by James Stone
‘Don’t play me for a fool,’ he cut in. ‘Nothing you did in the north was without cause. The same here, you think you stowed away without some ill intent?’
‘I—’
‘Get her a drink,’ Fabius interrupted, and the thrall things obliged, dropping her to the floor.
They returned rather quickly and forced a glass between her fingers. Its contents were black like unbroken pitch, but she drunk it all the same, wincing as she did.
When she was done, Magmaya tossed the rest aside and looked up to Fabius with the eyes of a lost child. ‘Am I in hell?’
‘Perhaps.’ The angel shrugged. He folded his arms into his chest. ‘Depends on your sins, girl.’
‘If I confess them, then can I leave?’ she asked. Her head was dizzy. She felt as if she was going to collapse.
‘You’re black as soot.’ He ignored her, but whatever was in place of an answer came with the smile that looked like the angel that had come all those lives ago, when he had been but a dream, rising from the seas.
‘This place has been rather unforgiving,’ Magmaya admitted.
‘You were a fool for coming here.’
‘I couldn’t stay there any longer,’ she protested. ‘I’d made a mistake. I’d made too many mistakes. I couldn’t go on like that, Fabius.’
‘We’ve had people like you before,’ he groaned. ‘Stowaways, merchants and the like. You’ve abandoned your people, chancellor.’
‘They’ll govern better without me,’ she said. ‘They’re safer now.’
‘You chose to distance the north from us. What makes you think I will vouch for you after you renounced my people?’
‘I don’t need you to vouch for me.’ The mere suggestion was making her uneasy. ‘But there was no other way to escape—I—’
‘I’m not taking you back,’ the angel asserted.
‘I didn’t expect you to,’ Magmaya murmured. ‘I did—’
‘Then you shouldn’t have expected safe passage south,’ he thundered. ‘It is not a wench’s right to stowaway. I still don’t understand exactly what you hoped to find here.’
Neither did she, in truth, but her mouth answered for her. ‘Anything but the cold,’ she stuttered. ‘I killed a woman I shouldn’t have. I was in no position to carry on there.’
‘You wanted to represent your people here, then?’ he asked. ‘Take our land instead?’
Magmaya scoffed. It was all she could do not to laugh. ‘I don’t want to rule over anything,’ she wailed.
‘I once thought like you.’ He smirked. ‘But I embraced what I did. I was not craven.’
‘I couldn’t do that,’ she murmured. She wanted to hit him. ‘I couldn’t misguide my city any longer.’
Much to her surprise, Fabius nodded, and she caught him staring her up and down, from her ashen feet to her black nails. Even more to her surprise, he said, ‘My men will see that you are bathed and cleaned. I will not have anyone coming from the Divinicus smelling quite as shit as you do.’
‘Excuse me?’ The light was playing a trick on her, she was sure of it.
‘Your skin will be fresh, it will soon forget this place, forget the north. You’ll start again under my curfew.’
‘I can bathe myself,’ she snapped but found herself backing down. She’d come too far to lose everything in a petty spat.
Fabius nodded to himself. ‘I’ll have someone escort you to suitable quarters.’
‘Here?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I will send you to men who will work you. Perhaps then you can discover what you wanted here. Have it known, girl, if you were some low-born child, I would not be so understanding.’
A moment later, he was gone, and Magmaya’s eyes began to sing beneath the dirt and dust that plagued them. And when she stood, her feet shook as if she were a fool balancing on a spire.
It was fear that woke her from a midday slumber and forced her to follow blindly through tattered, rusting passageways, damp with copper-blue and silt. The passage inland had lulled her to silence and yet, a burning anxiety nested in her like an old friend—Fabius truly couldn’t be so merciful, could he? An angel like him wouldn’t allow a damper on his pride, and she was exactly that.
‘Highport,’ one of the Divinicus told her and pointed across to the shore. It was still miles away, though. They hadn’t cleared the black waves yet.
Behind her, the shadow of The Golden Damnation lingered, and before her, there was Inamorata at last. And upon its banks, there was a crumbling edifice, throned with countless towers and spires, wrestling itself free from the sea.
‘It looks like it’s half sunk,’ Magmaya remarked.
‘It is,’ one of the thralls replied, but for all she knew, it might have been a drowning man rasping.
‘As Highport was built higher and higher, it sunk it farther and farther beneath the shore,’ another one of them explained. ‘So, time and time again it was built higher to compensate. But that only made it sink even more. Now there’s as much Highport underwater as there is above it.’
Soon enough, though, Magmaya couldn’t see any of it as the world around her become choked with fog. But when she looked up, she saw the same sun as there had been in the north; there was the same sky, the same moon, the same stars. It was as if she hadn’t travelled a mile.
It reminded her of a dream she’d had once—a dream that the world had woken up to seventeen suns glimmering in the morning sky, and that she had been a priestess, draped in brass and blood. What it had all meant, she hadn’t a clue. Kharon had never let astrologers pick apart her nightmares in fear they’d curse the palace. It seemed they hadn’t needed an astrologer to be cursed, though.
Soon enough, the crumbling towers reappeared from the mist and with a shake in her legs, the angels led her onto the sodden black shore, into an iron cavern and through a network of worn corridors beneath Highport.
Shortly after, several of the Divinicus left her for another turning, and so found herself stumbling alone amongst the horde of strange thralls with only a single angel in sight. There weren’t even any windows; it was as suffocating on land as it had been on the ship.
She shook herself free of the daunting haze to study the walls as they walked, finding complex spider webs of wires and pipes crowding them, broken with rust. Was this the kind of place the Golden Woman had once stood? Was she now walking in the footsteps of a goddess?
But there was nothing holy here. Save the blue-green stains that dulled the copper-red walls and a lightless complex free of warmth and voice.
As they turned a corner under the dim lamps from above, a group of locals appeared and approached the surrounding thralls; they wore strange metal contraptions across their mouths and spoke in a strangely rigid manner as if they were automatons talking. Almost all the others sauntered off then, leaving a single angel and a few thralls to march her forward, shake hands and begin what appeared to be an immortal conversation, which she could only shy away from by hiding in the shadows.
The chatter continued on until Magmaya’s heart nearly burst with fear, as without warning, a local tore a sharpened baton from his hip and levelled it to the angel’s face.
The remaining thralls around her collectively shuddered and hid away, but she found it in herself to stand and it seemed the Divinicus did too. He took his falchion from his hip and Magmaya closed her eyes, heart pounding before she disappeared into an alcove. The thralls fled while the assailants seemed to pour forth from every crack in the walls.
But then, there was a burst of light from the corridors beyond, and Magmaya braced herself—but there was no clatter of blades, only stunned silence. She opened her eyes.
Footsteps beat through the corridor like each one was a falling god, crumbling to its knees. And then she found Fabius standing over her, looking to the locals with an expression of absolute calm. She would have hazarded to say he was even enjoying the attention. And with him, another Divinicus joi
ned the fray with a blade outstretched, dazzling in the dim light and blinding the room.
The fighting ceased almost immediately. The locals stepped back and surrendered, but the Lord Commander paid no heed. He raised his finger, and his Divinicus’ falchions rang out. The locals began screaming, and blood lined the gutters.
Magmaya winced, but Fabius was there to comfort her—her noble knight, standing above her with all the eyes and subtly of a wise god.
‘Get up.’
Magmaya did as he demanded, avoiding the stares of the corpses, and looked to Fabius. The angel motif that swept across his shoulder must’ve cowered in his wake—if she had been none the wiser, she would’ve dropped to her knees and prayed.
‘Fabius,’ she caught herself stuttering.
He turned away and looked to the other angel, standing tall among the grimacing dead. ‘What happened?’
‘They claimed they never agreed to harbour a girl,’ he replied, and Magmaya realised, even here they don’t want me to rule.
‘They had notice enough,’ Fabius groaned.
‘What kind of place is this?’ Magmaya cut in. Heat was rising in her forehead.
‘Highport.’
‘You say that,’ Magmaya sneered, ‘but I can’t see anything; there are no boats; there are no seas, except maybe that black foam we sailed on. Only bloody corpses.’
‘You know this place better than I?’ Fabius spat. ‘If you don’t like it here, your options are scarce, girl. The seafarers have little use for a child like you, and I need not another handmaiden. And I assume you don’t want to be a refreshment for the older men, no?’
She shook her head.
‘I thought not,’ he said. ‘There’s someone else here who can harbour you. Be gone.’
Magmaya nodded, Fabius disappeared, and without another word, she followed on through the corridors as if the slaughter had never happened and blood did not still stain the floors. After a moment, she plucked up the courage to ask one of the thralls, ‘Who am I going to now?’
‘Spider,’ he replied. ‘But you will call him sir.’
‘Sir,’ she whispered, ‘Sir,’ she hummed as she chanted the name of her new owner.
He was a stranger man than Magmaya had expected—nearly seven foot, she guessed, sporting a thin, white beard and eyes like small, black beads. Spider had been a revered blacksmith at Highport, but she’d heard the years had taken their toll and he could scarcely turn out a hammer now. It looked as if he still liked to surround himself with all manner of furnaces, though, likely stolen from some archaic craft that might have travelled the Cold Seas a thousand years ago.
The Divinicus had left Magmaya at his doorstep, deep in the cavernous honeycomb of the port; there was no sunshine or warmth, save for the few kindles of Spider’s daily labour and the candles which prided themselves on going out far too early. Outside, there were a number of tin bowls strewn with flayed chicks and cubes of meat where half-clockwork cats would scrounge and paw. The strange man referred to one of them as Dreadbitch before ushering her to her chambers.
The room had a delicate quality about it as if it was to fall apart at a moment’s notice; a crooked bed frame and broken porcelain bath seemed to be the only things of note. But Magmaya didn’t care; she threw herself down against the tattered sheets and watched a cloud of dust erupt up around her like it was the most interesting thing she’d ever set her eyes on.
A heaviness was pressing on her forehead still, so she closed her eyes for what began as a moment, then a minute and then a night. But she felt as if hadn’t slept at all when dawn arose with a great pounding, and the door was thrown open—and for a moment, it felt as if the world was falling apart around her.
Spider barked something, and Magmaya dragged herself up from the bedding to face his dark eyes. He tossed a dirtied garb on the bed and left the room as quickly as he had come. She sighed and found the will at last to stand.
It was a dress, plain, frilled, and slightly too large for her waist, but she wasn’t in the mood to argue.
After changing, Magmaya turned to her satchel, reached in and found a small knife. It shone in the dim candlelight, and a tide of warmth crashed through her; it was Rache and Siedous, it was Kharon and Nurcia, but above all else, it was her fear. It was the carving knife she had taken when she’d met Kurulian that night. When she’d made the decision that brought her here.
No. She held back tears. I have to forget. This is my life now. I chose it.
A murder of crows plucked at the trailing eyes of corpses as they swung steadily from the rafters above. The dead men had rusted contraptions strapped across what was left of their mouths, while yellow-black robes flailed from their limp bodies as if they were the only things in Highport that were truly alive.
Under the brick and clockwork arches, hundreds of stalls had emptied as the crowds flocked to grimace, and Magmaya only found herself doing the same. The market (which was more of a towering complex) would have largely overwhelmed her if it hadn’t been for the unsavoury attractions that hung above.
Dead light bled from shattered windows, and a stale breeze tore across the courtyard, sending the bodies into a perpetual swaying. A moment later, though, the crowds were gone as if the limp things had never been there. But Magmaya stayed—she had recognised them immediately.
There was no doubt in her they were the ones the Divinicus had slain the day before—and it showed. Their entrails were dangling out of their bellies and dripping with gross ichor, and when the crows fed, the corpses burst into fountains of mucus. Magmaya had to turn away before a sickness came over her.
‘Move on, whore.’ A salesman waved her aside, and so she carried on.
The commoners would dare call me a whore in Orianne, she grumbled. But I’m not in Orianne anymore.
The other marketers weren’t anymore warm; she asked at every turn where she might find a way out to the seas, but it soon became clear that there was none. If she could’ve at least had a breath of fresh air, the place might’ve been bearable.
She passed an elderly fisherman selling all kinds of sharp shells, black shells and poisonous shells, and begged of him to tell her where she could see the ocean. But he had only threatened her and warned her to beware the waves. Another merchant tried to offer her a playing board for a Lamentation of Fates, and she would’ve been half tempted if it wasn’t for the snotty handprints all over the wood.
The day passed in an instant, and Magmaya returned with the same basket of metals she had started with, and slumped before Spider, her eyes bleached and grey. He was hunched over a workbench, fingering a deck of colourful tarot cards, but he quickly scooped them up and faced her with something of a disdainful frown.
‘There were bodies in the market, sir,’ she said numbly. ‘No one seemed to care.’
‘Aye, and it seemed people had little care for your iron too,’ Spider hummed, his greasy hands paving through the rusted ornaments.
‘Dead bodies,’ she insisted.
‘Often are, girl.’
‘People were staring.’
‘Looking for things to pawn if anything. I say you’re a fool if you die with your purse.’ He scratched his cheek. ‘Go and get rest.’
‘The Divinicus killed them.’ She stared into the fire and saw them die and scream and die again with each remoulding flicker. ‘Were they the ones to string them up?’
‘The angels aren’t savages,’ he said to her surprise and took a sip of ale out of his flagon. His stomach growled. ‘I wouldn’t know, anyway. I only take their heathens; I don’t… chatter among their pearly wings.’
There was silence as the fire burned the gap between them, and Magmaya heaved a sigh. ‘Did they tell you anything about me?’
‘Only that you were from somewhere far—not often do the arks come to these parts. They’re as rare as good ale.’ He shook his head. ‘What business you have here is none of mine; only that you follow by my rules.�
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‘Have you cared for many of the angel’s friends?’
‘Few,’ he admitted. ‘They seem not to be too abundant. Men like them aren’t what they seem, girl. They’re pretty and the best pretty you’ll ever feast your eyes on. But I wouldn’t trust them alone with me for a moment.’ He frowned. ‘Whispers say they eat souls, but I don’t believe whispers; they’re as human as you and me, just a little more shiny.’ He paused like he’d said too much. ‘No matter, you must be something special. Otherwise, a pilgrim like you would be strung up for the crows too.’
The thought made her sick to the stomach. Had she been a low-born girl, would Fabius have killed her?
‘Were there more like me?’ Magmaya asked.
‘Like you? I don’t know what you are.’
‘I was the chancellor of a faraway city.’ The words tasted so false now.
‘No chancellors here, if that’s what you mean. Many of the others were the Lord Commander’s contacts.’ Spider shrugged. ‘One of them he told me to guard with my life, though—never has that happened again.’
‘And who was he?’
‘She.’ He coughed, thumbing a shard of metal. ‘She fled from Kythera, and for whatever reason, the angels took pity on her. She was beautiful—for a whore anyway.’
‘Oh,’ Magmaya exclaimed. ‘Perhaps she sold herself to Fabius.’
He shook his head. ‘No, no,’ Spider said. ‘I wouldn’t think so. But he did care for her. She said she didn’t sell herself anymore. Not after she met their emperor apparently.’
‘The emperor of Kythera?’
‘Emperor, king, archon, my lord,’ he replied. ‘They’re different names for the same bastards. It’s no matter, he’s dead now, and so is the whore. Few moons later, she was found with a mouth of seaweed, caught in a fishing net.’ He dropped the metal. ‘And that was that, girl.’
‘She found her way to the ocean?’ Magmaya’s eyes widened. ‘But I was told they were—’
‘Cursed.’ He nodded. ‘Anyone can get to the Winter Seas. But yes, it is true; they’re haunted all the way to Belliousa.’
