Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Y Brenin

Originally published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies

An eagle turned in a low gyre over the battlefield. The red and cloying earth churned with rain and blood, turning everything to ochre in the light of a late summer. The sound of a hundred tiny battles between life and death caught in the arms of the valley.

The knight pressed through the crush of the fighting and the fallen. He fought as sunset swept unminded towards evening. Until the air itself seemed to thicken every sound and movement. And still the Red King did not yield.

Some long-forgotten blow had sheared the dulled gold armour of the Red King’s cuisse, black blood boiling through torn metal embossed with golden flowers. He stumbled in the red mud like a dying calf. And still he did not yield.

The knight bulled forwards with his shield, stubbornness and momentum overawing the Red King’s footing and throwing him over the body of a dying horse. The knight drew his sword back to make the killing blow. It took him some time to realise that his arm would not obey. He stood still as a golem shaped from blood-red clay. Only moving to draw deep gulps of air into his lungs.

The Red King’s sword fell from his hand, and he fumbled with shaking fingers at the catches of his helm. His hair and beard were the colour of polished mahogany, but his eyes were pupiless, bottomless black.

"What are your orders?" he said. "What does my brother say is to be done with me, Ser…"

"Mercher."

The knight removed his own helm. His thoughts ached for the dirty scrap of paper secured behind his breastplate. He knew its words by heart, but the touch of the paper against his skin gave him comfort.

"The Edling of the North would have me kill you," the knight said.

And take everything from the towns, his lord’s message ordered. Empty their stores. The North must eat.

The eithin aur on the Red King’s armour caught the last of the day’s light, gold petals of hammered metal glinting. The knight’s hand reached involuntarily for its mirror-image, shaped into his own breastplate. The eagle felt its way through the blue emptiness above them, with a mind as clear as polished glass held up before the sun.

The knight was a creature forged of the same base elements: his flesh and his bones, the blade in his hand, all birthed out of the belly of the same earth. The same clarity of purpose hammered clean through him.

He seized the Red King’s shoulder and wrenched him to his feet.

"Begin walking," he said, turning towards the ancient forest that rolled over the foothills, beyond the slow quiet seeping out into the battlefield.

They stopped quite close to morning, beside an ancient trackway that had led them to a clearing by the river. The path curved over a huge slab of grey stone that spanned the water, pitted and worn with a thousand years of feet and wheels and weather beneath the moss and lichen. On the other side, the track cut up over the bank and disappeared back into the woods.

The knight knelt beside the stream and washed the sweat and dirt out of his hair while his courser drank deeply beside him. He spread his hands and submerged them in the river until bloody trails of red earth streamed from the knuckles of his gauntlets. The sky glanced blue through sunburned leaves, and early light caught on the metal in the water.

"It is a dangerous thing for a knight to defy his lord," the Red King said from the shadow of a great old elm. He worked an arrowhead from his armour and lashed it onto a straight arm of fallen wood. "Aren’t you afraid of what my brother will do when he finds out that I am still alive?"

Red water dripped from the knight’s hands and dissolved into the current. "And why should I be afraid of Edling Gwyn when I have the Red King at my back?"

"The Red King? It has been a long time since any northerner has called me that, boy. Who are your family?"

"I wouldn’t know," the knight said. "I never had any."

The Red King took a limping step towards him, blood oozing from the torn metal on his thigh. When he came out from under the elm, he flinched and raised a hand to the sky. Tears spilled over his lashes and quickened down his cheeks.

He cannot stand the light, the knight thought. Something is wrong with his eyes. His lips parted to form a question, but the question never came.

The Red King cursed the sun and turned away, snatching up the arrow-headed spear and sliding down the bank into the shallows under the shadow of the tree.

The knight set his gauntlets down. "Are you going to try to kill me with that, Goch?"

"I was going to try and eat." The Red King tugged at the knots holding the arrowhead in place. "Unless you would rather that I starve. Where are you taking me? Do you even know?"

The knight unfastened the catches of his breastplate and laid his armour in the sun. Beneath it, his arming jacket was sweat-yellow and blood-black. "To Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth."

"Through the mountains?" The Red King drove the point of his spear into the water. "Taking North Road with the rest of your army would be safer."

"The rest of my army want you dead." The knight took his courser’s bridle and untied the barding from around her neck. "And every town and village we passed through would rather free you. That does not sound as though it fits my definition of safer."

The Red King crouched down in the water and clamped the thrashing salmon between his hands as it died on the point of his spear. He pulled it free and threw it up onto the bank. Far enough out of the water to suffocate.

"And what will you do with me when we reach the city, Ser Mercher?"

"I will bring you to the Edling of the North."

The salmon spasmed once and gaped for air. The Red King pulled himself up onto the bank and shelled its eyes into his mouth with his thumb. He pressed them between his teeth until they burst and nodded to the curl of parchment stowed in the hollow curve of the knight’s breastplate. "It seems to me as though my brother would much rather you killed me," he said. "And pillaged my towns to feed his army."

"You should not have read it," the knight snapped, tugging too sharply at his courser’s girth. The horse stamped and flashed the whites of her eyes.

"And when would I have done that? I didn’t have to read it. I know my brother, Ser Mercher. Better than you do."

"You don’t know anything," the knight growled, hauling the saddle off.

"I know that he would very much like to murder me and leave the south to ruin. I know that he expected you to break open our grain stores and find them overflowing with all the crops and livestock that we’ve taken, and that when he finds that they are bare, his cities will starve for the sake of his army just the same as mine."

"What else could he do?" the knight demanded. "Your people have been attacking our villages for months now. Why haven’t you sent word of the blight to Dinas Pair?"

The Red King laughed and laid his hand upon the eithin aur forged into his armour. "You think that when my brother hears about the blight, he’ll open his granaries and forget about this precious war of his? No, he will notice that we are weak. If he is smart, he will seize his chance to strike."

"Gwyn doesn’t understand," the knight said. "You’ve given him no choice. When I bring him to you, you will tell him. Then he can decide what he wants to do with you."

He frowned and stared into the current. Then he can decide what he wants to do with both of us.

The Red King cut the salmon with the point of his makeshift spear and emptied out its innards. "Gwyn, is it now?" he said. "Tell me, Ser Mercher, just how familiar are you with my brother?"

"You should still your tongue," the knight spat, his aching shoulders bowstring-tight. "You may need it when we reach the capital, but you do not need your fingers."

The Red King sat back against the elm and linked his hands behind his head. Metal intertwined with flesh.

"If you are so certain that all of this is a terrible misunderstanding," the Red King said at last, "then why have you brought me all the way out here without so much as sending him word?"

The knight glanced up at the tessellated sky, clear blue behind the shifting leaves, and did not answer.

Through much of the next two days the Red King sat astride the knight’s warhorse, raising his hand to block the sky from his black eyes while the knight walked along beside him. The wound on his leg stopped bleeding when they made camp, but overnight the flesh around it turned an ugly red.

On the second afternoon, it rained, starting in a few large drops that resounded on the knight’s armour and pinged off into the grass and soon pouring straight down in the windless air.

They pressed on for almost an hour before the knight relented, pulling up beside a ring of stones perched over the old trackway—narrow shards of mountain slate projecting outwards like a crown of purple thorns. The knight tethered his horse to a twisted hawthorn that looked as though it had stood there for a thousand years. The only part of it left alive was a corona of dark green leaves clinging to its branches. The courser twisted her head to tug at them, rainwater plastering her mane against her neck.

The knight pulled the Red King from the saddle and set about removing the mare’s caparison—a stained length of white cloth emblazoned with a thousand golden flowers. "We’ll use the stone circle for cover."

"That isn’t a circle." The Red King retrieved the body of the young hare they had snared the night before from behind the saddle. "It’s a cairn. A group of farmers from Dirneb dug it up when I was a boy. It was full of ash and bones. Human and animal, all mixed in together."

The knight shivered and stared into the centre of the circle: a round and gaping mouth ringed with broken teeth and half-smothered by low cloud. "Help me with this."

The Red King took the edge of the caparison, and between them they dragged it to the cairn and struggled to spread the cloth over two of the leaning spears of stone as the rain drummed down a steady cold. The knight drove his sword into the ground to make a third hitch for the canopy and crawled beneath.

The Red King stooped out of the rain to sit beside him. "Do you even know where we are?"

The knight tried to make out the shapes of the dark mountains drifting in and out of the cloud beyond the edge of the caparison. "Heading north."

"You realise that most of the Drysau are between us and Dinas Pair," the Red King said calmly. "Do you know these mountains well, Ser Mercher? Because Gwyn and I grew up in them. And, if he were here now…" He turned the limp, furry body of the hare over in his hands. "He would be telling you the same as me."

The knight looked at him sidelong. "And what is that?"

"That if you keep following this track…" The Red King sawed the hare open on the edge of the impaled sword. "Then you shall have to go over the shoulder of Y Brenin before you reach Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth. He would tell you that between us and that mountain, there is a valley at the foot of Caer Pwyll filled with nothing but reeds and marsh that is difficult to cross even on a fine day. For a horse, and two men in armour…"

The Red King held his hand out into the rain pouring off of the caparison and rolled his shoulders in a shrug. The knight wrapped his arms around himself, but wet metal-against-metal brought him little comfort.

"And what would you suggest?"

"Take the east fork in the road, half a day from here."

"Through Bannik and Gerwester?"

The Red King nodded.

"Through two villages sympathetic to you, and a stone’s throw away from the North Road?" the knight asked stonily. He shook his head. "We go north."

The Red King sighed and spread his hands in frustration. He studied them for a few moments, smeared with blood and rain, then began to strip the fur away from the dead hare in his lap. "You know," he said, peeling the muscle away from the bone and biting into the slick red meat. "I’m certain that I recognise you."

The knight watched the Red King suck down raw flesh and fought against a knot of nausea. The Red King chewed methodically, staring out into the rain. This close, the knight could see that his strange black eyes weren’t pupiless at all, but rather that the pupils were so swollen that the brown of his irises was almost swallowed up…

"Is there something that you want to ask, Ser Mercher?" the Red King said.

The knight hugged himself little tighter and looked away. "Caer Isel," he said under his breath. "You wanted to know where you’ve seen me before? You appointed me, and five other guardsmen, to keep watch over Edling Gwyn when you consigned him to live and die in that tower."

"You’re the traitor." The hard bark of a laugh lodged somewhere in the Red King’s throat. He swallowed another sliver of raw meat and shook his head. "The one who helped my brother to escape and take the north from me. And Gwyn knighted you for your trouble, did he? Well then, I suppose that it turned out well enough for you."

Well enough? the knight thought. It has ended in nothing but war and blight and famine. It has broken this land more deeply than you ever managed to alone.

"So, tell me." The Red King wiped some of the bloodied fur off of his hands. "I’ve heard that you sleep beside Gwyn. On the floor, like a trained dog. And that the two of you have spent the last two summers bathing in the Ysprid together like a pair of newly-weds. So, I’m intrigued. Does my brother fuck you well enough to compensate you for all the trouble you have put yourself through for his sake?"

The knight clamped down on the plume of rage and embarrassment and watched the rivulets of rain catching on blade of his sword. "You don’t know a damned thing about me!"

Something quirked at the corner of the Red King’s mouth. "I see. He hasn’t had you yet, then. Do you think that’s because he’s ignorant of your feelings, or because he simply doesn’t care?"

The knight swept to his feet, tearing the caparison aside and drawing his sword out of the earth. The Red King watched him calmly and did not move to stand. His lips and chin were smeared with hare’s blood and water.

A gust of wind surged up the side of the mountain and whistled between the leaning stones, turning the low cloud into unformed shapes that hurried through the cairn. The knight shivered and sheathed his sword at his side.

"Mount up, Goch," he said. "If you freeze to death, I’ll leave you for the crows."

"This is madness!" the Red King shouted from the saddle as they crested the wide green saddle of Caer Pwyll and descended down into the marsh, raising his hand to block out the light. "We must turn back."

They had abandoned most of their armour not long after the cairn, but the sky was still grey and thunderous, and the knight’s feet sank up to the ankle as the track became a stretch of churned-up mud then petered out entirely.

The Red King dug his feet into the stirrups. "Mercher!"

The knight ignored him, leading the courser by the bridle towards the mountain in the east: a low black tangle of granite looming in grey sky. If I can reach that mountain, he thought. Then perhaps the way will be a little easier over its feet.

After an hour, the knight’s legs burned. His courser’s feet dragged in the stagnant water. And they had come less than half a mile.

The knight stopped to swipe the sweat off of his brow, and his courser’s feet bubbled down into the fluid earth.

"You’ll have to dismount," the knight said, trying not to draw too hard for breath.

The Red King eased his injured leg over the mare’s back and lowered himself out of the saddle. Moss and marsh gave way like flesh under his feet.

"Lovely," he said. "You know that you’ll kill us both before we reach the city, don’t you?" The Red King checked the empty waterskin on his belt, knelt, and drank from the grey mire with cupped hands.

The knight grabbed the back of the Red King’s shirt and hauled him to his feet. "You certainly will be if you insist on eating every raw dead thing and drinking from every stagnant pool between here and Dinas Pair," he said. "What’s wrong with you? Keep walking."

The knight took another step towards the mountain, but his courser was sunk almost up to her hindquarters. She whickered with panic when she realised that she couldn’t move, and the knight took her bridle in both hands to calm her. As soon as she stopped fighting him, they pulled. Straining against the air together, the mare occasionally freeing a foreleg only to slap it back down into the swamp. Then the strength was out of her and she just stood there, panting hard.

"Gather as many of these reeds as you can," the Red King said. "Give her something to stand on."

The knight muttered a few half-believed words of reassurance to her and did as he was bade. He’d only walked a few heavy, aching steps when he came upon the bodies.

They were three, he thought. Two adults, and a child. But it was difficult to tell. The marsh had turned them grey. Their faces were bloated and fly-blown. Flesh wrinkled like the skin of an elbow, and open eyes turned to the milk-white of cut quartz. By his reckoning, they had been dead about a week.

The knight tried to remember how to breathe. "We are not the first ones to try this way," he said.

The Red King waded through needles of marsh grass to his side. "Southerners," he said. "Farmers, most likely. The blight has driven most of them out of their homes. Since your great and noble master has been turning back any refugees on the North Road, most of them try the old paths through the hills in the hope of better fortune."

"Do you expect to make me pity these people?" the knight demanded. "To turn my back on Gwyn?"

"No." The Red King stood. "I don’t."

They worked in silence after that, laying out whatever they could find around the courser. Somewhere far away a peal of thunder trembled in the mountains. When they had done all that they could, the Red King put his palms to the mare’s hindquarters and the knight took up her bridle. She was tired now, and without her help they were soon sweating and breathless.

"You never answered my question." The Red King stood back and rubbed his watering eyes.

The knight gave one last pull, raised both hands in defeat, and sank down to his haunches. "What do you want now, Goch?"

"Where are you from?" the Red King asked. "Who were you, before you became a bloody bane in my side and set my brother back upon the north?"

"I was no one," the knight said. "Just another unwanted bastard weaned in an orphanage in the wildwood. A farmer paid them for me when I was ten." The courser slumped down defeated, stretching her neck out until her nostrils were barely above the water.

"Old enough to work," the Red King said.

The knight made a soft sound of agreement. He put his hand under the courser’s jaw, lifting her head enough to breathe. "He wasn’t a cruel man," he said. "But he wanted his money’s worth from me. Worked me like a draught horse for six years before I managed to slip away and enlist with your guard. Six summers of the sun on my back and the breath of the wind in me. Six winters digging in those blasted, frozen fields."

"Do you miss it?"

The knight looked towards the southern horizon. "Sometimes."

"Let’s try again. Come here, maybe you can push better than I can. Use those shoulders of yours, plough boy."

The knight put the flats of his hands to her hindquarters and pushed until his muscles shook. The courser shrieked and thrashed at the pulled grass until she finally found footing. Then she heaved forwards, screaming and kicking out with her powerful back legs. As she came free, one of her shod hooves slammed into the knight’s chest like cannonshot.

Concussion rang in his ears, and the marsh reached out to catch him as he fell. He found that he was looking down on his own body—his chest imploded, ribs dashed into the hollow space of his lungs, and the whole marsh shifting and surging underneath him like a wave.

An explosion of coughing pain brought him back into himself. He strained for a breath that wouldn’t come, but the front of his shirt was drenched with marshwater instead of blood, and when he put his hand to the ache in his chest his ribs did not feel broken. The Red King offered down his hand, and the knight took it, pulling himself back up.

He followed the grim look on the Red King’s face to where his courser stood, three-footed. One of her hind legs was snapped at an impossible angle below the knee, bone puncturing bay fur and blood dripping from her hoof.

A deep calm drove down into the knight’s fingertips, and he forced his voice to soften as he took her head up in both his hands. He let the steadiness of his body pass into hers and bowed his head until it touched her muzzle.

"Gwyn gave her to me," he said softly, his voice twisted out of shape. "I had her from a yearling."

"Mercher…"

"Be quiet."

The knight drew his sword slowly so as not to startle her. A murmur of metal against leather, a few more gentle words, and one sharp, deep thrust that drove the blade up to the hilt in her chest. Her howl filled up the whole valley as she wrenched away, overbalanced, and fell hard onto her side. A huge flower of dark blood blossomed out into the grey water. The knight knelt and put his hand on her neck. Her eyes rolled white. She sucked down a lungful of mashwater, spasmed, and fell still.

"I’m sorry," he said, catching his tongue between his teeth. "I’m so sorry."

He grasped the bloody hilt of his sword and worked the blade out of her body.

"Come here," he told the Red King. "I’ll need your help to butcher her."

Y Brenin rose out of the valley like the arched back of a fish: a high ridge of bare jagged granite sculpted by time and weather into a host of peaks, buttresses, and gulleys. More a wall than a mountain, dividing the southern high places from rich northern lowlands with a serrated ridge of bare granite. They approached it swathed in the fog of a grey morning, rounding a scree slope that sank down into a high valley filled with a crooked finger of black lake. A heron raised its head on the far shore, poised between the worlds of fog and water, looking more a spirit than any living thing.

The knight raised his eyes, tracing line from the quiet of the water to the mountain looming in the cloud. His breath tangled in his throat and a shiver of recognition cut through him as an indistinct figure all but crawled over the ridge behind him. Until he saw the colour of the hair and the blackness of the eyes, the knight was certain that it was not the Red King that walked towards him out of the mist but his lord.

"He looks fierce from down here, doesn’t he?" the Red King said, the fog smothering the sound of his voice. "From the north, Y Brenin’s as smooth as glazed ceramic and blue-grey as a thundercloud. But the sun never touches the south face, and so it’s gouged by ice and wind and water. Nothing more than an accident of circumstance, when you think on it."

"You talk too much, Goch," the knight said, his voice harsh with dehydration and his tongue so swollen that he could barely speak.

He shrugged the Red King’s hand away and glissaded through the scree to the waterside, boots sliding in great strides through loose sharp stones.

The water was smooth as jet, and when his fingers broke the surface it was cold enough to hurt. He knelt and drank his fill, until his stomach and his throat burned with cold and his hands were white-numb.

The Red King slid down behind him, favouring his good leg. "We shall have to go over the eastern slope," he said. "There’s a shepherd’s track that cuts down into the valley on the other side. It’s steep, yes, but passable."

The knight splashed the dark water into his face and stood. "Do you not understand what it means to be a man’s prisoner, Goch?"

"Someone may have tried to explain it to me once," the Red King said. "But I’m not sure I listened. I tend to forget these things rather quickly when my captor seems determined to lead us both into a certain, painful death. Or would you rather ignore me and die the same way as your horse?"

The knight turned around too quickly and grabbed the Red King’s shoulder. "I’ve had my fill of you," he growled, clenching his jaw to stop his teeth from shivering.

"Why?" the Red King asked. "Because I am right and you cannot bear to admit it? Or because I sound too much like my brother, and you are afraid that you might fall pathetically in love with me?"

The knight’s grip tightened until his arm shook.

"Tell me," the Red King said. "When all of this is over and I am returned to my throne, do you think that Gwyn will give up his lands and his riches to live out his days with some ignorant little plough boy? Until he is old and bitter and you must nurse him to his death? Or do you think that he will continue ordering you around like a kicked dog? Sending you off into every pointless battle that he wages against me in the hopes that one day you just don’t come back?"

"You think that I care?" the knight spat. "So long as I get to stand at his side on the morning that they hang you?"

The Red King shrugged. "If you wanted me dead, then you should have killed me on the battlefield and had your fill of it. My brother might even have been grateful enough to let you up into his lap for the night." He frowned for a moment and made a small, amused sound. "Only you don’t really care if I hang, do you, Mercher? It isn’t me that you are in a rage with, it’s yourself. My brother might forgive you if you beg and grovel at his feet for long enough, but it will all taste like ashes in your mouth. You know that you’ve failed him by refusing to carry out his order on that battlefield, and you shall always know it. It will haunt you in the dark quiet of the night between now and the day that you die."

The knight seized the Red King’s shirt and found his lord looking back at him accusingly.

His curled fist slammed into the Red King’s jaw. It would have thrown the Red King from his feet if the knight hadn’t gripped him by the hair and kissed him hard and full on the mouth.

The Red King tensed in response. His body curling like a windless flag, and his fingers running over the clinging thinness of the knight’s shirt to the hilt of the knight’s sword. Metal rasped on leather, and he broke away to draw the blade into his hand. His laughter sang off of the south face of Y Brenin.

A surge of humiliation snarled through the knight, bleeding into the love and hate, loyalty, and the fury at his own stupidity.

Then the edge of his own sword was coming for him.

Instinct pulled his body out of the way of the blow. His feet touched the lake, and a deep quiet smoothed all his thoughts down into nothing. He reached for the shield slung across his back and trusted his feet to keep him out of the way for long enough to fasten the enarmes.

When another strike came, the knight was prepared. He brought his shield out to block, and the sound of metal-against-metal burst in his ears. The next swing was swift and terrible, and the knight had no choice but to turn away to catch it. He twisted fully, kicking up stones and water and drove the point of his shield hard into the Red King’s belly.

The Red King laughed and heaved for breath, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and leaving a long black streak up the length of his arm. "Do you expect to beat me?" he said, stepping out and forcing the water to the knight’s back.

"You’re half-crippled with that wound, half-crazed with the infection, and I’ve already beaten you once," the knight retorted, crouching down to scoop up a handful of small wet stones. "So yes, I rather rate my chances."

The Red King feinted left then swung around hard right. The knight brought his shield out to cover his flank, too late. He barely noticed the notched sword tear through his hip but felt the sudden weakness in his leg.

Quick blood ran down his body into the water, and the Red King touched the black wound on his own thigh. "Evened things out a little, wouldn’t you say?"

The knight gritted his teeth and rolled his shoulders into a shrug. "Only seemed fair, the way you’re flailing that sword around," he said. "It was either let you land a blow, or give up my shield and see if you could fare any better against an unarmed man."

The Red King laughed, and when the knight thrust forwards he stepped carelessly aside. "You have a quick tongue on you, boy," he said.

"And you have the eyes of a cave-dwelling rat. Shall we see how well a rat fights blind?"

The knight moved to make another blow, but when the Red King brought up his sword, he threw the handful of scree and dirt into his face, then struck him with the shield’s edge. The Red King crumpled down into the lake. His red hair drifted into black water, and when he made to regain his feet the knight straddled him and pressed the top edge of his shield against the Red King’s throat. In response, the tip of the sword pressed into the soft flesh under the knight’s jaw.

In the sudden quiet, their breath echoed off Y Brenin and came back to them out of the fog.

"I could lay your throat open," the Red King said, spitting water. "Leave you here to bleed to death."

"The edge on that is as blunt as a tourney sword," the knight said calmly. "Do you think that I would die before I broke your neck?"

"You need me," the Red King insisted. "You’ve nearly killed us both out here. You’ll die from exposure, like those poor bastards in the marsh."

"And you will be dead from infection long before you manage to drag yourself back into the south."

"I thought you meant to bring me before my brother alive."

"Maybe," the knight said. "Perhaps it would be easier to carry out my lord’s will, rather than allow the disloyalty to…what was it? Haunt me in the dark quiet of the night between now and the day that I die?"

The Red King made a short, sharp sound that started as a laugh but which quickly descended into coughs. "What are your terms?"

The knight relaxed the pressure on the Red King’s throat, although he noticed that point of the sword stayed firmly where it was. "Show me the path around Y Brenin," he said. "I’ll bring you before Edling Gwyn and vouch for you. Ask him to spare your life so that this war can end. For all of us."

"You had better hope that Gwyn has allies to the north with deep grain stores and deeper pockets, little knight," the Red King said. "Nothing short of the goddess herself will save this land from ruin now."

The knight stared down over the silver flex of his shield and pressed a little harder.

"What faith can I place in the word of a plough boy?" the Red King complained. "Tell me, is my brother in the habit of giving you everything you want, Ser Mercher?"

"I do not often ask," the knight said quietly. "But he hasn’t yet refused me."

He drew back and offered down his hand. When the Red King let go of the sword, the knight pulled him to his feet. They stood together, shivering and bleeding, waiting for the other to move.

Finally, the knight knelt for his sword—resting on the black bottom of the lake, looking as though suspended in the dark.

"Start walking," the Red King said, turning towards the mountain. "The path is treacherous by day, but deadly on a moonless night. We need to be on the valley floor before the sun sets. With us both limping like old men, it shall not be an easy climb."

Across the lowland vale spread out beyond the foothills, the city of Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth boiled with smoke and flame. Voices rose from its cauldron and radiated into the morning fog, while behind its curtain wall a dozen thatched roofs oozed ugly smoke. Others were reduced to bones of blackened timber.

The knight and the Red King stood on a hillside swathed in the yellow flowers of the eithin aur which rolled out into deep folds of low pasture and bleating sheep. At their backs, Y Brenin pierced the blue morning like smoked glass.

"You are at war, Ser Mercher," the Red King said.

"Do you have a second army that you’ve sent north to lay siege?" the knight said, trying to stop some unnamed thread from tightening in his chest. "No. There is no war. The city has fallen in upon itself. There is nothing to eat, and the guards cannot keep order. The situation was bad when we marched south. Now the vassal lords have returned with nothing to show for all their battles. No relief, no salvation. Just the coming winter, and the famine."

The Red King tried vainly to keep the rising sun out of his face, his black eyes watering painfully. "You can’t take me down there," he said. "That city is at war with itself. If you were to bring the Red King into the middle it, you and he would both be dead before we reach the keep."

The knight’s shirt clung to him, mottled with sweat and dirt, marshwater, and blood. A low ache radiated out from his hip, and his left leg trembled when he tried to put his weight on it. But now they were out of the mountains, the ground was more solid under his feet than it had been since he stayed his blow on the battlefield. A shadow passed over their heads—was that an eagle, gliding north towards the city?

The knight watched it go, and realised what he had to do.

"You must leave," he said, very quietly.

The Red King frowned but did not turn his head. "Why now? Why listen to me now, when you have spent the last week ignoring every word I’ve said?"

"Give me your parole," the knight said. "Return to this place a year and a day from now to parley. Offer your word, Goch, then follow the North Road until you find a village, and take a cart back down into the south where you belong."

The Red King rubbed his watering eyes. "And why would I keep my word?" he asked. "Hasn’t Gwyn told you I don’t have a shred of honour? What’s to stop me mustering whatever people I have left and marching back along this road to give my brother what he deserves?"

The knight studied the Red King. For the first time, he saw the whole of him: the set of the Red King’s jaw that was so much like his lord’s, and the same curl to his hair, but the narrowness of his black and watering eyes and the thinness of his mouth that set him apart as something other.

The knight smiled. "What happened to your eyes?" he asked.

The same smile twisted the corner of the Red King’s mouth. He nodded and placed a hand on the knight’s shoulder.

"You aren’t as stupid as you look. For a plough boy." The Red King turned away. "A year and a day, then. For what it’s worth, you have my word."

The knight’s hands were sweating, and he could barely hear the screaming of the crowd or the crack of burning houses over the roaring in his ears as he climbed the stairs of the keep.

Three years ago, he had freed his lord from a tower much like this one, one cold clear night at the very cusp of winter. The guardsmen had feasted on soulcakes spiced with cinnamon and made as offerings to the dead, while the crows croaked to one another and the knight ascended the stairs of Caer Isel with a key clutched in his gauntlet.

Now the crows had come to Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth as the city collapsed into a heap of smoking timbers. This time the knight did not hold the key in his hand but felt it in his chest as he climbed. His fingers clenched and crept to the hilt of his sword. All of it evaporated the moment that he opened the door to see his lord standing before the window.

The white light streamed in through thick glass, catching in the silver strands of his lord’s dark hair and on the golden flower of the eithin aur embroidered onto his surcoat. Unnoticed, the door craned slowly shut, and the whole room seemed to fill with an impenetrable silence.

The knight closed the space between them to kneel, although his left knee buckled more than it folded.

"This is not the first time you have come when all my heart has gone to ruin," his lord said. "To deliver me from following it."

The knight drew his sword with clumsy hands and laid it on the flagstones. "And I will always come, my Lord."

His lord stared out into white light and warped glass. "Where is my brother?"

Breath knotted in the knight’s throat. He forced it to come slow and even. "I let him go."

The crack of his lord’s palm against the stone sill was like the sound of breaking bone. "Then you have cursed us all. I trusted you. With my most important duty. And you have betrayed me."

"This city was cursed the moment that we sued for war, when we should have been petitioning our allies for aid," the knight said. "I have done everything you’ve asked…But that…I couldn’t do that, Gwyn. And I could not bring him here. It would have undone everything.

"The south is blighted. Even if I had killed your brother, taken his lands, done everything you’d asked of me, all you would have to show for it would be more dead bodies when the snows come. There has to be a better way, Gwyn. A better way than more suffering and death."

"And who are you to decide what’s best for this land?"

The knight clenched his jaw. "You are alive now because of me. Because of the night I freed you. But all that helping you to escape has brought this kingdom is more pain. You are a better man than that, Gwyn. If I didn’t believe it, I would have left us both to rot up in that tower."

"You have disobeyed my orders, and disappeared into the mountains while my whole kingdom falls apart. I have not known this last week whether you even lived."

"I…" The knight ran his tongue over his lips and looked back down at the floor. "I did not know the matter was of any importance to you, my Lord."

"You take my bastard brother captive and drag him off into the hills, then set him free, and you don’t think that matter is of importance to me?"

"Of course," the knight corrected quickly. "I should have sent word. I’m sorry. That is…"

"Enough." His lord’s expression creased with pain. On the other side of the glass, a raven with gloss-black feathers perched on the ledge and looked down into the burning city dispassionately. His lord watched the raven watching the kingdom burn and pushed his hand through his hair. "What shall I do, love?"

"We have to leave this city," the knight said.

His lord nodded slowly and drew a breath. "We can go north," he said. "Lady Freuddwyd has long been our ally. She will give us sanctuary."

Pain roared in the knight’s hip as he pushed himself to his feet, but he gritted his teeth against it. "Her lands are three weeks' hard ride from here, Gwyn. We cannot go so far, not while people are starving. Not while our homeland is on fire."

"You would have me stay in my lands and die here?"

"I would have us stay and live, Gwyn."

"You think I haven’t tried to seek aid?" his lord snapped. "Every eagle that comes back from our so-called allies bears nothing but excuses and apologies. Lord Michael is too sick to care, and Cardington too greedy…"

"Then we can go south. Beyond Y Brenin," the knight said. "Into your brother’s own lands.

"You know more about the things that grow in this country than anyone I’ve ever met, Gwyn. We can stay on the road, move from village to village and teach the people which things they can take from the land to feed their families. Which ones they can use for medicine. You and I can help this kingdom and its people to recover, from what you and your brother have done to it. You have a knack for healing, Gwyn. I’ve seen you do it. I…I know you."

"It’s suicide," his lord whispered. "You want us to go into his lands alone? My brother will throw everything he has after us. I’ll not go back into that tower, Mercher. I can’t."

The knight felt the weight of the memory more than he saw it. A high place shaped from grey stone and hard wind. The crows upon the battlements. The warmth of the key in his hand.

"Edling Goch has given his sworn word to meet us a year and a day from today," the knight said. "To parley."

"Parley?" His lord’s voice curled with anger. "Have you lost your senses? You think that I will beg for scraps from the table of the man who poisoned this land in the first place?"

"You shall have to, Gwyn," the knight said, pushing the window open. "Or all you shall get is more of this."

The old-bonfire smell came first, then the sounds of raised voices, breaking glass, and screams.

Guilt and pain tore through his lord’s face, and he turned aside too late to hide it. The knight reached out for his hand. Fine bone china against hard skin, dried blood, and calluses.

"I will protect you, Gwyn," the knight swore. "I freed you from Caer Isel and I shall free you from this. But you must trust me. If I am right, this land will eat again. Its people will recover. They will thrive. Even flourish."

His lord pressed his tongue against his teeth. "And if you are wrong?"

"Then they shall have to sever every fighting part of me before they harm you."

His lord tried to smile. "It is a long road south. And if the southern lands are blighted, then those furthest from here will need our help the most," he said, the white silence pierced by the mounting certainty in his voice. "You’ll need your wound tended. Fresh armour. A whetstone for your blade. If we can last until a year from now, surely we will have earned this land some peace. Although…Although I shall have to re-learn how."

"In all the years I have known you, I have never once seen you fail at something, once you have set your mind to it," the knight said, saluting with a closed fist to his heart. "It will be done. By your will, my Lord."

"We shall have to pray that we will be alive to see it. The North Road is not safe for two men travelling alone. Let alone for you and I." His lord watched the raven rise through the smoke towards the dim disk of the sun, lips pressed together into a bloodless line. "If something happened…before I could do anything to fix this…"

"The North Road is not the only way into the south," the knight said, tightening his grip on his lord’s hand. "There is a path beyond Y Brenin, through the marshes and the mountains.

"I know where it lies, Gwyn. I will show you its way."

Murder on the Laplacian Express

Originally published by Interzone

"It’s all right," Shai Laren said as Anselm swung down into the driver’s cabin of the Laplacian Express. "I’m almost sure I know how to fly this thing."

Anselm’s stepped through the haze of bitter smoke pouring from the split control panel, almost stumbling over something obscured underneath it. "Where’s the driver?"

Shai didn’t look up from what was left of the controls, but the iridophores in her skin rippled blue and green with irritation. "I believe you have just found him."

"Ah." Anselm leaned out into the snarl of Martian wind. "What about landing? Can you do landing?"

Shai Laren flipped one of the switches and the thrum of the interstellar engine dropped by a full tone. "Maybe," she said. "Give me time."

Anselm rested back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms. "So long as you can do it before we plough into the side of that ravine, take all you time you need."

"Ravine?" Her eyes flashed purple then drained back to silver-blue.

Pointless trying to get the overhead display to boot up. She stepped into the open door and leaned out as he had done. The wind was a billion of grains of hard red sand, superheated by the bright white thrusters underneath the train. It was like putting her head into a blast furnace. Shai turned away. Her headtresses washed over her face as she looked back down the silver ribbon of the express train glinting blue and violet in the sunset.

She held her breath and turned back into the wind. It cracked against her ear drums and then everything went as quiet as cotton wool. Beyond the horizon, the verdant green of the agrisphere was rising in front of the night’s first stars. She watched it getting swallowed by the half a mile high wall of jagged red cliff-face emerging from the rusty shadows of the desert.

Shai ducked back inside and pulled the headtresses out of her face. "Yes," she said. "I can see the problem. That isn’t good."

Her eyes met Anselm’s through the smoke. He was still leaning calmly against the bulkhead, the veil torn back from his face so that she could see the golden weave of filigree over his skin. She looked away quickly, but her skin flushed with thick purple stripes before she could stop herself.

"You don’t look much better, I assure you," Anselm said crisply. "And no, it isn’t good. I quite agree. Perhaps you would like to try and stop this thing before it stops itself and kills us all?"

Shai flipped another switch and slammed the flat of her hand against a dead section of the console. It flickered for a moment, and came to life.

"If you’ll stop bothering me for just one moment, doula," she said. "Then I will see what I can do."

The night before, the two of them had stood in the middle of the largest interplanetary station on the surface of Jupiter, waiting for the Laplacian Express to pull up to the platform. The station was an ornate two mile dome of brass and polished glass rising out of the Jovian jungle and lit by a million hovering lanterns. Filled up with spices, animals, traders, and passengers from all over the Solar System. But to the ancient machine that nestled at the back of Shai Laren’s neck and wove its filigree-light exoskeleton over her body, she was still standing in the centre of a rainforest.

It had been clear-cut more than a century ago now, but the jungle rushed in to fill the darkness behind her closed eyelids so quickly that she was almost floating in it. A cold grey sky drifted above the canopy. Leaves heavy and slapping wet against her skin. She was like polished terracotta. Lean and strong and fierce. A Jovian huntress. And she was running. Running through ruins engulfed in twisted roots and vines. Something out there among the trees. She didn’t know if she was hunting it, or it was hunting her.

"Shai, pay attention."

Anselm’s voice snapped her back into herself. Suddenly there was too much light and too much noise. The night was so thick outside that the glass dome was polished black. Shai almost felt the pneuma machina curling against the base of her skull, aching after that lost ruin in the jungle. She wiped at the tears that stood in her eyes, thankful for the white linen wrappings that covered the scrollwork of her exoskeleton, but also hid the deep wave of blue longing that surged up through the chromatic cells in her skin.

She glanced across at Anselm awkwardly. "Yes, doula."

He linked his hands behind his back and stared out into the crowd. "You should enter resonance when you choose," he said. "Not whenever the pneuma machina whims it."

Shai looked down at her feet. "Yes, doula."

Anselm nodded. "Good. Now then, I think our charge is here."

Shai raised her head and rolled back onto the balls of her feet to get a better view. The air was warm as bathwater, full of the smell of incense and cooking food. She focused her mind and pushed down that feeling of floating in the jungle. The prickle of strange eyes prising into her from somewhere amongst the trees. The bustle of black body armour around Chief Executive Lascelles stood out almost as much as Shai and Anselm did in the veils and simple linen wrappings of the Syzygian Church. The guards formed a wall around Lascelles that even light could barely penetrate.

Anselm put his hand onto the wrappings of Shai’s shoulder. "Come on."

They wove through the crowd easily, their pneuma machina drinking in the data of their senses and performing a thousand tiny calculations on the location and velocity of every other moving creature in their paths. The data surged down the tracery of Shai’s exoskeleton like blood. All she had to do was allow her muscles to relax and respond to the touch of the machine. It was not yet as intuitive to her as it was to Anselm. After a few feet she slipped in silently behind him to let him feel out the path.

"Tell me about her?" she said. It probably wasn’t proper protocol, but the keepers in the Cathedral on Saturn had warned her that Anselm was considered unconventional even for a human. Perhaps he would respond well to some initiative.

He glanced back over his shoulder, everything by the deep green of his eyes covered by his veil. "Chief Executive Lascelles is on the board of the Lilienthal Mining Company." Speaking to her did not seem to interfere with his navigating the crowd. Most people saw the wrappings of the Syzygian Church and simply got out of his way, making it easy for his pneuma machina to guide him smoothly around the rest. "In addition to their conventional mining activities, Lilienthal also runs a number of correctional vessels."

"You mean prison ships?"

Anselm nodded uncomfortably. "The ships function as mobile refineries. They collect the ore from the surface mines in the various asteroid fields and deliver blocks of finished metal and machine parts to the drop-off points on Earth, Mars, or wherever else—Excuse me, terribly sorry."

Anselm stepped around the lumbering body of a Cronian. It turned its head to watch them go. How unusual it felt to see one of them outside of the Cathedral. Shai’s pneuma machina detected the patterns of the Cronian’s consciousness reverberating against her own and responded with the equivalent of a psychic handshake before she even knew what she was doing. The Cronian nodded slowly and lumbered off into the crowd.

"Six months ago," Anselm was saying. "The prisoners rioted on board one of Lilienthal’s correctional vessels, the Queen of Heaven. Since then, there have been four assassination attempts against members of the company’s board. Three of them successful."

Shai frowned. "You think the prisoners on board the Queen of Heaven have found some way to kill those responsible for the prison ship," she said. "As revenge?"

Anselm nodded. "The Eye would like us to ensure that Executive Lascelles' trip to the trade conference on Mars is blissfully uneventful."

Before Shai had the chance to reply, they came up against the living wall of Executive Lascelles' security team. Their visors were all down so that they were indistinguishable from one another, but it was the one in the centre that spoke.

"Out of the way, please."

"Ah!" Anselm said affably. "Yes! Warden Alladice, is it? Executive Lascelles mentioned you were thorough. Very good. She is, however, expecting us."

The Warden shook his head slowly, his visor reflecting the light of the thousand tiny coloured lanterns hovering above. "I believe I would know about it if we were expecting—"

"And if you listened to me for even one moment," a voice came from within the crush of bulletproofed body armour. "Then you would do."

The security team hesitated for a moment and then parted around an ageing human woman in an angular and ugly suit that probably cost more money than Shai Laren would see in her whole lifetime. Shai’s eyes skipped to the Selenite in a simple black dress at her side. Selenites were still a rare sight beyond Earth’s wasting atmosphere and Her few remaining Lunar colonies. Shai had not seen another member of her species since she was a little girl. The Selenite’s skin scrolled red-gold and deep pink in a cautious greeting, and for the first time since her Anointment, Shai felt stifled in her wrappings.

"Anselm," Executive Lascelles was saying, taking his hands in her own and clasping them together. "I would recognise that voice anywhere. How are you? It’s been too long."

"Far too long, Chief Executive," Anselm agreed, bringing her fingers to his veil as though he meant to kiss them.

Lascelles smiled, flattered. "It’s Marjory, Anselm, and I am so glad the Church could spare you."

Anselm dipped his head in a small bow. "It was my pleasure."

"And you have a new initiate with you too, I see."

It took Shai Laren a moment to realise that they were talking about her. A jolt of sudden embarrassment shot through her body, the thick purple stripes reaching all the way into the gap in her veil. When she looked up, Lascelles was still staring.

"And Selenite too, is she? My my. How very exotic. I wasn’t aware the Empire allowed them to join the Syzygian Church."

Anselm inclined his head a little. "Not all of her people belong to the Empire. Shai Laren was born in a dancing hall back on Earth. When the company folded, the Church offered her sanctuary."

Lascelles nodded. "Very charitable of you," she said. "Yes. Very charitable. Well then, girl, let’s see you. Take off those wrappings and let me have a proper look."

Shai Laren’s eyes crept to Anselm, but he only shifted his weight awkwardly and looked away. She started with the veil, unfastening it on one side and then the other before unwinding the longer wrappings about her head. She ran her fingers through her headtresses, which mottled yellow-brown when the cool air touched them before returning to the almost-white of moonstone.

Executive Lascelles took Shai’s chin between her thumb and forefinger and studied her carefully. "I prefer you like that," she pronounced. "Leave them off."

She offered Anselm her arm and they turned away before Shai had the chance to protest. The Laplacian Express was rolled into the station almost silently. Half a mile of mirror-polished steel and glass. Endless cabins of sparking crystal and thick purple velvet behind its windows. Warden Alladice yelled at the security team to bring the Executive’s bags and clear the way to the cabin, while Shai fell in beside the other Selenite.

"I’m Shai," she said.

The other woman’s skin mottled caution, although Shai noticed an unfamiliar green colouring along the exposed lengths of her arms. The meaning of the pattern was beyond her, but it made her feel safer.

"Serethi," she said. "Although it pleases the Executive to call me Selene."

Shai flushed with irritation and she looked up at Lascelles.

"Do the two of you have plans for dinner?" she was asking. "You must join me. No really, I insist."

Serethi took a blank disk of wet clay from the small bag at her hip and incised an number of small marks into it with the edge of her fingernail. She did it swiftly. Automatically. Without taking her eyes from the train. Shai folded it up into the sleeve of her wrappings just as quickly. Their eyes met for a moment. Then Lascelles called for Serethi, the doors of the Laplacian Express whispered open, and all of them were swallowed by the crush of bodies, light, and sound.

"I’ve seen those before," Anselm remarked, carefully re-pinning his veil. Shai Laren averted her eyes. "The slave dancers in many of the theatres on Earth exchange them as trinkets."

Shai Laren turned the clay coin between her thumb and forefinger, letting it dry underneath the desk lamp. "They’re more than that. We…the Selenites, I mean…they use them to share information amongst themselves."

She was almost certain that she shouldn’t be telling him, but she gave up any loyalty to the rest of her species when she joined the Syzygian Church. The keepers were very specific.

Anselm glanced away from the small mirror wedged into a corner of their cabin, his fingers still thoughtlessly brushing at the dirt on his sleeve. "And what information does that one have for us?"

Shai frowned, trying to work out which way up it was meant to go. "It’s…not easy for me to tell," she said. "I was never taught much about Selenite culture before the Church took me, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten most of what I knew when I was small."

It wasn’t a complete lie, but even Shai could make out the eyes and open mouth incised into the centre. The lines pointing outwards from it that meant danger. She turned it over and studied the reverse. The marks there were obviously intended to be a number, although she couldn’t tell which one. The curved line a representation of the moon. Or the Selenites. Or perhaps Serethi herself.

Anselm turned his attention back on his reflection. "You should get ready for dinner," he said, and when she did not respond: "Is something the matter, Shai?"

"I…no, doula. It’s only…this ship is very strange and it moves more than I am used to. I feel a little unwell, that’s all."

"That’s hardly unusual," he said lightly. "It is after all very different to any vessel that you have been on board before." He frowned for a moment, drew a breath, and stepped back from the mirror. "Perhaps you should stay here and rest. I’m sure the nausea will wear off once we are above the atmosphere."

Shai remembered the way that he had kissed Executive Lascelles' hands on the station. The way that Lascelles had looked at him. She dipped her head in agreement.

"Thank you, doula," she said. "I’m certain that you’re right."

Finding some space to move around on board the Laplacian Express was harder than it seemed. It took Shai almost a full hour to happen upon a mostly empty baggage car towards the back of the train. The silver bulkheads were exposed, the sound of the thrusters raw through the scuffed steel, and the coldness of space seeped into every nook.

It didn’t matter. At least she was alone.

Shai stood still in the centre of the carriage. Eyes closed. Just listening to the resonance of the thrusters. The resonance of the blood in her own veins. Of the machine coiled about her hindbrain. The pneuma machina was reluctant tonight, as though it was watching from a distance to see what she would do. But then Anselm was insistent that those were the moments when she most needed to practise.

She relaxed every muscle in her body one after another. Breathing and listening and waiting. And when the machine quietened into compliance, she danced. The more she moved her body, the more she became aware of its position in space and time. Of every minor adjustment in the muscles running from her feet, through her core, to her arms and her neck. She didn’t force the pneuma machina to guide her. Just allowed her body to move and waited for it to join in. For flesh and circuitry to melt into one another, twisting her body around impossibly quickly and smoothly, the filigree of her exoskeleton supporting her until she could push her weight right up onto the very tips of her toes…

"You move so beautifully."

The voice brought Shai back into herself with a jolt. Everything came apart in a clattering chaos that sent the blankness of her mind spiralling out into a thousand different thoughts. She almost lost her footing and reached out to steady herself on the bulkhead.

Serethi stood in the doorway, her skin cells patterning with a mixture of apology and amusement. "There are dancers in the slave pools on Earth who spend their whole lives learning to move their bodies and never manage to be so fluid." She walked forwards slowly, stretching out a finger towards the tracery of brass-gold metal woven over Shai Laren’s skin. "Is it something to do with this? I heard someone say that you are fused to a machine."

Shai Laren pulled a face. "We call it Anointment," she said. "The pneuma machina aren’t like the modern cybernetic implants that the Gradivusi make on Mars. They are very old and powerful. They get to choose who they want to be joined with. I…like to dance. The keepers encouraged me to keep doing it when I was brought to the Cathedral. After you’ve been Anointed, you have to figure out how to let the machine co-operate with you. How to allow it to move for you, because they can work so much quicker and more precisely than our brains can. Perform a billion calculations about our weight and speed in every second. Learning how to surrender to the machine, but also to guide it to doing what you want it to do…they call it going into resonance."

Serethi inclined her head a little and traced a curl of golden metal from Shai’s cheek to her jawline. "That’s what you were doing then," she said. And, when Shai nodded: "Can it feel me touching it?"

Shai laughed. "It’s not like that," she said. "It isn’t separate from me any more. Me, the machine, the memories it has of all of the people that it was joined to before me…we’re all the same now."

Serethi drew her hand away and crossed her arms loosely, her skin showing uncertainty. Apprehension. "Executive Lascelles says that you are in some kind of church."

"The keepers call it a Church, and I guess the Cathedral on Saturn looks like one. Only we don’t worship any gods."

"So…what do you worship?"

Shai struggled for a moment. "Just…the universe, I suppose. The patterns of it."

"Like physics?"

Shai shrugged. "Sure, that’s part of it." She rolled onto the balls of her feet, felt the pneuma machina thrum against her thoughts. "I couldn’t read the coin well, but I thought you might come to find me. Ever since I met you, you’ve seemed…scared."

Shai sat down cross-legged on the floor and leant her back against the bulkhead. For as long as she could remember, she’d felt like a lost child wandering an impossibly huge universe. It was strange to be the one who wasn’t afraid. She motioned for Serethi to sit beside her. "Do you want to tell me what you’re scared of?"

Serethi scoffed and looked at her hands. "What aren’t I scared of?" she said. "One wrong word to the Chief Executive and I’m back in the slave pools on Earth. But that’s…that’s not why I’m here. I heard Major Alladice talking. About the Queen of Heaven. About how we’re going to Mars so that Executive Lascelles can attend the trade conference."

Shai nodded and waited for her to finish. Serethi hesitated for a long time. The tone of the thrusters grew deeper and fuller as the Laplacian Express finally slid free of the last of Jupiter’s gravity.

"The say the Syzygian Church are good people," Serethi said at last. "That you’re not like everybody else. If that’s true, then you and your master should stop her before she gets to that conference."

Shai Laren frowned. "Why?"

Serethi’s skin surged red-orange. "Because a lot of people are going to die if you don’t," she snapped. She took a couple of breaths to let the colour drain away. "The Executive has me take all of her letters and messages down. The prisoners on board that ship, the Queen of Heaven, they are entirely dependant on everybody planet-side to help. Their ships can’t enter the atmosphere. There are some places out in the colonies…docks that are controlled by the big unions that Lascelles has spent the last few years trying to wipe out…they’re giving the Queen of Heaven support. Resupplying her with food and oxygen. She’s going to the conference to convince the companies that own those places to lock their people out until the Queen of Heaven surrenders. Only…Only I’m not sure that she wants them to surrender. She wants them to suffocate. To use the whole thing to turn people against the last few unions still clinging on out there. Make it look like their fault somehow. I don’t…I don’t understand the details."

Shai shifted her weight uncomfortably. "That’s terrible."

"She believes that if she doesn’t crush the Queen of Heaven and the unions that are supporting her, then dissent could spread to the other prison ships. That they could lose a fortune. All any of them care about is their share price. And why wouldn’t they? It’s not like they know what it’s like to be stuck somewhere. To be utterly dependant on someone else to keep you alive…"

Shai Laren got to her feet. "Then we have to make them understand," she said. "Come along. My doula is a good man, even if he is human. He’ll listen to me, I know it."

"Absolutely not."

Anselm strode through the narrow corridors between the sleeping compartments, heading for First Class. Shai Laren had to break into a trot to keep up.

"But doula, Serethi said—"

"—It doesn’t matter," he cut her off. "The Eye sent us here to fulfil an order. Not to play politics. It is not our place, Shai."

"Not even when hundreds of people could die?"

"The men and women on that ship are all murderers, thieves, and terrorists," he said. "They had their chance to serve the punishment metered out by their societies, instead they chose open revolution. It is up to the planetary governments and companies to decide how to react, not you."

Shai reached out and grabbed the sleeve of his wrappings. "Then what are we even doing here? Why didn’t those companies and the governments send their own people to watch over the Executive? Why would the Eye intervene in this matter and ask us to go? Unless…the Church was responding to your personal request."

"What in the stars are you talking about? Let go of me."

Shai released his sleeve and stepped back. "You obviously know the Executive," she said. "Is it fair that you should be involved in this, when you obviously have feelings for her?"

"You speak out of turn, Shai. Be careful that you don’t come to regret it."

The threat stopped her cold. She thought about returning to the stone corridors of the Cathedral. Even of going back to the dance halls on Earth that they had plucked her from as a child. About what the Church would do if Anselm decided that she was too much trouble. Decided that she could not be taught. And then she thought about the Queen of Heaven, Drifting helpless through the cold dark and slowly running out of air…

"Now," Anselm said. "I have to check the forward section before we land. Can I trust you to watch over the Executive while I am gone, or must I confine you to quarters until all of this is over?" He stopped beside a carved door where Warden Alladice was standing guard and turned around to face her.

Shai felt her skin mottle with rage. "I will do my duty, doula."

Anselm nodded. "Good. Now, if you will excuse me?"

He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and walked into the dining car leaving the door swinging behind. Shai Laren watched him disappear into the tinkling of crystal, the warm light fracturing through the chandelier, and the laughter of the guests. She took up her place on the other side of Lascelles' room and balled her hands up into fists. Warden Alladice glanced curiously across at her, but said nothing.

Difficult to tell how long she stood there before the light changed in the dining car and the blast shields rolled down over the windows. A chime sounded in the tiny speakers set into the moulded plaster ceiling and a sweet artificial voice washed over the faint hum of the engines.

"Attention all passengers. We shall shortly be descending into the atmosphere of Mars. Our expected arrival time at Oculus Station is four minutes past twelve bells, standard time. Please return to your seats and ensure that your restraint belts are correctly fastened until the blast shields are lifted. Thank you."

Shai Laren raised her head slightly to listen, nodded, and linked her hands behind her back.

Warden Alladice glanced sideways. "Perhaps we should do as it says."

Shai Laren frowned. "Anselm has charged me with keeping watch over the Executive," she said. "I am not about to shirk my duty."

"Very well then," he said. "I will do the same."

The train began to shudder with the stresses of re-entry. Warden Alladice reached out to steady himself on the door frame, but Shai only rolled onto the balls of her feet and allowed the pneuma machina to find the point of perfect balance. She closed her eyes and for a moment she could almost feel the atmosphere of Mars rushing past. Tiny particles racing over her skin in trails of blue and gold. It took her some time to separate out the shouting in the dining car from the gentle roar of the re-entry.

A wave of nauseous apprehension rippled through her body a moment before an explosion of raygun fire turned the air to a prickle of lightning. The sound slammed against her body like the blow of an open hand. Someone started screaming. Moving on her toes to absorb some of the turbulence, Shai Laren slammed into the dining car. In all of the commotion it was difficult to tell the shooter from the bystanders. Her eardrums hazed with white noise as the pneuma machina sifted out the useful information, isolating one voice amongst a hundred.

"—these monsters won’t stop until they have bled us dry. Every one of us! The Queen of Heaven is not our enemy! These people just want the basic rights to life as you. As your own sons and daughters. It is barbaric to keep them sealed up there in the vacuum and the darkness, forcing them to work and threatening them with death if they do not comply.

"You think that you are ruled by your planetary governments? These companies own each and every one of you. And we aren’t sentient creatures to these corporations. We’re cattle!"

A man’s body was lying prone on the floor. Shai could smell the sharpness of ionised particles. The sickening char of burning meat. She crouched down as she reached the body, but the crowd pushed her out of the way before she could feel for a pulse. Shai had no choice but to head for the man with the raygun. He was wearing a badge on the lapel of his tattered jacket—red and shaped like a star with an open hand within. She raised her voice over the screams.

"There’s a storm on Venus that’s raged for more than a thousand years," she said. "The Cythereans call it the Spectre Unchained."

He stopped speaking. His face knotted with confusion as he tried to fit the information into what was happening around him. It was one of the first things the keepers had taught her to avoid drawing her fanblade. Still her favourite when facing someone so pumped with adrenaline and cortisone that their whole perception of the world was narrowed to a pinpoint.

"I…" he began shakily, all the certainty gone out of him. "I don’t…"

"Amongst some Gradivusi," she said, taking another step forwards. "It’s considered grossly offensive to ask a direct question to anything but a close friend or family member."

She had his full attention now. He was Mercurial. One of the lower castes from the look of his six fingers. There had been a Mercurial in the Cathedral who could trace her ancestry three thousand years, and boasted two full sets of eight fingers and three thumbs. He stood out amongst the opulent interior of the Laplacian Express. His chalk white skin and hair almost a negative space.

"…What…"

Shai held out her hand. "Give me the gun," she said.

The Mercurial hesitated for a moment, his eyes darting amongst the passengers who were still trying to climb over each other to escape. It looked like he might shoot her anyway, and Shai reached for the hilt of her fanblade. Then a hand emerged from the crowd behind the shooter, plucking the raygun out of his six fingers. The Mercurial started shouting, but moments later two of the train’s robotic security team were wrestling the him to the floor.

Anselm dropped the raygun into a half-finished tureen of soup and reached out to take her elbow, turning back towards the sleeping cabins. "Panic over," he said.

This time, Shai Laren could get close enough to the man lying on the fine carpets to be sure that he was dead. She sighed and stood with him for a moment until the security team came. Stupid, really. But it seemed like the least she could do. As they took him away, she looked back over her shoulder.

"How many of the assassination attempts did you say had succeeded so far, doula?"

Anselm frowned at her. "Four attempts. Three successful." And when she kept staring back at the Mercurial spitting and swearing into the pile of the carpet. "What is it, Shai?"

"Assuming that the other targets had a comparable level of security," she said. "This would appear to be a particularly inept assassination attempt."

Anselm shrugged. "Perhaps he is a particularly inept assassin," he said. "Perhaps he has nothing to do with the others. When we reach the Oculus station the Gradivusi will take him into custody. We can question him then."

Shai nodded and kept walking, but did not look convinced. When they reached Executive Lascelles' door they took up their places on either side.

Anselm looked around. "Where’s Warden Alladice?"

Shai’s chromatophores pulsed. "He was here before," she said. "Perhaps he saw what was going on and decided to check on the Executive? Anselm, wait—"

Anselm opened the door. The blast shields were slowly scrolling back from the windows, bathing everything in Martian twilight—an ever-changing collage of red-orange sand, purple sky, and burned umber shadows that made everything inside the cabin look like it was moving. Layered in rippling light. Warden Alladice was a curve of concentrated shadow bending over Executive Laselles' bed. Silver reflections from the orbital array spun themselves into the evening cloud and caught on the knife in his hand. Shai Laren reached for her fanblade, but Anselm had already drawn. His blade came open in a arch of brass-coloured metal that hung in the air as Warden Alladice spat with pain and the knife clattered to the floor in two shards of severed metal.

Anselm’s fanblade folded back into itself and the Warden backed away from them both, pressing against the windows where the surface of Mars crested slowly into view behind. In the silence, Shai Laren could hear herself breathing over the pulse of the engines. Then the windows shattered outwards. For a moment, Alladice hung in the roaring gale that shredded his black cloak into rags. Then he reached out almost in slow motion and curled up onto the roof of the train.

Anselm rushed to the Executive’s side and Shai Laren hesitated—her hand still resting on her fanblade.

"Go after him, Shai!" Anselm’s voice cracked over the wind. "Or we’ll lose him. Quickly!"

It took her a moment to realise what he was saying. After that, she didn’t have time to be incredulous. Shai covered the small cabin in three fast steps and swung herself up into the wind. It roared through her headtresses and burned in her eyes, but the air itself was cold enough to make her fingers ache. The roof of the Laplacian Express reflected all the changing colours of the twilight. Thick pink and fragile lilac. Mirrored silver, slipping through the air like a serpent a hundred feet above the surface of Mars.

Alladice stopped on the roof of the next carriage and turned around to face her. He smiled. And he waited. Shai Laren spread her weight between her feet and opened up her fanblade—painting the air with a half-circle of gold-coloured metal. It would have been enough to scare off an opportunist, but Alladice only reached for the matt black baton at his hip. He thumbed the mechanism, and spikes of bare metal a foot and a half long speared out of either end.

Shai Laren swallowed hard and advanced. She reached out to the pneuma machina for resonance. Felt everything come into sharp focus. The desert sky like split goldstone. Whorls and whorls of stars. The roof of the train still warm from re-entry. The thrusters like a blast furnace underneath. Reflected light from the orbital array turned Alladice’s face into sharp angles and deep shadow. She hopped the gap between the carriages and feinted forward, waited for him to lunge, then kicked off the roof of the train and cartwheeled over his head. Inverted in the air, she just had time to notice the natural stone archway racing out of the desert ahead before she had her back to it. Had to balance her weight carefully so that she didn’t slip on landing.

A flash of metal, and Shai Laren swept her fanblade into a long arch in front of her to catch the blow. Nestled against her hindbrain, the pneuma machina ran numbers. The speed of the train. The pitch and incline. The height of the stone archway racing unseen out of the umber shadows behind her.

Duck. Now.

Her blade snapped closed with an audible crack. She rolled and pressed down against the hot silver of the train as the stone bridge whip-cracked past. She allowed her momentum to return her to a crouch, swept the blade open at Warden Alladice’s ankles as he rose, then pivoted as he anticipated the blow and leapt. Adrenaline was a low roar in her blood, smothered by the steady stream of emotionless numbers pouring from the machine. Shai Laren rose and painted the air with a vertical arch of metal that sliced easily through the carbon weave of Alladice’s staff. One of the telescopic spikes shuddered and collapsed in on itself. He thrust at her with the other.

The machine drank it in. Position of the blade, rotation in his arms. The tracery of her exoskeleton tightened a little in anticipation and she surrendered to it—sliding sideways over the curved roof of the train. Coming to a stop barely an inch from the dead drop into the desert.

Alladice threw the useless end of his staff at her, and ran. He was headed for the engine.

Shai twisted in mid-air, pulling her feet out of the way before Warden Alladice’s half spear took them off. He had nowhere left to go now. A dozen feet of sharply curved engine housing was all that was left between them and the smokestack. Even from here, Shai could feel the blistering heat of it through her wrappings.

She landed, steadied her footing, and found him staring back at her. Realised what he was going to do halfway between when he acted and the last second that she could have stopped him. The machine made a snap calculation. She didn’t have time to weigh up the pros and cons. She and Alladice swung themselves down into opposite sides of the driver’s cabin at exactly the same moment.

As she straightened, the train’s robotic pilot looked between them. Its face was featureless silver and couldn’t register emotion. Not even when Alladice’s spear split its head open from crown to collarbone. Smoke and coolant fluid sprayed over the bulkhead and sizzled down into the metal. Shai slid back as Alladice’s spear slammed through the air where she had been and embedded itself in the console. The pneuma machina stabbed at her thoughts. No space to open her fanblade. Best to unbalance him. She grabbed his ankle with her free hand and pulled. When he sprawled backwards amongst the wreckage of the pilot, she half-opened her blade and stepped forwards. No room here. We’re at a disadvantage. Have to think of something else. Where the hell is Anselm?

"Why are you doing this?" Alladice is too sharp to fall for the distraction technique. Play for time. "You want the Executive dead, I understand that, but why wait until now? Why not do it before Anselm and I even arrived? And why endanger the lives of everyone else on this train now that you’ve failed? How does that make you better than her?"

"Better than her?" Alladice laughed, wiping a long stripe of blood up the black sleeve of his body armour. "Stupid child. You have no idea what this is about. You think we care about Lascelles? About the Queen of Heaven? About anybody on this train?"

Shai’s mind spun for a moment. "Who’s we?"

A nasty smile pulled at the corner of Alladice’s mouth. He brought up the tip of his spear. "If you’d lived," he said. "Perhaps you would have found out."

Her exoskeleton seized hold of her body, pushing her into a low crouch and bringing the closed shard of her fanblade up to block. Leaning her weight into her forward knee. Forcing him to step back.

"And when you’re done with me," she said. "What will you do then? Anselm will not go down so easily."

Alladice repositioned his feet and cleaved down with another blow. Her exoskeleton constricted, splaying her feet out over the sizzling metal. Twisting her blade to hold him off. He backed up another step.

"I’ll think of something," Alladice spat. "You think the two of you are the first members of your Church that I have killed?"

Shai’s stomach turned to cold, clear water.

Stay calm. Get your feet back underneath you. Quickly. Raise your blade.

The force of the next strike reverberated in her arms. Muscles shivered with exertion. She made a show of trying to push herself up. Sliding forwards. Letting him retreat another pace.

Alladice’s eyes flashed over his shoulder as his heel touched the edge of the cabin. "Such a clever girl," he said, smiling. "But not quite clever enough."

Before he could pull away from the edge, an hand reached out of the howling gale and plucked him into the open air. He hung suspended there—his face twisted with a mixture of fear and rage, the tattered remains of his cloak fraying in the wind. Then he was gone, rolling in a disordered mess underneath the thrusters of the Laplacian Express. A shadow burned down into the Martian sand.

Anselm swung down into the cabin and Shai Laren straightened up, wiping the sweat and dust off of her skin.

"It’s all right," she told him, looking down at the controls. "I’m almost sure I know how to fly this thing."

The Laplacian Express screeched and squirmed as it barrelled towards the canyon. Its thrusters burned blue and then white-hot as the ribbon of muscular silver jack-knifed and threatened to roll. Red sand spat into the thin atmosphere on every side. The last few carriages banked harder than the others. For several seconds before they righted themselves, the furnace of their underbelly was exposed to the air.

As the train finally ground to a shuddering halt, Anselm leaned out to watch it settle down into the desert. The air filled up with an eerie silence.

"A little bumpy, but we appear to have survived."

He dropped down into the sand. Shai stepped out of the other side of the cabin and took a slow pass around the engine. On the far side of the ravine the Martian capital glittered in the twilight, cupped in the crater of Solis Lacus. Aqueducts sloped gracefully down into valley. High silver arches and sparkling lights. The whole city seemed silent from out here in the desert. Motionless. Its greatest skyscrapers outlined in a pale glow.

Shai turned her back on it and walked towards Anselm. "He said that it wasn’t about the conference," she said. "That it was bigger than I could understand." And, when Anselm did not respond: "Warden Alladice, I mean."

Anselm nodded, watching as people from all across the Solar System climbed down out of the Laplacian Express.

Shai sighed. "What will happen if I leave the Church?"

"Difficult to say." He still wouldn’t look at her. Even with his veil torn back from his face his expression was inscrutable. "Can’t say I’ve known it to happen before. But the pneuma machina are precious, Shai. I can’t imagine the keepers would simply allow you to walk away with one of them."

"And it can’t be removed," she finished stonily, iridophores turning her skin as silvery as the city hanging in the heat haze. "At least, not without killing me."

Anselm nodded and drummed his fingers on his lips. His green eyes were murky and distant. Shai wasn’t even certain that he was listening to her.

"And what will you do?" she asked, her teeth catching on the end of her tongue.

He drew a breath, and came into focus. "Well, if Alladice was part of some greater plan, as you say, then I shall need to find out who he was working with. Once I get these people to the Oculus station, I’ll start by running a background check on Alladice. I’m sure Executive Lascelles must have the information in her personal files. Then I’ll interview the Mercurial. Find out about the man he murdered in the dining car. Try and work out if it’s connected."

"And the trade conference? The prisoners on the Queen of Heaven? What is going to happen to them?"

Anselm’s expression creased tight with frustration. "As I said, Shai, the matter is hardly our concern."

"And if I leave the Church?" she pressed. "If I walk away now and you become the first doula to lose one of his charges in…what? At least as long as you have been a member? What will the keepers make of that? Do you think that will be any of your concern, doula?"

The line of his mouth set hard. "You are playing a dangerous game, you realise that?"

She held his gaze and her ground, and waited for him to make his choice.

"Fine," Anselm sighed. "I will speak to Executive Lascelles and see if a compromise is at all possible. It’s not entirely without precedent for the Church to intervene in certain matters of diplomacy. If you are so set on the idea, then perhaps you would like to carry out negotiations with the Queen of Heaven yourself."

Shai nodded slowly. She unwound the wrappings from around her forearms and used them to bind up her headtresses. Tucked the stray edge across her face, obscuring everything but her eyes. She hopped back up into the driver’s cabin.

"I’m certain that the Executive will listen to you, Anselm," she said. "The two of you seem to be old friends, after all. While you are discussing it, perhaps you can ask if she will lend me Serethi’s services until the matter is resolved. If we are to carry out negotiations between the Executive and the prisoners, I will need all the help that I can get."