The Blood Debt

* * * *

The Blood Debt

[The Cataclysm 02]

By Sean Williams

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

‘The Void Beneath is a horrible place. A ringing emptiness infuses it, an endless hum that scrubs the soul clean. Imprinted on this eternal drone are the minds of the lost, clinging to their memories like life rafts. Despairing and desperate, the Lost Minds smother new arrivals with pleas to hear their stories — for if they are forgotten, they inevitably die.

‘Among the Lost Minds is one they call the Oldest. The Oldest One bade me listen to his story, and I did. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. If it is true, then even the most outlandish tales in the Book of Towers are based soundly on fact. If it is not true, then we are as much in the dark about our past as we ever were. Even now, years later, I am still unsure which of these two possibilities is the more terrible.’

Skender Van Haasteren X

* * * *

Seth remembered: the Flame imploding and the two Sisters being sucked into it; ekhi breaking into Sheol and Ellis escaping on a brilliant, hypnotic back; mountains closing in over a dark, hunched shape and three slender glassy towers entombing them all. Through the chaos, a green figure strode calmly toward him and whispered softly into his ear.

‘Peace, Seth. This is neither our first meeting nor our last. In your future, the Goddess awaits.’

The bubble of the world burst, and a new topography swept over the land.

‘Remember us, Seth,’ Horva insisted from very far away. ‘Please, remember us ...’

Sandwiched in the knot that had once been Bardo, the twins rolled and tumbled. They weren’t in the First Realm; they weren’t in the Second Realm; they were between, holding the worlds together like glue. A hum swept over them like the breathing of an ocean, smoothing them out and removing their sharp edges. The void pressed in until only echoes of their lives remained.

They had bent worlds to their will and travelled the darkest of ways; conversed with gods and with those who would be gods; walked in the company of monsters and angels. They had killed.

Time passed, and they knew it not.

* * * *

The Warden

‘On the matter of the ghosts, we find that their

presence comprises no direct threat to the citizens of

the Haunted City. Only when summoned can they

do any harm. In order to deter such a summoning,

necromancy will remain a Category A crime,

punishable by expulsion from the Haunted City.

‘Therefore, on the matter of Shilly of Gooron, we

find her guilty of necromancy and recommend that

she be punished accordingly. She may live freely in

the Strand provided she does not attempt to

practise or teach the Change, or re-enter the

Haunted City. Any deviation from this course will

result in exile beyond our borders.’

JUDGMENT OF THE SKY WARDEN CONCLAVE IN

EXTRAORDINARY SESSION,

YEAR EIGHT OF THE ALCAIDE DRAGAN BRAHAM

he young man looked out to sea.

As far as days went, this one was almost perfect. The sky hung overhead in a marvellous blue dome, marbled with clouds. The sea sighed with easy, patient rhythms. An effervescent breeze blew directly into his lungs from the grey expanses of the ocean.

He should have been content. But he wasn’t. His skin tingled from more than just the salty spray. He would have been sunburned hours earlier, but for the protective charms daubed on his shoulders and back. The smell of rotting fish came strongly on the breeze. The pounding of the surf was relentless, day and night.

A seagull cawed in the distance, and he looked up sharply, feeling eyes on him.

I’m not here,
he projected. He imagined the beach as it would look from the air: a ribbon of cream-coloured land separating the blue from the brown; him alone along its length — shoulder-length dark hair waving in the wind, an oval face with unremarkable features, apart from his eyes, which were shades of blue mottled with white flecks. His mother’s eyes; and his adopted father’s hands, weathered and calloused from plenty of hard work.

The seagull cawed again. Sky Wardens sometimes used seagulls as spies along the Strand. Whether this was one of them or not, he couldn’t tell, but it paid to be careful. The beach he stood upon was a part of their endless, linear empire, and for Sal the sea had never been a friend.

Gently, so as not to raise more interest than he might already have, he painted himself out of the picture.

Just a fisher. Not Sal Hrvati.

Wheeling and diving, the seagull resumed its hunt for lunch.

Sal was hungry too, but that wasn’t the source of his discontent.

Something’s wrong, somewhere,
he thought.
I’ve been feeling it for days. But what does it have to do with me? Now?

He closed his eyes and let the world rush into him. He forgot the seagull and the wind and the heat on his temples and the sea’s stealthy creep. He exhaled, then inhaled deeply. A vibrant buzz passed through his bones. The Change was powerful and raw on the beach, where earth and ocean met. He could feel it in everything around him, as wilful and nebulous as air. Sometimes he would sit for hours and let his thoughts drift beyond the ephemera of everyday life. In the ebbing and flowing of the Change, he felt vitality and vigour that was equally beautiful in life and in death.

But not any more. There was a tear, somewhere — a tripping of the cadences -of the Strand. It nagged at him, maddening in its ability to pull out of reach when he tried to pin it down. He couldn’t tell if it was a person or a thing, or something he feared to see in himself. As much a part of the Change as anything else, he knew he was far from infallible.

Sal glanced to his left at a grave marker on the edge of the beach line. The weatherworn post was inscribed with charms and encrusted with salt.
What would you tell me, Lodo? Am I imagining things or beginning to see clearly at last?

He returned his attention to the sun and the sand and the sky. The wind danced fitfully around his legs, as though sweeping the way clean for a storm, but he could smell no rain, no thunder. The stone pendant around his neck, a weather charm called
yadeh-tash,
was silent.

Then it struck him — at once both physically and mentally. He cried out at a fierce stab of pain between his shoulder blades, and spun to look behind him. The beach was empty, except for him and the birds, but his eyes saw beyond them, through the rough fringe of scrub and into the gracefully towering folds of sand dunes that marched effortlessly inland. In the long moments he had been gawping at faraway fractures, he had completely overlooked something nearer and infinitely more precious. Close to home someone had tripped a trap.

‘Carah.’ He called the name as loudly as he dared. ‘Carah!’

His toes clenched in the sand and he began to run.

* * * *

Carah!

The sound of her heart-name propelled Shilly out of a deep sleep she didn’t remember entering. She had been dreaming of an outline of a face, or something very much like a face, although it seemed to have too many eyes and maybe an extra mouth. It belonged to something buried under the sand, something that was trying very hard to surface. It frightened her, and with her hands she had tried to sweep the impression of it from the sand. But sweeping the grains away only brought it to the surface faster than ever ...

She sat up with a jerk. Sal had called her, and he had sounded panicked. It had been a long time since the last false alarm. Although they knew theoretically that they could be found at any time, it wasn’t possible to live in a state of perpetual dread. Their jitters in the early days had settled down to a constant, low-level vigilance. Hiding was second nature to them now.

She didn’t dare take the chance that he was jumping at shadows. Struggling free of her rabbit-skin coverlet, she shook off the lingering veils of sleep. The underground workshop, their home, was warm but not stuffy, ventilated by a chimney leading up through the compacted sand to fresh air far above. Kidney-shaped and high-ceilinged, the workshop had been fashioned decades earlier by a renegade Stone Mage who had come to Fundelry in search of new ways to master the Change. Instead of peace and quiet he had found Shilly, a girl with a knack for the Change but without the talent to use it. He had taken her as an apprentice and, on his death, left Shilly all his possessions. The workshop contained the trinkets he had made or gathered to himself down the years. Some she understood perfectly, grasping their purpose the moment she studied them, even though she didn’t have the spark that would make them work. Others remained a mystery despite many hours of contemplation.

A flawed metal mirror caught her in its depths as she shrugged into the cotton dress she had worn the previous day and slipped on her sandals. Her dark hair stood in total disarray, bleached at the tips by sunlight. The same light had burned her skin deep brown, darkening what nature had given her still further. A series of thin white scars marred the skin of her right leg. The mirror had been dropped and was now warped on its left side, giving her a compressed, foreshortened aspect, as though she was walking into an invisible barrier. She didn’t linger.

She grabbed the workshop’s pole-shaped latchkey from its usual place and hurried through the tunnel which led her from the main room to an antechamber. There was a wicked hook at one end of the latchkey and, on reaching a cave barely large enough for her to stand upright, she poked this into the sandy soil and twisted. Half of the latchkey vanished into the wall, as though tugged at by hands on the far side. She hung onto her end and firmly twisted the pole again. The charm had come with the workshop, one of those she hadn’t quite fathomed, but she understood its operation well. Something clicked under her hands, and she raised her eyes to look into the dull, sandy wall.

A faint echo of the dunes outside the entrance to the workshop came to her, as misty as a dream. She didn’t see the shape of the dunes so much as the
form
of them: the lines they made against each other, against the spindly grass that grew in their shadows, against the blurred horizon. She swept her attention along those lines, looking for any recent change. Birds appeared as swooping vortices, dimples in the sky; crabs were asterisks leaving complicated ellipses in their wakes; humans stood out like giant, dead trees on a fallow field.

There.
She focused on a new feature of the dunes: a line of footprints marred the smoothly changing symmetry. Past them, just touching the low hills beyond the sand, were several parallel tracks that looked hauntingly familiar.
Made by wheels,
she realised. No hoof-prints, horse or camel. Self-propelled, although she couldn’t see the machine itself.