The Black Wall E-Book

R.A. Fisher

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

When Syrina finds Anna and Pasha, survivors of General Mann’s assault on the valley hidden in the peaks of the Black Wall, she realizes they may be the key to discovering what she is. But after feelings she didn’t think possible well up for Pasha, things grow complicated.

With the help of Ves, pirate-turned-smuggler, they pursue Mann across the continent. However, growing tensions between factions within the Church of N’narad make the trip more perilous than they counted on.

Can Syrina find the key to herself and the voice in her head, and find revenge against her master? And what price will she be willing to pay?

Leseprobe

THE BLACK WALL

TIDES BOOK TWO

R. A. FISHER

CONTENTS

Map

Prologue

1. The Invasion: Six Months Before the Verdict

2. The Defenders

3. Waiting

4. The Aftermath

5. Meeting

6. The Crossing: Seven Months Before the Trial

7. Unrequited Love

8. Old Friends, New Deals

9. Smudge

10. Unwelcome: Eight Months Before the Trial

11. Search

12. Requited Love

13. Interlude

14. Rescue

15. The Flowered Calf

16. The Salamander: Nine Months Before the Trial

17. Great Spring

18. The Astrologer

19. Myrion’s Revenge

20. Those Who Care

21. The Grace’s War

22. Orders: Fifteen Months Before the Trial

23. The Fight

24. The Pit

25. The Wrong Sibling

26. The Pirate’s Plan

27. Going Home

28. Broken Bones

29. Into the Void

30. Maresg

31. Allies

32. The Rescue

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Next in the Series

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2020 R.A. Fisher

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Marilyn Wagner

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

PROLOGUE

THE TRIAL

“Guilty.” The Grace’s word reverberated through the Hall.

The Grace of Fom, an angular, thin woman with hair and eyes the color of unpolished iron, waited for the echo of her verdict to die before continuing. “General Albertus Mann, you are condemned to the Pit for public viewing until dead, for sedition, treason, and the murder of Cardinal Prast Vimr. Do you have any words before you are stricken from the Books of Heaven?”

Mann, despite his condemnation, felt unexpected relief. The verdict and sentence were, of course, inevitable. Despite its ultimate success, his expedition to the Black Wall, and the valley hidden within it, had been a disaster from the moment he and his ridiculous army had embarked on the three steamships bound for Valez’Mui.

He looked around the cathedral at the center of Wise Hall, Seat of the Grace. On buttressed marble walls two-hundred hands high tapestries draped, depicting images of the Tidal Works, steamships, the thirteen harbor towers, and other glories of Fom, including several of Wise Hall, which he had always found redundant.

The Grace stood at the pulpit. Behind her rose a stained glass window from floor to ceiling—a cacophony of light and color depicting the Eighteen Levels of Heaven, from the Heaven of Stone at the bottom to the Heaven of Light at the top, represented by the sun with the crescent Eye above, embracing it in its half-circle. The seal of the Church of N’narad.

Eighteen Heavens that no longer held a place for him.

No matter, he thought. He’d stopped believing in Heaven long before he’d sunk a knife into the back of Vimr’s skull.

What could he say? He was guilty of killing Cardinal Vimr. Guilty of so much more.

“Nothing, Grace,” he said, voice soft and even, despite his shaking hands.

The Grace only gave a slight, sad nod. Mann let the guards lead him away.

1

THE INVASION: SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE VERDICT

Bodies lay strewn, pale against the rich brown ground. Blood muddied the soil between the trunks of massive trees, churned until its hue matched the broad, fern-like leaves grasping the sky. Long-beaked scavenger birds, red breasted with gleaming black wings, hunched in the lower branches, silent and waiting. I watched Cardinal Vimr lean down to pluck one of the long, black, wooden daggers from the hand of a corpse, the plates of his elaborate, ill-fitting leather armor sliding against each other like a film of cracked wax floating on water.

The karakh shifted beneath me. I wondered if the creature found the corpse-littered glade as terrible as I did, or if it just shared my hatred of the Cardinal. Or its attitude to our situation was as alien as its form, and its thoughts unknowable to anyone but its human companion.

Gre’pa, or as close to that as I could pronounce, was shaggy white with grey streaks, and over twenty hands tall at the shoulder. Dakar had unsheathed its tusks when we arrived in the valley. They were studded with bronze bolts, sharpened edges now dripping with gore. The shepherd sat motionless in front of me on the karakh’s shoulders, and the back of his head revealed nothing about what the chieftain’s husband was thinking.

I pulled my thoughts from the monstrous scavenger and forced them back to the clearing. Corpses of my soldiers. How many of them had been added this time to the ranks that would never return home from this wretched mission? How many of their lives had I spent? I tried to feel something; tried to recall my horror and shame at the first loss of life we’d suffered on this mad journey when the burning wreckage of the Salamander sank into the Sea of N’narad. But my grief since then had been replaced with a void, and now, even when recalling the Salamander, I could feel nothing.

“General Mann.” The low sound of Vimr’s voice made the hair on my arms stand on end, but I kept my expression even when I turned to face the Arch Bishop’s adviser harnessed behind me on Gre’pa’s back.

“What is it, Vimr?” I spat the words more than I’d intended.

Vimr cast a meaningful look at the bloody meadow. “I maintain that this requires a purge.” Vimr’s voice was smooth.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing the answer but needing Vimr to say it. Needed him to say it, so it would not be my responsibility. To tell myself that I was only following orders. I felt sick.

Vimr sighed, reading my thoughts on my face. “Genocide is an ugly term, and shouldn’t apply to these constructs. Nevertheless, as I have said on more than one occasion, our passage the rest of the way through this valley will only be achieved with the extermination of the guardians.”

I looked again at the scattering of bodies that weren’t my soldiers. The karakh had mangled most into bloody strips and bone. Still, I could see enough. Shorter on average than those from outside the Black Wall, clad in soft, dark leather. Both men and women. Weapons of strange, black wood, harder than iron or ceramic. “They seem human enough to me.”

Vimr shrugged. “Regardless, the histories are consistent. Whatever guardians the Ancients left in this valley were created by them. Produced, not born. Not, at least, in any normal sense of the term.”

I felt my jaw clench, but I was facing away from Vimr, and I doubt he noticed. “I will not condone the annihilation of a people who are only defending their land. Whatever your ‘histories’ tell you.”

Vimr sighed. “They are not my histories. They are, as you well know, the records of the Church—of Heaven itself. Anyway, General, I’ve broached the subject with the remainder of your men. They all agree that their survival and the completion of our mission surpasses any cultural needs. We—you—lead a quest passed from Heaven itself, and the locals, whether machines or men, are killing themselves in their attempt to stop you. The only difference between staying the course and bringing the fight to them is how many more of your own people you lose.”

The remainder of your men. The words echoed in my head, drowning out the rest of Vimr’s tirade, threatening my numbness with the only thing that would be worse: regret. Memories flooded back.

The descent into the valley strapped to the back of Gre’pa had been only a little less terrifying for me than it had been for the five hundred soldiers I’d chosen to come with, rappelling over six hundred hands to the jagged, black scree that ran to the edge of the forest. Maybe. To be fair, I’ve never been a fan of high places. At least the soldiers had had ropes. The eleven karakh had plunged from the grotto head first, creeping down the obsidian cliff like spiders, their massive claws gripping the cracked, black glass.

And yet the other half, who stayed in the grotto, like the thousand still waiting in the foothills of the Black Wall, had complained at being left behind. Good men. Better than me. Better than I deserved.

The first attack came while we camped at the base of the cliff that first night, whipped by wind blowing up from the south. They flooded out of the darkness like demons, slaughtering a quarter of us before vanishing among the trunks of the enormous, blood-hued trees. The canopy was so thick that even the great lens of the gibbous Eye couldn’t penetrate it enough for any organized pursuit. If not for the eleven karakh, we all would have died then.

I wondered at the time—still wonder now—if those in the tunnel, so disappointed at being left behind, felt the same way as they watched our burning tents far below them and listened to the distant screams. Probably, they’d only grown more bitter as they’d looked on, helpless. In all the months since that first night, I was too much a coward to ask them.

For five days, we pushed south, circumventing the few settlements we’d found, over Vimr’s protests. The villages had, at least from a distance, seemed abandoned in any case. I argued that we’d only come for the contents of a library, not to exterminate the hapless guardians who had been imprisoned in that valley since the Age of Ashes. My soldiers, for their part, followed me into the valley because they were faithful. Destined to a better Heaven should they be lucky enough to give their lives in service to the Church of N’narad.

Now more than half of them lay in a trail of corpses from the grotto to the glade where we now stood.

I studied the faces of the survivors, scattered around the edge of the clearing, standing or crouching. That meadow had become sacred. Even the karakh were reluctant to enter. Hard, tired eyes. Leather armor, some of it hanging in tatters, all now spattered with blood, their own or someone else’s.

Vimr was right about one thing: These soldiers no longer served me. They no longer even served the promise of Heaven. They only wanted to survive long enough to go home.

I ground my teeth and turned, craning my neck until I could look Vimr in the eye. “I will not allow my army to commit genocide,” I whispered. Then I spat. “But it is obvious that this army is no longer mine.”

“Was it ever, General?”

I didn’t have an answer, and Dakar, if he’d heard the exchange, didn’t react.

We continued south. The terrain became rocky and uneven, but there was still no end to the massive, red trees. Twice in two days, we came across large, square patches of thin-leafed brambles covered in barbed, finger-long, thorns and tiny white flowers. The blackvine, you called it. Not even the karakh could find a path through them, and we were forced to make our way around. Both times we stumbled upon villages of small, obsidian buildings, their roofs thatched with the broad, dried leaves of the trees. Well maintained. Abandoned. Vimr ordered the buildings doused in naphtha, and their roofs burned. I watched, silent and ashamed.

The sun set early behind the western Black Wall, plunging the valley into a twilight that would last for hours. I called for a halt, anxious to finish setting up camp before the wind that had raged every night made such a task impossible. I half-expected my order to be overridden by Vimr, but the squat man only nodded like a sage from his perch behind me on the shoulders of Gre’pa.

It took two hours to set up the tents and a few hasty pickets on the uneven, root-knotted ground, but twilight still seeped, speckling the haggard remnants of my soldiers in blood-hued shadows.

I walked among my men, though in truth, it was only to get away from Vimr; there was no need for orders. From somewhere nearby but out of sight, I could hear his voice chattering and laughing with a few officers.

No, no orders were necessary. Not from me.

They set up my tent first, despite my objections, and I wandered back to sit alone at the end of my cot, listening to the sounds of my army through the canvas walls.

I wouldn’t have realized I’d fallen asleep if it weren’t for the scream that woke me.

An orange light flickered through the heavy cloth of my tent. Fire, I remember thinking, groggy through half-remembered dreams. The scream was sustained, inhuman, shrill. It pierced the air from every side. The tent shuddered and flapped. Wind, I realized. The screaming was the sound of the wind.

I bolted upright, and my right hip creaked in protest, reminding me I was too old for this. For all of it.

I staggered to the flap, which had become untied, now snapping in the burning gale. I forced myself to stand straight and gave my right leg one final shake, as if that would help.

Heat roiled from the south, and smoke churned between the tents on violent, stray currents. Above the scream of wind skittered other sounds—soldiers yelling in confusion, uprooted tents snapping where they fluttered, ensnared in trees, the creak and snap branches, the panicked whistles and clicks of the karakh. A black and gold Sun-and-Eye pennant of Tyrsh tumbled past, writhing like some mad spirit.

The smoke burned my eyes. A few soldiers ran this way and that between the tents, or knelt by fallen comrades. I hesitated, feeling lost, before making my way to the west side of the camp. Most of my soldiers had already moved to the perimeter to man the pickets, despite the lack of orders and the flames.

Captain Rohm was there, crouched in a shallow trench. He glanced at me and nodded a greeting as I limped down to hunker at his side, trying and failing to suppress a wince as pain growled from my hip.

“They’re trying to drive off the karakh with fire.” Rohm had to yell over the din. “Or just kill us.”

I grimaced, remembering the Salamander. “Guess they’ve never seen a karakh before.”

Rohm shook his head, but before he could respond, the wind surged. A wall of heat rolled over us. The livid glow to the south became a liquid avalanche of flame stampeding through a tunnel of air clear of smoke, leaping from tree to tree, devouring the whipping red leaves like locusts.

I coughed and grasped at my chest, unable to catch my breath in the boiling fumes. The air shimmered and writhed like water. Through the sheet of darkness collapsing over me, I could see Rohm on his knees, clawing at the ground.

I guess this is how it will end for us. The thought was calm. I could feel the oxygen-starved air singe my lips and tear at my lungs, smell burning hair, but it was far away. I sucked in another desperate, pointless breath.

My last breath, I thought, with a vague sense of disappointment.

A shadow passed across the wall of light. Huge eyes of gold, pupils shrunk to tiny black marbles against the glow of fire. Massive tusks bolted with bronze curved up from a flat, dog-like nose, which in turn jutted from the white face of some immense, demonic goat.

Gre’pa, smoke curling in reeking tendrils from his fur, scooped us up, each in a massive, clawed hand, and tossed us behind Dakar, who straddled the creature’s neck, clinging to the brass chains pierced through its cheeks.

Without bothering to check if we’d gotten a grip on the smoldering fur, Dakar let go of the chains, leaned forward into his mount’s neck, and let the creature carry us away.

I’d trained riding a karakh before the mission. Since our descent into the valley an endless week before, I’d spent every long day strapped into a harness behind Dakar, but I’d never, until that moment, imagined needing to ride as the shepherds do, without a harness, or even the benefit of the chains.

Fire and light filled my senses, and burning wind, and now over everything the acrid stench of smoking fur. My palms burned where they clung to the thick, white hair, and my legs felt like rubber. Pain screamed from my hip.

The creature leapt from tree to tree, and even through its panic it kept itself between us and the ground. I had no idea if Rohm still clung behind me, or lay dying on the forest floor somewhere behind. I could only press myself into Gre’pa, feeling the rhythm of surging muscles, while I waited to fall and be consumed by the fire that raged on every side.

Maybe, I thought, using fire to drive off the karakh worked, after all.

Our flight, panicked though it was, faded to monotony. I clung to the smoldering fur, choking against the rancid stench of burning hair, which was so strong that the banshee wind of the valley couldn’t tear it away.

After what seemed like hours, I felt the karakh slow. The grasping fingers of branches were gone. Leaping from tree to tree was replaced with an even, crab-like amble. The wind still screamed.

I peeled my face from where I’d buried it in the burnt hair of Gre’pa an eternity ago.

Smoky, orange light oozed over the eastern peaks, which now reached almost to the zenith. Gre’pa had carried us due east to the treeless, boulder-strewn slopes at the base of the Wall. Rough chunks of obsidian ranging in size from pebbles to towns scattered to our left and right. Behind and below, grey smoke shrouded the forest of red, fern-like trees, rolling off to the north in the dissipating tendrils of wind. Beneath it, the fire throbbed orange and red and yellow.

My numb limbs failed at last, and I released Gre’pa to slide onto the lichen-encrusted rocks. There I lay, looking at the grey light of the sky with burning eyes. The karakh stepped away.

The blurry image of Rohm’s face peered down at me, silhouetted against a smoggy blue sky. A light, cool breeze brushed around us.

“Rohm. I didn’t know you made it.” The words burned my throat.

“Right behind you, clinging to Gre’pa’s ass, General. I’m as surprised as you.” Rohm’s voice was no better off than mine. “And I take back everything I’ve ever said about that glorious beast.”

I tried to sit up, but the effort made my head swim, so I settled back down onto the jagged shale. My fingers felt like claws. I could still feel flames dancing along my limbs and face.

I coughed. The sound was soft and dry and sent flames into my lungs. “Who made it?”

Rohm hesitated, but I couldn’t make out the captain’s expression through the shadows. “Us. And Dakar and Gre’pa, obviously. Six other karakh and their shepherds. Dassik, the new Artificer, but he’s burned bad. Five men in pretty good shape, and another eleven not so good. Was fifteen when we got up here a few hours ago. Now eleven, if that tells you anything. Not good at all. We’ll probably be down to eight by tomorrow morning, though it looks like anyone who lives through the night will survive long enough to be killed by something else. If you want to consider that good news, go ahead. It isn’t going to get any better.” He ended with a shrug that might have been apologetic. “And Vimr.”

I closed my eyes again. Twenty-two of my soldiers were still alive and uninjured enough to carry on. Twenty-two out of the five hundred who’d descended into the valley. Twenty-two and Vimr.

“What about the powder?” It was a question I didn’t want to ask. If we’d lost the powder kegs to the fire, there wouldn’t be any point in going on. I had heard no explosions, but I doubted I would have noticed them over the wind.

Rohm nodded as if he’d expected the question. “Not as bad as it could be. Eleven kegs can’t be accounted for. Might still find a few where we camped, but I wouldn’t count on it. Dersh and his karakh—Zha’an or something—grabbed the other half and got up here before the fire rolled through. Don’t ask me how they did it.”

It was the best news yet. I hoped eleven kegs would be enough to get through whatever door we’d been sent here to find. Only one way to find out.

“What do we do now, General?” I heard the question he was asking. Can we go home now?

I said nothing for a long time, eyes closed. Rohm probably thought I was planning some grand course of action, but my mind was blank. “Where are the others?” I asked at last, voice rasping, peeling my eyes open to look at the silhouette of my captain.

Rohm nodded past my shoulder, and I sat up enough to crane my head in that direction, wincing at pain even that slight motion shot through my head. The rocky slope we sat on fell into a crevasse fifty paces to the south.

“They fell in?” I asked, realizing how stupid the question was as I asked it.

“No, General.” Rohm’s forced chuckle turned into a cough. “There’s water down there. Fast running stream. Fish, too, I guess, though I didn’t get close enough to see any, myself. We lost everything in the fire, and we don’t have enough provisions left to get back to the grotto the way it—”

“We’re not going back to the grotto,” I said, hating how much sense he was making. “Two, maybe three days more at the most. Faster now.” Now that there’s so few of us, but I couldn’t finish the thought out loud. My voice caught in my throat, and I despised myself for it.

My army had been annihilated by its own existence. Had we just come with the karakh, we would have traveled faster. Maybe fast enough to avoid conflict. Fast enough to flee the fire. The deaths of four hundred and eighty-four men were—are—my fault. I could blame the Arch Bishop and Vimr for the others if I were the type of man to set my responsibility at someone else’s feet. They had been the ones who forced me to bring that absurd army across the continent. But it had been my call to bring them into the valley.

Now they were dead. And because they were dead, the survivors could complete their mission.

I thought back to the Salamander, and the specter of death that had continued to chase me like my shadow since then. And now this. The grand finale.

Rohm’s eyes flickered, but he only gave a quick nod. “Yes, General. I’ll inform the others.”

In the end, it wasn’t that simple, because nothing is ever that simple. Of the five that included Rohm’s “not so wounded,” three included broken bones, and the next morning five of the burned could walk, and four others needed to be carried on litters but would survive.

For all my words to Rohm, I would not push them any further. Not for a Heaven I’d lost my faith in years before, not for the Arch Bishop of N’narad and his schemes, nor the Grace of Fom and hers.

I would go on along with the remaining officers, mounted on five of the karakh because we had a job to do. I released the rest to go back to the five hundred still waiting in the grotto, and the more than nine hundred who waited in the foothills outside the Wall. I gave the remaining provisions to those returning with the wounded, and the fish they’d caught that afternoon. I sent two of the karakh back, too, in case they ran into any more trouble. Vimr objected. I continued with my orders as if he hadn’t spoken, and he fell into fuming silence.

Those that were to go back watched with blank stares as we plunged into the smoldering forest, and returned my parting salute with empty, mechanical precision. I had time to wonder if I would see any of them again, but then they were gone, behind the ethereal barrier of curling smoke and blackened pillars of the giant trees, and I was clinging to Gre’pa, thankful now to have the luxury of the harness. Vimr muttered something behind me, lost in the crack of brittle underbrush.

We traveled until the trunks looming out of the void in front of us were nothing more than shafts of shadow in the glossy haze cast by the starlight that glinted through bare branches. I intended to call a halt during the long twilight, but Vimr had beaten me too it, so I had them press on into the night, out of spite, like a seventy year old toddler.

Within an hour of setting camp, the watch reported we weren’t alone. They’d heard low voices in the darkness to the south, over the pops and snaps of falling, burnt branches. The first watch had reported to Rohm, who had reported to me out of ear-shot from Vimr.

I called them over—Isam, tall, balding, and hunched, and a burly, bearded thug everyone called Keg.

“Sound like another ambush?” I asked, glancing where Vimr had waddled to relieve himself.

“Nah,” Keg answered, picking at his short, ruddy beard with a thumb and index finger. “Women. Not that that means anything, I guess, but children, too. Like a town.”

“A town?” I looked around at the blackened trunks. Little gusts of wind curled fingers of ash from the ground, visible in the Eyelight glaring up from somewhere beyond the eastern peaks of the Wall.

“Well, a settlement or something, anyway,” Isam answered. “I heard it, too.”

“They survived the fire, then?” I realized the idiocy of my question after it left my mouth.

Keg grunted.

“Who survived?” Whined Vimr’s voice from where the little man lurched out of the darkness behind the two scouts.

Isam turned to face him. “A settlement or something, I guess.”

“It should be purged, then.” Vimr’s voice was bored.

I ground my teeth. “Children and their mothers? I don’t think so.” I turned to the two scouts. “Keep an ear to it. Tell the next pair on watch to do the same. We’ll move on before dawn. Take the long way around. With the karakh, we’ll be gone before they know we’re here. You hear anything—anything—that sounds like more than a few surviving kids and their mothers, let me know.”

Nobody moved. Isam studied me a long time before he spoke. “We’re with Cardinal Vimr on this one. We’ve had enough of these bastards, and I’m pretty sure the other men feel the same way.”

“I gave you an order—”

“You can bring me up on insubordination charges if we ever get back to civilization,” Isam stated. “But Cardinal trumps General, anyway, so good luck with that. I’d rather get out of here alive and let the courts decide, how about you, Keg?”

The stocky shadow of Keg dipped his head in agreement.

The silhouette of Vimr nodded as if a difficult but apt decision had been reached. Rohm watched, expressionless. I couldn’t blame him. Had he argued, he’d only be tossed out with me. The men had made up their minds. The mutiny was complete.

Vimr coughed and called out into the darkness. “Dakar, is Gre’pa harnessed?”

There was some rustling from somewhere a little way to the north and a slow answer. “Er, not yet, but he can be in twenty minutes. Why? We going somewhere?” Dakar emerged from the darkness just as the tip of the gibbous Eye crested the top of the Black Wall. His grey eyes were on me, not Vimr. “General?”

I said nothing at first, trying to think of a way out. I thought about saying nothing, pretending I could wash my hands of the coming massacre with inaction.

Complacency. The evil of cowards. I could order Dakar to stand down, wait for morning and go around. And then what? If Dakar stayed loyal to me, which was likely, the five karakh would make easy work of the few soldiers and Vimr, but that… I thought of the Salamander and shut my eyes. No, I couldn’t do that. Whatever happened, whomever they took orders from, they would be my soldiers. Until the end. What action was left to me? To take responsibility for the actions of an army that wasn’t mine.

That was the moment I realized that was what my job had always boiled down to. Embarrassing it took so many decades to figure out something so obvious to everyone else.

“As the Cardinal said, Shepherd Dakar.” My voice was quiet, sapped of will. “Harness the karakh. We move when the Eye breaks free of the Wall.”

When we mounted, it was Vimr who took the place behind Dakar. The shepherd shot me a questioning look. I kept my face blank.

The village squatted on a low mesa. It was walled on two sides by fields of the black, thorny brambles, now stripped of their leaves and little white flowers, made harder than steel by the fire. South of the small collection of sunken longhouses, the ground dropped a short way before rising again into the foothills that groped the base of the Wall. To the north of the settlement, between the five remaining karakh and the base of the mesa, a circular lake burbled, edged by reeds. In the Eyelight, the south peaks glowed purple. The wind blew in sharp gusts hard enough that a chorus of cracking branches and swirling ash clogged the air and helped mask the karakh’s approach. The soldiers had tied cloths around their mouths, dampened in the lake, to help filter out the ash and still-hot embers, but the karakh all coughed and sneezed, and the shepherds bore the pain along with them.

I’d harbored faint hope that any survivors would have gone into hiding, if not into their homes, then perhaps into the ash-filled forest. As we edged around the lake, my hope winked out. A line of figures appeared on the ridge above before scattering again.

“They’re up there!” Vimr shouted above the din of branches and gusting wind. “Their last line of defense!”

I said nothing as we charged up the slope into the village.

A coward to the end.

The whole scene became a scatter of broken images: Pregnant women, the elderly, children, who couldn’t have been older than eight or nine, trying to hack with the unwieldy, wooden halberds that the warriors had wielded with such skill. Weeping girls impaled on the tusks of Gre’pa. Old men slashed into bloody strings by a karakh’s claws, faces set with resolve. Dakar looked back at me, his face pale, but I couldn’t meet his gaze.

The ash-laden ground became clotted with thick, bloody mud. I felt sick in every cell of my body, and I hoped I would die before I could see the other side of the Wall and face the black tunnel the rest of my life had become. No words came to my mind, for myself or anyone else.

After sending men from building to building to ensure there were no survivors, Vimr ordered camp set at the base of the mesa along the edge of the lake.

The karakh’s feet and hands were burned, and Dakar and the other shepherds coaxed them down to the shore and the cool mud beneath the reeds to coat their feet and protect them a little against the still-smoldering ground.

I leaned over to retch from where I still sat strapped to Gre’pa’s rear, shaking, when I saw two figures huddled among the reeds. Small, almost child-like, I thought at the time, but clad in the clinging leather the warriors had worn. They crouched just beneath the surface of the water, faces upturned, hued violet but clear in the Eyelight, breathing through reeds.

That, I guess, was the first time you saw me, too.

I spit the last of the vomit from my mouth. The other four karakh had moved further around the lake to a flat clearing a quarter-span away. There was no one else around.

“Two there,” Vimr’s voice. My heart jumped and sank at the same time. “Dakar, kill them, or they may rally survivors.”

“No.” The sound of my own voice surprised me, stronger than it had been since Vimr had taken control of my army.

“General—” Vimr’s tone was condescending, but he got no further.

Without thinking, I pulled the long, wooden dagger from Vimr’s belt. The one the Cardinal had looted from the dead valley native a few days before.

I was old, but I was still fast. Fast enough, or should have been. In one quick motion, I thrust the knife up towards the back of Vimr’s skull.

He twisted out of the way, and in a blur, his soft hand shot up to grab my wrist in a grip of iron.

I was flabbergasted. I did nothing but stare, useless and confused, when from behind the Cardinal, there was another flurry of motion, and Vimr lurched towards me. Dakar, almost as fast as Vimr had been, had twisted to elbow him in the back of his head.

His grip slipped on my sweaty wrist as he spun back to confront Dakar, tangled as he was in his harness, and I tore my hand from his grasping fingers.

I slid the blade into Vimr’s head.

The wood cut through bone like cheese. Vimr stiffened, and he let out a short, strange, high pitched sound. Dakar released Vimr’s harness with a few deft motions and watched as the Cardinal tumbled to the smoking ground.

The corpse smoldered a moment, before it ignited in a sudden flash, burning to ash in a few shocking seconds. Gre’pa jumped and waded a few dozen hands into the lake. Dakar’s brow furrowed at the spot where Vimr’s body had lain, now just a pile of ash a shade lighter than the ash around it, and a few fragments of blackened bone. I stared.

Dakar grunted. “Must have been a hot spot. Coals can be hotter than flame after a fire like this one.” He sounded unconvinced.

I had nothing to add.

I looked toward where the soldiers were setting camp and saw Rohm standing thirty paces away. His face was pale, even in the violet and red light of the Eye, but he only gave me a quick nod and turned back toward the others.

I cleared my throat. “We were ambushed. A lone warrior came out of the reeds and threw his knife. There was no time to react, but Gre’pa finished the bastard off, didn’t he?” I cleared my throat again.

Dakar glanced back, a hint of a smile on his rugged face. “That’s right, General. Not a goddamned thing either of us could have done.”

“Just a minute,” I said. I undid my harness, slid down the back of Gre’pa, and retrieved the black dagger from the pile of ash and bone that had once been Vimr. It was made from something like wood, but undamaged by the fire or the smoking ground which, I couldn’t help but notice, wasn’t as hot as it should have been.

“Let’s go.” I looked for the huddled figures in the lake, but there was no sign of them.

2

THE DEFENDERS

Pasha tugged his sister up from where they’d hidden under Bora lake and watched the bizarre scene play out. Her face was round, with a small mouth and wide set, slanted eyes. She was a child—not even thirty, yet—but she looked even younger. Tears mingled with fishy lake water, now black and grey with ash. Her silver eyes looked blue in the Eyelight.

Anna sucked in a breath, released a shuddering sob.

Pasha pulled her close so his body would smother the sound of her crying. His own face was gritty with soot, concealing the thick scar that ran from his right eye to the corner of his mouth. Through the blur of his own tears, he watched the shaggy, white monster scuttle toward where the other creatures had settled by the lake, far from the rest of the invaders who’d set camp just beyond their village. “I know, I know.”

She turned her head away from him to watch the creature move away but said nothing.

“I think they saw us,” he answered his own question lurking at the forefront of his mind. “I’m sure of it. The old man looked right at us after he threw up. The little fat man pointed and said something, and the old one killed him. Then they left.”

Anna pulled away from her brother and sniffed. “What are you saying?” They were the first words she’d spoken since he’d started the fire.

“I don’t know.”

Anna pushed him away. Why would he save us?” Her words trailed away.

Pasha was quiet for a minute. “I don’t know. And why did the man he killed burn when he hit the ground? It’s not that hot.”

Anna didn’t answer, but stood for a minute, waist deep in the lake, looking off towards where the creatures had gone. Then she spun around and shoved her brother, hard. “And you killed everyone else.” the sobs came, louder.

Pasha pulled her close again. She resisted, but with weak effort, and he held on until she stilled, willing his tears not to join hers. I’m seventy-five now, he repeated the thought, over and over again. I’m seventy-five. But he didn’t feel seventy-five. He felt like a child who’d just lost his parents.

“You know why I set the fire,” he said into her wet hair. “They came to open the Tomb. We had to stop them. We had to try.” And we were so close, he thought. But we failed. The night winds had come, swept the inferno up the valley just as he’d been taught they would, but it hadn’t killed all of them.

Anna struck his chest but didn’t answer.

“Even father said we did the right thing.” But at the thought of their father, their mother, of everyone else, the dam holding his tears cracked. They stood in the lake for a long time, holding each other and crying.

Anna pulled away first.

He wiped his face, smearing ashes into his eyes and making them burn. “They came from outside the valley.”

“That’s impossible. There’s no one left,” Anna whispered.

“We were wrong.”

He thought back to what his father had said after Pasha had told him he’d set the fire. “We haven’t failed. We’re here, so we haven’t failed. That’s why he sent us to the lake while everyone else…” He trailed off, and they both fell silent again.

After a while, Anna asked, “What do we do now?”

Pasha had already thought about that. “We can’t stop them from getting into the Tomb now. They would just kill us. But we can hide. Look for others. There must be someone left.”

“What’s the point?” She whispered. “All we’ve ever done is guard the Tomb. Pretend to guard the Tomb. If they open it, take whatever’s inside, what’s the point?”

Pasha swallowed. Pretend. For hundreds of generations, the people had guarded the door set into the Wall behind Suedmal from a world that wasn’t supposed to exist. Worthless guardians, he thought. All this time. Every one of us. The ashes in his mouth tasted bitter.

“We can follow them, Anna. Us, and whoever we can find. We’ll follow them, take back what they stole.”

Their father’s foundry was only a quarter span from where the invaders had set their camp, but the entrance was hidden, the chimney in the middle of the blackvine patch, which was now impenetrable with the coils of fired thorns that wouldn’t grow again until spring.

The boiler pit was cold and dry. They huddled together in the blackness, waiting for dawn.

Daylight revealed itself with a single, muted shaft beaming down from the chimney hole in the middle of the round chamber. The boiler sat in the center—a single slab of obsidian carved into a bowl with the furnace beneath, where their father had boiled blackvine for three days until it turned soft as clay. Against one wall squatted the kiln, and next to it, the smooth block of volcanic glass where he had beaten the softened vines into shape before being fired. Along the walls, de-thorned rolls of blackvine cluttered, and on the lone stone table opposite the tunnel entrance lay an array of finished tiles, tools, and weapons.

Their father had claimed to be the best blackvine smith in the valley, and no one had ever disputed it that Pasha had ever heard, though he suspected all the smiths made such claims to their clans. Now, though, his forge seemed ramshackle and cold, it’s spirit flitted away with the life of the man who’d spent over two centuries there working his craft.

They stayed at the forge for two days, gnawing on strips of dried bora meat and watching the shaft of light slide from west to east. Towards midday the first day, there was a low, resounding boom that echoed back and forth against the Wall around the valley, rolling down through the chimney hole, making the coils of blackvine stir. A few trailers of dust sprinkled from between the stone blocks of the walls. Anna and Pasha squeezed each other close. There was nothing to say. The invaders had breached the Tomb.

In the afternoon on the third day they left the safety of the forge after Pasha collected two long blackvine knives, thin and curved, from his father’s worktable. Rain had washed through the night before that neither of them had noticed, dampening the ground, making it stick to their moccasins and clearing the air of ash, but it still smelled like smoke.

“We should look for survivors,” Pasha said.

Anna wiped her face with the back of her hand and didn’t answer.

They stood together at the narrow trail that led up the side of the mesa to Suedmal. Clouds had moved in, squeezing through the lower valleys of the western Wall like glaciers, making the sky featureless and dull. He didn’t want to go back to Suedmal. He didn’t want to see what had been left behind. He didn’t want to voice his fear to his little sister, either, so he said, “Alright,” and they continued up the path together. Towards home.

The grey smell of smoke wasn’t enough to drown the stench wafting from Suedmal as they climbed the path. Anna gave a quiet little cough and pulled her vest over her nose. Pasha gave her a questioning look, but she only shook her head, and they continued on.

Animals filled the street. Rats scattered, and mourner birds took flight as the siblings crested the bluff. A family of bora rooted and gnawed at something near one of the longhouses. Revenge for a millennium of their kin being drowned in the lake below for leather and meat. Their heads swung as one towards the siblings, smooth black hides glittering in the filtered sunlight. The female’s tusks jutted out and forward from the back of her lower jaw, curving upward. They were as long as Pasha’s forearms. He drew his knives and struck a low defensive stance, wishing he’d taken a flat-spear from his father’s forge, but she just snorted at him and led her family away to the south, unhurried. Silence returned to the village as the crunch of their hooves died in the distance.

Limbs, fragments of gnawed bone, shattered skulls with eyes pecked out by the mourners, and blackening piles of flesh were all that remained of their clan. An end to the eternal struggle to lay claim to Suedmal, the sacred village closest to the Tomb.

The invaders had tried to set the roofs of the longhouses on fire. They’d clearly been unfamiliar with blackvine and had abandoned their useless torches where they lay on the tiled roofs. Instead, they’d directed their monsters to tear the structures apart, to limited success. They’d collapsed every house, and Pasha watched with tears in his eyes as his sister tried to dig through the rubble of their home until he pulled her away. Their parents wouldn’t be there, anyway. Their father would have been with one of the first failed assaults a day or more to the north beyond Bora lake. He’d gone out the same night Pasha had told him he planned to set the fire for the night winds to carry up the valley, and had never returned.

And their mother—he forced himself to finish the thought, willing himself to anger—their mother would be out here, somewhere, in Suedmal’s lone street, reduced to bones or a blackened pile of flesh. Food for hornets.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s go. There’s nothing left for us here.”

She let him lead her away.

They made their way down the backside of the mesa and then up again, though a little stretch of forest untouched by the fire, though it was blanketed in ash, the green only uncovered by their footprints.

At the base of the trail that led up past the tree line, she halted and grasped Pasha’s hand.

“Wait.” Her voice was soft but free of the quiver that had been in it since they’d hidden in the forge.

Pasha stopped and turned to face her. “What is it?”

She said nothing at first. Pasha waited, absentmindedly running a finger back and forth across the scar on his cheek.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” She blurted.

Pasha sighed, but before he could respond, she spoke. “Why is it okay to go there now? We know they took something. Isn’t that enough? Why do we have to break the second law?”

He faced her, surprised to see her dark eyes sparkling. Not with tears, but what? Curiosity. He pressed his lips together and ran a finger across his scar again, studying her face. She wanted to go. She was looking to him for a reason not to.

Find the old man, and they would find whatever he’d taken, whatever had lain at the end of the path they now stood on. But Pasha wanted to know what they’d been protecting, too. He wanted to see what was so important that the Ancestors left his people to protect it, entombed in the mountains for an eternity that had ended four days ago.

His sister must have seen something on his face that told her all she needed to know. “It’s okay. Never mind. There doesn’t need to be a reason.” She took his hand, and together they climbed the path toward the Library.

They stood, staring at the ruin in the long twilight, each stranded by their thoughts. Pasha, about the first time he’d come here, brought by his father in the ancient ritual of adulthood less than a year ago, to show him all that the people stood for. Anna, about how her adulthood had come early, and how meaningless it was, now that it was too late.

The white door lay forty hands away from where it had been set in the Wall, its bottom resting on a black boulder, while the top of the thick disk had sunk into the mossy ground. A passage led down into darkness. A scuffling of footsteps in the dust forged a path into the shadows. Rubbish left by the invaders lay strewn to the side of the opening.

Anna broke the silence. “Let’s go.”

“We need light.”

Anna walked over to the pile of foreign junk and poked through it. She pulled out a cage of bent brass and broken glass and held it up.

“This is one of their lights,” she said. “I saw their camp.”

“It’s broken.”

Anna examined it, standing beside her brother. “The wick is sticky. I think it’ll work for a little while.” She struck her flint next to the cage, and the wick inside lit with a soft, bluish glow.

She walked toward the opening in the Wall without waiting to see if Pasha was following.

He hesitated for a second, then followed his sister into the passage.

The tunnel led straight into the Wall for a hundred paces before ending in a large, round chamber, the back half collapsed sometime in the distant past. What looked like glass tables and a few rows of featureless white boxes, made of the same material as the door, were arrayed around the room. On one side, half-buried in rubble and black stone, was a machine full of triangular holes. Shards of broken crystal were scattered in front of it. If any passages had once led from this room deeper into the Wall, they’d been entombed by the ice for centuries.

The siblings stood in the center of the chamber. Pasha wandered over and examined the crystal shards near the collapsed wall and wandered back again. Neither of them could think of much to say. The faint blue light from their ruined lamp was fading, and they started back towards the distant light of day.

“There’s no reason we should understand it,” Anna said as they reached the opening.

“No,” Pasha agreed. “Those broken crystals, though. The invaders did something with them. Took them out and smashed them?”

Anna shook her head as they stopped together in the fading daylight at the mouth of the tunnel. “Why would they come here just to smash something nobody was going to find? I think those were already broken, so they left them behind.”

“And you think that’s what they took? The unbroken… whatever they were?”

“Maybe.”

Pasha nodded. “Maybe you’re right. We need to find out. Follow them and see. If they didn’t find anything, we need to know that, too.”

Anna studied her brother, but all she said was, “Okay.”

“We’ll go down a little way and camp,” Pasha said. “Tomorrow we’ll head north. We’ll find other survivors, figure out what to do next.”

“I want to leave the valley, Pasha,” Anna stated, her voice quiet enough that the tunnel behind them seemed to drink the sound of it.

“I know. We’ll go,” he said, pulling her into a hug she didn’t resist. “North, then, to find where they came in. We can look for others on the way. We’ll learn the truth. We have to. How else are we going to return what they stole?”

If Anna had any thoughts on that, she didn’t share them.

3

WAITING

Syrina was bored. She was used to waiting in uncomfortable places, but she’d milled around the villages in the foothills for eight weeks waiting for Mann to show up. Now she’d spent another three watching his bored army waiting for him to come back through the tunnel. She’d decided two weeks ago that watching a mob of bored people was the only thing more boring than being one of them.

Things hadn’t been too bad until she’d reached the Black Wall. She’d taken the Great Road from Fom, and reasoned that if Mann and his army had somehow passed her on their way to Valez’Mui, at least she’d hear about it.

They hadn’t passed her. She’d waited in Valez’Mui for three months before Mann arrived from the south. Some misplaced desire for secrecy had compelled him to travel by sea around the Ristro Peninsula, and he’d paid for it. All her intelligence said that he’d departed the Upper Peninsula with three ships, but he arrived in Valez’Mui with two, undermanned at that. The Corsairs had taken their toll.

At least back in Valez’Mui, she hadn’t been bored.

She didn’t have many contacts left in the Yellow Desert from when she’d done work for Ormo there years ago. Valez’Mui was a city-state of transients. Nomads, indentured servants, and the slaves who didn’t survive long enough to be called residents. She was glad she didn’t need too many contacts this time around, and the one she needed most was still there. On the other hand, she and he hadn’t parted on good terms.

Syrina could have approached Vesmalimali as someone other than the old man who’d scammed him out of his steamship seventeen years before, but she didn’t want to take the time to build a new relationship with a rogue-corsair-turned-crime lord. Not when the previous one had worked so well right up to the end. Anyway, Ves had done well for himself as the smuggler known as Whitehook. Not that he was the forgiving sort, but she hoped two decades of success had softened him enough that he wouldn’t try to kill her outright. Again.

Valez’Mui was a sprawling city of intricate marble buildings and wide, palm-lined boulevards. Kiosks and bazaars filled every square, shaded by linen sheets held aloft by arches carved into flowering vines. The city of a half-million people slept through the hottest part of the day and came alive again as the sun set over the Great Road, which was so wide here she couldn’t see the far shore through the haze rising from the river.