FAR OUT IN the desert there was a fortress, like a smoke-stained moon orbiting a dead and distant planet. This fortress was a prison, and it was called the Iron Hill.
It was a day of unmerciful heat. The sunlight hammered on the walls of the Iron Hill like a broadside, picking out every patch of rust, every creaking seam, every cloud of dirty steam that leaked from its vents.
A hatch in the wall of the Iron Hill slid open, and a child fell out. A bundle of grey cloth, bleached instantly white by the unforgiving sun, turning and spiralling in the wind. A brief pale flash against the blue unseeing sky.
No one saw them fall. If anyone had chanced to look up at that moment, the sun would have dazzled their eyes. The child fell out of reality, and entered it again several seconds later when they landed on the upper hull of the small Thousand Eye transport which was docked to the side of the prison. They lay there on the hot metal, among dust and smashed insects, clinging like a barnacle as the ship slipped its moorings. The canopies unfurled, the engines hummed to life, and the ship rose into the burning sky, oblivious to its strange new cargo.
A chain of hills ran through the desert, and on the largest of these hills there was a monstrous palace. In places, through walls of volcanic glass, behind its spines and towers, buried under the new fortifications that the God-Empress had made, you could see the shadow of Tlaanthothe, the city she had devoured.
The palace, which was called the Lignite Citadel, was encircled by an equally monstrous town, as ramshackle as the palace was impenetrable. The outskirts and remnants of lost Tlaanthothe had been glued together, like the fragments of a broken vase, by a spreading penumbra of new factories, barracks, and slums. This was Ringtown, and down in the docks, the convicts were scrubbing another poster off the wall of the Thousand Eye barracks.
The poster depicted an athletic Tlaanthothei youth standing on a serpent’s neck, looking young and muscular and waving a sword over his head. Under the direction of a Thousand Eye officer who clearly thought she was better than all this, the gang of convicts slopped at it with brooms.
Tal pulled his collar high and walked on by.
This shit was why Tal hated coming into town. It just made it more likely someone would perform the complex imaginative manoeuvre—rare in Outer Ringtown—which was necessary to picture Tal without his beard. Clean-shaven, with his hairline free from grey speckles, he looked all too much like the legendary outlaw Talasseres Charossa, the favourite topic of seditious artists, greatly desired by the God-Empress as a traitor and ally of the pretender Belthandros Sethennai.
It was all very funny, because Tal didn’t know whether Sethennai was alive or dead and would sooner ally with a scorpion.
And what kind of idiot would stick something like that on the walls of the barracks themselves? Tal gave it two days before the culprit was caught and drowned in the public fountain.
He put it out of his mind. The entire strategy which had kept him alive for the past fifteen years of his life relied on not running toward trouble and not being noticed. The secret of survival in Ringtown was to mind your own business, and at this point in time, Tal’s business was to consider a job offer.
He turned down a narrow alley and ducked inside the Lemon Tree. The place was optimistically named, a bleak, windowless boozer that smelled of stale wine and smoke. A while back, the old landlord had been executed for distributing illegal pamphlets about the Snake Tyrant, and the place still seemed to be in mourning.
Tal’s brother was waiting for him at a basement table.
Niranthos had offered Tal work before, but it was the first time he’d come down from his perch to do it. It had been years since the two of them had met face-to-face, and the fact that Niranthos was here in person was unnerving. For one thing, Niranthos looked shockingly old. His hair was thin and iron-grey, and his beard did not hide the deep lines around his mouth.
Do I look like that? Tal thought. Niranthos was giving him a forbidding look.
“Talasseres,” he said, “you’re late.”
“Yeah, sorry,” said Tal. “I guess everything up in the Citadel runs on time, but—”
“Not so loud!” said Niranthos.
“I’m not the one wearing my shiny fucking shoes under—what is that, a bedsheet?”
Niranthos’ idea of a disguise was apparently to pull on a ragged cloak and wrapper over his immaculate palace livery. The sickening risk they were both taking made this less funny than it could have been.
Niranthos had some kind of dire administration job in the Citadel, and in his spare time he was the world’s most boring Tlaanthothei loyalist, longing for the old order of things, in which he, Niranthos Charossa, had been the ultimate specimen of correctness. His rebellion was of a very Niranthos variety, trafficking information, funding propagandists, leaking the Thousand Eyes’ secrets in measured drops. Tal didn’t work for him when he could avoid it. Involving yourself with plots against the God-Empress was—as the former proprietor of this very pub had learned—a speedy way to get yourself executed. Sometimes, though, there were no other options.
Niranthos handed over a sheet of paper and waited while Tal read it. It was a Thousand Eye memorandum, detailing the route of a certain transport across the desert, from the Iron Hill to the Citadel.
“Commander Jatharisse was supposed to report at the Citadel yesterday. She left the Iron Hill as scheduled, but her transport never even arrived in Ringtown.”
“You’ve lost a snake? Embarrassing for you,” said Tal.
Niranthos lowered his voice to a hiss. Really, it was incredible that this man had survived as a double agent for so long. “Jatharisse is one of the Empress’ high officers. She is deeply involved in what they’re calling the great work. I need you to find out what’s happened to her transport and get there before the official salvage team does.”
“Right. Well, you know my usual fee.”
Niranthos looked disappointed, as though somehow, after all this time, he expected Tal to volunteer out of the goodness of his heart.
“I need to eat,” said Tal. It had been a bad winter. He had caught a fever and come close to death, shivering in a sleeping bag in one of his bolt-holes, and his resources were stripped to the bone. “We don’t all have a nice townhouse with proper plumbing, and if you think this job sounds like such a walk in the park, then maybe you should go yourself, or—”
“All right, Talasseres,” said his brother, his shoulders slumping a little. “Yes. Fine. I can pay you.”
Beyond the margins of Ringtown, the desert went on into a seeming eternity. Roads, like people, went out into the desert and disappeared. The God-Empress had taken territory in many worlds, but nowhere was her conquest so complete as here in Tal’s homeland.
Tal’s cutter skimmed low across the desert, cutting a winding path between outcrops of rusty stone and dried-up groves of acacia. He didn’t want to be seen, not by the Thousand Eyes and not by any of the scavengers who made their living in the Speechless Sea by less official means.
Niranthos had given him the approximate location of Jatharisse’s crashed ship. Tal tried not to think too much about how his brother even knew this stuff, but his sources must have been good, because there was the wreck. It lay in the shadow of a huge rock formation which cut the black sand like a shark’s fin. Smoke rose in wisps from a hole in the hull, but in an unprecedented stroke of luck, it did not appear to be actively on fire.
Niranthos wasn’t paying him to be curious, but Tal couldn’t help wondering how this had happened. Why would Jatharisse have run her ship into a perfectly obvious rock like this?
Tal landed his cutter nearby and approached on foot. He recognised the ship’s build—it was nearly as old as he was, and it had been a luxury Maze transport before they’d slapped a Thousand Eye insignia on its flank. Might never fly again now, given the damage.
Get on board, get whatever documents you can—don’t bother trying to read them, you wouldn’t understand them—and I’ll pay for anything you can get, even if it turns out to be her shopping list. Those had been Niranthos’ instructions. Unfortunately the way the ship had fallen meant there would be no access to the main hatch, but he could get in through the secondary cargo hatch which—yes—was still exactly where he expected to find it.
He climbed up to the hatch and began twisting the rings of the lock. With these old ships you could usually get the combination by feel if you had a few uninterrupted minutes to meddle with them. Tal remembered Sethennai teaching him that and felt an ancient and unbidden rush of blood to his cheeks.
The moment he solved the damn thing, the cargo hatch popped open and someone fell out with a shriek, right on top of him.
Tal did not jump. He did not yelp. It took many years’ practice at self-restraint merely to curse in a clipped whisper.
It wasn’t Jatharisse. It was a kid, not even five feet tall, squawking like an angry magpie.
“Shut up!” said Tal.
The kid didn’t answer him. They’d already gone quiet, staring out over his shoulder. Tal turned, knowing what he’d see before he saw it.
Behind him was a Thousand Eye officer, her livery scorched, her smoked-glass visor cracked, and her sword already drawn. She must have heard the screeching. So here was Jatharisse.
Would she stab first and ask questions later?
Before Tal could find out, the child kicked him in the shins, pelted out of the cargo hatch, and was away the moment they hit the ground. Tal cursed again and followed suit. He heard Jatharisse snarl behind him.
Losing a pursuer would have been easier if he had been anywhere else but this. The desert was like an empty oven, and the snake was between him and his cutter. He zigzagged deeper into the shade of the rock, planning to double back round once he’d lost her.
He was all too aware that he was no longer as fast or as resilient as he had been. If he didn’t get away from Jatharisse and back to his cutter before his first burst of energy ran out, he was a dead man.
God, but the snake was so fast! He glanced back over his shoulder, breathing hard, and saw that she was almost close enough to grab him.
“Hey!” came a shout from some distance away. “Hey, fucker! Leave him alone, it’s me you want!”
It was the kid. Tal’s lungs hurt too much for him to feel really bewildered by this. He had to assume they’d mistaken him for somebody else, because the life he was currently living wasn’t one anyone else would risk themselves to save.
Jatharisse paused and dropped back, giving Tal time to dart deeper into the shadow of the rock. He didn’t look back until he was beyond the outcrop and back in the blazing sun. He couldn’t see the snake or the kid, and he had to catch himself before almost stepping back into a deep gully which trailed the outcrop as though the shark’s fin had cut a wake in the earth.
“She’s still coming, idiot!” said a voice from beneath him. It was the child again—what business did they have being that fast?—at the bottom of the gully, trying to climb up the far side. Without thinking, Tal dropped down after them.
“Go away! Don’t give me away!” they hissed.
Tal stepped up on a rock and peered over the edge of the gully. Through a stand of dry grass he could see Jatharisse, silhouetted against a burning sky. Shit.
Option one, thought Tal. Shove the kid back out in the desert as a nice distraction for the snake, and go back to Niranthos empty-handed. It would be shitty even by Tal standards to use them as snake bait when they’d saved his life just now, but—well, it was a hard world, and if there was no other way—
“You were on the ship? Jatharisse’s ship?” he said.
“I was stealing it,” said the kid, ignoring him. They were trying to climb up the far side of the gully, but the sand slipped under their battered sandals.
“Yeah, that seems to have gone really well,” said Tal.
Jatharisse was taking her time searching. Unhurried, relaxed, confident as only an apex predator can be.
“Get bent, old man, I’m not dying because of you!”
They scrabbled at the edge, slid down, and bounced immediately back up again, only to fall just as before. Tal knew the feeling.
Option two. Try to keep us both alive, and if we don’t die, I can at least hand the kid over to Niranthos as proof that I tried.
“Leg up?” said Tal.
The kid was surprisingly sturdy, but Tal managed to hoist them to the top of the far side of the gully, and swung himself up after. Might buy them a little time, if they could at least get out of Jatharisse’s eyeline.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Tsereg,” said the kid. Oshaaru, probably, with dark grey skin and a mass of curly black hair that fell in loose ringlets over their face. Could have been a boy or a girl or neither. Tal didn’t know enough about the Oshaaru to tell from the name or the hairstyle.
“No, I mean, what are you doing here?” he said.
“None of your beeswax,” said Tsereg. “Get behind the rock before she sees us!”
They rounded the outcrop and kept going, close against its sunlit side. The heat was vicious. Tal felt like a blistered strip of paint flaking off the hot rock.
“Why exactly did you steal a Thousand Eye officer’s ship?” said Tal, as they ran. No answer from the kid. “My cutter’s nearby,” he went on. “We can get away from here. Just need to know you’re not going to knife me and take my ship too.”
“Might do,” said Tsereg. “Probably not. Had to catch a ride with Commander Snake-o to get out of the Hill, didn’t I?”
“The Hill?” said Tal. “The Iron Hill? You were in prison?”
“Yeah, and I’m not going back,” said Tsereg. They glanced back. Jatharisse was already past the gully and coming after them.
“Fuck! How can we lose her?” said Tsereg.
Short of splitting up and taking their chances, Tal had no idea. If Tal doubled back and charged Jatharisse directly, then he might be able to keep her occupied long enough for Tsereg to get away …
And god, for a moment, it was almost tempting. To die on Jatharisse’s sword might just be the solution to all his problems. No uncertain future. No more memories. No more debt, no more fear, no more shame, no more regret, no more cold nights shivering in his tent alone, no more, no more—
But that had never been his style. He had bought his life dearly, and whatever he was these days, he wasn’t the kind of person to throw it away for someone he’d just met.
His brain hovered around the thought for a while, like a fly inspecting a carcass, before alighting: he wasn’t Csorwe, was he.
Then Tsereg tripped with a muffled scream, one threadbare sandal flapping off their foot, straps broken.
The smart thing to do would be to keep moving, away from danger and away from the small grey bundle that lay stunned on the ground like a dead pigeon. All he had to do was get round the other end of the outcrop and back to his cutter, and he would be safe, and Tsereg would most likely be dead. Just one of the many compromises one made to stay alive in the new order of things. If you had an ounce of self-preservation, you wouldn’t slow down, you wouldn’t turn back, you wouldn’t draw your knife and yell—
Oh, for fuck’s sake, thought Tal, as he did every one of these things.
By the time he closed with Jatharisse, Tsereg was back on their feet, and still shrieking, less with terror and more as if they had turned a spigot marked yell and the valve had broken off in their hand.
“Keep running!” Tal yelled, gesturing in what he hoped was the direction of the cutter. “I’ll take her!”
Tal didn’t carry a sword these days, not wanting attention from the Eyes—the irony was not lost on him—but at least his knife was the length of his forearm and could punch cartilage like a needle through canvas. Tal had as good a chance as he’d ever have. He sprinted toward her and tried to kick her backward. His boot connected with her ribs, but—god, impossible—she grabbed his calf and threw him back. He staggered and spun to keep his balance, but the Eye was upright now and facing him. Behind her cracked visor, she beamed, a crescent of gleaming white teeth. All the Thousand Eyes had the same face, but Jatharisse wore it crueller than most.
“Do try to fight, if you like,” she said, as if she was being very generous in giving Tal the opportunity.
“Bite my ass, you crusty shit!” he said.
The Eye moved unlike anything Tal had ever fought, like a silk flag rippling in the wind. She twirled in circles round Tal. The sword drifted through the air in unhurried arcs, and yet Tal felt himself pinned in place, rapidly losing control of the fight.
He was horribly out of practice and he’d made an awful mistake and he was going to die. He feinted, retreating a little, trying to gain some space to breathe. If he could spin this out long enough, he might give Tsereg the chance to live a little longer, which was about as stupid a legacy as he deserved. He hoped they had run.
The Eye wasn’t even trying seriously to kill him. She was having fun with him, tiring him out, in the knowledge that she could reel him in whenever she liked. Tal had long had enough of being treated like that. It made him angry enough that he actually had an idea.
He retreated further, moving back the way he had come, favouring his right foot as though injured.
The Eye pressed him as though her appetite had been sharpened by his yielding.
That’s right, thought Tal. That’s me, I’m vulnerable as shit, come fucking murder me.
The great thing about fighting to the death was that you had no time for doubt, no opportunity to worry about whether you’d miscalculated. Tal gave way and gave way until the Eye was almost on top of him, and then he dodged sideways so that she was between him and the hidden gully.
Tal spun and pushed the Eye back as hard as he could. She fell back in a perfect arc, head over heels into the gully. As she fell her head struck a rock, and by the time she hit the bottom, her body was limp and unmoving.
Tal straightened up, breathing hard.
“Fuck,” he said, indistinctly.
Tsereg hadn’t run. The little idiot had followed him, and now they were standing a little way off, an elbow-high pillar of silence.
“Is she dead?” they said, twitching aside a hank of hair to reveal their nose and a selection of teeth.
Tal gasped out a kind of laugh. He was still out of breath from the fight, which would have been shaming if he’d been able to experience such a sophisticated emotion in that state.
“Is she, though?”
The fall might well have killed an ordinary mortal, but you never knew with a snake. Tal hopped down into the gully. No, dead, neck snapped, no doubt about that. He set about searching the body.
Tucked into her outer sash was a wallet of papers. The first of these was a letter of marque in Tlaanthothei, confirming the snake’s identity as Jatharisse, Seven Hundred and Forty-Ninth of the Thousand Eyes, and requiring all loyal citizens of the Empire to give her aid and succour.
Ha ha, succour, thought Tal, perhaps still shaky from the fight.
The rest of the letters were in Echentyri. Tal struggled to read Echentyri characters at the best of times, but these didn’t make any sense at all—they weren’t even grouped into sentences, just laid out in a dense grid. They must be encoded in some way.
Some of the papers had an unpleasant wriggling quality, the characters slipping from view like eels in a pond. Sethennai had sometimes received letters like this, and one of the few things Tal knew about magic was that this shimmery, elusive quality meant the papers were sealed under arcane cipher.
Well, bully for Niranthos, he thought. These must be the documents he’d been sent to find.
Tsereg had also shinned down into the gully again. They poked Jatharisse’s shoulder with their toe, then looked from Tal to the corpse and back again, then grinned, a slow expression of pure glee which transformed their beetly, ingrown little face into something like a daisy opening.
Tal found that his face of its own accord relaxed into a grin. Maybe he had never enjoyed fleeing for his life over the rooftops; maybe the thing he enjoyed was surviving afterward.
“Wow, you really killed her,” said Tsereg. “Nice.”
“You are very damaged,” said Tal. “But thanks. Now let’s get out of here.”
“So what were you in jail for?” said Tal, as Tsereg climbed up into the back of the cutter. Undoubtedly a breach of prison etiquette, but they could shiv him later.
“Killing old people,” said Tsereg. “Asked me too many questions.”
Tal laughed. “How old are you?” he tried instead.
They hunched up on the bench like a carrion bird guarding its kill, clearly enduring some kind of internal struggle over whether to divulge this secret information.
“Fourteen,” they muttered.
“Right,” said Tal. He tried to remember what he’d been like at that age, but recalled only a red fog of distilled embarrassment. Best not to dwell. “Well. Should I drop you somewhere? Where are you going?”
“On my way to Ringtown,” they said, with great confidence for one who had broken their journey by crashing a hijacked transport into a rock. “I have a contact there, at the Lemon Tree. Let’s go back there.”
“We can’t,” he said. “Not for a few days, anyway. Place will be crawling with Eyes, all looking for you.”
“I’ll be fine. We have to go there.”
“No, we don’t,” he said. “If you’re meeting someone at the Lemon Tree, they’re just going to have to wait. Who is it, anyway?”
Tsereg gave him a hard stare. For fuck’s sake. This was going to be like dealing with Csorwe all over again, but worse, because at least he and Csorwe had been allowed to hit each other.
That made twice in an hour that he’d thought about her. It had been so very, very long. He didn’t miss her, except in the way you missed the empty space when you stubbed your toe on something in the middle of the night.
The worst of it was that he couldn’t think of her without remembering what she’d become. The Thousand Eyes scared him, but they were nothing compared to the Empress and her Hand. Csorwe and Shuthmili had died in the temple fifteen years ago. The fact that their bodies still walked the earth was just salt to the wound.
The cutter sped on across the desert, black sand glittering below.
“Someone told you this person could help you on the outside?” he said.
“I’m not telling you anything. Why should I trust you?” They bared a single tusk at him. There was a raw-looking gap of grey gum where the other one was waiting to grow in.
Tal raised his eyes to the heavens.
“No reason,” he said. “Except that I could’ve avoided a lot of mistakes if I’d been a bit quicker to recognise what a common enemy looks like.”
“Talasseres Charossa,” they said, muttering it into the ragged shawl which served them as a cloak.
“What?” said Tal. He hadn’t heard his full name for a very long time. The legendary outlaw Talasseres Charossa was a character from a wanted poster.
“He’s the one I’m looking for.”
Once upon a time, Tal had thought he’d survived every ambush this bitch of a world could try and startle him with. Some years later, he’d realised this was never going to be the case, and that all you could do was laugh.
Tsereg sat in the back quite calmly, as if they were used to people acting erratically.
“You got something wrong with you?” they said.
He just went on laughing. Maybe he did have something the matter with him.
“You’re Talasseres Charossa?” they said, when he had recovered enough to explain himself.
“But you’re…” They stopped, biting their lip. However Tal had disappointed them, they were—amazingly—too tactful to spell it out. They wrapped their skinny arms around their knees and stared at him. “Huh.”
“Not like in the paintings, yeah,” said Tal.
Once again Tal wondered why Oranna had thought it was a good idea to spread that particular story around. He’d never know, since she was dead, but it was a pain in the arse.
“I took a stupid risk in a fight that happened before you were born, and I got two ribs broken and my friends died. Great story. Love to be reminded of it.”
“Hmm,” said Tsereg. “Well, but you failed. I’m not going to fail.”
“You’re not going to what?” said Tal.
Tsereg narrowed their eyes. “I am going to assassinate the God-Empress.”
They were so serious and so certain that Tal could almost have laughed again—it was like seeing a woodlouse with homicidal intent—but there was real venom in it. They’d do it, if they could. Or, far more likely, they’d make the attempt, and get themselves killed before they passed the walls of the Lignite Citadel.
“That’s a hell of a death wish,” he said, suddenly feeling very tired. Tsereg shrugged, like a pile of unclean laundry falling over.
“People are relying on me,” they said.
Tal bet they were. Nothing like sending an untrained infant to die for you. He knew all about that. That was the shit that got into your bones, and there was nothing anyone else could do about it.
“That sounds like a problem for them,” he said. “What are you going to do, anyway, just walk into Tlaan—into the Lignite Citadel and stab the Empress in the heart?”
“No,” said Tsereg, although their face wilted as if that had very much been the beginning and end of the plan.
Tal raised an eyebrow. As ever, when he thought of the Empress, he had to make a conscious effort to sweep away what he knew about the Empress, what she looked like, who stood at her right hand.
“I have a sacred duty,” Tsereg added, which was the kind of thing that always made Tal’s head ache. What people always meant by it was: I plan to commit an astonishing fuckup, and it will hurt my feelings if you try to stop me.
“The Abyss will consume the breaker of promises,” Tsereg went on, coldly. “I won’t turn my back on my people. And my god won’t turn its back on me.”
“Your god?” said Tal. Oh, great. “Trust me, I’ve dealt with gods, and they lie and betray just like anybody else—” Belthandros Sethennai was one of the most accomplished liars he’d ever met, for example.
“No,” said Tsereg. “The Unspoken does not lie.”
Tal jerked in surprise, sending the cutter sharply off course.
“Right,” he said, when he’d recovered what little remained of his dignity and poise. “Makes sense. The Unspoken One loves an obstinate little shit.” Tsereg gave him a scathing look, which did not help because Csorwe had given him exactly such a look on many occasions. He did not need this. He wanted Tsereg gone so he could get back to normal and not have to think about any of this past dead shit. “Look, I don’t know who sent you to find me, but they picked the wrong guy—”
He paused. What was he going to do with them? Wandering round Ringtown with an escaped prisoner was obviously not an option, and he didn’t think that even he could leave a kid in the desert to die, but where else? He still didn’t have any money, and wouldn’t until he could hand those documents over to Niranthos, and—
Maybe that was the answer. Niranthos had a nice setup in the Citadel proper, well out of Ringtown. Niranthos could take Tsereg off Tal’s hands and give them an easy job as a servant or something, in his nice house away from prying Eyes. He might even pay Tal for the privilege, but if he decided to be a dick, Tal could make it a condition of the bargain. Take Tsereg, or you don’t get the papers. Then Tal could get a little breathing space, pay off the people he owed, and start again somewhere else.
“If I can get you into the Citadel, will you do as you’re told?” he said.
“I thought you were going to say no,” they said. He should have known better than to expect any kind of relief or gratitude. They frowned at him. They had been frowning already, so their face now looked like a box that had been kicked.
“I changed my mind,” he lied. They wouldn’t be happy when they found out, but at that point it wouldn’t be his problem anymore.
“Why?” they said. There was no suspicion in it. They were simply baffled.
He sensed that he would not get the desired reaction with anything along the lines of because you may be mistaken for a spider and washed down the drain.
“What can I say?” he said. “You remind me of a friend.”