The Iron Ship (2 page)

Shrane washed her clothes, took them outside and left them to dry on rocks away from the cave mouth. The heat on her skin made her shudder, but her delight was born of higher emotion, the joy all religious feel upon experiencing the divine.

She returned to the cave still unclad. There she took up her staff and book, wrapped tightly in its cloth. She waited a moment for her eyes to readjust to the darkness before approaching the black door.

There was a small cavity in the stone in front of the door. Into this she slid the ferrule at the base of her staff. The near-silent click of it going home echoed through the cave. She twisted it in her hand and muttered certain ancient words no one understood. The plain wood warmed in her hand. Patterns of firelight turned around it. Firefly motes spun in the air.

The water of the pool rippled. The door drew back into the wall, a squealing groan of metal boomed through the cave. The air beyond was colder than that of the outer cave and smelled so strongly of iron it tasted of blood. Shrane’s breath plumed, and she went forward unhesitatingly.

Stairs wound down into a grotto. The walls were rippled by rock formations laid down in wetter days, and beyond the carved steps the cave had been left as nature made it.

The glow of Shrane’s staff sent the rock forms into flickering life. Once this had unnerved her. No longer.

She rounded the final curve in the stair, and the light of her staff fell upon an artefact alien to the stone; a statue, ten feet tall and massive across the shoulders. Anthropoid in shape, it depicted no man. The arms were too long, the legs too widely set, the head blocky and disproportionate. What features it once possessed were mysterious, scabbed over with flakes of rust, but there was a suggestion of a jutting jaw and brow. Orange oxides streaked the floor on which it stood. Four-fingered hands were clenched in fists. It stood in a half crouch, as if it had attempted to rise at great cost in effort only to fail, the head bowed in final defeat. She did not know how old the statue was. The contents of the book she carried were thirty centuries old, the statue and rituals it described were older. The book gave no date for the statue’s creation.

Shrane slotted her staff into a hole in the floor. By the patterned light of its magic, she put the book before the statue, knelt, and bowed her head like the statue’s. In this posture of obeisance, she unwrapped the book.

The original book was written in the waning days of Old Maceriya. Her predecessor, her mother, told her what she had was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Pages of fine vellum bound in soft leather, each illuminated with designs that disturbed the eye, and dense with esoteric diagrams.

One day, she would choose her successor. Only she was permitted to read it until then. Some of the oldest passages told that the Iron Priestess had once been one of many, and that men had come here also. There was no portentous myth written in the book that told her, but there were many odd things gathered together between its covers. She had gleaned this impression from the prescriptions for rituals no longer observed, and from dry financial records of gifts to a church no one remembered. Whatever the truth of it, her creed had always been a secretive one. For generations there had only been a handful of adherents, then a few, then one. Adamanka Shrane was the last.

She whispered words awkward as pebbles in her mouth. She ran her fingertips over the seventy-four relevant pages in the book. Once done, she drew a small flint knife from the book’s spine and cut her left forefinger tip with it. A perfect bead of dark blood welled there. Glints of yellow sparkled in it. Not all of it was light reflected from her staff.

“I am the iron wife. I await your return,” she said as she stood, careful to keep her finger elevated in front of her. “As my mothers waited, so I wait. In my blood flows your blood. Blood calls to blood. I wait.” She smeared blood on the statue as high as she could reach, below the sternum. “Lords of ancient ages, usurped masters, titans betrayed by gods, I honour you. I await you.” A stain barely perceptible lingered a moment on the corroded surface. Was it gone into the metal, or did her eyes trick her and did the powdery oxide coating the statue simply suck the wetness from it? She had never decided. She brought her forefinger to her mouth, and licked off the mixture of blood and rust that stained it.

She concluded her rites and genuflected to the statue. She had performed the ritual one hundred times before, and its actions came to her automatically. She came here trembling with excitement, her eagerness building with every step she took north toward the Red Expanse, but once the ritual was begun her ardour dimmed. Long living in hope, she no longer believed it was her who would receive the sign. For years she had watched the statue for hours after the rite. Latterly she had concluded her task without conscious thought and gone from the fane quickly.

She flipped through the book to the pages toward the end. Hundreds of tally boxes filled the last third of the book, fifty to a page, each stamped with a bloody fingerprint. Ten pages from the end she found the next empty box and pressed her finger down hard onto it, leaving a smeared oval of blood. She blew upon it until it had dried, and shut the book. The hollows of the statue’s eyes glowered down at her in silence. The sense of divine immanence that energised her upon her journey inevitably gave way to disappointment. Her god did not show himself. He never did.

She felt the cold of the cave now. The staff’s light faded. She wondered how long this could go on. One of her successors would die unexpectedly, or give up. It was a certainty. A matter of time.

Eager to depart before her staff-glow went out, she hurried for the steps. The last light was dimming to an ember glow when a scrape troubled the cave. Metal upon metal, sly in the thickening dark.

Shrane spun on her heel. Her eyes narrowed as she peered into the rapidly dimming cave. She saw better than most in the dark, but the night under the earth cannot be pierced by mortal eyes no matter how keen. A slam of her staff on the floor made it flare brightly once more. To do so caused knots in her stomach and the grip of age to tighten on the bones within her youthful-seeming skin. Such power as hers was limited, and dearly paid for.

Her heart pounded. Her neck throbbed with the strength of her pulse. Her throat thickened. “Has the one arrived whom I await?” The ritual question; one she thought she would never ask.

The statue remained still. The flickering glow of her staff picked out hard lines and previously unseen details. She saw shapes in it she had not seen before. Did its form appear sharper? It had not moved.

Her long years of vigilance had not prepared her for this. Fear tainted her exultation.

“Have you come? Have you finally come?” she asked, abandoning the cant as she approached.

She looked up into its great and formless face. “Am I no longer alone?” she whispered. She held her breath. Nothing. Her shoulders slumped. She took a step backwards. Something crunched under her heel. She lifted her foot. A flake of rust as big as her hand lay in three pieces, broken by her tread. A sick feeling of sacrilege welled up in her. This could only have come from the statue. It had fallen, that was what caused the noise. Her disappointment redoubled.

A tremendous grinding hit her. She staggered back, ears ringing. A wash of heat boiled off the statue. Rust flakes exploded off it as it moved, singeing her skin. She screamed. The statue juddered into life, standing tall over her as it attained its full height. Coals burned deep in hollow sockets. The statue lifted its fist before its face, arms shaking with effort, shedding rust. The hand burst open, a violent flower, more rust pattering from it. The metal beneath gleamed. It stared at its fingers and worked them wonderingly, a creature given fingers which had never before had them, but somehow remembered their possession.

“You have come!” Shrane cried, and dropped to her knees.

The statue’s head swivelled, predator-swift. To a screeching of metal it stepped forward off its plinth.

“Utelemek carramon ite delik!” It moved oddly, suddenly, without the smooth, careless delicacy of the human body, as if every movement were considered before being precisely actioned and abruptly halted when complete.

Old words, like those in the book. Shrane had never heard them spoken but for her own voice and that of her instructress. The statue spoke them differently, without her clumsy, laboured pronunciation.

“I, I do not understand. I...” said Shrane. She bowed low, frightened.

“Utelemek carramon ite delik!” The voice became insistent. Angry. Intense heat from the thing hit her like a blow. The skin cracked, uncovering untarnished metal that shone with a dull maroon glow.

“You have returned, now tell me what I must do!”

“Utelemek carramon ite delik!” It stretched out a hand to Shrane. The hand burned forge-hot, going from red to amber. Her staff flared as bright with magical sympathy. It seared her hand, and she dropped it with a scream.

The statue’s hand came close to her face. If it touched her it would surely kill her. She wanted to run, but could not. Its forefinger uncurled. Her skin blistered as it drew close. She was screaming in agony before it touched her. When it did, she believed it to be the end. Pain drew itself as a steel band about her head, and tightened mercilessly.

“Know now,” the statue said. “And go.”

There was a bang. A smell of glimmer hit by iron. Shrane fell with great weight and heat atop her.

She awoke some time later. The thin light leaking into the cave from outside had taken on the grey of evening. The statue was over her, leaning in like a lover, supported on one hand. The fire in its eyes had gone. The metal was cold but clean, the form of god revealed.

She was burned all over. Her skin was a mess of blisters and sores. The worst pain came from the wound upon her forehead where it had touched her. It throbbed with a sickening warmth.

From the pain came knowledge. She knew what she had to do.

She kept the agony at bay with thoughts of the pool waiting at the top of the stairs. She prayed to her reawakened god that it still possessed the power to heal her. The journey to the pool was endless, but there was joy in her heart that grew with every agonising step.

After dozens of lifetimes of waiting, it had been her that had received the sign.

CHAPTER ONE

The Haunted Marsh

“‘A
S YOU GAZE
on where I lie, have a care, you too shall die.’”

Aarin Kressind moved so that his good eye was better positioned, and reread the words. The grave marker was exiled from the burial grounds atop the cliffs, half hidden by the wooden stair of the Path of the Dead. A commemoration for a criminal, the inscription was worn by time and weather and barely legible. A stylised face of a man, described entirely by arcs and circles, gaped at the top of the stone, staring out to distant sea in dismay.

That was the resting place referred to; not the cliffside, but the ocean, the ultimate home of the dispossessed and the criminal. Aarin wondered who the marker had been raised for, and if their ghost still roamed the marshes.

Aarin looked back up the greyed wood of the Path. If he held his hands boxed so, either side of his face—hands that were smooth and inkstained yet strong—he could shut out the city. Karsa did not encroach on the Path of the Dead. Through his hands he was looking back a hundred years to a time before Karsa had swollen with self-importance and burst its guts all around the county. He saw the Path of the Dead as it had been for a thousand years. A notch in the cliff edge closed by black iron gates leading down from the plateau, turning the instant it crossed the edge to lead down smooth, treacherous rock to the top of the wooden stair. The land around the steps was free of the spires and roof ridges that crowded the sky both left and right. Once all the dead of Karsa City had been brought this way and on out to the Black Isle. No longer. That lone and dismal outpost of the cliffs in the marsh had become choked with bones two centuries ago. Cemeteries lined the route to the head of the path, a plot in one of those was the best a man could hope for.

Aarin’s moment of reflection passed. His irritation overcame him.

“Pasquanty! Move yourself!” he yelled upwards.

His deacon’s reply was reedy with distance and broken by the wind, but his fear was unmistakeable. “Coming, Guider Kressind!” The stairs vibrated quicker with his tread.

The ledge broke the precipitous descent in two. Black rock stretched down six hundred feet to the marshes. The stairs were rickety, grey wood pinned to the cliffs by rusty iron. Aarin would have to report their condition to the Order. This was not fitting. The living forgot the dead at their peril.

On both sides of the path, Karsa City spilled over the brinks of the cliffs as if pushed. A static avalanche of shacks teetered over the marsh. Wood and sheet metal huts held in place by braced diagonal beams and optimistic cantilevers, connected by bridges and walkways woven from equal parts rope and hope. The shanty extended eighteen fathoms down and stopped in an abrupt line. The high water mark was still some eight hundred feet below the bottommost shacks, but it was not the vagaries of the tides that discouraged people from building lower.

Ordure streaked black rock and wood. Privy holes opened in the underside of the buildings directly onto the roofs of their neighbours. Between the shanties the sewage of the upper city spewed from modern culverts piercing the cliffs. All part of Per Allian’s plan to clean up the capital. No thought had been given to the marshes. It appeared neither Allian nor his sponsor Prince Alfra cared for them or their sanctity. Aarin seethed at it. The slums were a disgrace. Every time he came here it was worse.

The sewer’s rank bounty supported its own indelicate web of life. Gulls screeched in wheeling formation, fighting the unpredictable gusts deflected from the cliff face to return to their roosts. By day they feasted on the crabs and worms and other things that gorged on Karsa’s shit. Thousands—tens of thousands, some said—plagued the new cliff edge districts in aerial hordes, worse off to the north where the Slot climbed down to the sea. There the city proper tumbled eagerly about the locks, coming as far as the high watermark one hundred yards above the marsh. There were clouds over the tight streets of the Slot and the Locksides, dark and thick in resolute defiance of the wind. Hard to tell from that distance if it was smog or yet more of the blasted gulls.