Chris Wooding - The Ace of Skulls

Beautiful.

Beautiful, in a way that startled her. Beautiful like an infant saw beauty as it stared in wonder at the sunrise. Incomprehensible, overwhelming, penetrating to the core.

What did it mean? What had she seen, when she saw the whispermonger?

Jez had always been detached, even before that day in Yortland when the Manes came. She’d yearned to connect with others but never could. She had friends and family and partners, but the deep, passionate link that she craved in her adult life had always eluded her. Aspects of human relationships that other people seemed ready to kill and die for had never seemed that important to her.

Once she’d slept with a man forty years older than her just to get the Cap’n’s neck out of a noose. Most people would have been appalled by the notion. For her, it was simply the most expedient way of getting something done. She hadn’t been defiled by the experience. She hadn’t felt much of anything about it.

Maybe there was something wrong with her. Maybe she wanted to feel more than she had a right to, more than she was capable of. That was why she’d chosen the Manes, in the end. They promised togetherness, companionship, the kind of unity that was beyond anything she’d experienced before.

But now this. Was this what the Cap’n felt when he thought of Trinica? This astonishing, stunned sense of wanting ? Was she in love? And if that was so, was it too late to turn back from the path she’d chosen?

Was it too late to choose to be human?

The city of Korrene lay at the feet of the Hookhollow mountains, on a stony hill that afforded a commanding view of the plains to the west. In the days before the Third Age of Aviation and mass-manufactured aircraft, it had been an important gateway for travellers and merchants making their perilous way up to Vardia’s vast Eastern Plateau.

Those days were long gone.

‘Damn,’ said Frey, peering through the windglass of the Ketty Jay ’s cockpit. He looked across at Ashua. ‘And I thought your city was a piece of shit.’

Crake couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment. Rabban, where Ashua grew up, had been bombed to rubble during the Aerium Wars and still hadn’t been adequately rebuilt. But the destruction in Korrene was of another order of magnitude altogether.

The ancient city had been literally ripped apart. An enormous crooked chasm ran through the heart of it, separating the western third. Smaller cracks radiated outwards; the streets slumped into them. Broken stubs of towers jutted from the wreckage of palaces, shattered arches lay in pieces, winding lanes and terraces had folded and crumbled. The river that had run through the city was dry now, choked off by the cataclysm.

Fifty years since the final quake. The city had endured many shocks over thousands of years, but this last one had been the end of it. The survivors left and never returned. Once the scavengers had picked it over, not even the pirates wanted to stay. It became a ghost city, a bitter reminder of the savage nature of the land they lived in.

But the ghosts had been stirred up by the civil war, and the city wasn’t so empty any more.

‘Somebody tell me why they’re fighting over that heap of bricks?’ Ashua asked. She was leaning against a bulkhead, hands in one of her many pockets. Her expression, as was usual, suggested she was deeply unimpressed by everything. A black tattoo swirled around her left eye, reaching over her cheek and onto her forehead. Rabban gang fashion, from a time when the borders of that smashed city were the limit of her world.

When nobody answered her question, she looked at Pelaru, who was standing near the doorway. The cockpit was crowded, as it often was these days. Usually the Cap’n was easily annoyed by people pestering him while he was flying, but Crake got the sense that Frey didn’t like being alone with Jez. Nor did any of them, for that matter.

‘How about you?’ she asked the whispermonger. ‘Isn’t it your job to know everything?’

Pelaru gave her a faint smile. ‘And if I gave it away for free, how would I eat?’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’d eat just fine,’ said Frey, with the merest hint of sulkiness. ‘Fighters coming in.’

There was a Navy frigate to the south of the city, hanging in the early evening sky. Several small shapes had detached from it and were approaching. They were hard to make out against the mountains, but since it was a Navy frigate, it was a safe bet they were Windblades.

Frey touched his earcuff. ‘Nice and easy, Pinn. We’re all friends here, remember? Stay off the trigger.’

Crake shifted uneasily and his gaze returned to the city. He didn’t like the idea of going down there, and not only because of his lifelong aversion to getting shot. It was something deeper than that, something that had been nagging him for weeks now.

It wasn’t the idea of stealing from the Awakeners that bothered him. It was the aristocratic sense of honour that had been instilled in him by a stern and industrious father. There was a clear enemy here, a threat to the nation and his way of life. He felt he should be participating in this war rather than living off it.

Besides, it was in his own interests to see the Awakeners defeated. They’d persecuted daemonists for more than a century and poisoned the populace against them, forcing them to practise the Art in secret or risk being lynched. If the Awakeners won, the persecution would only get worse.

But if they lost, if they were driven out. . well, what might that mean for daemonism? What great strides in science might they make if daemonists were allowed a university, a library, a place to share their views without fear? Maybe then their profession wouldn’t be so fraught with danger.

Maybe then no more daemonists would have to suffer the tragedy that he had.

‘Ready on the heliograph, Jez,’ said Frey. ‘We want to let ’em know we’re on their side.’

Jez, hunched over her desk, reached for the press-switch by which she could send coded messages. There was a signal light on the Ketty Jay ’s humped back, bright enough to be seen on all but the brightest day. Most aircraft didn’t have the daemon-thralled earcuffs that the Ketty Jay ’s pilots used. It gave the crew an edge that had saved their lives more than once. Crake felt a small sense of pride at that.

Frey picked up a mug of coffee from the dash and sipped at it, watching the windblades approach without much concern. ‘So what do we tell ’em, Pelaru?’

‘Tell them that I am aboard, and I have important information for their leader. He knows me.’

‘Oh yeah? Who’s in charge down there, then?’

‘Kedmund Drave.’

‘Shit! Shit! Ow!’ Frey hissed as he spilt burning coffee over his fingers. He put down the mug and flapped his hand in the air to cool it off. ‘You could have told me that before!’

‘You didn’t ask. You and he have some history, then?’

‘Few years ago, Frey emptied a shotgun into him, point blank,’ said Ashua with a wicked smile. She liked that story.

‘Suffice to say I’m not his favourite person,’ said Frey. ‘Jez, do the business.’

Jez began tapping on the press-switch, signalling to the approaching Windblades. She hadn’t looked up from her desk since Pelaru had entered. The Thacian was making such a show of ignoring her that his interest was obvious to everyone.

What’s going on between with those two? Haven’t they only just met?

Crake cleared his throat. ‘Any, er, any other Century Knights down there apart from Drave?’ he asked Pelaru, as casually as he could manage. Frey cackled knowingly, and he felt his cheeks growing hot.