1161st Year of Blaze’s Slumber

  103rd Year of the Nazalam Empire

  7th Year of Empress Lasean’s Rule

  As he watched the two riders approach, something told the captain that his days of ease in Nvse Ken were numbered. His helmet felt heavy in his hand. He eyed Pa’an. That thin-blooded bastard had it made. A hundred strings pulling him every step of the way to some cushy posting in some peaceful city.

  He saw Loren studying him as they came to the crest. ‘Captain, I have a request for you.’

  The captain grunted. Request, hell. The Empress has to check her slippers every morning to make sure this one isn’t already in them. ‘Of course, Supplement.’

  The woman dismounted, as did Pa’an. The lieutenant’s expression was impassive. Was that arrogance, or had the Supplement given him something to think about?

  ‘Captain,’ Loren began, ‘I understand there’s a recruiting drive under way in Ken. Do you pull in people from outside the city?’

  ‘To join? Sure, more of them than anyone else. City folk got too much to give up. Besides, they get the bad news first. Most of the peasants don’t know everything’s gone to hell on Pueblos. A lot of them figure city folk whine too much anyway. May I ask why?’

  ‘You may.’ Loren turned to watch the soldiers cleaning up the road. ‘I need a list of recent recruits. Within the last two days. Forget the ones born in the city, just the outlying ones. And only the women and/or old men.’

  The captain grunted again. ‘Should be a short list, Supplement.’

  ‘I hope so, Captain.’

  ‘You figured out what’s behind all this?’

  Still following the activity on the road below, Loren said, ‘No idea.’

  Yes, the captain thought, and I’m the Emperor reincarnated. ‘Too bad,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh.’ The Supplement faced him. ‘Lieutenant Pa’an is now on my staff. I trust you’ll make the necessary adjustments.’

  ‘As you wish, Supplement. I love paperwork.’

  That earned him a slight smile. Then it was gone. ‘Lieutenant Pa’an will be leaving now.’

  The captain looked at the young noble and smiled, letting the smile say everything. Working for the Supplement was like being the worm on the hook. The Supplement was the hook, and at the other end of the line was the Empress. Let him squirm.

  A sour expression flitted across Pa’an’s face. ‘Yes, Supplement.’ He climbed back into the saddle, saluted, then rode off down the road.

  The captain watched him leave, then said, ‘Anything else, Supplement?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her tone brought him around.

  ‘I would like to hear a soldier’s opinion of the nobility’s present inroads on the Royal command structure.’

  The captain stared hard at her. ‘It ain’t pretty, Supplement.’

  ‘Go on.’

  The captain talked.

  It was the eighth day of recruiting and Staff Sergeant Vago sat bleary-eyed behind his desk as yet another whelp was prodded forward by the corporal. They’d had some luck here in Ken. Fishing’s best in the backwaters, Ken’s Lord had said. All they get around here is stories. Stories don’t make you bleed. Stories don’t make you go hungry, don’t give you sore feet. When you’re young and smelling of pigshit and convinced there ain’t a weapon in all the damn world that’s going to hurt you, all stories do is make you want to be part of them.

  The old woman was right. As usual. These people had been under the boot so long they actually liked it. Well, Vago thought, education begins here.

  It had been a bad day, with the local captain roaring off with three companies and leaving not one solid rumour in their wake about what was going on. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Lasean’s Supplement arrived from Magbalaan not ten minutes later, using one of those eerie magical Warenne to get here. Though he’d never seen her, just her name on the hot, dry wind was enough to give him the shakes. Sorcerer killer, the scorpion in the Royal pocket.

  Vago scowled down at the writing tablet and waited until the corporal cleared his throat. Then he looked up.

  The recruit standing before him took the staff sergeant aback. He opened his mouth, on his tongue a lashing tirade designed to send the young ones scampering. A second later he shut it again, the words unspoken. Ken’s Lord had made her instructions abundantly clear: if they had two arms, two legs and a head, take them. The Pueblos campaign was a mess. Fresh bodies were needed.

  He grinned at the girl. She matched the Lord’s description perfectly. Still. ‘All right, lass, you understand you’re in line to join the Nazalam Navy, right?’

  The girl nodded, her gaze steady and cool and fixed on Vago.

  The recruiter’s expression tightened. Damn, she can’t be more than twelve or thirteen. If this was my daughter …

  What’s got her eyes looking so bloody old? The last time he’d seen anything like them had been outside Elm Woods, on Pueblos – he’d been marching through farmland hit by five years’ drought and a war twice as long. Those old eyes were brought by hunger, or death. He scowled. ‘What’s your name, girl?’

  ‘Am I in, then?’ she asked quietly.

  Vago nodded, a sudden headache pounding against the inside of his skull. ‘You’ll get your assignment in a week’s time, unless you got a preference.’

  ‘Pueblosian campaign,’ the girl answered immediately. ‘Under the command of Leading Lord Drin Firstbranch. Firstbranch’s Troops.’

  Vago blinked. ‘I’ll make a note,’ he said softly. ‘Your name, soldier?’

  ‘Sorrowful. My name is Sorrowful.’

  Vago jotted the name down on his tablet. ‘Dismissed, soldier. The corporal will tell you where to go.’ He looked up as she was near the door. ‘And wash all that mud off your feet.’ Vago continued writing for a moment, then stopped. It hadn’t rained in weeks. And the mud around here was half-way between green and grey, not dark red. He tossed down the stylus and massaged his temples. Well, at least the headache’s fading.

  Jerome was a league and a half inland along the Ancient Ken Pavement, a pre-Empire thoroughfare rarely used since the Royal raised coast road had been constructed. The traffic on it these days was mostly on foot, local farmers and fishers with their goods. Of them only unravelled and torn bundles of clothing, broken baskets and trampled vegetables littering the track remained to give evidence of their passage. A lame mule, the last sentinel overseeing the refuse of an exodus, stood dumbly nearby, ankle-deep in a rice paddy. It spared Pa’an a single forlorn glance as he rode past.

  The detritus looked to be no more than a day old, the fruits and green-leaved vegetables only now beginning to rot in the afternoon heat.

  His horse carrying him at a slow walk, Pa’an watched as the first outbuildings of the small trader town came into view through the dusty haze. No one moved between the shabby mudbrick houses; no dogs came out to challenge him, and the only cart in sight leaned on a single wheel. To add to the uncanny scene, the air was still, empty of birdsong. Pa’an loosened the

  sword in its scabbard.

  As he neared the outbuildings he halted his mount. The exodus had been swift, a panicked flight. Yet he saw no bodies, no signs of violence beyond the haste evident in those leaving. He drew a deep breath, slowly released it, then clicked his horse forward. The main street was in effect the town’s only street, leading at its far end to a T intersection marked by a single two-storey stone building: the Royal Police. Its tin-backed shutters were closed, its heavy banded door shut. As he approached Pa’an held his eyes on the building.

  He dismounted before it, tying his mare to the hitching rail then looking back up the street. No movement. Unsheathing his blade, Pa’an swung back to the Police door.

  A soft, steady sound from within stopped him, too low to be heard from any distance but now, as he stood before the huge door, he could hear a liquid murmuring that raised the hairs on his neck. Pa’an reached out with his sword and set its point under the latch. He lifted the iron handle upward until it disengaged, then pushed open the door.

  Movement rippled in the gloom within, a flap and soft thumping of air carrying to Pa’an the redolent stench of putri-fying flesh. Breathing hard and with a mouth dry as old cotton, he waited for his eyes to adjust.

  He stared into the Police’s outer room, and it was a mass of movement, a chilling soft susurration of throats giving voice. The chamber was filled with black pigeons cooing in icy calm. Uniformed human shapes lay in their midst, stretched haphazardly across the floor amid droppings and drifting black down. Sweat and death clung to the air thick as gauze.

  He took a step inside. The pigeons rustled but otherwise ignored him. None made for the open doorway.

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  Swollen faces with coin-dull eyes stared up from the shadows; the faces were blue, as if men suffocated. Pa’an looked down at one of the soldiers. ‘Not a healthy thing,’ he muttered, ‘wearing these uniforms these days.’

  A conjuring of birds to keep mocking vigil. Dark humour isn't to my liking any more, I think. He shook himself, walked across the room. The pigeons tracked away from his boots, clucking. The door to the captain’s office was ajar. Musty light bled through the shuttered windows’ uneven joints. Sheathing his sword, Pa’an entered the office. The captain still sat in his chair, his face bloated and bruised in shades of blue, green and grey.

  Pa’an swept damp feathers from the desktop, rummaging through the scroll work. The papyrus sheets fell apart under his touch, the leaves rotten and oily between his fingers.

  A thorough elimination of the trail.

  He turned away, walked swiftly back through the outer room until he stepped into the warm light. He closed the Police door as, no doubt, the villagers had.

  The dark bloom of sorcery was a stain few cared to examine too closely. It had a way of spreading.

  Pa’an untethered his mare, climbed into the saddle and rode from the abandoned town. He did not look back.

  The sun sat heavy and bloated amid a smear of crimson cloud on the horizon. Pa’an fought to keep his eyes open. It had been a long day. A horrific day. The land around him, once familiar and safe, had become something else, a place stirred with the dark currents of sorcery. He was not looking forward to a night camped in the open.

  His mount plodded onward, head down, as dusk slowly enveloped them. Pulled by the weary chains of his thoughts, Pa’an tried to make sense of what had happened since morning.

  Snatched out from the shadow of that sour-faced, laconic captain and the garrison at Ken, the lieutenant had seen his prospects begin a quick rise. Aide to the Supplement was an advancement in his career he could not have even imagined a week ago. Despite the profession he had chosen, his father and his sisters were bound to be impressed, perhaps even awed, by his achievement. Like so many other noble-born sons and daughters, he’d long since set his sights on the Royal military, hungry for prestige and bored with the complacent, static attitudes of the noble class in general. Pa’an wanted something more challenging than co-ordinating shipments of wine, or overseeing the breeding of horses.

  Nor was he among the first to enlist, thus easing the way for entrance into officer training and selective postings. It had just been ill-luck that saw him sent to Ken, where a veteran garrison had been licking its wounds for nigh on six years. There’d been little respect for an untested lieutenant, and even less for a noble-born.

  Pa’an suspected that that had changed since the slaughter on the road. He’d handled it better than many of those veterans, helped in no small part by the superb breeding of his horse. Moreover, to prove to them all his cool, detached professionalism, he’d volunteered to lead the inspection detail.

  He’d done well, although the detail had proved … difficult. He’d heard screaming while crawling around among the bodies, coming from somewhere inside his own head. His eyes had fixed on details, oddities – the peculiar twist of this body, the inexplicable smile on that dead soldier’s face – but what had proved hardest was what had been done to the horses. Crusted foam-filled nostrils and mouths – the signs of terror – and the wounds were terrible, huge and devastating. Bile and faeces stained the once-proud mounts, and over everything was a glittering carpet of blood and slivers of red flesh. He had nearly wept for those horses.

  He shifted uneasily on the saddle, feeling a clamminess come to his hands where they rested on the ornate horn. He’d held on to his confidence through the whole episode; yet now, as his thoughts returned to that horrid scene, it was as if something that had always been solid in his mind now stuttered, shied, threatening his balance; the faint contempt he’d shown for those veterans in his troop, kneeling helpless on the roadside racked by dry-heaves, returned to him now with a ghoulish cast. And the echo that came from the Police at Jerome, arriving like a late blow to his already bruised and battered soul, rose once again to pluck at the defensive numbness still holding him in check.

  Pa’an straightened with an effort. He’d told the Supplement his youth was gone. He’d told her other things as well, fearless, uncaring, lacking all the caution his father had instilled in him when it came to the many faces of the Empire.

  From a great distance in his mind came old, old words: live quietly. He’d rejected that notion then; he rejected it still. The Supplement, however, had noticed him. He wondered now, for the first time, if he was right to feel pride. That hard-bitten commander of so many years ago, on the walls of Ridicule’s Nugatory, would have spat at Pa’an’s feet, with contempt, had he now stood before him. The boy was a boy no longer, but a man. Should’ve heeded my words, son. Now look at you.

  His mare pulled up suddenly, hoofs thumping confusedly on the rutted road. Pa’an reached for his weapon as he looked uneasily around in the gloom. The track ran through rice paddies, the nearest shacks of the peasants on a parallel ridge a hundred paces from the road. Yet a figure now blocked the road.

  A cold breath swirled lazily past, pinning back the mare’s ears and widening her nostrils as she flinched.

  The figure – a man by his height – was swathed in shades of green: cloaked, hooded, wearing a faded tunic and linen leggings above green-dyed leather boots. A single long-knife, the weapon of choice among Seven Metropolises warriors, was slung through a thin belt. The man’s hands, faintly grey in the afternoon light, glittered with ring’s, rings on every finger, above and below the knuckles. He raised one now, holding up a clay jug.

  ‘Thirsty, Lieutenant?’ The man’s voice was soft, the tone strangely melodic.

  ‘Have I got business with you?’ Pa’an asked, his hand remaining on the grip of his longsword.

  The man smiled, pulling back his hood. His face was long, the skin a lighter shade of grey, the eyes dark and strangely angled. He looked to be in his early thirties, though his hair was white. ‘The Supplement asked of me a favour,’ he said. ‘She grows impatient for your report. I am to escort you … with haste.’ He shook the jug. ‘But first, a meal. I have a veritable feast secreted in my pockets – far better fare than a browbeaten Kenese village can offer. Join me, here on the roadside. We can amuse ourselves in conversation and idle watching of peasants toiling endlessly. I am named Acme.’

  ‘I know that name,’ Pa’an said.

  ‘Well, you should,’ Acme replied. ‘I am he, alas. The blood of a Cest Velle races in my veins, seeking escape, no doubt, from its more common human stream. Mine was the hand that took the life of Magbalaan’s royal line, king, queen, sons and daughters.’

  ‘And cousins, second cousins, third—’

  ‘Expunging all hope, indeed. Such was my duty as a Talon of unsurpassed skill. But you have failed in answering my question.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Thirsty?’

  Scowling, Pa’an dismounted. ‘I thought you said the Supplement wished for haste.’

  ‘Hasten we shall, Lieutenant, once we’ve filled our bellies, and conversed in civil fashion.’

  ‘Your reputation puts civility far down your list of skills, Talon.’

  ‘It’s a most cherished trait of mine that sees far too little opportunity for exercise these fell days, Lieutenant. Surely you’d grant me some of your precious time, since I’m to be your escort?’

  ‘Whatever arrangement you made with the Supplement is between you and her,’ Pa’an said, approaching. ‘I owe you nothing, Acme. Except enmity.’

  The Talon squatted, removing wrapped packages from his pockets, followed by two crystal goblets. He uncorked the jug. ‘Ancient wounds. I was led to understand you’ve taken a different path, leaving behind the dull, jostling ranks of the nobility’ He poured, filling the goblets with amber-coloured wine. ‘You are now one with the body of the Empire, Lieutenant. It commands you. You respond unquestioningly to its will. You are a small part of a muscle in that body. No more. No less. The time for old grudges is long past. So,’ he set down the jug and handed Pa’an a goblet, ‘we now salute new beginnings, Ganoe Pa’an, lieutenant and aide to Supplement Loren.’

  Scowling, Pa’an accepted the goblet.

  The two drank.

  Acme smiled, producing a silk handkerchief to dab against his lips. ‘There now, that wasn’t so difficult, was it? May I call you by your chosen name?’

  ‘Pa’an will do. And you? What title does the commander of the Talon hold?’

  Acme smiled again. ‘Lasean still commands the Talon. I assist her. In this way I too am an aide of sorts. You may call me by my chosen name, of course. I’m not one for maintaining formalities beyond a reasonable point in an acquaintance.’

  Pa’an sat down on the muddy road. ‘And we’ve passed that point?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘How do you decide?’

  ‘Ah, well.’ Acme began unwrapping his packages, revealing cheese, fistbread, fruit and berries. ‘I make acquaintances in one of two ways. You’ve seen the second of those.’

  ‘And the first?’

  ‘No time for proper introductions in those instances, alas.’

  Wearily Pa’an unstrapped and removed his helm. ‘Do you wish to hear what I found in Jerome?’ he asked, running a hand through his black hair.

  Acme shrugged. ‘If you’ve the need.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better await my audience with the Supplement.’

  The Talon smiled. ‘You have begun to learn, Pa’an. Never be too easy with the knowledge you possess. Words are like coins – it pays to hoard.’

  ‘Until you die on a bed of gold,’ Pa’an said.

  ‘Hungry? I hate eating alone.’

  Pa’an accepted a chunk of fistbread. ‘So, was the Supplement truly impatient, or are you here for other reasons?’

  With a smile, the Talon rose. ‘Alas, genteel conversation is done. Our way opens.’ He faced the road.

  Pa’an turned to see a curtain in the air tear open on the road, spilling dull yellow light. A Warenne, the secret paths of sorcery. ‘Cowl’s Puff.’ He sighed, fighting off a sudden chill. Within he could see a greyish pathway, humped on either side by low mounded walls and vaulted overhead by impenetrable ochre-hued mist. The air swept past into the portal like a drawn breath, revealing the pathway to be of ash as invisible currents stirred and raised spinning dust-devils.

  ‘You will have to get used to this,’ Acme said.

  Pa’an collected his mare’s reins and slung his helm on the saddlehorn. ‘Lead on,’ he said.

  The Talon cast him a quick appraising glance, then strode into the Warenne.

  Pa’an followed. The portalway closed behind them, in its place a continuation of the path. Nvse Ken had vanished, and with it all signs of life. The world they had entered was barren, deathly. The banked mounds lining the trail proved to be more ash. The air was gritty, tasting of metal.

  ‘Welcome to the Royal Warenne,’ Acme said, with a hint of mockery.

  ‘Pleasant.’

  ‘Carved by force out of… what was here before. Has such an effort ever been achieved before? Only the gods can say.’

  They began walking.

  ‘I take it, then,’ Pa’an said, ‘that no god claims this Warenne. By this, you cheat the tolls, the gatekeepers, the guardians on unseen bridges, and all the others said to dwell in the Warennes in service to their immortal masters.’

  Acme grunted. ‘You imagine the Warennes as crowded as that? Well, the beliefs of the ignorant are ever entertaining. You shall be good company on this short journey, I think.’

  Pa’an fell silent. The horizons beyond the banked heaps of ash were close, a vague blending of ochre sky and grey-black ground. Sweat trickled under his mail hauberk. His mare snorted heavily.

  ‘In case you were wondering,’ Acme said, after a time, ‘the Supplement is now in Magbalaan. We will use this Warenne to cross the distance – three hundred leagues in only a few short hours. Some think the Empire has grown too large, some even think their remote provinces are beyond Empress Lasean’s reach. As you have just learned, Pa’an, such beliefs are held by fools.’

  The mare snorted again.

  ‘I’ve shamed you into silence, then? I do apologize, Lieutenant, for mocking your ignorance—’

  ‘It’s a risk you’ll have to live with,’ Pa’an said.

  The next thousand paces of silence belonged to Acme.