Ashes of the Sun Read online

“Go!” Yora said to Ibb. “Harrow, stay with him. We’ll buy you a few minutes to get clear.”

  Harrow clearly wanted to object, but Ibb was already snapping the reins, startling the thickheads into lumbering forward. He grabbed the boy by his shirt and hoisted him onto the box as the coach got up to speed. Yora moved to stand beside Gyre, spinning her spear in a slow circle.

  “Was there a way out the other end of that alley?” Gyre said as the tramp of booted feet got closer.

  “Someone’s back door,” Yora said, calm and professional.

  “Locked?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t break through.”

  Lights swirled in the mist. “Give them a look at us,” Gyre said, “then head that way?”

  Yora gave that a moment’s thought, then nodded. Gyre reached into the pockets of his coat and came up with three small clay spheres.

  A squad of Auxiliaries emerged from the mist, twelve men and women with long spears and sword belts, in padded leather jerkins and conical steel caps. Their sergeant, a red-faced man with a bushy blue beard, had a whistle between his lips and was blowing for all he was worth. He pulled up at the sight of Gyre and Yora, and the squad clattered to a halt behind him. Gyre heard someone say, “Halfmask!”

  “That’s right,” he muttered. “Here’s your stupid ghost story.”

  He tossed the clay bombs, letting them land at the Auxies’ feet. They were crackers, less spectacular than the stunner—too easy to blind himself at this range—and went off with more of a pop than a bang, but the explosion gushed an enormous cloud of choking, acrid smoke. Shouts of alarm and hacking coughs filled the street. Gyre held out a hand, warning Yora back from the expanding miasma. Only when the first soldier burst free of the cloud and fell to her knees, retching, did Gyre turn and run for the alley.

  “They’re getting away!” the woman rasped. “To the right!”

  Perfect. Any pursuit would focus on them, rather than the stolen wagon and its lumbering team of thickheads. Gyre darted into the alley, Yora close behind him. But another set of footsteps followed, and he turned in time to see someone else turn in after them. His stomach fell.

  Legionary.

  The Auxiliaries were local militia, indifferently trained and armed with weapons forged by ordinary human smiths. The Legions of the Dawn Republic were another matter entirely. Equipped with Chosen arcana maintained by the centarchs of the Twilight Order, they were the heart of the Republic’s military. They were spread thin—Gyre doubted there were a dozen Legionaries in Deepfire—but it was enough.

  The soldier was armored in off-white unmetal from head to heel, an insectoid suit of overlapping plates that slid smoothly over one another at the joints. Gyre guessed it was a woman by her height, but there was no other way to tell, with her face obscured behind a pane of darkened Elder glass. On her left arm she carried a large round shield, and a sword rode on her right hip, one of the Legion-pattern unmetal blades. The snub nose of a blaster rifle poked up over her shoulder.

  “Halfmask,” she said, voice distorted by the mask. “I am detaining you by order of Dux Raskos.”

  “Get the door open,” Gyre muttered. He saw Yora nod out of the corner of his eye.

  The Legionary stepped forward, the streetlamps giving her armor an iridescent shimmer. “Put down your weapons and surrender.”

  Gyre drew his knives and charged, and the soldier drew her sword. Checking his momentum at the last moment, Gyre faded back from her slash, drawing her deeper into the alley. Then, with as little warning as possible, he planted his back foot and lunged.

  It was a good move, and it would have worked against any ordinary opponent. His right-hand dagger curved in, wide and obvious, and the Legionary brought her shield up to block. His left thrust upward, fast and tight, even as his knife was skittering over the impenetrable unmetal. There was just a hint of cloth visible, where the bottom of her helmet met the articulated breastplate. Maybe—

  She moved fast, faster than someone wearing armor had any right to. Her blade met his edge on, and where unmetal clashed against steel the Elder creation won easily. Gyre yanked his hand back and found himself holding the hilt of a dagger with perhaps an inch of blade remaining.

  Oh, plaguefire. The Legionary advanced again, and Gyre danced backward. Something squishy burst under his feet, and for a moment he lost his balance. She thrust, and he threw himself sideways to avoid being skewered. His remaining dagger scratched uselessly against her shoulder, and she threw herself behind her shield and slammed it into him, driving him hard against the wall. Stars burst behind his eye as his head cracked the bricks.

  “I am detaining you,” she said. “Just hold still, would you?”

  Gyre tried to think of a good rejoinder, his mouth coppery with blood, his vision edged with shimmers. He reached into his coat but froze as the Legionary raised her sword to his throat. Then, abruptly, the soldier spun, shield coming up. She wasn’t fast enough, and Yora’s spear slipped under her guard to slam into her breastplate. The Legionary grunted, retreating a step, and brought her sword down behind the spearhead. An ordinary weapon would have been sliced in half, but Yora’s spear was of the same Elder make as the Legionary’s gear, and the sword rebounded with a distinctive crystalline ring.

  Yora pressed her attack, spear whirling in her hands. Unmetal weapon or not, she was still unarmored, and she fought to keep the Legionary on the defensive. Her blade scraped against the soldier’s shield and glanced off her armored side, and the Legionary ducked under a swing that would have sent the butt of the spear into her head. But the soldier’s blade licked out, and Yora’s parry caught it too late to turn the weapon entirely. The edge bit into Yora’s thigh, raising a thin line of blood.

  By that point, Gyre had caught his breath. More important, he’d gotten his hand into his coat pocket, grabbing his backup stunner. He ran forward, hurling the little sphere in the Legionary’s face. It went off as he collided with Yora, one arm raised so the leather of his cloak covered her eyes.

  The bomb exploded with a soft whuff, a wave of pressure, and a light much brighter than the noonday sun. The Legionary staggered backward with a strangled cry. Even facing away with his eyes tightly closed, Gyre still saw an orange flash, and afterimages danced across his vision. He could see well enough to get to his feet, though, and pull Yora up after him. Her eyes were watering fiercely, so he grabbed her hand and ran for the door, which now hung slightly open.

  It led to a dusty storeroom, which had another door leading into the entrance hall of a small apartment building. Gyre tumbled a stack of boxes behind him, blocking the way, and he and Yora pounded through, boots clattering on the floorboards. The front door was latched but not barred, and in another moment they were through into a dark, empty street.

  In theory, Deepfire proper, the aboveground part of the city, was sealed off from the tunnel network that surrounded it at night. Great gates guarded by Auxiliaries blocked off the major entrances, where city streets dove underground and merged seamlessly with the largest passageways. In practice, however, there were too many tunnels and not enough Auxies, and getting underground was just a matter of finding the right forgotten corner or dark oubliette.

  Or, in this case, the unused last stall in an otherwise legitimate livery stable. Yora opened the stable door with an iron key and led the way past wooden pens full of the curled-up shapes of sleeping loadbirds. A few interrogative chirrups followed them, but the birds remained calm as she entered the stall at the end of the row, kicked some straw aside, and raised a wooden trapdoor.

  “Your leg all right?” Gyre said, indicating the wound Yora had taken from the Legionary’s sword. Yora glanced down as though she’d forgotten about it until that moment. “I’ve got some bandages.”

  “It’ll keep,” Yora said. “I want to put some rock between us and Raskos’ people first.”

  Gyre nodded. They’d stopped hearing the whistles of Auxie pursuit several blocks back, but that was no guarantee. Not if he�
�s sending Legionaries after us. That meant they had the dux’s personal attention.

  Yora strapped her spear to her back and climbed down the short ladder under the trapdoor. Gyre pulled off his mask—and scratched his scar, a blessed relief—then followed. The ladder let them into a narrow stone passage, smooth walled except where chunks had fallen away to litter the floor with rubble. Yora took a glowstone from her pocket and shook it to life, its pallid blue light painting the walls with leaping, shivering shadows.

  It was possible to forget, on the surface, that Deepfire was not a human place. It had streets and buildings, shops and restaurants, like any other city. If you were wealthy enough to live aboveground, only the deep, smoldering fire of the Pit and the white-capped mountains clustered close in every direction kept you from imagining you were somewhere in the central Republic.

  For the majority of residents, though, an open-air dwelling was far out of reach. They lived in the tunnels, dividing up the vast, winding galleries with wood-and-cloth partitions, reclaiming human space from something Elder and intimidating. But no one forgot where they were living, not when every too-smooth curve and vast cavern was a reminder.

  Before the Plague War, this had been a ghoul city—possibly the ghoul city, their capital, though legends were contradictory—and the endless kilometers of tunnels that honeycombed the mountain had once been their homes and workshops. Not long after the war began, the Chosen had unleashed a terrible weapon, which had smashed the place open like a child taking a shovel to an anthill. No one was quite certain what kind of weapon it had been, but everyone agreed it was still down there, sputtering away at the bottom of the Pit. It was the source of both the warmth that kept the city free of the surrounding glaciers and the occasional miasmic gases that strangled children in their sleep.

  The surviving tunnels, in the meantime, had been ruthlessly cleansed by the Chosen and their armies. These battles had left a rich legacy of Elder arcana behind, broken weapons and shattered armor, bits of junk and the occasional marvel. Not long after the end of the war and the final downfall of Chosen and ghouls alike, bold men and women had returned to scavenge for treasure and had raised the beginnings of the modern city in the still-glowing crater.

  And then the centarchs decided no one else was allowed to play with their toys.

  The small tunnel joined a larger one, which bore a few signs of habitation, bits of trash in the corners and crude messages painted on the walls. This eventually joined another, still larger passage, which became an alley feeding into one of the main thoroughfares. Apart from the smooth stone roof, twenty meters overhead, this could have passed for a street in the poor quarter of any city—a narrow, muddy road down the center, lined by narrow, rickety buildings. Day and night had little meaning down here, and torches and braziers burned nonstop, filling the air with a haze of smoke. There were no carriages in the tunnels, and a sea of bustling humanity pushed and grumbled past one another, mud spattering from their feet.

  Poor bastards. It was hard not to pity the tunnelborn, who spent their lives down here, emerging aboveground only long enough to trudge to a job at some manufactory. They were gaunt from bad food and pale from lack of sun, like they were half corpses already.

  Yora threaded her way into the crowd, instinctively using hips and elbows to work her way through the press. Gyre stayed in her wake. Even after three years, he couldn’t maneuver through crowds of tunnelborn with the ease of a native like Yora. After a cramped, sweaty interval battling the press, they broke through into a less crowded section.

  There was nothing marking out the door to the Crystal Cavern as belonging to a pub. Gyre wasn’t sure if that was even the official name of the place. An alley led to a side tunnel, which dead-ended in an iron-banded door. It opened to Yora’s knock, revealing a tough-looking woman who gave them a once-over, then grunted.

  Inside, a long, low-ceilinged cavern was mostly full of a haphazard array of mismatched tables. There was a bar along one wall, made of pieces of old packing crates. The place was mostly empty, apart from a few determined lone drinkers, and Gyre spotted the rest of their crew in their usual spot in the back corner.

  “Good to see you in one piece,” Ibb said, tipping his hat graciously. He sat in a rickety chair tilted dangerously far back, his boots propped up on an unused table. “Have any trouble losing our helmeted friends?”

  “A little more than usual,” Yora said, pulling another chair over. “They had a Legionary with them.”

  Ibb raised his eyebrows. “That’s unusual. Maybe we’re finally getting to Raskos.”

  “Are you all right?” Harrow got up from where he was sitting and hurried over. When he noticed Yora’s wound, his eyes widened. “That looks—”

  “It’s a scratch,” Yora said, waving a hand. She prodded the wound with her finger and winced. “Sarah will sew it up for me. Right, Sarah?”

  “Not really my area of expertise,” Sarah said from the corner. “Nevin’s the one who’s good with needles.”

  “Nevin’s a little busy at the moment,” Nevin said.

  Harrow pulled up a chair for Yora beside Ibb. A heavy wood-and-iron chest had been hauled onto a table, and Nevin sat in front of it, a pair of lockpicks in his hands, bent in front of a keyhole at one end. Sarah stood behind him, one hand on his shoulder in silent encouragement.

  Sarah was their arcanist, a woman in her midtwenties, short and plump with a mass of red-brown curls. She’d been with Yora for years, since before Gyre had arrived in Deepfire, and her cheery optimism sometimes seemed like a deliberate counterpoint to Yora’s dourness. Nevin was a newer addition, a tunnelborn thief whom Sarah had taken up with and convinced Yora would be a useful member of the inner circle. He was a tall, lanky young man with dark green hair and long, spidery fingers, well suited to the kind of work he was doing now.

  There were more members of their nebulous organization, spread throughout the tunnels and reaching into Deepfire proper. Probably only Yora knew for sure how many. Certainly among the tunnelborn—the Deepfire natives, born underground and rarely seeing the sun—there was no love lost for the Republic, Dux Raskos Rottentooth, and the Twilight Order that backed them. That resentment kept them alive every time Raskos sent his Auxies into the tunnels, searching for the daughter of Kaidan Hiddenedge and the thief called Halfmask who’d caused so much trouble.

  It’s kept us alive so far, anyway. If Raskos was calling in the Legionaries, that might not last. Yora and I need to talk. He glanced at Yora, who was deep in conversation with Ibb. Harrow, catching Gyre’s look, gave him a resentful glare, and Gyre sighed inwardly. The boy’s puppy-dog protectiveness of Yora was starting to get genuinely irritating. He needs to learn that she can take care of herself.

  A loud clunk drew his attention back to the chest. Nevin leaned back, brushing his sweaty hair back from his forehead and grinning broadly.

  “Told you,” he said. “No problem.”

  “You’re brilliant.” Sarah bent down and kissed him, then flipped up the lid of the chest. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The box was full to the brim with small bundles, wrapped in rough cloth and tied up with twine. Yora and Ibb got up, too, and came over as Sarah rooted around, pulling out a few pieces that clunked when she set them on the tabletop. She peeked inside a few of the other bundles and gave a soft whistle.

  “These I’ll have to take a closer look at,” she said, gesturing to her chosen items. “The rest looks like raw alchemicals. Lynnia’s going to have a field day.”

  “A field day for which she’ll pay handsomely,” Ibb said, grinning broadly. “You know what that means.” He glanced at Yora, then raised his voice. “A round for the house, courtesy of our favorite alchemist!”

  One round turned into several, as drinks were wont to do. Gyre nursed a clay mug of dark, sour wine and watched Harrow try to keep up with Ibb. The boy was already weaving unsteadily as he went back to the bar, while Ibb seemed utterly unaffected no matter how much he down
ed. The benefits of experience, I suppose.

  Yora was holding court. Word had gotten around about the score and the free drinks, and a steady stream of tunnelborn made their way to the Crystal Cavern to pay their respects and collect their booze. They bowed to Yora, or bent close to whisper words of support they didn’t dare say aloud, or raised foaming mugs to toast the memory of Hiddenedge and his companions, who’d first roused the tunnelborn against the Republic and ended up dying in a cell for his pains.

  “It’s not all that encouraging a story, actually,” Sarah said, coming to sit beside Gyre as yet another toast was proclaimed. “From our point of view, I mean.”

  Gyre glanced at her. She and Nevin had been sitting in a corner for some time, pressed close and lips locked, pausing only long enough to down the drinks Ibb kept bringing them. “What happened to your boy?”

  “Having a piss, I think. Or losing his dinner.” Sarah gave a cheerful shrug. “You don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “It’s dangerous to be out in public like this, even in the tunnels.” Gyre watched Yora shake a gnarled old man’s hand, nodding as he told her some story. “I’m just not sure it’s worth the risk.”

  “It lets the tunnelborn know someone’s fighting for them,” Sarah said. “That’s worth something, I think.”

  “To them?”

  “And to us, if it means a friendly hand or a sympathetic ear when we need one.” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Seriously, what’s eating you? You’re not usually the worried one.”

  “Just thinking too much,” Gyre muttered.

  “I know what’ll fix that,” Sarah said, pushing his mug toward him. Gyre took a drink, to appease her, and changed the subject.

  “So did you get a chance to look closer at the loot?”

  “Only a little.” Sarah’s eyes lit up. “One piece is a secondary actuator, which looks intact. It might have come off a skyship, but more likely got broken off from—”

  She was interrupted by Nevin, returning from the toilet apparently none the worse for wear. Sarah bounced off to meet him, leaving Gyre alone once again with his thoughts.