Tripwires.
He pushed off with his feet and backward-rolled a split second before the deadfall smashed to the ground where his head had been. In one smooth motion he was on his feet, but his opponent was springing over the debris of the trap even before the dust had settled, utterly relentless. Saran had barely time to realise that he had lost his dagger; he blocked upward with his hand inside the sweep of the creature’s blade, catching it on the inside of the wrist, but already another knife was coming from nowhere, his
own
knife, slicing towards his face. He pulled away fast, the cutting edge missing the bridge of his nose by a whisker, but something caught at his ankle and he toppled backward, his balance deserting him. As he fell there was a harsh hiss of movement, and something blurred past his eyes, stirring his hair with the wind of its passage; then there was a dull, wet impact, and a moment later he crashed flat to the earth, supine and all but helpless against his opponent’s killing strike.
But no strike came. He looked up.
The creature stood lifelessly before him, its body limp, supported in the air by the vicious row of wooden spikes that had impaled it through the chest. Saran had literally been tripped by a tripwire, and the bent sapling that was released had passed before his face as he fell backward and caught the creature instead. He lay in a long moment in disbelief, and then began to laugh convulsively. The fleshcrafted monstrosity hung like a marionette with its strings cut, its head lolling, black eyes sightless.
Tsata found Saran dusting himself off and still laughing. The sheer exhilaration of the moment had made him giddy. The Tkiurathi took in the scene with puzzlement on his face.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.
‘A little poison,’ Saran replied. ‘Not enough. I think I will be sick for a while, but not enough. That thing counted on it finishing me off.’ He began to laugh again.
Tsata, who was acquainted with Saran’s remarkable constitution, did not question further. He studied the creature that had been caught in the spike trap.
‘Why are you laughing?’ he inquired.
‘Gods, it was so fast, Tsata!’ he grinned. ‘To face something like that and
beat
it . . .’
‘I am glad,’ said Tsata. ‘But we should not celebrate yet.’
Saran’s laughter died to an uncertain chuckle. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘It is dead. There is your hunter.’
Tsata looked up at him, and his pale green gaze was bleak. ‘There is a hunter,’ he corrected. ‘It is not the one I saw two days ago.’
Saran went cold.
‘There is another,’ Tsata said.
TWO
The cracked moon Iridima still hung low in the north as dawn took the eastern sky in a firestorm.
It began as a sullen red mound, growing wider and glowering ever fiercer as it slid over the curve of the horizon. Beneath it, the sea, which had brooded under the glow of Iridima and the vast, blotched face of her sister Aurus during the night, took up the sun like a tentative choir picking up a melody. Scattered glints prickled the distance, flashing in rhythm with the tug and ebb of the waves. They began to infect the neighbouring swells, which glittered a counterpoint, lapping to a different time as they were stirred by underlying currents and the memory of the chaotic twin gravities of the moons. The sky overhead began to blend from black into a deep, rich blue, the stars fading by degrees.
The final stages came in a rush. The calm, gradual process collapsed into disorder as it came to crescendo, and the upper rim of Nuki’s eye peeped over the edge of the planet, a blazing arc of white that ignited the breadth of the ocean. The light reached past the sea, over the tiny specks of Saramyr junks that plied towards the westward coast, and it spread over the land beyond: a colossal swathe of green as all-encompassing and apparently endless as the sea that foundered on its shores. Okhamba.
The port of Kisanth lay within the sheltered cradle of a lagoon, separated from the sea by a towering wall of ancient rock. The frowning black mass kept the lagoon waters safe from the ravages of the storms that lashed the eastern coast at this time of year, while myriad subterranean channels allowed a plentiful supply of fish through from the open ocean. Uncountable ages of erosion had widened one of these channels until it undermined the rock overhead and caused a section of it to collapse, forming a tall tunnel wide enough to allow through even large commercial trading ships.
The
Heart of Assantua
slid into that cleft, its fanlike sails sheeted close. It passed from the heat of the early morning sun into cold, dank shade, where the ceiling dripped and echoed, where lanterns cast a pitiful glow against the gloom and rope walkways ran along the walls. The interior of the tunnel was just as rough and uneven as it had been all those years ago when it was formed, before the settlers had ever fled here from the burgeoning Theocracy in Quraal, before they had ever discovered what kind of primitive nightmare they were casting themselves into.
Sharp eyes guided their slow way through the eerie half-light. Minute adjustments to the rudder were made as instructions were hollered from the prow. Dozens of men stood on the decks with long push-poles, ready to use their combined weight to avert the course of the bulky junk if it should drift too close to the sides. For a few long minutes, they passed through the strange, enclosed world that linked the port and the ocean; and then the end of the tunnel slipped over them and they were out, the blue sky above them again. The lagoon was still two-thirds in the shadow of the rock wall, but its western side was drenched in light, and there lay Kisanth, and the end of a long journey.
The port sprawled gaudily along the edge of the lagoon and up the steep incline of the forested basin that surrounded it. It was a heady riot of wooden jetties, gangways, brightly painted shacks and peeling warehouses, counting-houses and cathouses. Dirt tracks had been planked over and were lined with inns and rickety bars. Stalls sold foodstuffs from Saramyr and Okhamba in equal measure or combination. Small junks and ktaptha glided out from the beaches on the north side, cutting through the wakes of the larger vessels that lumbered towards the spidery piers of the dock. Shipwrights hammered at hulls on the sand. Everything in Kisanth was daubed in dazzling colours, and everything was faded from the scorching rays of the sun and the onslaught of the storms. It was a vivid world of warped boards and steadily flaking signs that tried to disguise its constant state of decay by distracting the eye with brightness.
The
Heart of Assantua
spread its smaller sails for the last, leisurely stretch across the lagoon, found an empty pier and nosed alongside it. The push-poles were gone now, and thick ropes came snaking down to the waiting dockhands, who made them fast to stout posts. The junk came to a standstill and furled itself like peacock.
The disembarkation formalities took most of the morning. Kisanth being a Saramyr colony, there were rigorous checks to be carried out. Robed officials and clerks logged cargo, checked passengers against the list, recorded any dead or missing in transit, asked what the travellers’ purpose in Kisanth was and where they were staying or going. Routine though their questions were, the officials carried themselves with a fierce zeal, believing themselves the guardians of order in this untameable land, bastions against the brutal insanity that reigned outside the perimeter of their town. When all was accounted for to their satisfaction, they returned to the dock-master, who would check the list again and then hand it to a Weaver. At the end of the week, the Weaver would pass the information on to a counterpart in Saramyr, bridging the gulf between continents in the span of a thought, and the receiving Weaver would inform the dock-master there of the safe arrival of their dependant merchants’ vessels. It was an eminently well-structured and effective system, and typically Saramyr.
Not that it concerned two of the passengers, however, who were travelling under assumed names with falsified papers, and who passed through the multitude of checks without raising the suspicions of anyone.
Kaiku tu Makaima and Mishani tu Koli walked amongst the crowd of their fellow travellers, exchanging goodbyes and empty promises of further contact as they dispersed at the end of the pier and headed away into the wooden streets. After a month aboard ship, legs were unsteady and spirits were high. The journey from Jinka on the north-western coast of Saramyr had shrunk their world to the confines of their luxurious junk. Largely ignored by the busy sailors, and with little else to do, the passengers had got to know each other well. Merchants, emigrants, exiles, diplomats: they had all found common ground in their journey, forming a fragile community that had seemed precious at the time, but which was already collapsing as their world expanded again and people remembered the reasons that they had crossed the sea in the first place. Now they had their own affairs to attend to, affairs that were important enough to spend a month in transit for, and they were forgetting hasty friendships or ill-advised trysts.
‘You are far too sentimental, Kaiku,’ Mishani told her companion as they wandered away from the pier.
Kaiku laughed. ‘I might have known I would hear that advice from you. I suppose
you
feel no regret at seeing any of them go?’
Mishani glanced up at Kaiku, who was several inches the taller of the two. ‘We lied to them the entire journey,’ she pointed out dryly. ‘About our lives, our childhoods, our professions. Did you honestly entertain the hope of meeting them again?’
Kaiku tilted her shoulder in what might have been a shrug, a curiously boyish gesture from a lithe, pretty woman nearing her twenty-sixth harvest.
‘Besides, if all goes well we will be away from here within a week,’ Mishani continued. ‘Make the most of your time.’
‘A week . . .’ Kaiku sighed, already dreading the prospect of getting aboard another ship, another month back across the ocean. ‘I hope this spy is worth it, Mishani.’
‘They had better be,’ Mishani said, with uncharacteristic feeling in her voice.
Kaiku took in the sights and sounds of Kisanth with fascination as they made their way up steps and along board-walks, losing themselves in the belly of the town. Their first steps on a foreign continent. Everything around them felt subtly different and indefinably new. The air was wetter, somehow more fresh and raw than the dry summer they had left behind at home. The insect sounds were different, languid and lugubrious in comparison to the rattling chikikii she knew. The hue of the sky was deeper, more luxuriant.
And the town itself was like nowhere she had ever visited before, at once recognisably Saramyr and yet indisputably foreign. The hot streets creaked and cracked as the sun warmed the planking underfoot, which had been laid to keep the trails navigable when the rain turned the sides of the basin to mud. It smelt of salt and paint and damp earth baking, and spices which Kaiku did not even have a name for. They stopped at a streetside stall and bought
pnthe
from the wizened old lady there, an Okhamban meal of de-shelled molluscs, sweetrice and vegetables wrapped up in an edible leaf. A little further on, they sat on a broad set of steps – having observed others doing the same – and ate the
pnthe
with their hands, marvelling at the strangeness of the experience, feeling like children again.
They made an odd pair. Kaiku projected vibrancy, her features lively; Mishani’s face was always still, always controlled, and no emotion registered there if she did not desire it. Kaiku was naturally attractive, with a small nose and mischievous brown eyes, and she wore her tawny hair in a fashionable cut that hung in an artfully teased fringe over one eye. Mishani was small, plain, pale and thin, with a mass of black hair that hung down to her ankles in a careful arrangement of thick braids and ornaments tied in with strips of dark red leather, far too impractical for anyone but a noble and carrying all the attendant gravitas. Kaiku’s clothes were un-feminine and simple, whereas Mishani’s were elegant and plainly expensive.
They finished their meals and left. Later, they found a lodging-house and sent porters to fetch their luggage from the ship. Their time together in Kisanth would be short. In the morning, Kaiku would be leaving to head into the wilds while Mishani stayed to arrange their return to Saramyr. Kaiku hunted down a guide and arranged for her departure.
They slept.
The message that had come to the Fold eight weeks earlier had been of the highest priority and utmost secrecy, and neither Kaiku nor Mishani were even aware of it until the two of them had been summoned by Zaelis tu Unterlyn, leader of the Libera Dramach.
With Zaelis was Cailin tu Moritat, a Sister of the Red Order and Kaiku’s mentor in their ways. She was tall and cold, clad in the attire of the Order – a long black dress that clung to her figure and a ruff of raven feathers across her shoulders. Her face was painted to denote her allegiance: alternating red and black triangles on her lips and twin crescents of light red curving from her forehead, over her eyelids and cheeks. Her black hair fell down her back in two thick ponytails, accentuated by a silver circlet on her brow, and where it caught the light it glinted blue.
Between the two of them, they had told Kaiku and Mishani about the message. A coded set of instructions, passed through many hands from the north-western tip of Okhamba, across the sea to Saramyr, and thence to the Xarana Fault and the Fold.
‘It comes from one of our finest spies,’ Cailin said, her voice like a blade sheathed in velvet. ‘They need our help.’
‘What can we do?’ Mishani had asked.
‘We must get them off Okhamba.’
Kaiku had adopted a querying expression. ‘Why can they not get
themselves
off it?’
‘Travel between Saramyr and Okhamba has been all but choked by the Emperor’s ruinous export taxes,’ Mishani explained. ‘After he raised them, the Colonial Merchant Consortium responded by placing an embargo on all goods to Saramyr.’