Chapter Five

SHADOWS OF THE PAST

The ash did not stop falling for a week. Whichever volcano vented its temper to the north, it certainly proved angrier than most. Canarva hadn’t seen the Great Watcher in days.

A particularly fat ash flake landed right on my lunch, staining into the white fruit grey before I could swat it away. I don’t know what kind of fruit I had swiped from a distracted market stall. Something I imagined had come off a southern wagon. It took me chewing two of the fruits for me to realise you needed to peel them first. They looked like eyeballs once you got through their rosy hides. Even though they were ugly as sin, they were deliciously sweet compared to the sour apples the Ashlands grow. That is the way of many things in my world. Often an outer ugliness hides an inner beauty. Sometimes ugliness is an Ashland apple: gnarled and sour all the way through.

The fruit had been my last, and with a huff, I threw it down into the street. A crow snatched it from the air before it even touched the cobbles. Away it flew, zigzagging through the chimneys with other crows cawing at its forked tail feathers.

I was coming to like this practice of lurking on rooftops. I could name you five stories or ballads right now that have their hero enjoying a moment of brooding upon the spine of a roof. Often gazing out – quite broodingly remember – over some filthy city or grand battle.

Naturally, I needed to see what all the fuss was about. It took several tries and one very close brush with death thanks to a rusty gutter, but I had found my way onto the slate streets of Canarva’s roofs.

Let me be the first to tell you: the rooftop thing is a blast. The benefits were immediately obvious. The view, of course, even on ashen days when lightning chased its tail across the clouds. There’s a sense of superiority when you get to look down on somebody instead of up. Nobody thought to look on the rooftops for a gutter rat, either. It was bizarre how infrequently people looked up, even in a world where your god is right there in the sky to gawk at. Chimneys and the jumble of Canarva’s ancient buildings gave me shelter. The rooftops also came with feathered friends, both birds and lizards. And let’s be honest, if nothing else, it looked roguish as all hell. Especially when you wore a hood. You can’t do any brooding or intentful staring if you don’t have a hood.

I winced as I stretched. There was one downside the bards never sang of, and that was fierce cramp in the arse and legs from sitting like a crow with a grudge for hours on end. I stood holding a chimney for balance. Two blue drakes perched on the smoke-pot above me and breathed in the char of a fireplace when they weren’t chattering to each other I shook my head free of ash and spotted my quarry swaggering beneath square umbrellas.

Baron Wrekham was a busy chap. He wasn’t lying when he said my accidental poisoning had stirred something in him. If Wrekham wasn’t strolling with his guards, probably looking for me, it was trawling from one venue to the next for meeting after meeting, function after function. Taverns, betting dens, galleries, butchers, brothels, factories… his huge shadow darkened them all like a fat moth thudding against a lantern. Even at night, visitors and all sorts came and went from his mansion. The man must have uncorked ten bottles of rum and wine a day just to play host and didn’t hit the hay until a few hours before dawn. It looked frankly exhausting. I liked my human interactions to come like my shits: infrequently and absolutely on my schedule.

And speaking of schedules, I had the baron’s pegged. Every day of the past week, I had watched him come and go and learned his habits. Wrekham might have kept long hours, but he never missed his weekly visit to Canarva’s amphitheatre to hear the screeching of Venerance cleric choirs. Meanwhile, Pitius kept his master’s mansion on a rigid schedule. The night and day servants flowed in and out of the mansion like a mustard tide and the guards moved in mechanical shifts and patrols. I was no burglar, but I knew predictability was good. It made my task of robbing Wrekham blind a little easier. What did the exact opposite was the fact the paranoid baron had doubled his guard since my accidental poisoning. It had taught me one important lesson: I couldn’t do this alone.

Baron waddled into his mansion as the noon bell rang, and I decided I had looked enough upon his ugly face for one day. I put my backside to the slate roof tiles and skidded through the ash to the ridged eaves. A windmilling jump saw me across the alleyway to a flat roof. Hopping between the ridges of buildings, I found a thin lane to slide down, boots and palms pressed to the walls. With a clatter of feet, I was back on the cobbles and mingling with the other mortals.

*

Riveno was waiting outside the Buried & Lost for me, arms crossed and foot tapping. ‘Where have you been? We said noon.’

‘I thought you said noonish,’ I answered with a lie. ‘Got distracted by two workers having a fight in Seven Pike.’

‘Not safe to be wandering about as much as you have been. The prosecutors are still after you, you know.’ Riveno cracked his knuckles at me. ‘And you should know by now from your practice with the powders that dealing with ishes and rough guesses always leads to trouble. I thought you wanted to see the old world.’

‘I do. I wanted to go three days ago but you were busy with your little errands.’

‘Little errands,’ scoffed Riveno. ‘The cheek.’

With a flick of his cloak that almost whacked me in the face, Riveno led the way north through the ashfall. After an hour of weaving this way and that between prosecutor patrols, we broke out of Canarva’s gates and walked the edges of the fields. Ash or shine, the workers still toiled. Heads down, we marched until we came to a tower shaped like a hook. Its girders were long-rusted and scorched by the elements. Well-worn paths and tracks for carts trailed from the wide door at its base. A guard in the livery of some merchant company lingered by its hinges, scratching patterns in the dust with the butt of a spear. The woman sighed as she saw Riveno standing in the grey murk, waving without a word.

‘Watcher’s balls. Again, Riveno?’ she called out. ‘Haven’t you scoured these tunnels to death?’

The man held out his hands in innocence. ‘There’s always more secrets to be found in the earth, Myers.’

The guard pointed to me. ‘Who’s this little bag of bones?’

‘A helper.’

Myers waved her spear about as if she churned butter. ‘You weren’t so careful last time. Foremen saw your light. The masters almost had me whipped for letting a trespasser in.’

‘You know they don’t take kindly to people wandering their tunnels. Even the dead ones. You know the dangers.’

Riveno reached for Myers’ hand and pressed a pouch of shells into her hand. ‘I only wander their tunnels to get to my tunnels, Myers. How about I find you something to make the risk worthwhile?’

Myers looked about, saw nothing but silhouettes in the ash, and shrugged.

‘You’d better,’ she said, no longer meeting our eyes, and Riveno led me into the tower. The structure was an iron shell, full of huge winches and pulleys. The ash might have been kept on the outside, but in there, dust reigned. Lengths of chain led down into a black pit in the earth. The crooked claws of a ladder hooked over one side. Riveno already had one foot on a rung and tossed down a loop of rope.

‘We’re going there?’ I asked. It was curiosity, but it must have sounded like fear to Riveno. It wasn’t. It was strange how much fear subsides when you carry a meat cleaver in your pocket.

‘What do you think the “buried” of buried civilisation means, Dwellin?’ he said before disappearing into the gloom.

I mounted the ladder. There wasn’t a bottom to be seen, only a velvet pool of darkness. I shrugged, and began to descend. Darkness might have scared some, but not me. I had other fears, which we will discover later. Be patient.

The rungs grew rustier the deeper we went. I moved by feel alone. The darkness was so thick I couldn’t see my own nose, never mind my hands. A single speck of green glow told me Riveno was nearby, tinkering with something glass and metallic. I smelled blightpowder before a spark broke the gloom. Fire blossomed from a makeshift blightlamp, no more than a cradle, a pan, and a pinch of powders. Its light showed me a circular tunnel with a flat floor strewn with rubble and forgotten tools. The hand-hewn walls bore the scars of tools and steel teeth. Crystals hiding in the black rock sparkled as if gems still waited to be chiselled free. I took a step and immediately stumbled on an iron track set into the rock.

‘Mine how you go, Dwellin.’

I looked up at Riveno from under hooded and furrowed brows. He was pursing his lips together, trying to keep his smile small.

I sighed. ‘Really?’

‘Mine how you go. Mine? No? Because we’re in a—

‘A mine. Yeah, I get it, it’s just awful. Verging on painful.’

‘All the best puns are,’ Riveno corrected me. ‘What? Did Mattox and Wrekham beat all the funny out of you or something? You have to laugh at dire circumstances otherwise they will stay dire. You need a little comedy in the dark.’

Wasn’t that the truth.

‘No, but it’s hard to laugh when all I can think about is Aberan,’ I said, feeling the lack of my normal irreverent humour more than anyone. A week had passed since the bandages had been unwound from my brother’s face, and still he was showing me how mute he could be. He had barely left his bunk for the first few days. When he had finally roused, he spent his time staring into the mirror at his scarred eye.

Riveno hummed, sparing a moment to kick a piece of rusted chain and bucket. Dust spiralled around us and our sphere of light. The blightlamp tried its best to keep the darkness at bay, but the mine tunnels clung to their gloom like drowning men cling to flotsam.

With the ground sloping deeper beneath our feet, Riveno led me left and right through the tunnels’ maze with the help of a small, square scrap of map. I was content to watch, follow, and make my own map in my head.. I knew some people feared the cold press of rock above them. I couldn’t disagree more. The thick air and silence were comforting. Canarva was a mess of noise even without my own thoughts clamouring in my head. Beneath its rock, it was peaceful.

Riveno cleared his throat of dust. ‘Give him time to heal, in more ways than one. He’s your blood, right? Takes a lot to sever that cord. Watch out for that chain.’

I swerved around the hanging noose of iron links and took the conversation in a direction I preferred. ‘Why are these tunnels so abandoned? Where is everyone?’

‘Bled it dry of ore, is why. Once they can’t dig any more out, it’s on to the next tunnel. We’re not far from the newer mines.’

I could hear the faint and muffled noise of picks on stone and the rattling of machinery if I pressed my ear up to the pitted stone.

‘Aside from cave-ins and earthquakes collapsing floors, they’re all connected. That’s why you don’t want to get lost down here. You could wander for days in the dark without finding a way out. You’re more likely to plummet down a pit first. If you’re lucky, you can follow the sound of the miners or the smell of the sewer tunnels that use the old mines to hide their shit away from sensitive noses. Like I told you the other day, some run under Canarva itself.’

That Riveno had. I had found myself incredibly interested in the mines ever since. I was glad for the darkness to hide my smile. ‘Which ones are those?’

Riveno tapped his map. There was an excitement in him today. ‘Back the way we came. The barons and masters used them to hide in during the uprising. Now, it’s the other way around,’ he whispered. ‘Quiet now.’

‘Why? What are you worried about? Other miners? More scavengers?’

Riveno shook his head. ‘Dark and the forgotten place attract more than just scavengers. Beasts. People that come to hide from the world. The lost. That’s why they lock them up, keep them guarded.’

I turned around at a scrape of stone behind us. The blightlamp showed me nothing but rock walls, and Riveno did not seem perturbed. We walked on in silence, and I spent the entire time staring down every side tunnel and bore, inventing all kinds of monsters for the shadows to hide. Once, I swore I spotted eyes gleaming back at me. For all my talk of bravery, I felt a claw run down my spine.

Riveno’s tunnels were not as uniform as the mines, but a series of rifts we had to squeeze down. Glowing moulds lent their light to the blightlamp – and soiled the front of my shirt and trews, might I add.

I escaped from the last pinch of the rift with a gasp and tripped over my own feet. I went down expecting my knees and palms to hit unforgiving rock. They hit the ground with an echoing thud instead. Beneath the dust, my hands found a surface that was smooth as polished wood but solid like metal without none of the chill. I looked up to bother Riveno for an explanation when I noticed where we were.

A narrow cavern of granite lay before me. It was no hand-carved and blightpowder-blasted tunnel, but a cave lost to memory. Stalactites hung from its lofty ceiling. Their tips glowed with mould like blue blood on fangs. The light was faint but enough to see that half the roof had caved in long ago. Slabs of stone, some as big as houses, lay strewn across the cave at odd angles.

Riveno marched across the strange and dust-thick floor without hesitation. His boots fell into the hollows of prints he had made on his last visit. ‘Welcome to the past, Dwellin. Buried and lost as all things are with time,’ he said.

Behind and beneath the rubble, I saw the paler stone of buildings broken and crushed. The edges of the parts still standing were too perfect to be made by Ashlander hands. I saw walls without brick, mortar, or seam of any kind. I put my hand to one and realised it wasn’t stone at all, but the same smooth metal that the floor was made of.

‘What is this place?’

Riveno was digging into a nook with his metal pole. ‘Far as I’ve been able to tell, a place where the Augurs came to rest and relax, whatever that feels like. Like the baths they’re fond of in the south, but far grander. This is but a fraction of what’s buried. I dig out what I can,’ he said with a sigh. ‘If the mine masters listened to me, I could get more of you down here and excavate properly. If I were ever to have a dream, this would be it. Here, hold this.’

The pole was thrust upon me, and I waited while Riven dug a box out of the rubble. It was large as a crate, but it didn’t seem to weigh more than a straw basket. Nothing remained inside but dust and flat, square pieces of the strange pale metal. Riveno sifted them from the dust and stuffed them into a cloth sack before moving on, working his way around the cavern wall. Relic after relic emerged from the rubble, and he told me about each of them, speaking words I didn’t understand but committed to memory in any case.

Riveno schooled me on the ancients’ power over night and day, the sun and moons; of great machines the size of cities that cast the Augurs between the stars; of balloons of metal that raced across the skies. It all sounded incredibly fascinating, but at the speed Riveno lectured me, it was more bewildering. My mind was already too full with the alchemagic I had spent days learning, and I had not come to the mines for trinkets.

Riveno was sweating by the time the sack became hard to carry. As was I. The air was heavier beneath the earth.

‘I think that’s enough for today,’ Riveno decided, sweeping the sack over his shoulder. ‘Mostly scrap, but Augur metal can still fetch a shell or two at the foundries.’

I sucked my teeth. ‘Interesting,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Don’t play your games with me, Dwellin. Spit it out,’ Riveno ordered.

‘I played my words carefully. ‘When Aberan last spoke to me, he said all your trinkets were stolen and that you were no better than the rest of Canarva’s masters. Clearly he’s wrong.’

Riveno grunted at that.

I waited for the words to come. Riveno made me wait until we had squeezed back into the mine tunnels.

‘Your brother would indeed be wrong about that,’ he told me in a low voice, as if the cave had ears to listen. ‘But not entirely wrong.’

I stayed silent. I knew people would often seek to fill a silence if you laid one out before them like a tablecloth.

‘Don’t you judge me now.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I’m better than those silk-dressed thieves. I’m no Ma Mattox. I don’t send you out pickpocketing or burgling. I won’t see any of you with a noose about your necks, nor trouble brought back to the shop. But, should somebody bring me a pilfered item, well… some things are better off in the right hands.’

I pounced. ‘Like whatever Wrekham’s selling to the Revenant?’

Riveno regarded me coldly. The blightlamp was fading, and he passed it to me. In his other hand were two vials of blightpowder, orange and yellow. ‘Fix the lamp.’

‘Seventy-five thousand shells could change everything for everyone in the Buried & Lost,’ I said, while I poured the powders together over the molten leftovers and watched them come alive again.

‘Don’t you think I know that, Dwellin? But you should know the price of thieving isn’t always the price of the item you steal. You think a man like Wrekham would sit back, throw up his hands, and say, “oh well”? There would be uproar amongst the barons. Never mind the Venerance getting involved. Blood would run in the gutters. You want that on your hands? I’ll answer for you: no, you don’t. I won’t let you.’

‘So, what you’re saying,’ I muttered, ‘is we should let Wrekham go about his business.’

‘I know he hurt Aberan, Dwellin, but you’re better biding your time. Let it go until you’ve got an older head on those shoulders. A wise woman once told me revenge always cuts both ways, and I still believe it.’

‘Don’t you wonder what he’s selling?’

‘Of course I do,’ Riveno snapped. ‘I’ve spent days wondering. Just like you’ve spent days following the baron around. Oh yes, I’ve watched you. Fight in the Seventh Pike, was it?’

‘Thought you trusted me.’

‘I do, but I don’t trust you not to do something stupid in the name of your brother. He is alive, Dwellin. That’s what matters.’

‘So Wrekham’s just supposed to do what he pleases and suffer no consequences?’

‘Enough, Dwellin. Don’t think of it any more.

Dear reader, if we ever have the pleasure or displeasure of meeting, know this about me. If there was a sure way to make me do something, it was to tell me not to do it.

Riveno said no more. He had paused in the tunnel, looking back the way we had come. That shiver ran my spine once more.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing to worry about. We’re almost at the ladder.’

That we were. While Riveno looped the rope around the sack as if it had been sentenced to death. I stepped away from him, treading between the stones and deeper into the dark. I held the light up to face south, back to the city, and I saw the black eye of a tunnel watching me from further down the mine. A breeze stirred my hair, and brought me the smell of shit.

Rubble clattered and I whirled into Riveno’s chest. There was a firmness to his form, as if he wore armour underneath his cloak.

‘Looking for something, Dwellin?’ Riveno said, his voice low.

‘Just curious.’

‘And that’s what worries me,’ came the answer. ‘Come on. We’ve stayed too long.’

Riveno took the lamp from my hand and seized the ladder. The clanging of his boots echoed down the mine while I watched the darkness close in. The breeze had stopped dead. A stale stench spread in its place.

‘Dwellin.’

I grabbed the rusty metal and hoisted myself up to the creaking of the ladder’s bolts. Three rungs above the ground, I felt something solid brush my leg. Fingers traced my ankle. I kicked out with a yelp but punished nothing but air. The stones rattled in the dark, and I don’t mind admitting to you I climbed much faster, almost bumping into Riveno.

The man set his hands to the rope and began to haul. I stood nearby, fidgeting with my hands. The dark had tested me. I stared into the pit’s mouth with more trepidation than I had before.

‘There’s something down there.’ That put a twist in my budding plans.

Riveno hummed in a way that neither confirmed or denied. He was busy placing his map back into the pocket of his cloak. The scraping of the sack came in increments until he hoisted it up from the depths. I half expected something to be perched on or cling to the sack as it came into the light.

A stone turned his heel and he stumbled ever so slightly. He grimaced at me as he watched my smile grow.

‘Better mine your step,’ I said.

Riveno cracked his own smile. ‘Don’t quarry about it,’ he said quick as a heartbeat.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and squeezed my eyes. ‘Oh, gods…’

*

Myrs took her time digging through the scrap, even though she spent the minutes muttering about all kinds of punishments she would be up for if they were caught. In the end, she got away with a plate with some intricate pattern pressed into it for her troubles.

The slate-grey haze veil of Canarva was lessening. Rifts of pale blue cut the clouds. The storm was finally running out of breath. The shadow of the Watcher peeked through the clouds. Its cragged face and jaws were hidden by an anvil of storm clouds, ever-present, ever-surveying.

Riveno and I drifted through the ash like leaves on the wind, my hood as low as his. Our feet fell in time with the jangle and crunch of the sack. I was busy watching the carriages and wagons battle for space in some of Canarva’s smaller streets. A man drenched in a brown ichor was screaming up at a woman leaning from a high window. An empty chamberpot in her hands waved back and forth as she argued. Nothing ruins a day like raining shit. That’s why, if you ever find yourself spending a night in Canarva’s gutters, I heartily recommend you don’t sit your arse down beneath a window. If you do, better prop up an umbrella just in case.

A gang of Venerance prosecutors were sprinting down the street towards us. Riveno immediately pushed me behind him and edged into an alleyway, but he needn’t have worried. The prosecutors ran right by us, scattering a gang of shambling factory workers in the process. They didn’t even glance in our direction. Clearly there was a criminal more important than us that needed seeing to. Several clerics, their faces red and masked with sweat, brought up the rear.

‘Wonder what’s got them so rattled,’ I said aloud.

‘Something to do with the prophecy, I’ll bet,’ Riveno muttered. ‘The Venerance has been running about all week. Drakka was right: the seer’s prophecy ’

‘I thought it was because of the reverent coming from Bashkar. What’s the problem with the prophecy?’

Riveno tutted. ‘Don’t you remember what the seer said?’

‘Erm. Something about carving south through sun and gloom and two suns and…a battle?’

‘You really should pay more attention.’

‘That was like two chapters ago,’ I whispered to myself.

Riveno stared back at me. ‘What?’

‘I said far too much has happened since then. I can’t be expected to remember everything. It wasn’t about me, so why should I remember it?’

‘Because it’s not every day a prophecy ends with such calamitous words as, “World ever changed as the darkness calls. One must stand against them all”. There’s not been a prophecy that’s spoken of the fate of the Holy Realms in four hundred years, before the time of the First Chosen. I’m of the opinion the seer wasn’t supposed to say it all.’

‘So that’s why they dragged her off the altar like they did.’

‘The story’s always in the little details, Dwellin. The Venerance was clearly unnerved by what the seer prophesied. Whoever her words are talking about could be the most important chosen one for centuries. That’s why a reverent is coming here personally from Bashkar. I wager they want to find this chosen one for themselves and become their patron before somebody else snaps them up.’

Every swordsaint and alchemage had one. Devoters or reverents, usually. Sometimes a noble who got lucky. Not all chosen ones were created equal, and with a patron to pull strings for them, they could get the finest trainers and armourers, secure grander missions, and could rise in favour politically or publicly. There were always shells to be made from doing the Great Watcher’s work.

‘You really believe in the prophecies, don’t you?’

‘There’s yet to be a seer that was wrong.’

‘But those words could mean anything. What darkness? Who is “all”?’

Riveno chuckled as if I had missed another pun of his. ‘The little details, Dwellin. They’ll reveal themselves eventually.’

The journey back to the shop was silent and swift. My mind was wrapped up in seers and chosen ones and words of a prophecy I couldn’t remember.