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  For the wild

  ‘If you chance upon your master

  on the road – kill him.’

  OLD SAYING OF THE TRAVELLING TUCHONI

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Fast Falling Rocks

  Over the man’s head a star was falling.

  He looked up as it streaked across the night sky, blazing in a display of unlikely brilliance, and had time enough to track its course as it fell through the constellations to the west, fading even as his own fierce spirit continued to wane.

  The old farlander blinked the sweat from his eyes, and forgot for a moment the ring of men that surrounded him in the fire-struck darkness, pressing closer even now; a thousand figures nervously eyeing his black skin and his curved sword, while beyond them thousands more surged towards the distant wall, roaring their fear and rage at its defenders.

  Instead Ash’s stare lingered on the stars of the night sky, his thin eyes narrowed further by the bright twin moons hanging there in a deeper blackness of their own making, the Sisters of Loss and Longing.

  Right overhead – the band of stars that was the Great Wheel, glowing with faint smudges of colour. And there, low to the east – the red planet known as Obos by his people, its delicate string of moons stretching like a necklace from its body. Cold air swirled in his open mouth while the constellations shone with a hard intensity. Names of myth enshrined upon the cosmic sky: the supreme wilderness, he supposed, up there where anything could be possible; whilst here, down in the mud which clung so hungrily to his boots, there was only blood and carnage.

  Around Ash the heat from the thousand men formed a cloud of mist in the wintry air through which their faces stared at him, flickering in the torchlight.

  The enemy host bore features drawn from every corner of the known world, and languages too. Over the din and clash of the greater battle they jabbered their excitement, coaxing each other closer towards the old Rōshun who stood with bloody sword over those he had already slain.

  Not long now, Ash supposed, with a wipe of a hand across his mouth. He was losing blood fast from the bandaged wound in his side, and two arrows stuck out from his back like quills. Exhaustion hammered down on him in waves that he was growing too unsteady to resist.

  His balance suddenly swinging on a pendulum, Ash sagged against the belly of his fallen zel to save what little strength was left to him, aware that it could be counted in heartbeats now. With a grimace he spat the bitter coppery taste from his mouth; glanced back over the black and white stripes of the zel to his fellow Rōshun, lying dead against the creature’s saddle.

  A cluster of arrows stood out from the Alhazii’s barrel chest. Baracha stared with lifeless eyes that still caught the light of the moons, a fixed expression darkened with the tattooed words of his Prophet.

  At least you saved your daughter, Baracha. You were right to stop her. She lives now because of you.

  Past the heads of the enemy, explosions ripped through the air where the defenders’ shells rained down amongst the attackers. Roars sounded from the throats of men cutting each other down.

  Ash breathed deeply to quieten his racing heart, his many pains. He saw the naked steel in their hands and the ropes to bind him. He would die before he fell into their hands. He would rip open the wound in his side and bleed out right there in front of them all, before that happened.

  How did it come to this? he asked himself now through the fog of his mind, and it seemed that the closing pressure of the enemy was precisely enough to focus his memory, for suddenly it came back to him.

  Ash recalled the Great Hush and the hordes of kree deep in their warrens . . . His captivity in the Isles of Sky and his dead apprentice Nico . . . The tragic fate of the Falcon and her crew . . . All of it and further back, every step in his life leading him to the space and time he occupied now with his final breaths.

  ‘Huh,’ the old farlander grunted with a tilt of his head, seeing the full picture of it at last.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Captive States

  In silence a young thunderhawk glided across the black surface of the canal, landing with a squeak from its pinned prey: a thick-bodied rat that had been squirming through the grasses by the water’s edge. At once, another thunderhawk cried out from the opposite side of the water, a harrowing screech joined again by a third bird nearby, so that their
triumph rang out across the moonstruck rooftops of the city, drowning out even the gunfire of the endless siege.

  Ash lifted his chin to the sudden hoots and howls that answered from the other side of the high wall he was facing, the animals of the menagerie provoked from their slumber by the sudden cries of the birds. His lips curled as a roar from a desert lion stilled them all, restoring silence again to the night. Nothing stirred save for the thunderhawk lifting off with its prey, and the soft tread of the night-sentry’s boots as he strolled along the gravel path following the canal.

  Ash was well hidden here, deep within the shadows of a ruined and solitary archway by the edge of the water. He was sweating in this heat. It was like a Honshu high summer in the Sea of Wind and Grasses, those endless plains of his homeland where the tindergrass was so dry it exploded with each drop of sweat that touched it. At least the nights there had offered some relief, with the vast cloudless sky sucking the heat from the land. Here in Bar-Khos, the city’s million stones seemed to release the heat of the summer sun all night long.

  He would be glad to be gone from here once the repairs to the skyship were completed, returned to the cooler climes of mountainous Cheem and the Rōshun order. Glad to be home.

  In the muggy darkness of the archway, his new apprentice occupied himself by chewing the inside of his mouth, bored like most youths with the simple task of waiting. Ash could hear it, the soft rhythmic clacking of the boy’s teeth, a sound not dissimilar to the canal water dripping occasionally from their sodden clothes onto the stone flagging.

  Click, click, click.

  Ash blinked rapidly, suddenly caught in this moment which he felt he had lived through before.

  There was a name in the old country for this kind of experience, way-wei, a vivid sense of having already lived the same moment, prompting nostalgia before it was even gone. With such a mood upon him, the old farlander studied the curly-haired, half-starved young man called Nico Calvone, eighteen years of age and primed with all the life still owed him – and wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake by taking him on as his first and only apprentice.

  A few days ago, Ash had wakened alone in a Bar-Khos taverna from dreams of his past, of his life before the failed revolution. He had awoken to find himself not in his homeland after all but on the far side of the world, a dying exile blinded by tears and hearing movement next to his bed – this boy Nico stealing his purse – but thinking, for the briefest of moments, that it was his dead son instead.

  His son Lin, who had fallen all those decades ago in battle right before Ash’s eyes – for all that Ash had promised to protect him.

  Amazing, the power of memories, to make him feel pain after all this time, like an accusing finger stabbing at his chest.

  Such times as those he would never wish to live through again. Yet somehow he had just made a promise to a different mother, Reese Calvone; having sworn to keep her son safe from harm. Safe – in this line of work!

  What if it all ended in tragedy once more?

  Ash swayed in the shadows of the archway, feeling the sudden pain in his chest pulsing up into his skull, where the vice that had been there all day tightened a little further. In the moonlight his vision dimmed for a few trembling heartbeats. The old farlander winced, chewing faster on the bitter dulce leaves bundled in his mouth for relief.

  His head pains had been worsening for months now. Soon he would be cast blind from them, unable to see at all, and then death would take him swiftly, as it had taken his father and grandfather before him, in the same way.

  Not long now.

  Nico’s eyes were two lamps in the darkness. ‘What?’ the young man muttered through a yawn, and the luminescence of his stare caught Ash for a moment, startled him. He hadn’t realized he had spoken aloud.

  Instead of answering the boy Ash straightened, blew these ghosts of his away with a silent exhalation.

  He rocked his boots against the stone of the ground, rooting himself to the world again, to the heart of the moment and what needed to be done.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let us try this.’

  *

  Quickly, Ash stepped onto the gravel path and crossed to the shadows of the wall, where he pressed his back against the stone and looked back to see Nico standing out in plain sight, bent over something as he tried to scoop it up with awkward sleepiness. It was the heavy wool blanket he had been carrying.

  ‘Boy!’ Ash hissed at him sharply, chancing a glance along the path. The sentry was lost in the gloom.

  Against his back, the wall was ten feet high and topped with broken shards of coloured glass that glinted from lights on the other side.

  ‘I still can’t see why you had to wake me in the middle of the night for all this,’ grumbled the boy, throwing the blanket over the top of it.

  ‘I told you. If you are to be Rōshun, and that remains to be seen, you must learn to perform your work when tired, exhausted even. Besides, we would not make it far with this in broad daylight. Now, give me your foot,’ he snapped, and cupped his hands into a stirrup. ‘You go first.’

  Nico studied him with narrowed-eyed suspicion. On the other side of the wall the desert lion roared again into the darkness. Ash imagined he could see the process of the boy’s thoughts: the memory of the recent gaol he had been imprisoned in for his theft of Ash’s purse; the need to make a good impression here, on this man who had saved him from punishment in exchange for becoming his apprentice.

  ‘Consider it part of the lesson,’ Ash prompted.

  ‘A lesson in what, I’m starting to wonder?’

  ‘Consider it courage.’

  A roll of the eyes, and then the boy placed one of his new boots into Ash’s hands, and in an instant had scrambled up over the wall. A fine climber, Ash noted.

  Just as quickly he followed after him, ignoring his protesting joints and the hammering weight of his head. Ash saw colours dance when he landed on the other side. He gritted his teeth and crouched down next to Nico, where the blades of long grasses hid them from sight.

  In the distance, he could hear the music of plucked strings and a woman or young boy singing. Ash parted the grasses to peer at the mansion up on the hill. The house was brilliantly lit up there, bordered by lawns struck by the light flooding from its interior. The odd scrap of laughter could be heard amongst the notes of music spilling from its open windows: people socializing on a patio, their shapes black against the open doorways. It was as though the siege of the city and the imperial army massed against them were only a distant dream.

  ‘Your father,’ enquired Ash of his apprentice, while he scanned for nearby guards. ‘You said he fought beneath the walls. What became of him?’

  ‘Dead, most likely.’

  ‘He went missing in battle?’

  ‘No,’ replied the boy’s quiet voice. ‘He ran off on us. Deserted everything.’

  Ash thought of the visitors’ vault in the gaol again where he had met with the boy’s mother, Reese Calvone. The way she had dismissed her younger lover from the room. The emotional armour she had worn about herself.

  ‘Your mother. She still loves him.’

  ‘And hates him. Is this part of the lesson too?’

  Anger in the boy’s voice. Clearly he was sensitive to questions about his family. It only made Ash want to enquire more, but instead he chewed the bitter dulce leaves for relief and stared out across the grounds beyond, staying his tongue.

  Below the mansion and its lawns, a large expanse of hedges ran out towards the perimeter wall where they hid. Gravel pathways threaded between them, past cages covered by sheets of canvas from which the odd noise of a captive animal arose into the night; the grand menagerie of the Santobar family, one of the wealthiest Michinè bloodlines on the island of Khos.

  ‘Come,’ he said, and they rose to amble onto a path that led into the menagerie, their boots scrunching lightly on the gravel.

  ‘Loose coral,’ he noted aloud for Nico to see, ‘difficult to run in,’ but the
boy was peering around him nervously instead, as though an ambush or trap awaited them.

  ‘I’d feel better if you’d brought that sword with you.’

  ‘I told you, we must not harm anyone tonight. If it comes to it, we will flee.’

  ‘At least with a sword you could wave it around a little, scare them with it.’

  Ash had paused in front of a long cage not much higher than himself, fashioned by thin bars of tiq. Shapes could be seen moving inside the cage. Claws clacked on the floor. They crowded towards him, making soft snapping sounds with their beaks. Ash had never seen such animals before. Their bulbous heads swayed on impossibly long necks; their feathered bodies rested on bony stilts.

  ‘You watch too many Tales of the Fish in the street,’ he told his nervous apprentice. ‘A naked blade has a hunger for blood. It will seek it out or draw the blood to it. Either way,’ he stepped closer to the cage, reached out a hand as though to stroke one of the animals through the bars, ‘it is rarely only a threat.’

  The nearest creature poked its head out through the bars, stretched its long neck in an attempt to reach his outstretched fingers. ‘Birds, would you believe. Here, try touching one. They are tame.’

  Again that boyish suspicion. Still, Nico was game enough to reach out with a finger, and prod one of the feathered flank pressed against the bars.

  In an instant a beak came flashing out at him, snapping loudly as he snatched back his hand.

  ‘Hey!’

  Ash chuckled softly. Moved on.

  There were more cages, many more. Some were silent in their darkness, no sign of what might be contained within them. In others, the animals came to the bars in open curiosity. Monkeys hooted and grinned with their lips peeled back from their gums. A beaked kerido hung from the bars of one cage, its eyes round and forlorn. Stinkrats scurried through the sawdust of another. The last cage at which he lingered held a black panther, prowling back and forth as though demented by its confines.

  Frowning, Ash headed inwards. In the distance a lone guard patrolled the lawns around the mansion, but he spotted no one closer. Abruptly he stopped, raised a hand to stroke his stubby wedge of beard.