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  ‘Yes, lord.’ Tun yanked the man up by his shirt.

  ‘We were attacked by a witch!’ the fellow gasped, now upright and glaring furiously. ‘A servant of the Night-Queen.’ Remembering his place he quickly lowered his gaze.

  Pon-lor stepped even closer to peer down at the much shorter young man. A witch. So that’s what this is all about. They have some poor village woman they hope to sell as a witch. He made a show of sighing his utter lack of interest and clasped his hands at his back. ‘Believe me, fool. If you had met a servant of the demoness you would be either dead or insane. I do not have the time for a court of inquiry. You’ll just have to let the old woman go back to selling her moss-unguents and d’bayang tea.’ He waved to Tun, who smacked the pommel of his sword across the man’s head, sending him face first into the mud.

  He stopped short as the fellow spoke from the muck. His voice was slow and tight with suppressed rage. ‘You will be interested in this witch, I think … Magister.’ Pon-lor turned: the man was actually levering himself up to his hands and knees. Tun stood over him, sword raised, a brow cocking a question.

  Pon-lor raised a hand for a halt. ‘Very well. You wish me to ask … why?’

  ‘Because this one,’ the man coughed and brought his hand away from his head, red and wet with blood, ‘has enslaved a yakshaka soldier.’

  After a long pause Pon-lor said, ‘That is impossible.’ Tun swung the sword up to finish the man but another curt sign halted the execution. ‘You realize that if you cannot support this claim you will be slain?’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘And so what happened?’

  The man straightened, wincing and touching gingerly at his head. ‘The witch escaped us through the use of her arts and her yakshaka guard.’

  ‘I see. She escaped you. How unfortunate. Is it too much to expect that you can produce witnesses to these events?’

  ‘There are witnesses, Magister. I can lead you to where it happened.’

  ‘Very well. You will do so. And if I find that you have lied I will have you beheaded. Is that understood?’

  The man bowed even lower. ‘Yes, m’lord.’

  Pon-lor turned away. Tun grabbed the fellow’s arm and pulled him aside. The man kept glancing back, his gaze hardly that of a browbeaten peasant or servant, but Pon-lor did not notice. He was barely aware of his surroundings, hands clasped behind his back as he walked. His thoughts were a roil of unease. The yakshaka captured? How unlikely. Yet, if this so-called witch should succeed in fetching it to the Demon-Queen’s court, all the alchemical secrets and rituals of their creation could be penetrated. This was the most deadly threat the Circle had faced in generations. If it should be true … Ancient Ones, let it not be true.

  As he was being pulled along, Kenjak kept his head low and worked hard to keep the satisfied smirk from his mouth. Yet he could not help sneaking quick glances to the retreating back of this young Thaumaturg mage. He’d given his name as Jak, the true nickname of his youth, but until most recently he’d been known as Kenjak Ashevajak, the ‘Bandit Lord’ of the borderlands. At least until a damned witch showed up and destroyed his authority and scattered his men to the seven winds. But he would have her head and a fat bounty for it. And this upstart Thaumaturg would not come between him and any bounty. He did not fear the yakshaka: he could easily outrun those lumbering elephants. This was his gods-sent chance to avenge the insults his family had so long suffered at the hands of these self-appointed nobles and rulers. And if the witch were to die along the way, well, no matter. Imagine what the demoness Queen of the Night herself would pay for a trussed-up yakshaka warrior.

  CHAPTER III

  When the functionaries of this nation [the Thaumaturg] go out in public, their insignia and the number of their attendants are regulated according to rank. The highest dignitaries are protected by four parasols with golden handles, the next, two parasols with golden handles, and finally there are those protected by a single parasol with a golden handle. Further down the line come those permitted only parasols with silver handles. Likewise so with their rods of office, and their palanquins …

  Ular Takeq

  Customs of Ancient Jakal-Uku

  FOR SHIMMER, IT did come to seem as if they moved within a dream as the changeless days of travel upon the river slipped from one on to the next until all became one. The unruffled earthen-brown waters flowed beneath the ship as smoothly as if they traversed a slide of mud. Not a breath stirred the leaden air between the walls of verdant green where flowers blazed bright as flames. The sails hung limp, damp and rotting. Yet the vessel moved upriver against the sluggish current. As the days passed, the crew came to huddle listless and dozing in the heat on the deck. They watched with fever-glazed eyes the vine-burdened branches brushing overhead. All came to speak in hushed whispers as if afraid of breaking the spell of stillness that hung upon the river.

  As evening came on, clouds gathered as predictably as the sun’s own setting and a torrential downpour would hammer them through the night. So dense was the warm rain that it seemed that they had sunk into the river. Nothing of either shore could be seen through the solid sheets. To be heard one had to press one’s mouth to another’s ear. Figures would appear suddenly from the roaring downpour, emerging like ghosts. Come the dawn the clouds would be gone as if they’d thrown themselves to the ground and the day’s heat would gather like a sticky tar. Heavy mist arose to smother the river. To Shimmer it appeared so dense it could actually snag and catch at passing branches and hanging vines. Her sodden clothes gave off a vapour as if she were boiling – and she had long given up her armour as a useless rusted heap.

  Throughout, she kept a wary eye on the vessel itself. At times it appeared terrifyingly derelict, as if everyone had been snatched away, or become ghosts. Its shrouds hung in loose tatters. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d glimpsed a sailor among the spars or in the rigging. Yet it continued to move, silently gliding. In the dawn and dusk it resembled to her nothing more than a mist-cast shadow, or their own ghost.

  One dawn she emerged from below to find the crew sprawled asleep and no one at the tiller. Of the Avowed, Cole was on watch and she spotted him standing near the bow. ‘Cole,’ she called. The man did not answer. ‘Cole!’ Still he did not respond. She crossed to his side and leaned close; he was staring down over the side at the passing blood-hued water. She reached out and gently touched his shoulder. The man slowly blinked. ‘Cole? Can you hear me?’ He frowned now and his gaze rose to her; for a moment he stared as if not recognizing her, then he drew a sudden breath, as if broaching a great depth.

  ‘There are things in the water, Shimmer,’ he pronounced as if imparting a profound secret.

  ‘Where’s the pilot – what’s his name? Gods, I can’t even remember his name …’

  Blinking heavily, Cole peered about, frowning. ‘I’m sorry, Shimmer – it’s morning already?’

  She squeezed his arm. ‘It’s all right. I feel it too.’ She headed for the afterdeck. ‘Captain! You are needed! Captain!’

  The men and women of the crew stirred yet none moved to set to work. Shimmer took hold of the tiller arm. The captain arrived, unshaven, in a stained shirt that hung to his knees. He was followed by Rutana and K’azz. ‘Where is the pilot, Captain?’

  The man rubbed his jowls, his brows rising. ‘We’ll have a look for him,’ and he lumbered off.

  ‘Shimmer,’ K’azz said, ‘what happened?’

  ‘I found the tiller unmanned.’

  Rutana snorted at that, as if scornful.

  ‘You have something to say?’ Shimmer asked.

  The woman nodded, her gaze defiant. ‘We may have had a pilot, Isturé, but another has been in control of the vessel for some time.’

  ‘Another? Who?’

  Rutana smiled as she squeezed the bands indenting her upper arms. ‘Ardata, of course.’

  The captain reappeared. ‘He’s not on the ship. Must’ve fallen overboard. We’ll have to go ba
ck to look for him.’

  ‘We are not going back, Captain,’ Rutana announced without breaking gaze with Shimmer.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ K’azz said. He motioned to Shimmer. ‘Turn us round.’

  She clasped both hands on the long arm of battered wood and pushed. The broad tiller swung but somehow the ship did not respond. It continued its slow sluggish advance.

  Rutana’s contemptuous smile climbed even higher. ‘There is no turning back now, Isturé.’ And she walked off.

  Shimmer’s gaze found K’azz, who was eyeing the tiller arm, his mouth sour and tight. ‘What now?’ she asked.

  He drew breath to answer but a shout went up from the crow’s nest. ‘A village ahead! People!’ The crew surged to the larboard rail. Even the crewman from the crow’s nest came swinging hand over hand down the ropes. The Avowed gathered at the stern with K’azz. Banners of mist painted the river’s surface and coiled along the jungle shore. Through them, Shimmer glimpsed a clearing dotted by leaf-topped huts standing on tall stilts. Figures lined the shore. Most were in loincloths and bright feathers decorated their hair and hung at arms and legs. The crewmen and women waved, shouting. ‘Hello! Help! Help us! We are ensorcelled!’

  ‘Back to work, damn you all!’ the captain bellowed in answer.

  ‘We’re cursed!’ one shouted and jumped overboard.

  ‘Not a good idea …’ Rutana warned.

  The rest of the crew followed in a surge, as if terrified they would be held back. They jumped, arms waving, and splashed into the murky water to emerge blowing and gasping. The captain managed to catch one woman by the arm only to be smacked down for his trouble. He lay holding his head and groaning. The entire crew swam for the shore. Shimmer shot a questioning look to K’azz who motioned a negative. ‘Let them go,’ he murmured. ‘Perhaps they will find their way to the coast.’

  ‘Or perhaps they will all be eaten,’ Rutana offered, laughing her harsh cackle.

  K’azz faced her. ‘Then see that they are not …’

  Her hands, closed about her neck, seemed to squeeze off her laugh in a hiss. She jerked her head to Nagal at the bow. The big man climbed up among the loose rotten rigging and yelled to the shore in a language Shimmer had never heard before. A banner of mist wafted across the river and the bank and when it had passed the figures were gone, disappearing as if they had never been.

  ‘Thank you,’ K’azz said.

  But Rutana only sneered and turned away.

  Through the scarves of fog Shimmer caught glimpses of the crew dragging themselves up the muddy shore and running into the jungle. Then a curve in the river’s course carried them from sight. She turned to K’azz. Their commander had a hand on the tiller arm, which jerked this way and that, yet to no apparent shift in the vessel’s course. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  He shook his head as if awakening from a reverie and his gaze jerked from hers – as if terrified, she thought. Terrified of what? Our situation? Or of what he may reveal?

  ‘A lesson here, Shimmer,’ he murmured, his mouth tight. ‘One can squirm and fight against it, but everyone is drawn inexorably along to the fate awaiting them.’

  ‘I don’t believe in that self-serving predestiny justification that religions flog.’

  He nodded his understanding and she was struck by how skull-like his features appeared. ‘Well, let us call it a natural proclivity then,’ and he offered a smile that struck her as heart-achingly sad. ‘No one’s alone from now on,’ he called, raising his voice. ‘Watches at all times. A mage on each watch.’

  Shimmer saluted. ‘Yes, Commander.’

  Yet the spell that clung over the river and surrounding impenetrable walls of forest somehow made the distinction of being on or off watch irrelevant. Shimmer, and, as it seemed, the rest of them, found it increasingly difficult to sleep. She would lie only to stare at the damp mouldering wood unable to slip into any dreams. And so she would arise and go above and here she would find the majority of the party, eyes on the river or passing shores, silent and watchful, like a standing troop of mist-shrouded statues.

  She saw, or thought she saw, bizarre creatures among the branches of the trees: enormous vultures and bats the size of people, hanging upside down. On the shore one of the long-snouted alligator-like creatures that swam along pacing the vessel heaved itself up on the mud slope and she was only mildly surprised to see it stand erect on two thick trunk-like legs, a wide pale belly hanging over a bare crotch. It followed them with its unblinking baleful eyes.

  At one point she found herself next to Gwynn, the one-time mage of First Company, Skinner’s command, and she asked him, ‘Was this how it was when you were last here?’

  The man shook himself, rubbing his eyes and frowning. ‘We weren’t here, Shimmer. We stayed on the south coast. It was pleasant there – much cooler.’

  ‘You didn’t travel through the countryside?’

  The man laughed and waved to the shore. ‘Gods, no.’

  ‘Not to Jakal Viharn?’

  ‘No. Never been.’

  The news startled Shimmer so much that she had a hard time comprehending it. She felt that it ought to alarm her, but for some reason all she could summon was a vague unease. ‘You haven’t … But I thought … I’m sorry. I thought you had.’

  ‘Skinner has.’ Then Gwynn ran a hand over his sweat-matted pale hair and frowned as if chasing after a thought. ‘At least he was gone for much of the time … We simply assumed he was with her.’

  ‘You never asked him about it – about the city?’

  ‘No.’

  Shimmer found that difficult to believe. ‘Really? No one asked about Jakal Viharn? Not even once?’

  Gwynn cocked his head, the edge of his mouth quirking up. ‘One does not ask personal questions of Skinner.’

  Ah. There is that. She knew that some people were just naturally less forthcoming or prone to talk about themselves than others. And Skinner even less so than most. He’d always been silent regarding anything other than the business at hand. He’d become utterly closed to her before the end.

  Now Shimmer frowned, thinking, for it seemed so very difficult in this choking thick air. ‘Well, then, why don’t we travel by Warren?’

  Gwynn rubbed a finger along the knife-edge bridge of his great hooked nose. ‘Jakal cannot be found via the Warrens. Ardata has seen to that. She allows you to enter. This time she sent a boat.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I do not know. A demonstration, perhaps?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Shimmer tried to think through to the hidden motive behind the choice but couldn’t come up with any definitive possibility, and so instead she let it lie to be answered later and returned to watching the thick reddish-brown flow coiling and ribboning beneath them.

  What she did come to understand was the spell, or sensation, she and her brother and sister Avowed were experiencing. She wasn’t certain where the answer came from; perhaps from a waking dream she had when the deck appeared populated by all the fallen Avowed brethren interspersed with the living, all journeying to their unknown destination on the river. And it struck her that this timelessness was a sensation she’d known before. Over these last few years it had been growing, ebbing and waning, yet always abiding just beneath the surface of her awareness. It was – perhaps – an artefact of the Vow they had all sworn together.

  And now this land, Jacuruku, seemed to somehow intensify it … or perhaps the word she was looking for was exacerbate. Or aggravate? In any case, it was not entirely imposed from without and so she tried to let slip away her almost constant state of heightened anxiety.

  She was, unfortunately, premature in that choice.

  It began as a noise, a loud thrumming or hissing. It seemed to be coming from all around. Rutana, Shimmer noted, ran to the bow to stand tall, peering to the right and left.

  ‘What is it?’ K’azz called to the woman.

  She shook her head. ‘I cannot be sure …’

  ‘Look there,’ Amatt calle
d, pointing ahead upriver.

  A cloud was approaching, skimming the dark bronze surface of the river, stretching from one shore to the other. Within the haze of the cloud a blinding iridescent storm of colours flashed and glimmered. Shimmer winced, shading her gaze. ‘What is it?’ she called to Rutana, just as K’azz had.

  The woman just shook her head as she stepped down from the railing as if retreating. ‘I do not know.’

  The cloud engulfed them, flowing around the vessel. Her vision of either shore was lost in a hurricane of lustrous rainbow-like flashing. Blinking, Shimmer was astonished to find herself surrounded by hundreds of darting and rushing hummingbirds. The blinding colours came from their feathers, which held a metallic iridescence of every hue.

  They hove in close to her face as if inspecting her. Their wings churned as near invisible blurs. She didn’t like the glow of their tiny red eyes and she gently waved them aside. ‘What is this?’ she called to Rutana. She had to shout to be heard above the combined roaring of the thousands of whirring wings.

  The woman might have answered but Shimmer did not hear as one of the hummingbirds suddenly darted forward and thrust its long needle-like beak into her neck. She flinched and reflexively grabbed hold of the tiny bundle of feathers and threw it to the deck. ‘The damned thing stabbed me!’ she yelled, more surprised than hurt.

  Grunts of shock and annoyance sounded all around as the Avowed waved their arms through the eddying clouds of birds. Then, all at once, as if at a given order, the birds crowded close all about Shimmer, jamming so tight they blotted out the day. Stiletto beaks thrust for her eyes, her neck, and clawed feet scratched for purchase on her ears. She covered her face to spin left and right but the mass of birds followed, stabbing her. She ran into someone, his face a steaming wet mask of blood, who howled. A scream sounded and a splash as someone fell or jumped into the river. She heard Nagal’s bull voice shouting in that strange language, then K’azz bellowing: ‘Gwynn!’