Fierce Gods

  For my sisters

  The Story So Far . . .

  It is a time of war for the beleaguered Free Ports of the democras, that confederation of islands strung across the Midèrēs Sea. Surrounded on all sides by the Mannian Empire, the Free Ports hold out when most other nations have already fallen, offering the only lasting resistance to the Empire’s domination . . .

  On the front line of this conflict stands the fortress city of Bar-Khos, its mighty walls stretching across an isthmus that connects Khos with the occupied southern continent. Bar-Khos has been besieged by the Empire’s forces for ten long, desperate years. If it falls, the rest of the Free Ports will likely follow. Defeat means the enslavement of them all.

  Now, with the surprise invasion of an imperial army behind Khosian lines, attacking the city from the rear, everything hangs in the balance . . .

  To the east, across the sea, lies the Alhazii Caliphate and its desert capital of Zanzahar. The Alhazii remain neutral in the war. Their power is founded on their monopoly of black powder, which they supply to both sides for profit. It is a monopoly based on their ancient trading partnership with the mysterious and advanced Isles of Sky, the location of which remains a jealously guarded secret. The Alhazii will do anything to stop the location of the Isles of Sky from becoming known. What they don’t know, yet, is that a covert network known as the Few, which works behind the scenes to defend the democras of the Free Ports, has already uncovered their secret. Indeed soon, the Few should have navigation charts showing the way. Charts that could change the entire balance of the war – if only they hadn’t recently gone missing . . .

  Meanwhile, two moons orbit the planet of Erēs. One of them, a water moon, shows signs of life . . .

  The Players

  In the midst of this war, several people hold the fate of the Free Ports in their hands:

  NICO CALVONE A young man returned from the dead; the son of Cole and Reese Calvone, and the recent apprentice to the old Rōshun assassin, Ash. Nico was recently slain in an imperial arena, far from his homeland of Khos. However, following a mission to the Isles of Sky by his Rōshun master and his father Cole, Nico was reincarnated by the strange technologies of the people of the Isles. He has since returned to Bar-Khos with his father, only to find that his mother has been kidnapped and enslaved by the invading Mannian forces. Together, father and son have set out to save her.

  BAHN CALVONE A Red Guard officer and field aide to the Lord Protector of Khos, the famous General Creed. After a reckless show of bravery at the recent battle of Chey-Wes against the invading Imperial Expeditionary Force, Bahn was captured by the enemy. Along with other Khosian prisoners, he was secretly indoctrinated by Mannian priests to betray the cause of his own people. He was then allowed to escape. Bahn returned to the besieged city of Bar-Khos, unwittingly primed with his mission of treason. Not long after his return he received a surprise visit from his brother Cole, a brother who fled the endless war many years ago. Even more surprising is what Cole carries in his possession – charts to the Isles of Sky: a chance of changing the whole course of the war. Without explaining how he came by them, Cole asked Bahn to take the charts and to pass them to the relevant Khosian authorities. Something which Bahn has not yet done, even as the invading imperial army masses beyond the wall.

  CHÉ A young man who was once an apprentice with the Rōshun, an order of assassin monks who offer protection to people through the threat of vendetta. Unknown even to himself, however, Ché was actually an infiltrator sent by the Mannian Empire, his mind manipulated so that he believed himself to be someone else. Upon deserting the Rōshun, Ché returned to the Mannian capital and became a Diplomat, an elite imperial assassin, and subsequently helped betray his previous companions in the Rōshun. He later joined the surprise invasion of Khos by the Empire’s Expeditionary Force. It was in Khos where Ché finally deserted his own side. After a brief liaison with a young woman called Curl, a medico in the Khosian army, the ex-Diplomat was captured and imprisoned by the Khosians.

  COYA ZEZIKÉ Famed Delegate of the League of Free Ports, and descendant of the even more famous philosopher Zeziké, whose teachings inspired the revolution of the democras more than a century ago. As a secret member of the Few, Coya Zeziké has travelled to Bar-Khos to lend what aid he can in their defence.

  SHARD THE DREAMER A refugee from the occupied southern continent, and a native Contrarè. After fleeing with her family to the Free Ports, Shard made her home in the Academy of Salina, where, as a student, she helped develop the burgeoning craft of rooking – the craft of covertly accessing and subverting farcrys, a form of exotic technology which allow for distant communications through the medium of the Black Dream. By now though, Shard is much more than an expert rook. She has become a Dreamer too, able to manipulate reality by accessing the bindi itself, the cosmic code.

  ‘If you cry freedom, start praying to

  your fiercest gods.’

  NIHILIS, FIRST PATRIARCH OF MANN,

  TO THE DEFIANT GREEN ISLANDERS.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

  CHAPTER ONE: Nico

  CHAPTER TWO: Bahn

  CHAPTER THREE: Nico

  CHAPTER FOUR: High Priest

  CHAPTER FIVE: Bahn

  CHAPTER SIX : Coya

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Nico

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Coya

  CHAPTER NINE: Nico

  CHAPTER TEN: Coya

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Diplomat

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Dreamer

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Nico

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Nico

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Diplomat

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Ocean

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Nico

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Coya

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Bahn

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Nico

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Dreamer

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Diplomat

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Coya

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Nico

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Bahn

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Nico

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Halahan

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Nico

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Bahn

  CHAPTER THIRTY: Nico

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Coya

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Nico

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Coya

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: High Priest

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Diplomat

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Dreamer

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Nico

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: Nico

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: Diplomat

  CHAPTER FORTY: Diplomat

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: Nico

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: Diplomat

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: Nico

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: Diplomat

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: Coya

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX : Diplomat

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: High Priest

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: Nico

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE: Coya

  CHAPTER FIFTY: Dreamer

  EPILOGUE: Beginnings

  PROLOGUE

  The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

  ‘Did I ever tell you about Horroco Pledge?’ rasped the woman through gritted teeth, clenched hard to stop them from clattering in the worsening vibrations of the descent. Already a sharp tang of blood filled her mouth from where she’d clipped the end of her tongue. ‘Only man to take a Yukka ride to the planet and make it back again?’

  She had to speak, had to hear the sound of her own voice just to prove that this was still real – that she was really falling faster than a bullet through the upper atmosphere of the planet, tracing a trail of fire across the sky like a falling star.

  Suddenly, a shudder ran through the protect
ive Yukka shell all around her like a jolt of fear.

  Ocean gasped, swallowing down more blood. Her lanky body jostled in the harness fixing her to the curve of the shell wall, and she gripped the straps even harder, feeling them digging into her flesh. Something cracked loud and spirited overhead, but Ocean dared not look up to see. She knew it was the thick outer casing of the husk starting to fracture in the heat.

  ‘Horroco Pledge,’ she rasped again, heaving for air through her flaring nostrils. ‘One of those early hermit mystics, used to seek out the remotest islands of Sholos to live alone. Until even those islands were not remote enough. So the mystics turned their gazes to the planet overhead. They started hollowing out the Yukka seeds, and hitching rides inside them across the void. Hoping to find somewhere unpopulated, secluded, on that big fat planet of Erēs, even if they died in the attempt.’

  So startling, this primal terror gripping her body. Like she was a frightened child again, falling in a dream. Even her own throat seemed to have seized itself in a vicious chokehold, trying to throttle some sense into her as though there was still time for that, as though she wasn’t fully committed. Her years of experience seemed as nothing in comparison to this present, pressing reality; wrapped in flames and plummeting to the surface of another world, riding the seed pod of a tree that had flung its spore in the wildest gesture of hope and life across the void.

  A roar was pressing hard against her eardrums, the howl of scorched air through which she and the seed shell were plummeting. It was getting harder to breathe inside the hollowed-out husk, the oxygen thinned almost to nothing during the crossing, even with the tanks of blue-algae sloshing on the floor. But Ocean spoke aloud anyway, squandering what air remained on what seemed an even greater need just then – holding herself together through the shaking dignity of her own voice.

  ‘His pod . . . it came in too shallow. Skipped right off the atmosphere and ended up slingshotting all the way around the planet. He thought he was dead when his food and water ran out. All he had left was the supply of moondust he’d brought with him, hoping it might be a valuable commodity to the natives. So he ate it all and off he went, soaring in his mind while the pod shot off through the void, as alone as anyone has ever been . . .

  ‘Hey, you even listening?’

  With a grunt of effort Ocean forced her neck forwards. She couldn’t see the little swamp rat anywhere. He was no longer peering out from her pocket. Blinking the sweat from her eyes she gazed down at her juddering, suited body, and her legs ending at bare feet dangling just above the glowing floor.

  Look y’all, I’m flying.

  Ripping through the upper atmosphere of a planet!

  Ocean bounced around in her harness like an underweight jockey, her eyes widening as she stared down at the fiery glow now rising from the floor of the pod, all too aware of what she was looking at. It was the Yukka shell’s long-spent combustion chamber, which had first launched the mighty seed out of the water moon’s atmosphere with Ocean snug inside it, being burned away in the heat of their rapid deceleration. Now, parts of the floor itself were thinning to a vague translucency which seemed to be barely holding back the yellow blasts of heat.

  With a flash and a shudder the burning air pulsed even brighter, so that the space of the seed pod was filled with the flickering tones of flames.

  ‘Old Horroco . . .’ she gasped. ‘He said – he said that when he was soaring like that, all alone through the void, high on moondust and waiting to die, he tried calling to the Great Dreamer, and even deeper to the Source itself . . . But he gained no answer to his pleas. Or so he thought, until a miracle of good luck happened, and he got snared by the moon’s gravity so he made it back to Sholos. The only person ever to make a return trip!’

  Ocean grimaced at her own words. Even if she made it down in one piece, she was never coming back from this. She was never going home.

  Sweat dripped from her face and fell spinning in slow motion towards the glowing roar of the floor. She felt movement across her shoulder. It was Pip, her friendly swamp rat, digging his claws into the impenetrable weave of her skinsuit.

  ‘Hey,’ she said to the little rat, its hair banded with dark green stripes like blades of grass. ‘What happened to staying in my pocket?’

  The rat was going after a bug, she saw. A little moon bug that had caught a ride with them on their voyage, somehow hidden until now, sitting there on her upper arm with its silver carapace splayed open, beating its wings. Slowly, tenaciously, gripping on against the forces of free fall, Pip clawed his way towards it, his whiskers twitching.

  ‘You need to be doing that right now?’

  Her voice snagged the rat’s ear, for Pip looked up to meet her eyes. He snapped his front teeth together, then carried on towards the bug.

  Ocean reached out a hand towards him, seeing colours swimming across her blurring vision. For an instant she was struck with the sight of her hand shaking and swaying there in front of her – how her black skin turned bronze in the upward glow of the flames – and then she grasped the squirming rat and pulled him tight to her chest, tight to her heart, where his own tiny pulse raced in her grasp.

  Another shock sent the shell of the Yukka pod lunging sideways. Ocean cried out aloud, though her shout was near lost in the angry growl of the descent.

  Hard to believe the vibrations were worsening. She heard what sounded like a rip over her head, something forcefully separating. It was the worst of bad signs, the heat crisping the hoary outer shell and penetrating inwards, forming cracks where it was thinnest. It suggested she was coming in too steep.

  With a deep exhalation she projected her inner eye out beyond the husk to take in the roaring brilliance of its exterior, almost too bright to look at in the surrounding darkness of night.

  A jerk. A shudder. Part of the outer shell tearing off entirely.

  ‘We’re all right. We’re all right. We’re all right!’

  At last Ocean dared to look up, only to see the split forming right above her head and running across the woody curvature of the shell.

  ‘We’re all right. We’re all right!’

  Screaming at a thousand lems a second through air growing ever denser, Ocean’s voice juddered as though she was beating on her chest, the vibrations grown so bad now she was being shaken loose even from the straps holding her to the wall. She gripped harder to the harness and to Pip as she was thrown from side to side, her head rocking so violently she thought her neck would snap.

  ‘Shit!’

  Many of the seed pods didn’t make it to the surface intact, coming in too shallow or too steep. Fifty-fifty were the considered odds for a Yukka rider’s chances of survival. Sometimes the rider made it. Sometimes they didn’t.

  Dig deep, advised the disciplined core of her mind. You’ve lived or died on a coin toss before.

  Hard to focus though with her brains being scrambled in her skull. Ocean’s left arm and shoulder had somehow come loose, so that she was partly hanging free from her harness as she was thrown about, and coming looser with every heave. Pip squirmed in her grip to be free.

  It was all clearly madness to her just then – this mission she had taken on, this insane feat of will and desperate chances. Any moment now the shell was going to crack apart and the flames would consume her in their hungry need for life.

  But there was nothing she could do but hold on, and even as she thought that she was finished the roaring faded away just as quickly as it had come, replaced instead by a whine of passing air. Through the thin patches of the floor the flames were suddenly replaced by darkness. Around her, the vibrations became nothing but an occasional rattle.

  She was through the upper atmosphere, having shed most of her velocity along the way. In moments the wobbling pod righted itself with a deployment of leaf vanes trailing behind its fall. Again she checked with her inner eye, and saw the vanes flapping above in ribbons that caught the light of the moons, slowing her descent even further as they unravelled themsel
ves to catch the air.

  She was still alive. She was going to make it.

  *

  Heavy, this world of Erēs.

  Even with the superior strength of her Patched body, Ocean had the impression of moving through water as she struggled from the fresh-cut hole in the shell’s top to emerge into a howling winter’s night.

  Freezing gusts narrowed her eyes to slits, blasting the great cloud of black hair on her head so that she felt the heft of it like never before. Below her, the seed pod bucked wildly in waves that tossed it this way and that, tilting sharply from one side to the other. In the moonlight its exterior looked scorched like some cauldron left too long in the fire, its hoary curved flanks still smoking. Steam hissed wherever waves crashed against them.

  Ocean gasped against a spray of salt water. The bubbling backwash glowed with a green phosphorescence, and when she looked about she saw that the whole surface was shining with it wherever the waters broke. She gasped again as she cast the bundle in her hands over the side, so that it landed with a limp splash on a surging swell.

  Instantly the object began to expand into the shape of a small boat.

  Grinning from exertion, Ocean clambered clear of the hole on her long and shaky limbs with a sleek carryall dangling from her back. She clung on to the ragged edge for a moment, caught by the sight of white water racing towards her glowing with threads of green. She managed a curse before the wave washed her away in its bubbling riot.

  Long moments of breathless scrambling for the surface, fighting against the drag of her carryall, the water, the colossal weight of the planet itself. For a desperate moment the woman found herself caught beneath one of the trailing leaf vanes of the Yukka pod, like coming up under a layer of sea weeds. But she didn’t panic. Ocean had been born in the water, and if she was lucky she would die in it too.

  But not today.

  She broke the surface crying out for air, scattering water like beads of green fire. Just ahead of her, the little swamp rat squirmed over the crest of a wave with his long tail leaving an emerald trail behind him, obviously headed for the inflatable boat. By then the craft had fully expanded, its tiny wheelhouse visible above the bubbling swells. Ocean surged towards it too.