Farlander hotw-1 Page 9

  Or so the faith went, though Belias thought it all so much fluff at the end of the day. He had merely felt sickened by his own long night of initiation. While more devout priests repeated the ceremony of the Cull many times during the course of their lives, supposedly honing the divine flesh further still, Belias had never repeated the experience, and tried hard never to dwell on that one and only time. Not once had he ever told his family what he had done to attain these white robes of his station.

  Before now it had never seemed to matter that Belias did not believe in any of Mann's more fundamental nonsense. He was an ambitious turncoat priest in a religion that did not concern itself with selflessness or sacrifice, but only with power and self-divinity, and therefore Belias, a man of supreme self-worship in his younger years, had rarely ever felt himself a fake.

  It was curious however, sitting at his own dinner table with these obvious fanatics from Q'os – real priests in every sense of the word, with their carefully shaven scalps and their abundance of facial piercings – that Belias was finally feeling himself to be the charlatan he really was. And it was this thought that lay at the forefront of his mind as he sat observing the scene before him, his sense of foreboding growing by the moment. He wondered just what they would do to him if they ever suspected.

  *

  Kirkus was feeling irritated. The wine was passable, the food at least filling, but it felt as though he had passed the last hour dining with corpses, so stiff and formal were the minor conversations conducted around the table. Not for the first time in the last six months, he wished he was back at the Temple of Whispers, along with his peers.

  A sharp cry from outside broke his disgruntled train of thought. Likely, one of their newly acquired slaves was being coaxed into silence by the lashings of a whip.

  'About time,' he commented, fumbling to refill his glass yet again. Such arrogance was partly for show, however, for Kirkus was not in every way the spoiled lout that he pretended to be: it simply entertained him to appear so at times such as now.

  No one responded to his remark. The tinkle of cutlery and the crunching of food continued around the table.

  Kirkus straightened the cutlery before him until each piece was again perfectly in its place. His teeth ground together. If he did not do something soon to relieve his boredom he would go mad.

  A quiet conversation flurried for a moment between Kira and the high priest, something about the river, and how far along it the Lake of Birds must be from here. Belias was sweating even worse than before.

  'I'm bored!' Kirkus cried out again, louder this time, though still not enough to scatter the polite conversation entirely from the table.

  It was enough, however, to draw the attention of the high priest's daughter from her plate of fresh salmon. She turned round and fixed a smoky, indignant gaze on his own. It was the first time she had met his eyes since they had sat down for dinner. He leered back at her, making a show of it, and then he leered at her fiance, too, that slick profiteer who looked up briefly to acknowledge him. As one, the couple returned their attention to their plates. Kirkus watched on, seeing the glances they passed between them after that. They shared something, these two: an unspoken connection.

  He's probably riding her like a stallion whenever the parents are away, Kirkus mused broodingly. And, unwarranted, a memory forced itself into his mind: Lara and the last time they too had ridden together, her drugged and debauched hunger for sex driving him to a high he had never before known.

  The memory lay like a leaden ball in his belly, and now it caused others to emerge. An evening spent with his grandmother in the cool shadowed room that was her personal chamber, her constant croaking reminding him of things he would rather not have to contemplate during those days in which all he wished to think about was when next he would see Lara. All that mattered to him was the scent of her skin, smooth and supple beneath his touch, or his bite; the sound of her laughter, clear and melodious, and provoked by things he could only guess at; the vision of her perfect face, flushed beneath him, or above him; her gifts of spontaneity and high spirit.

  'Little Lara can never be your glammari, Kirkus,' his grandmother had told him bluntly, after spending an hour explaining yet again how only the women of Mann transmitted the power and wealth of their families, for only they could pass down an ancient bloodline with certainty.

  'These things you must remain aware of more than merely who pleases your cock the most,' she had chided. 'Remember, Lara's kin are already allied to our own. You, my child, must chose your consort to the advantage of your position, from a powerful family we wish to bring over to our side. For you, Lara can be nothing more than what she already is, and you must be content with that, the pair of you.'

  Kirkus had cursed at the old woman and told her to mind her own business. He had said nothing of it to Lara – not even knowing how to. Yet still she had come to hear of it, somehow.

  Lara's behaviour had been skittish on the night that would prove to be their last together, though only she had known it as that. After their hours of love play, they had fallen into an argument over something of no importance, some vague misunderstanding that even now he could not recall. Lara had stormed off, shouting about how she never wanted to speak to him again, and he had laughed at her dramatics and thought it nothing more than one of their usual squabbles – not knowing he had lost her.

  A few days after that, at the Ball da Pierce, Lara had arrived with a new lover, that ass Da-Ran strutting proudly in his dress armour with its ribbons, and a scar still healing on his cheek, having just returned that very week from putting down some tribes in the north.

  Lara had not even looked at Kirkus that night.

  Not once.

  This girl at the table, Rianna, she had a way of glancing at her fiance that made Kirkus feel uneasy; if he had been remotely inclined towards self-analysis he would have recognized it for the envy that it was. But instead, he merely sat with increasing ill humour and watched with darkening eyes.

  One of her hands lay beneath the table as she ate, Kirkus observed. Peering closer, he saw how that same arm kept moving to a rhythm, though so delicately it was barely enough to notice. Kirkus grunted. With the showy subtlety of a drunk, he dropped his unused napkin to the floor, and ducked beneath the table to squint along its underside. There. Her fragile white hand gloved in lace, the tips of her fingers stroking lightly against her fiance's crotch.

  Kirkus retrieved the napkin and returned it the table. He was grinning now, and, as he looked upon the girl again, it was as though he suddenly saw a different person. His attention lingered on her skinny body beneath her green dress, the breasts pouting with youth, the long swan-like neck curving up to a face, that was soft-skinned, proud, both whitened and blushed with make-up, and framed with a great tumult of red hair.

  'I want her,' he said to the room, and his quiet and fierce demand caught the attention of all.

  'What, dear?' inquired his grandmother from the far end of the table, the old bitch pretending to be deaf.

  He pointed a finger at Rianna.

  'I want her,' he repeated.

  The girl's plump mother broke her silence at last. She giggled into her fist as though she had suddenly found herself in the presence of the insane. The other diners, however, seemed far removed from laughter. They were still hooked on his words, their mouths open in shock, perfectly poised.

  'Are you quite serious?' asked his grandmother, in a tone that implied he had better be sure of himself before he next spoke.

  Kirkus knew what he was asking of her. Back in Q'os, she might well refuse such a thing; she had done so with Lara, when he had demanded her as his own after the night of the ball, too fearful of upsetting the delicate balances of power that his mother had contrived, as always, to maintain her position. But here? With this provincial fool of a high priest? The report she had been given earlier in the day was correct. Belias was obviously playing at his role of Mann, not fulfilling it.

 
'You know as well as I do what these people are. Yes, grandmother. I want her – for my Cull.'

  The young redhead held a hand to her throat and turned to her father for reassurance. Her fiance placed a hand against her arm and stood up in protest, though he said nothing. The mother continued to giggle.

  The old priestess Kira sighed. What was passing through her mind in the next few moments no one in the room could guess at, not even Kirkus, but she stared long and hard at him down the length of the table, and he at her, till the silence grew into a hanging presence.

  Turning to Belias, Kira studied him carefully, his face suddenly drawn tight and white with fear. It seemed to prompt her in her decision. Her smile, when it came, appeared merely for politeness.

  'High Priest Belias,' she said deliberately, placing her cutlery down beside her plate, 'I would ask of you a question.'

  The man cleared his throat. 'Mistress?'

  'What is the greatest threat to our order, would you say?'

  He opened and closed his mouth a few times before the words gained voice. 'I… I don't know. We rule most of the known world. We are dominant everywhere. I… see no threat to our order.'

  Her eyes closed for a moment, as if the lids were heavy. 'The greatest threat,' she intoned, 'will always come from within. Always we must guard against our own weaknesses – of becoming soft, of allowing those into our order who are not truly of the faith. This is how religions become hollow in the end, and meaningless. You must surely appreciate this.'

  'Mistress, I…'

  She opened her eyes again, and the high priest fell silent. His hands, poised above the tablecloth, trembled visibly.

  'Thank you for your hospitality this evening,' she told him, dabbing at her mouth with her napkin before setting it down.

  The old priestess raised a skeletal hand into the air and snapped her fingers once, with a sound like the breaking of bone. As one, the four Acolytes stationed around the room began to move.

  The girl shrieked as they fell upon her.

  Her fiance swung a fist, desperate and panicked enough for it to catch an approaching Acolyte on the jaw.

  In the next instant another Acolyte drew his sword and raised it to strike – the fiance, by instinct, raised his forearm to block the blow, and with a butcher's mindless simplicity the Acolyte hacked clean through it, then raised the sword again and hacked down through the wounded man's collarbone. The severed hand had already dropped to the floor. The arm flopped heavy and awkward next to it, where it rolled to settle on the open palm, while its owner fell screaming, blood spurting everywhere.

  The mother stood up and vomited a shower of barely digested shrimps over her embroidered tablecloth.

  The father mouthed words of inconsequence and stumbled around the table towards his daughter, his voice rising. But he slipped on the spreading pool of blood on the floor and, as he regained his footing, clutched at his chest, his face tightly pinched.

  The doors at the far end of the room burst open and the mansion's guards tumbled in, weapons already drawn, anticipating trouble. They took in the scene: their master reeling as though drunk at the far end of the room, the bloody mess of a man still screaming on the floor, the daughter struggling in the arms of the Acolytes: and there, seated calmly at either end of the table and sipping wine, the two white-robed visitors from Q'os.

  The men backed slowly from the room, closing the doors gently as they left.

  The high priest groaned, then fell to his knees as Kira rose above him.

  'Please,' he barely managed as he clutched at his chest. A small blade appeared in her hand. With the smallest of motions she swept it across his throat.

  'Take the mother, too,' she commanded, as she stood over the dying man.

  The Acolytes seized the mother and dragged both her and her shrieking daughter from the room. Kira paused to look down at Belias. She stared into his rolling eyes.

  'Do not be bitter,' she told him, though it was doubtful if he even heard her words. 'You did well enough out of us – while it lasted.'

  Kira stepped over the high priest, rather than around him, leaving a trail of dainty bloody footprints in her wake.

  Kirkus finished his wine with one swallow and stood.

  In the great hall of the mansion, the guards waited with expressions of poorly concealed fear. Egan, the high priest's chancellor, stood before them, his hands hidden within the sleeves of his white robe. His silver hair contrasted sharply with the flush of his face, and Kirkus assumed it to be anger until he observed an interested gleam in the man's eyes, which now followed both mother and daughter as they were pulled outside into the rain. He wondered if he was the one who had penned the note earlier that day.

  'We have need of a new high priest, Chancellor Egan,' Kira announced.

  'Indeed,' the man purred.

  'I hope you prove a more dedicated follower of the faith than your predecessor ever was.'

  Egan bowed his head. 'He was weak, Mistress. I am not.'

  Kira appraised the man for a moment longer, then with a sniff she whirled about and swept through the front doorway.

  Kirkus dutifully followed his grandmother outside.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In Flight The cabin stank of mould and dampness and vomit. Nothing moved in the room, yet the gentle motion of the skyship could be detected through the occasional creak of timbers, a rattle of the lantern hanging from the ceiling, a minute sense of lift or fall in the depths of the stomach. In his bunk, Nico lay wretched and pale-faced.

  Almost as soon as the ship had lifted off from Bar-Khos and climbed into the cloudy sky, Nico had goggled at the unnatural sight of land diminishing far below him, and he had clutched at the rail with a sensation of lightness in his head, and a loose churning in his belly. For three days now he had lain in his bunk awash with fearful tension and nausea, leaning over occasionally to retch into a wooden bucket on the floor. It was now painful for him to speak, for his throat was burned raw from the bile. He ate little, consuming only what water or soup he could hold down long enough to digest. Every moment, awake or in restless sleep, he was aware of the thousands of feet of empty air gaping beneath him, and the constant tensions on the ropes and struts by which the hull dangled from the flimsy, gas-filled envelope overhead. Every sudden shout from a crewman on deck, every thump of feet or twist of motion within the ship, heralded for Nico impending disaster. It was a misery like he had never known before.

  Most of the time he spent alone. Ash shared the cramped cabin, but the old farlander did not seem to appreciate Nico's prolonged bouts of retching; he would become impatient with it eventually, and set aside the little book of poetry he always seemed to be reading, and stomp out on to the deck, muttering under his breath. It was Berl the ship's boy, therefore, who tended to Nico and brought him food and water.

  'You must eat,' the boy insisted as he held out a bowl of broth. 'There's nothing left of you but skin and bones.' But Nico grimaced, and pushed the bowl away.

  Berl tutted at his stubbornness. 'Water, then,' he told him. 'You must drink some water, no matter if you hold it down or not.'

  Nico shook his head.

  'I'll have to fetch your master if you don't.'

  Nico finally consented to take a mouthful of water, if only to placate the boy. He asked what time of day it was.

  'Late afternoon. Not that you'd know the difference in here, with the shutters closed all of the time. You need some fresh air, it stinks in this place. No wonder your master stays up on deck more often than not.'

  'I don't like the view,' Nico told him, and he thought back to his first morning on the ship when he had flung open the shutters, only to reel away from the sight that greeted him.

  He groaned, a palm clasped against his ailing stomach. 'I think there's something truly wrong with me.'

  Berl grinned. 'My first time out I was sick for a whole week. It's common. Some gain their wings faster than others.'

  'Wings?'

  'Yes. D
on't worry, another few days and you should be fine.'

  'It feels like I'm dying.'

  The boy hefted the skin of water towards Nico's lips again.

  Berl looked to be no more than fourteen, though he exuded a confidence of one older than that. As Nico wiped his mouth dry he studied the younger boy. There were scars, small ones, on his narrow face, concentrated around his brows and especially about his eyes, which themselves seemed hard like long-healed wounds.

  'I used to work beneath the Shield,' Berl explained, noticing Nico's interest.

  Ah, thought Nico. He had once been told by his father how boys were sometimes used in the tunnels beneath the walls of Bar-Khos, in spaces too small for men but large enough for boys and attack-dogs alike. He now said as much to Berl, how his father had been a Special himself, trying to make a connection with him perhaps. The boy simply nodded, and set the skinful of water on the floor next to the bucket.

  'That's enough for now,' he said. 'But you need to keep drinking it, you hear?'

  'I will,' Nico replied. 'Tell me, where are we?'

  'Over Salina. We made its eastern coast this morning.'

  'I thought we would already be heading for Cheem.'

  'As soon as we find a favourable wind. The captain likes to conserve our whitepowder whenever he can. As soon as we do, we'll strike north through the blockade. Don't worry, the Mannians have as few airships as we, and the Falcon here is a fast ship. The crossing should be swift.'

  He stood, saying, 'Come on deck later, if you're feeling up to it. The fresh air will help.' And then he walked with an easy gait across a floor that was sloping visibly upwards, the ship itself climbing. Nico could hear the hull drive tubes being fired, burning their precious fuel.