanse. A student from the Academy of Coraxa claimed to have discovered a series of farcrys so far away they couldn’t possibly be of this world, and then others reported seeing them too, hysterically, before the devices suddenly vanished without a trace. Myths grew and mysteries deepened.
To the exclusion of all others, those students most passionate about their new craft started clustering together in excited groups, exchanging hushed secrets. Someone started using the name ‘rook’, and it stuck.
Shard herself became the first rook to ever crack the farcry of a foreign nation, one belonging to a minion within the Alhazii Caliphate. Together with her friends she listened in on everything being said. Shard was also the inventor of the thought-worm, which after months of effort she was finally able to smuggle into a Mannian farcry and have it transmitted as speech. Her lover Tabor Seech, notoriously, became the first to show that minds could be damaged in the Black Dream through another’s force of will, making him the first to introduce violence into the rooking craft.
*
Still no response from the young woman, not even now.
Shard approached the white orb that was Sholene, trying to gain a sense of her but failing.
She said she was listening in on General Mokabi?
I’ll engage first. Don’t come in unless I tell you it’s safe. And keep scanning the Black, I don’t want any surprises.
I hear that.
Shard willed herself towards Sholene until white light filled her vision. She hoped she could still find a loose thread of the girl’s mind that remained untangled, something to lead her back to safety.
There was a flicker of light as they connected, then all at once Shard was in a different place entirely.
A room with arched windows of white gala lace blowing in from a sea breeze. Gulls shrieking outside and the azure blue of a placid harbour. Shard was sitting in a chair, and a white-haired man was standing behind her shaving her face with a straight-edged razor, for she caught a glimpse of him in a mirror on the wall and then she saw her own lathered face; a nose poking out from the white froth that was tattooed fully black, the highest military ranking of Mann.
Staring out from a pair of dark eyes like gashes, Shard took in the old and unmistakable features of General Mokabi, famed ex-Archgeneral of the Mannian Empire, despised conqueror of Pathia and the rest of the southern continent.
Coya had remarked that General Mokabi was marching from Sheaf with an army larger than any ever seen, intent on taking the Shield of Bar-Khos from the south where the siege had been raging for ten long years. Which meant this had already happened, and what she saw was some kind of memory. Sholene was caught in one of Mokabi’s recollections, no older than a matter of days.
