Talonsister E-Book

Jen Williams

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 857

Beschreibung

Uncover a magical past that refuses to be forgotten in a world of mythical creatures and ruthless religion in this brand-new duology from the multi-award winning author of The Ninth Rain, perfect for fans of John Gwynne and Andrea Stewart. Leven has no memory of her life before she was a soldier. The process of turning her into a Herald – a magical killing machine – was traumatic enough that it wiped her mind clean. Now, with the war won and the Imperium satisfied, she finds herself unemployed and facing a bleak future. Her fellow Heralds are disappearing, and her own mind seems to be coming apart at the seams. Strange visions, memories she shouldn't have, are resurfacing, and none of them make any sense. They show her Brittletain, the ancient and mysterious island that the Imperium was never able to tame. Leven resolves to go to this place of magic and warring queens, with the hope of finding who she really is. Envoy Kaeto has done a number of important little jobs for the Imperium, most of them nasty, all of them in the shadows. His newest assignment is to escort the bone-crafter Gynid Tyleigh as she travels across the Imperium – as the woman responsible for creating the Heralds, his employers owe her a great deal. But Tyleigh's ambition alarms even Kaeto, and her conviction that she has found a new source of Titan bones, buried deep in the earth, could lead to another, even bloodier war. Ynis was raised by the griffins, and has never seen another human face. She lives wild, as they do, eating her meat raw and flying with her talon-sister, T'rook. The griffins fiercely protect their isolation – the piles of skulls that litter the mountains of Brittletain are testament to that – but the magic they guard will always make them a target for the greed of men. By choosing not to kill Ynis when she was just a baby, the griffins may have doomed themselves – because the girl's past is coming for her, and it carries a lethal blade.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: The Lip to the Lich-Way

Prologue

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3

4

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Part Two: The Bone Fall to Galabroc

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Part Three: Undertomb to the Caul of Stars

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80

Acknowledgements

About the Author

“An intricate and compelling new tale from one of the great original voices of fantasy. Full of fascinating ideas, engaging characters and magic.”

ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF SHADOWS OF THE APT

“Talonsister is wonderfully rich and inventive, it takes familiar things and places to make them new and interesting and the tone is perfectly balanced. I hugely enjoyed it.”

MIKE BROOKS, AUTHOR OF THE GOD-KING CHRONICLES

“One of my favourite books of the year so far, Talonsister shows Jen Williams at the peak of her powers. An enthralling tale split across a cast of complex and fascinating characters, each flawed yet loveable in their own way... I was left bereft by its conclusion, and cannot wait for the second part.”

DAVID WRAGG, AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLES OF FAITH

“Talonsister has all the hallmarks of a Jen Williams novel: a fast pace, humour, slick and sure worldbuilding, but most importantly it’s driven by characters you immediately adore... I was utterly charmed by the world and people of Talonsister and I am certain you will be too.”

LUCY HOLLAND, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OFSISTERSONG

“Dizzyingly inventive and packed with mythologies familiar and strange, Talonsister is Jen Williams at her storytelling best.”

ANNA STEPHENS, AUTHOR OF THE GODBLIND TRILOGY

“Talonsister sweeps readers into a fantasy world both delightfully familiar and brilliantly unexpected, brimming with griffins and broken warriors and forests filled with uncanny beasts. Williams knows her craft, and her confidence and ingenuity shines through every twist and turn.”

H.M. LONG, AUTHOR OFHALL OF SMOKE

“This is an author going from strength to strength. An unforgettable magical fable from Britain’s Queen of fantasy.”

FANTASY HIVE

“I thoroughly enjoyed Talonsister. It’s perfectly balanced between whimsical and gritty, with characters so skillfully drawn you even have sympathy for the villains (well, most of them). A superb piece of fantasy storytelling by a writer at her peak.”

JAMES OSWALD, AUTHOR OF THE BALLAD OF SIR BENFRO

“Like all the best fantasy Talonsister goes for the heart. Relatable characters in strange situations, a rich world painted with a wry sense of humour, and more cool creatures than you can shake a stick at.”

PETER NEWMAN, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE VAGRANT SERIES

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Talonsister

Print edition ISBN: 9781803364353

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803364360

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: September 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2023 Jen Williams. All rights reserved.

Jen Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

This one is for me.

PART ONE

THE LIP TO THE LICH-WAY

PROLOGUE

In our beginning there is yenlin, the slow forming within the shell. Those who are yenlin are the responsibility of all. At the time of yenlin, the unhatched is neither talon clan nor claw, and cannot be held on bond-oath or attached to a feud.

The Griffin Creed, as writtenon the Silver Death Peak byFionovar the Red

The scent of blood was threaded through the sky like a red ribbon; slippery and quick, but unmistakable.

Flayn tossed his head towards T’vor to see if his partner had noticed it, but T’vor was already folding his wings, his long sleek head bent towards the ground. They were on the very edge of official griffin territory here; the mountains had become foothills, and the human territory of Brittletain lay to the south, although most griffins preferred not to acknowledge that name at all. Directly below was a clear patch of ground, bare save for grass, snow, a handful of trees. T’vor landed with a shuddering thump, scattering dirt and snow, and Flayn dropped down neatly next to him.

‘Blood,’ said T’vor, unnecessarily.

Flayn let his beak hang open for a minute, tasting the air on his tongue. It was an unusually warm day in the deep winter, and he could smell many things at once: pine needles, snow melt, lichen, the sharp scent of T’vor himself. And over and under it all, blood, and also violence. He snapped his beak shut.

‘Human,’ he said. ‘And…’

He stopped as a shriek rent the air around them. T’vor took an indignant step back, while Flayn felt all the feathers on his neck stand on end. The noise was piercing and shrill, awful. Belatedly, he realised that something was moving on the very edge of the clearing. He had missed it initially because it was so close to the ground – only the smallest prey or inedible things were so close to the dirt – and now he padded over to it, T’vor close at his shoulder.

‘What is it?’

At first he took it to be a bundle of something, perhaps of the clothes that humans liked to press around themselves, but looking closer he saw that it had a small, round face, soft and bare, and tiny clasping hands. The hole in the middle of the face was wide, the eyes scrunched up with the power of its call.

‘It’s a cub,’ he said. He lifted his head and looked around. Humans didn’t usually let their cubs out alone, especially not ones this small, but he could see nothing else moving in the dripping forest. ‘The smallest human.’

‘It is yenlin?’ T’vor dipped his head down to the snow and quickly wiped his beak across it, first one side and then the other, cleaning it and making it shine, black like old river ice. ‘We’ll take it back for T’rook. She is long enough out of yenlin to eat hot meat.’ Seeing Flayn hesitate, he snorted with impatience. ‘Hurry up, it is noisy. I tire of it. Pull it in half and we shall each take back a piece. Then you shall not be the favourite with her, as you usually are. Or eat it now, if you must. Just make it quiet.’

The shrieking seemed to double in volume, as if the cub knew what they were talking about. Flayn settled his paw on the thing’s chest, easing out his claws slowly, and to his surprise the cub took hold of his claw with one fist, almost as though it were trying to push him away, or greet him. It would be a good treat on a winter’s day like this, a quick hot beakful of blood and flesh, a few rubbery organs. The bones wouldn’t be up to much, not in a thing this small, but they would add to the texture. Instead, Flayn leaned down to look more closely at its furious face, and then addressed it carefully in the dialect of Brittletain.

‘Are you lost?’

T’vor squawked with amusement. ‘As well ask the cow if it enjoys the sun before you eat it.’

‘It’s strange, though.’ Flayn looked around again, at the dark trees and the dirt. Where T’vor hadn’t scuffed it with his talons, he could see that the snow was marked with prints – the footprints of humans larger than the yenlin cub on the ground. ‘Human cubs are not normally left alone in the cold. And the smell of blood does not come from it. Where are the humans that laid it? Are they dead nearby?’

This had T’vor’s attention. A human cub might make a good meal for their hatchling, but a pair of humans would represent a significant amount of meat for all of them. The big black griffin lowered his head and opened his beak, scenting the area around them, and after a moment he stepped into the line of trees, beyond the screaming yenlin cub. Flayn watched as T’vor stamped around for a time, his partner’s blue scaly legs quickly becoming flecked with mud and pine needles, until he came to a halt and began scratching at a particular patch of earth.

‘Something half buried here,’ T’vor said shortly.

By the time Flayn reached him, he had dragged something out of the mud and was preening at his long flight feathers, oily black under the dappled forest light. It was the head of an adult human, a male, the skin on its face a yellowish-green. There were clods of mud in the black hair that sprouted from the top of its head and the bottom half of its face.

‘It’s dead?’

T’vor snapped his beak together derisively. ‘Humans usually keep their heads attached, Flayn. Here, look, is the rest of the body.’

Flayn came closer until he too was standing over the dead thing. Blood had turned the earth around it a deeper, meatier black. It certainly smelled dead, but it also smelled wrong.

‘One of us did this?’ asked Flayn.

This time, T’vor did not snort. Instead he seemed troubled by the question. ‘From the wounds, yes. Talon or claw, human bodies fall apart before both. But from the smell…’

‘From the smell, not us. And why leave it intact? We would have eaten it.’ Flayn dipped his head and tore open the dead human’s lower half; he buried his beak in the guts, letting the smell overwhelm him. Behind them, the yenlin had grown quieter, making small hiccupping noises of weariness. There was the good, rich scent of human blood, awakening his hunger as it always did, but underneath and over that was another, colder scent, something that smelled deeply wrong. He pulled his head away and snapped his beak a few times, trying to place what it was, but clarity danced just out of reach. Oddly, it made him think of the Bone Fall, the high and lonely place that griffins went to when they felt the ache of their last days. It made him afraid.

‘I don’t like it,’ he said eventually. ‘I cannot smell a poison, but even so, I don’t think we should eat it.’

T’vor shook out his coat and feathers in irritation, sending a brilliant cascade of water droplets to patter against the foliage.

‘Fine. I will trust your word, forvyn.’

Flayn lifted his head, surprised. T’vor usually only called him ‘beloved wise one’ in jest, but there was no trace of his usual affectionate teasing this time. The strangeness of the human corpse had clearly gotten to him, too.

‘We’ll find other game, T’vor.’

‘And we can at least eat the yenlin. Or save it for T’rook.’ He turned away and moved back to the edge of the clearing, lowering his powerful beak to the tiny wriggling shape on the ground.

‘Wait.’

‘What now?’

‘I don’t think we should eat that, either.’ Flayn went and stood over the cub, already feeling foolish. ‘I think we should take it back, let it grow a little, see if we can learn more. Whatever killed that human, I feel like it is a danger to us.’

For a long moment T’vor said nothing, his great yellow eyes narrowed in confusion. ‘You want us to… look after it? In our own nest?’

‘T’vor, many times we’ve listened to my instincts, and it has kept us flying, hasn’t it? We need to know more about what happened here. And besides, it’s yenlin.’ He looked away, too aware this particular argument was nonsense. ‘Yenlin is the responsibility of all.’

‘Listen to yourself! This is a human cub, some featherless, ground-stuck meat bag. It is not worthy of dirtying our nest, unless our daughter is eating it. Too soon I called you forvyn – you know as well as I do that we remember very little from the time of yenlin, and I doubt that humans, with their tiny soft brains, are any different. This thing can grow and it can become more troublesome, but it will never teach us anything.’

‘I don’t believe that’s true.’ When T’vor began to turn away in disgust, Flayn butted his shoulder with his head. ‘We can stand here arguing about it while we lose the light, or we can skip to the part where you let me have my way, as you always do.’

‘Ha!’

‘I have a feeling about this, T’vor. A strong one. I swear it on my bones.’

‘Hmm.’ T’vor shook out his feathers again. Bones were a serious matter, not to be sworn on lightly, and Flayn could see him weakening. ‘Well, you can feed it. And you’ll have to explain to Queen Fellvyn why we are keeping food alive in our nest. It is not hygienic.’

*   *   *

They flew back with the wailing bundle clutched carefully between T’vor’s powerful talons. On the way Flayn spotted a small herd of mountain goats creeping cautiously up the sheer side of Silver Death Peak, and without slowing them down he snapped up a couple of the rangy animals, breaking their necks quickly and efficiently, so that they would have something to eat that night at least. The Silver Death was one of several mountains that punctuated the hazy border between griffin territory – known to them as Yelvynia – and the many scattered settlements of the ground-stuck humans. These lands were strictly forbidden to those prey animals; any foolish enough to venture near the mountains and get caught were killed without trial or discourse, and their stripped, severed heads were left on the southernmost foothills as a warning. Humans, it seemed, did not learn lessons quickly or well, since the southern foothills were awash with ancient skulls, turned white and yellow with the freezing winters and bleaching sun.

A griffin bringing one over the mountains personally was unheard of, and Flayn had no real idea of how the clans would react. Most likely there would be demands the thing be killed immediately, yenlin or no, or if they were really unlucky, someone would decide it was a grievous insult to Great T’vyn the Trickster himself, and they would be driven out of their nest to avoid bringing a curse on them – all three of them, including T’rook, who was too small yet even to fly.

‘The queen may not even bother with exile,’ said T’vor, as if he knew exactly what Flayn were thinking. ‘She could simply tear our throats out for this.’

‘I do not think she will,’ said Flayn. In truth, he wasn’t sure at all, but Queen Fellvyn was claw clan too, like him, and he thought there was a chance she would listen. ‘T’vor, this creature is fate-tied to us, and perhaps to all griffin.’

‘Nonsense. What are you, a witch-seer now?’

‘I feel it in my bones.’

T’vor made a growling noise in the back of his throat, and they flew back the rest of the way in silence, the bundle still clutched carefully in T’vor’s talons. When they reached their own nest-pit, T’rook lifted her head and squawked at them, her feathers still a sticky downy fluff, her eyes not quite fully open.

‘She is too small to understand yet,’ said T’vor. His harsh voice was softer than it normally was. ‘Flayn, she may eat this thing anyway, regardless of your supposed fate-ties.’

‘She might,’ conceded Flayn. ‘And then you can tell me I was wrong about everything.’

Yet when T’vor placed the human cub into the nest-pit with T’rook, the hatchling sniffed at it, then tugged at the material it was wrapped in, as though trying to understand what it was. After a moment, she folded her wings away – bony crumpled things as yet – and curled up next to the wriggling bundle. The human yenlin, which had freed one of its own smooth limbs during the flight, reached out and touched T’rook’s downy head. For the first time it seemed calm, its small eyes closing.

‘Well,’ said Flayn. ‘Would you look at that?’

1

SIXTEEN YEARS LATER

The tavern was busy, but Leven had no trouble weaving her way to the front of the crowd. When she got to the bar, a foaming tankard of The Lip’s best ale was placed in front of her.

‘No Herald will pay for a drink in my lifetime.’ The barkeep did not quite meet her eyes, as if embarrassed by his own emotion. Further along the bar, several men and women were nodding furiously at his words, and a murmur rose up all around that a Herald was in the bar. A short woman to Leven’s right placed a hand on her bare forearm, where the silvery-blue ore-lines traced intricate patterns across her skin.

‘You are the pride of the Starlight Imperium,’ said the woman. ‘When you’ve finished that, girl, come and tell me. You won’t go thirsty tonight.’

‘Stars bless you.’ Leven grinned and picked up the tankard. She nodded to the barkeep. ‘Another one of these, if you’d be so kind?’

She made her way back to their table through the attentive crowd. Foro had chosen to sit right at the front, where the bar was open to the outside, the wooden shutters rolled back to reveal the spectacular views beyond. The Lip, as its name suggested, sat at the very top of the vast crater that was the city of Stratum, and its patrons could look out across a teeming landscape bathed in clean golden sunshine. Leven spared it a quick glance as she set their drinks on the scratched table. Right at the very bottom a lake glittered as blue as the sky, and it was just possible to see boats down there, white sails as tiny as the half-moons on her fingernails.

‘It’s true what they told us, Foro,’ she said as she sat down. ‘We never have to put our hands in our pockets for a drink again. One look at the ore-lines and they’re falling over themselves to provide. I think this lot would buy us dinner too, if we wanted.’

Foro did not have his ore-lines on display. Despite the heat of the afternoon, he was wearing a thick hooded cloak, and he wore long sleeves over his burly arms. Even his hands, which bore blue circles of the Titan ore on their palms and on their backs, were covered with fingerless gloves. He glanced bleakly at the tankard of ale, then looked away.

‘Aye.’

‘The war is over, and we’re living the high life.’ Leven took a sip of her ale. ‘Fuck me, that’s good stuff. Do you remember some of the swill we drank on campaign? No more of that Unblessed toilet water they called wine, and no more of that brutal stuff Nines used to brew up through his socks. Do you remember that? More than once I lost all the feeling in my feet after a night of drinking his brew.’

Foro drew himself up, taking hold of the tankard and turning it in his hands. Around them, Leven was still very aware of the men and women watching their table. It had been almost three months since their company of Heralds had returned to the capital of the Imperium, and the novelty of their existence had yet to wear off.

‘Have you seen Nines lately?’ asked Foro eventually.

She shook her head. ‘He said he was going to find a wife, buy some land, settle down. Last I heard he was very enthusiastically looking for a wife in a number of taverns. Have you? Seen him?’

Foro didn’t answer. Instead he took a large gulp of his ale, the hood on his cloak falling back slightly to reveal his weathered, ore-lined face. To Leven’s surprise, he did not look well at all. There were dark circles under his eyes, almost like bruises, and his cheeks were gaunt. As he put the tankard back on the table, she noticed that his fingers had a slight tremble.

‘Do you remember what they promised us, Leven? Glory, gold, our names written in the stars. For every Unblessed nation brought into the warm bosom of the Imperium, our names would live for another age. Remember all that?’

‘Yeah.’ Said out loud, it sounded a little ludicrous, but it was what they had been told, all of them, over and over. ‘Sure.’

‘Our names, to live on. But what does that mean? I don’t even know my name. You don’t know yours, either.’

‘Foro…’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know the numbers we were given. But what’s your real name, Leven?’

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

He leaned forward, meeting her eyes for the first time. He looked haunted.

‘A joke. Maybe that’s what the whole thing is.’

‘Foro.’ Leven lowered her voice. She didn’t want the rest of the tavern to see them arguing. ‘What’s wrong? I don’t hear from you for weeks, and then you want to go for a drink, and then you’ve got the hump. Has something happened? Something I should know about?’

He looked away from her, placing his hands flat against the table. Leven had the idea that he knew they were shaking and he didn’t want her to see it.

‘I’ve been having… dreams. Except they’re happening in the middle of the day. Visions of places that, as far as I know, I’ve never visited. Seeing faces of people I’ve never met.’

‘You’re readjusting, that’s all. It’s been… I mean, eight years of war, Foro.’ She forced out a laugh. ‘A few bad dreams are to be expected.’

For a long moment he didn’t say anything at all. Around them the tavern was full of people talking loudly, and beyond the wide open window the dim roar of Stratum was a constant pressure on the ears.

‘They feel like memories, Leven. I think they are memories. Glimpses of my life before the ore-lines took all that away from me. And every time, it’s like being knocked sideways. I’m having blackouts, and when I come back for a little while I don’t know who or where I am.’ Foro turned to look at her then, and she sat back from the table a little, alarmed by the glassy fear in his eyes. ‘We all saw some terrible things during the campaign, yet I’ve never been as afraid as I am now. It’s like my idea of who I am is falling apart.’

‘Perhaps you’re coming down with a fever. Stars only know what you could have brought back from the Unblessed lands. Have you been to a healer?’

But Foro was shaking his head. ‘Do you remember the last battle coming out of Lamabet, that green river that cut through the mountains? What we did on the banks there?’

‘Oh come on, I don’t want to talk about that.’ Leven swallowed the rest of her ale in one gulp and looked around the bar. She wanted to be somewhere else. ‘It’s over. Let’s drink until we fall down, then roll ourselves downhill to a livelier tavern. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing now, not reliving past glories like we’re ancient old gaffers.’

‘Past glories?’ Foro shook his head. ‘Maybe you don’t remember the green river, then.’

‘Of course I bloody remember it.’

She didn’t want to, though. The last remnants of the Unblessed Lamabet armies had been retreating, fleeing from the scene of their last clash with the forces of the Imperium, towards lands in the north that might still conceivably be safe. Many of them had been wounded, and quite a few were being carried by their fellow soldiers, but there were still enough viable enemy combatants – according to Boss, anyway – to make it worth tracking them. It had been a cold, wet day, the river running high and fast, and the smell of water had been everywhere, strong and mineral, a thick taste at the back of Leven’s throat. From their vantage point on the cliffs overlooking the river, the Heralds had watched the men and women passing below with a patience that was edging into indolence. Leven remembered that the enemy’s steel helmets had gleamed like new coins, the dust and the blood driven from them by the rain.

‘It was a slaughter,’ said Foro. ‘I know you remember that.’

Leven shook her head. She wanted another drink, something stronger. Despite the bright clean sunshine of the Imperium pouring in through the windows, she felt cold. It was as if he’d brought back the chill of the green river just by talking about it.

‘Have a drink and fucking cheer up, will you?’

They had lined up along the cliff edges, Boss shouting them to their places. Below them, one or two Lamabetian lookouts had spotted what was looking down on them, and it was possible to hear them calling orders too, their voices floating up from below like the calls of frightened birds. There had been laughter along their line – they were so close to the end of this war, everything seemed too easy now – but at the time Leven had felt an uncomfortable tightness in her gut. The enemy were retreating. They were injured. They were no real threat to the forces of the Imperium.

But when Boss had given the order, she had stepped up to the edge of the cliff like everyone else, and as she leapt into the yawning space beyond it, she had summoned her wings with the same shout of joy she always did. They had snapped into existence at her shoulders, like clear shards of lethal blue glass, and then she was swooping down, her focus on the scattering troops below, and if she’d had any regrets when she cut down the first of them, she couldn’t remember them now. There was no space for regrets on the battlefield; the battlefield was for survival, blood, and the glory of Titan strength at your fingertips.

‘Half of them drowned,’ said Foro quietly, as if he could picture the parade of grisly images currently marching through her mind. ‘After we hunted them across their own country for months, they were so terrified that half of them ran into that river, even though it was swollen with rain and they were wearing heavy armour. We barely had to do anything.’

‘Yeah, I was there too. I remember pulling their bodies out of the water.’ She took a breath and tugged one hand quickly through her hair, making it stand up in messy corkscrews. ‘So what has that got to do with anything, Foro? What does any of it have to do with your… dreams?’

‘I always knew that being a Herald was a chance for me to make a new life, even if I couldn’t remember why I had abandoned my old life in the first place. But now… I think of what we did in Lamabet, and I wonder if it was an honourable way to live after all. Pieces of who I was are returning and it frightens me. What if I’ve always been a butcher, Leven? What if my whole life has been about spilling blood?’

‘Foro, the past doesn’t matter,’ she said, too quickly. ‘What’s done is done. We are the Imperium’s champions. That’s what matters.’ She felt annoyed with Foro. All her pleasure at their heroes’ welcome was being chased away by his gloomy mood. ‘Listen, recovering your memories could be a good thing.’ She tried to make a joke of it. ‘Could be that you’re the lost prince of some newly Blessed country, about to come into a huge inheritance. Right?’

‘You can laugh, Leven, but people who volunteer to have their memories wiped away are not running from riches and happiness.’ Foro shook his head. A cloud passed over the sun, and the light shining on his face dimmed for a moment. ‘I am remembering pain, Leven. Shame, and violence, and terrible mistakes. What if you find out who you were, and you end up wishing you never knew?’

‘That is ridiculous. You are flinching at shadows. Do you want me to take you to a healer? You have picked up a fever, that’s all.’

He shook his head. He seemed less angry and more bewildered. ‘I am a man with no name and a history soaked in blood and cruelty, Leven. I only know I can’t go on like this.’

Leven tried to remember which Heralds she had seen recently. In the months following their discharge most of them had left Stratum, heading for the lush lands directly south, intending to buy land and start building new lives. A few, like her and Foro, had stayed in the city, enjoying the sense of being around a large number of people you didn’t have to kill. They had kept in touch, at least at first, but it had been a while since she’d seen any of them. She had, in fact, been thrilled to get Foro’s message to meet up – without her brothers-in-arms she had been starting to feel alarmingly lonely.

‘Don’t you think it’s strange that they’ve let us go at all?’ said Foro.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Imperium’s greatest weapon.’ Foro smiled sourly. ‘We’ve presented them with the majority of the Unblessed lands on a silver plate, yet we’re allowed to just walk away, and settle wherever we would like? No more fighting for the empress – just a cosy retirement.’

‘We did our eight years, Foro.’ Leven looked down at the metallic lines etched into the skin of her forearm. ‘That has always been the agreement. They’ve just kept to their word, that’s all. And they can always make more of us.’

‘So they just give up their sharpest blade, to keep their word? When the Titan ore they use to give us powers is so rare, so valuable? Does that sound like the Imperium to you?’

Leven sighed. ‘We are the Imperium, Foro. Their chosen few, taking the light of the stars to the Unblessed lands.’

Foro snorted. ‘Stars’ arses, you sound like Boss.’

Leven scowled. To her own dismay, she was beginning to feel angry with Foro. Why did he have to question everything? Wasn’t it enough to just take what you were given and be grateful for it? Asking difficult questions only caused problems. She lifted her hands in defeat. ‘Foro, I don’t know, do I? I’m just a soldier. I just go where they tell me, except I don’t anymore. We don’t have to think about the Imperium or its ambitions ever again if we don’t want to.’

‘My friend.’ Foro leaned over and briefly clasped her shoulder. ‘Believe it or not, I didn’t ask you to come here just so that I could bitch and whine at you. I want you to be careful—’

At that moment, a giant shape stepped in front of the window, casting their table into shadow. Leven glanced up, annoyed at this interruption, to see an enormous man beaming down at them. He looked to be a warrior from the south, his chest bare and his forearms crisscrossed with scars, and his long yellow hair was braided into plaits. Once he saw that he had their attention, he smiled all the wider, revealing one tooth chiselled into a point. Belatedly Leven realised that there was a group of smaller people standing just to one side of him, wearing a variety of nervous expressions.

‘Small woman.’ He had a thick accent, marking out his origins as even further south than Leven had initially thought. ‘My friends, they tell me you are strong. That you could beat me in an arm wrestle. I have seen many things, small woman, but none as strange as this. So I would like to see it.’

‘That woman is a Herald, and you will show her some respect!’ Leven didn’t see the owner of the voice, but they were clearly agitated, and on the back of the outburst she could hear an undercurrent of angry muttering.

‘It’s alright!’ Leven held up one hand. Next to her, Foro had bent back over his drink. ‘You don’t want to fight me, friend.’

The warrior seemed positively delighted by this response. He pushed his braids back over his shoulders, as if to better show off his muscles, and gestured to her grandly.

‘But you are small woman. They tell me that because of your silly tattoos you are very strong. It is impossible.’

Leven didn’t entirely blame him for this assumption. He was at least a head taller than her, and she was slim, wiry even. She had a handful of scars here and there, but nothing unusual for a soldier of the Imperium, and while her arms showed some evidence of muscle, there were cooks in the army with biceps bigger than hers. She was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an imposing figure. She stood up, pushing her chair back.

‘My friend, not only could I beat you in an arm-wrestling match, I could pick you up and throw you out this window.’

In the end, Leven settled for picking the man up – much to his bellowed surprise – and, holding him up over her head, doing several circuits of The Lip. When the cheering and the shouting had died down and she had deposited the warrior back on a stool, she found that the grateful citizens of the Imperium had been queuing up at the bar to buy her even more drinks; there was a whole line of them, from glass beakers of wine to foaming tankards of ale to a tall green drink she had never seen before. She stood for a moment, bemusedly taking it in, while the southern warrior ordered in even more. When he was finished, he turned back to her, his face rather redder than it had been.

‘So you have shown me the impossible, small woman. It would be a great honour in my life if you would show me a little more?’

‘I think you’ve had enough excitement for one day, don’t you, big man? I don’t want to do you a mischief.’ Leven looked back over the bustling seats to the table where she had left Foro. His seat was empty. She plucked up one of the small glasses from the bar and downed its contents. ‘But you’ll finish the rest of these off for me, won’t you? There’s someone I need to see.’

2

‘Thank you for seeing me so quickly, sir.’

‘Anything for our brave Heralds. Such a victory you’ve brought to us, Blessed Eleven – the Unblessed lands have finally been brought into the fold. All the ones that truly matter, anyway, and I’m sure that with the Imperium changing the lives of thousands across the sea, even the barbarians of Brittletain will eventually warm to us.’ Imperator Justinia was an older woman with warm, weathered skin, her dark eyes lined in black and her hair oiled so that it fell in ringlets the colour of old, tarnished gold. The smile she gave Leven was warm enough, but the rolls of parchment on her desk and the presence of an Envoy at her shoulder suggested that the Herald could have picked a better time to come calling on her old employers. The Envoy was a tall handsome man with warm brown skin, a neat beard framing a mouth that was carefully free of smiles, and he wore loose, dark clothes, the only hint towards his station the solid silver pin in the black scarf at his throat; it was in the shape of a stylised comet, a chip of emerald glinting at its heart. The Envoy – whom Leven vaguely recognised on sight – kept his hands behind his back and his eyes on Leven.

‘It’s about Foro.’ At the Imperator’s blank expression, she carried on. ‘Blessed Forty, sir. He hasn’t been feeling well, and I think he needs help.’

‘Ah.’ Imperator Justinia glanced down at the notes in front of her, as if there might be answers there. ‘He is… poorly?’

‘Yes, sir. We don’t have access to the army’s healers now, you see, now that we are officially discharged—’

‘You were paid your victory bonus, were you not?’ Justinia cut in. She picked up a sheet of parchment and nodded at it, a small smile on her lips. ‘Yes, I see you were. A sizeable sum, I should say.’

‘Ye-es that’s true, sir, but I’m concerned that—’

‘There are healers in Stratum, are there not?’ Justinia turned slightly to the Envoy, who nodded. ‘Good ones, I believe. Where would you say the best healers in Stratum are, Envoy Kaeto?’

‘The Street of Bonesaws,’ he replied instantly, his voice smooth and quiet. ‘There are healers with flashier premises of course, but if you’re looking for real practical experience, I would point you in that direction, Herald.’

‘There you are then,’ said Justinia brightly. ‘I’m so glad we could help you today, Blessed Eleven.’

‘Forgive me, Imperator, I don’t think you understand.’ Leven cleared her throat, looking around the room for inspiration. It was a small gilded box, the walls covered in lacquered wood panels, while a narrow channel in the floor housed a constantly flowing stream of perfumed water; it ran around all the buildings of the Imperial Concourse. It was disorientating, a thousand leagues away from the concerns of soldiers, from men and women who went to sleep at night with blood drying under their fingernails. ‘Whatever’s wrong with Foro, he believes it’s a consequence of being a Herald, and, well, I don’t think a healer from the Street of Bonesaws is going to be able to deal with that.’

A flicker of annoyance passed over Justinia’s face. Envoy Kaeto remained as impassive as ever.

‘What is wrong with him, exactly?’ asked Justinia.

Leven shifted on the spot. They hadn’t asked her to sit down. ‘He’s having… he called them waking dreams.’ She didn’t see Envoy Kaeto move, but now he seemed to be watching her much more closely. All at once, coming to speak to the Imperium Office directly didn’t seem like such a brilliant idea after all. ‘Look, it doesn’t sound like a normal illness to me. You know what we are, what the Heralds are. We’re tough to knock down. I’ve seen Foro fight all day and all night without pausing to eat or rest, and now this same man looks ten years older. Is there anything you can do for him, sir? Perhaps he could speak to Gynid Tyleigh directly. Sir.’

There was a moment of silence then, filled with the gentle trickle of the narrow waterway.

‘Speaking to the Imperial Bone Crafter herself is out of the question,’ said Imperator Justinia eventually. ‘But you are right. The empress values every man and woman who fights for the Blessed Imperium, but none more so than our star-touched Heralds.’ She said it smoothly and without much emotion; Leven had the impression it was something she had said before, perhaps many times. ‘We will have healers dispatched to your friend Foro, and he will be given the very highest levels of care. You can be sure of it, Blessed Eleven.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘You may leave.’

Leven bowed quickly, and turned her back on them, glad to get out of the gilded room. As she left, she was certain she could feel the eyes of the Imperator and the Envoy boring into the back of her head.

*   *   *

Envoy Kaeto watched the young woman leave, making a note to himself to look back over her official files. All of the Heralds were known to be ‘unusual characters’ – they were, after all, men and women who had known nothing but war – but even so, he doubted that many of them would come all the way to the Imperium offices to tell Imperator Justinia that she hadn’t been doing her job properly. Leven was the youngest of the Heralds, and one of the least imposing; not especially tall, not especially bulky. She had worn her dark brown hair short during the war, but since they had been discharged she had let it grow, so that her untidy brown waves now framed her face. She had clear grey eyes, and the silvery-blue patterns of the ore-lines stood out starkly against her tanned skin – and there was a look, a stubbornness about her jawline, that was oddly familiar… Yes, he would have to check the records again.

Next to him, Imperator Justinia sighed noisily.

‘These soldier scum are an endless pain in my arsehole.’

‘Yes, Imperator.’

‘And she had the cheek to say “you know what we are”! Yes, I know what you are – a sorry collection of thieves and murderers who were given a second chance by our merciful empress!’

‘Not all of them were murderers, Imperator.’

‘Yes, well. That hardly matters now, does it?’ Justinia poked at the pieces of parchment on her desk as though they had done her a personal injury. ‘What news do you have on our other problem, Envoy?’

He inclined his head slightly and moved to stand in front of the desk. ‘As I understand it, the work is slow, and dangerous…’

Justinia tutted loudly.

‘And everything must be conducted in the utmost secrecy, which means the boats must be manned by our people, the ports must be bribed not to look too closely at our cargo, and the wagons have to travel a long way, over dangerous ground. Nowhere Unblessed, but even so, the risk is still considerable. And,’ he paused, uncertain how his next portion of information would be received, ‘I fear we must keep the numbers of people involved as low as possible, or keep our bribes extremely high. There is no predicting the level of outrage if any part of the Imperium’s business is revealed.’

‘Of course,’ said Justinia, her tone bitter. ‘The Titans must remain untouchable.’

‘It’s inconvenient, but it’s worth remembering how many cultures and nations the Imperium encompasses,’ said Kaeto. He wasn’t quite able to resist delicately hammering the point home. ‘The Titans are considered sacred all over Enonah, Imperator. Even the denizens of Stratum consider them to be the most starblessed of all creatures – they gave us history, stories, the first sparks of alchemy. They gave us language. They are the gods that walked among us.’

‘Yes, yes. I’m quite aware.’ There was a small golden plate of dried fruits on her desk, and Justinia began poking about amongst the small brown pieces. She was looking for dried sweet-apple, her favourite; it was Kaeto’s job to know that sweet-apple was her favourite, in case he should ever need to poison her. ‘And this Foro. I suppose you know where to find him?’

‘I do, Imperator.’

‘Then I suggest you get on with it.’

‘It is not my place to question your orders…’

Justinia laughed. She found a piece of sweet-apple and munched on it with satisfaction for some moments. ‘What is the place of an Envoy, exactly? Who can guess?’ She waved a hand at him dismissively. ‘Go on. Say what you want to say, Kaeto – I know you’ll say it anyway.’

‘The Heralds must be dealt with carefully.’ He let that hang in the air for a moment. He knew that Justinia had certain opinions on this; had watched from a dark space on an interior balcony as she had spoken to the empress herself, her face closed and furious. ‘The empress understands that they are heroes to the people of the Imperium, celebrated everywhere her starlight touches.’

‘And I don’t understand. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I am just here to remind you of the delicacy of the situation. The agreement was…’ He paused, trying to think how to phrase it. ‘It was agreed that for the Heralds to all die at once would be too suspicious, invite too many questions. We have to be careful.’

‘Celestinia has been cloistered inside her palaces for years. She doesn’t know what real people are like anymore, Kaeto.’ Justinia looked up at him, her dark eyes shining. ‘The people will forget about the Blessed Heralds soon enough – as soon as some other war or wedding comes along to distract them, and those are always just around the corner. And meanwhile, we have cut loose these dangerous men and women to roam freely. Carrying the secrets of the Imperium with them. Blessed Forty believes that his illness is related to his Herald magic, and has gone as far as to talk to another Herald about it. He has become a danger to us, and he’s dying anyway, Kaeto.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We should have ended the problem months ago, but Celestinia wouldn’t hear of it. Now we shall have to deal with each one as they deteriorate. And who gets their hands dirty now? You and I, Kaeto.’

Your hands will remain spotless, thought Kaeto, as they always do.

‘And what of Blessed Eleven?’

‘Oh, let her get on with it. She too will get distracted soon enough, or she’ll find some young farmer to marry, or she’ll sicken and die like her friend. I’m not as bloodthirsty as you make me out to be, Envoy. Until she starts to actively cause us trouble, I am happy to let this particular little bird fly away.’

*   *   *

When Kaeto was dismissed, he left Justinia with her as yet unpoisoned dried fruits and retreated to his own rooms, hidden away in one of the upper corners of the Imperium offices. It was a space he had worked for years to cultivate; far enough away from the main hub to be quiet; enough space for his records – all written in his own version of the Envoy cypher; and close enough to the Tower of the Voice that he could intercept messages coming and going faster than anyone else. Belise, his assistant, greeted him at the door, her eyebrows raised.

‘Anything I should know about, chief?’

‘The Imperator is a fool, the Herald problem isn’t going away, and my afternoon is ruined. Any surprises there?’

‘Not as such, chief, no.’

Kaeto stopped to look down at the girl. He had picked her up off the street when she was eleven, a sharp-eyed street rat with more sense than he usually saw in children of her ilk, but not quite enough sense not to attempt to pickpocket an Envoy on official Imperium business. Two years later and his impulse had proved a wise one: Belise was smart, loyal, devious and entirely unfazed by the darker portions of his work.

‘I’ll need my grey work kit laid out for me as quickly as possible. And here,’ he dropped a small bag of candies into her hand, ‘the Imperator doesn’t lock her treat drawer.’

He was rewarded with a quick flash of a grin, and then Belise was gone, back into the small locked room that smelled vaguely of chemicals. Trusting her to prepare what he needed, Kaeto went to his desk and unlocked a compartment built into its underside. From there he withdrew a slim leather folder, filled with pieces of ragged parchment, some old and yellowed, others still crisp and covered in dark, rich inks. He pulled a few items out and spread them on the table.

It occurred to him that Blessed Eleven would be very interested to see some of the information he had gathered here. She struck him as the curious sort, and these slim pieces of parchment were the only remaining evidence that the Heralds had had lives before Gynid Tyleigh had etched her lines of Titan ore across their bodies. The Herald known as Foro, for example, had once been an overseer in a gladiator complex in Unblessed Caucasore. It had been his job to take the prisoners given to him by the country’s army and turn them into people who could fight for the entertainment of Caucasore’s aristocracy – one of life’s delicious little ironies. He had by all reports been a brute of a man, and those who entered the training grounds were more likely to die – beaten to death, starved, or torn apart by wild animals – than make it to the arena. And then when Caucasore had been absorbed into the Imperium, Foro had fought against them for a while, one of the most vicious captains in their militia. This apparent loyalty, however, hadn’t stopped him taking the opportunity to become part of the Herald programme when the alternative was to die an honourable death next to his soldiers. The man known as Carlen Forgathers had happily switched sides when he saw that the tide was changing. Not that he knew anything about it now, of course.

Kaeto was just frowning over this information when Belise came back into the room and laid his tool belt on the desk in front of him. Her jaw was working rhythmically on one of the toffees he had given her.

‘Thank you, Belise. I hope you didn’t put that in your mouth in the Workroom? No food, no drink, and gloves at all times, remember?’

She rolled her eyes at him and then nodded at the folder.

‘What’s that about then?’

Few people would dare to ask what the Imperium’s master spy was reading, but it was one of the reasons he kept her around.

‘Just secrets and forgotten things.’

‘It’s always secrets and forgotten things.’

‘Yes.’ He paused, flicking through the documents in the leather folder a second time. There should have been a complete record of the former lives of each Herald, yet curiously Blessed Eleven did not seem to have one. Absently, he reached up and unclipped his silver Envoy badge, placing it carefully on his desk. Tugging out his scarf, he pulled it up and over the back of his head to make a hood. ‘Secrets and forgotten things are what we live for, in our dark little world.’

‘Yes, chief.’ He could sense her resisting the urge to roll her eyes again.

‘I have to go out.’ Standing up, he swept the folder and its documents back into the hidden portion of his desk and slammed it shut, before wagging a finger at her. ‘Don’t eat all those sweets in one go, you’ll get a stomach ache.’

‘Pft. You want me to shout up the coach?’

‘No, I’ll go out the back way.’ He picked up the grey toolkit belt and tied it around his waist, making sure to cover it with his long dark shirt afterwards. Through the narrow windows he could see that the sun was well on its way down, and Stratum was slowly being doused in shadows and oily lamplight. ‘I’ll want your help when I come back. Prepare the wet room.’

She grimaced at that, but as he was going out the door he noticed her slipping another toffee into her mouth. There wasn’t much that could ruin Belise’s appetite – she’d spent too long hungry on the streets for that.

*   *   *

Kaeto was gone for no more than a couple of hours. Foro had been renting a room in a boarding house on the Second Ring. It was a well-appointed place with large, ornate windows, standing open in the stuffy evening air – all the better for a quick shot with a poisoned bolt. The key to killing a Herald – something the armies of the Unblessed never quite seemed to grasp – was to do it from a distance, and to do it very quietly.

When the Envoy arrived back at the Imperium Concourse, he took one of the quiet back entrances and allowed a small team of staff to take the body, carefully hidden in an unremarkable travel chest, up to his rooms. There was a shaft in the back with a system of pulleys specifically designed to quickly move heavy, unpleasant things. When he arrived, Belise was already poking at the heavily laden sack.

‘You could have taken him out of the city,’ she said. ‘Dumped him in a river. Don’t see why you had to bring him back here at all.’

Kaeto pulled his hood back and made for the small clay pot by the hearth. One of Belise’s jobs was to keep it full of fresh tea. He poured himself a large cup and doused its heat with a thick slug of milk before taking a sip. It needed honey.

‘This particular corpse is property of the Imperium.’ When she just raised her eyebrows at that, he continued. ‘When we made the Heralds – when Imperial Bone Crafter Tyleigh, dreadful creature that she is, made the Heralds – they essentially signed over their bodies and lives to the Imperium. What are the ore-lines made of, Belise?’

‘The bones of Titans,’ she replied instantly. ‘Long-dead ones.’

‘Yes. And how many Titans are left in the world?’

‘Just the griffins,’ she said, her voice taking on a slightly bored tone. ‘In northern Brittletain. And there’s that one who’s still alive in the south, the giant bear one. But that’s just one.’

‘The Druidahnon, yes, although how much longer he will live we do not know.’ He put the tea cup down. ‘All the other Titan races – the wyverns, the great krakens of the eastern sea, the huge god-boar of the south, the giants, the unicorns, the firebirds – all died out hundreds and hundreds of years ago. The bones of a Titan are special. They are strange, magical. Heavier than normal bones.’

‘I know all this,’ protested Belise. She had gone back to picking at the bag. ‘If you’re going to drone on I’d rather go into the wet room.’

‘You know it all, yet apparently you haven’t thought about it. The remains of Titans are incredibly ancient and extremely hard to find, so the Imperium spent a great deal of coin sourcing enough bones to make the Titan ore Tyleigh needed. Ore-lines, then, are incredibly valuable – imagine if your body were lined with gold. Imagine if your bones were gilded with it.’

‘I would be very heavy,’ said Belise.

Kaeto ignored this. ‘And it’s more than that. Tyleigh’s methods are closely guarded secrets. Enemies of the Imperium might believe that they can learn her secrets by examining the body of a Herald. They can’t, but there’s no reason we should let them try.’

‘What’s to stop the Heralds selling themselves to some Unblessed country now that we’ve let them loose?’

‘Technically? Nothing, except loyalty to the Imperium, and the small fact that after around eight or nine years the magic that Tyleigh grafted onto their skin begins to degrade, leading to confusion, a resurgence of their previous memories and personality, and eventually, death.’

‘Ah.’

‘Imperator Justinia would prefer that we deal with all the Heralds as we have dealt with Foro here – kill them all now, remove the risk of losing our secrets or their loyalty, and invest ourselves in the next generation of Heralds. But to do so would be heavy-handed.’

‘And it would be as popular as a cold bag of sick with the Imperium’s citizens,’ added Belise. ‘They are the people’s champions. It’d be like killing the empress’s children, if she had any.’

‘Quite.’

‘So.’ Belise stopped nudging the linen sack with the toe of her boot and looked up at him. ‘Are we going to strip all the ore-lines from this man’s body now? Can we even do that? Is the stuff reusable?’

Kaeto sighed. The girl liked to pretend the fool, but she had an infuriating habit of getting to the heart of the matter with one fatal stab.

‘No. We’re going to cut his body up into pieces and dispose of them as we always do, because now that the man is dead, the magic is dead.’

‘Then what was the point of any of it?’

‘The point is, child, that Blessed Forty was a soldier of the Imperium, and if anyone is going to murder him and desecrate his body, it will be us and not our enemies. He deserves that much at least.’

‘It doesn’t seem like much gratitude to me, for eight years of fighting and killing.’

Kaeto looked away from the girl. ‘In the end, Belise, the secrets of the Imperium are worth more than any one man’s life, and it is our duty to do as we’re told.’

Belise seemed mostly satisfied with that answer. Kaeto downed the rest of his tea and set the cup back down on the work table.

‘Now. Did you lay out the bone saws?’

3

T’vyn the Trickster plucked the moon from the night sky and cast it down into the Last Lake to become an egg. From this, Fionovar the Red came forth, and Yelvynia became ‘the place where wisdom is hatched’.

Extract from the further historiesof Yelvynia, written on the SilverDeath Peak by an unknown griffin

‘You’re hogging the liver, and it’s the best bit!’

Ynis ground her teeth against the tough meat, half determined to bite off another chunk before she gave it to her sister, but the organ flesh was rubbery and difficult to get a purchase on. Instead, she swallowed a mouthful of hot, salty blood and passed the liver to T’rook, who snapped it from her fingers with one darting movement of her beak.

‘Cut it up for me, then,’ she said, rubbing her bloodied hands on the grass. The carcass of the goat was a few feet away from them, its chest and stomach open to the blue sky. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I will slice it into delicate slithers, the better to suit your tiny human throat,’ said T’rook mockingly, but in a few seconds Ynis had several long strips of purple offal in her lap, and she ate them up greedily. For a little while they sat in companionable silence, eating their way through their lunch while a handful of white clouds scudded overhead. They