Sartosh extended his own hand to me, and I understood I was to take it. I stood and did so, and as Sartosh closed his eyes I felt a flow of energy coming from him, in the same way I had felt it flow up through the floor. Only this energy was sharper somehow, more focused and more intense, and I let it pass through me, mix with the other energy I had from the house, and flow out through the tip of the knife.
The golden beam sparked even brighter. At the far end of the beam, the desk burst into brilliant red and gold flames, so suddenly that I gasped and dropped the knife.
Instantly, the golden beam vanished in the air. But the desk continued to burn. Smoke billowed from it, up toward the high ceiling of the room.
“Awesome,” Sartosh whispered to himself. “Simply freaking awesome.”
Then, to me, he said, “When a mage takes on the willing power of another mage, with proper training, their energies expand exponentially. Remember that. The mage who stands alone is only as good as himself. One only achieves true greatness by working in concert with others.”
Sartosh crossed to the windows and slid them open to the street. The hallway door burst open, and servants with red cylinders came running in. The cylinders had black cones attached to them that spit white foam over the desk. “Mind the books!” Sartosh called out. When they extinguished the fire, I was disturbed to see that, aside from four clawed stone feet, there was very little left of the desk, and the wooden floor was badly scarred. The air was filled with smoke.
I picked up the knife, and with some reluctance handed it back to Sartosh. As I did so he glanced beyond the men to see my aunt step cautiously into the doorway. She sniffed the air and looked about the room, and as she saw me an expression of fury crossed her face. Instantly, all my hair went white. She dropped the cleaning materials she held in her hands, strode across the floor, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and jerked me roughly to her side.
“I am sorry, khalee, very sorry,” she said in the human language, bowing formally to Sartosh. “The boy will not trouble you again.”
She turned and pulled me toward the door. Head down, hair white, I knew better than to resist.
“Stop,” said Sartosh.
I looked up and saw different emotions crossing my aunt’s face, first fear and then more anger. It was that anger that was all too familiar to me
Sartosh came across the floor to us. The man’s voice was firm and held a commanding tone now that it hadn’t held before. “The kid has great talent, Clarinda. He’ll be trained, I think.”
My aunt frowned, and looked down at me with a foul expression. She did not turn around. “You honor us, khalee,” she said, in a tone that implied quite the opposite. “But you should not trouble yourself…”
“He will be
trained
,” Sartosh stated flatly. He put his small pale hand on my aunt’s large, furred bicep and turned her around to face him. “As long as you are here in my house, on my lands, Clarinda, you will bring him to me daily.”
Her face was bitter, impassive. She nodded once to the mage. I understood several things in that moment. First, that my aunt had no choice. Second, that all the fury that was in her about it would soon find its target: me.
Sartosh tucked the
Gloaming Day
book into my arms, and patted me on the side of my face with that strange, hairless hand. “His fathers were mages, were they not? His mother as well? It would be a shame if the boy did not continue in the trade. I will see you again soon, young Blackwell.”
My aunt would not meet his eyes. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had reached out with her claws and cut that poor, fragile man open from throat to groin.
“As you wish, khalee,” Clarinda said instead, through tightly gritted teeth, sharp as razors.
We donned the great coats and thick hats, left the house by the back door, and walked quickly down the alley. At the main street, humans hurried by without seeing us. A streetcar passed. A dog lifted its head and sniffed in our direction, but before it could react we were down a side street that humans couldn’t see, the corpse road. Here the city noises faded, and as the fog cleared there were towering trees, sky, a long dirt path through woods that ran down to a series of low stone kivas dug into the ground. The air smelled of pine. We were back in Kiryth, on Sartosh’s land, and my tribe’s home now. I hugged the mage’s book tight to my chest, and tried not to show any expression. I was going to be trained! As a mage!
I walked in a daze, dreaming and I'm sure I didn’t notice how all of the other Hulgliev of the tribe we passed took one look at my aunt and quickly stepped out of our way.
It was when I came down the ladder into their small kiva that my aunt finally turned and cuffed me sharp across the face. “
You could have killed us all, do you know that?”
she said in our High Tongue.
“If you’d done ANYTHING to anger that
Bakarh
,”
she spat the unfamiliar word out between her sharp teeth,
“then we would be homeless once again, and sooner or later the hunters will find us. And when they find us, they will surely kill us.”
She growled, spit at me and kicked me repeatedly where I’d fallen to the floor. I wrapped myself tightly around the book to protect it.
“You are a stupid, ugly child,”
she said.
“You are a worthless little beast. You should have died alongside your fathers and my sister, and my own son should now be standing here in your place. You are lower than a pile of shit. Even that
Bakarh
heretic is better than you deserve.”
I stayed where I was, pigmenting all of my hair to something like the color of the floor and trying not to move or cry out, knowing that if I gave her something, anything to react to, it would only make it worse. She cursed me awhile longer, hit me across the sides and back. And then finally she went off and sat by the fire, where she sat and smoked her clay pipe of leaf until the thick smell filled up the kiva.
When I was sure she wouldn’t notice me, I rose and crept off to my dirtnest in the far corner of the room. I cleaned myself, and there in the dark, with only the flickering light of the fire to light the pages, I opened the book carefully. I stared at the glowing illustrations. The fire’s light made them dance. In particular, I studied the picture of the great armored Hulgliev, and the flower,
Te’loria.
How thrilling it would be to hold such power, such respect.
A mage, I thought. A mage!
And despite the bruises that I felt across my sides and back, I remember that I smiled into that smoky darkness.
2.
T
hat was then. This is now.
There’s a clap of thunder and a flash of white light as the battered podship I’m riding in cuts down through the clouds. I’m strapped in the back, the place they use for cargo. I’m starving and frozen, and if there was anything left in my stomach it’d be all over the rusting metal floors, the walls, the roof by now.
Most of my team doesn’t look any better. Josik is a bright shade of green. I’ve never seen a human go quite that color before, and against his bright red hair it makes him look like some strange, undead version of himself. His eyes are closed, his lips are moving soundlessly. He hangs on to the frayed straps that hold us all in with a death grip. Pirrosh grins back at me. He’s a Solingi, I get that. They’re mostly human, but they live in the air, and apparently they like this shit, but despite that I can tell this is a lot even for him. I can see it in the tight skin at his jaw, the whites around his eyes. This isn’t a lazy blimp ride. This is a nightmare. The Buhr we hired is curled into a ball of fur up in the corner. There’s so much noise from the rattling of the ship, the storm outside, that if it’s making any sounds I sure can’t hear it.
And then there’s the girl with the tattoos. She’s staring out the window at the ocean below us. She’s new, and I haven’t worked with her, though Josik swears she’s got a lot of potential. Matthais, the kid we’d originally trained up, got himself cut up over an orange he’d bought in the market. Some withered old thing, not good enough to get shipped up to the mansions on the cliffs where all the real money in Tamaranth is. It probably didn’t have any juice left in it. Some thugs had jumped him, deep in the Warrens. We’d bandaged him up as best we could and left him with a friend to heal.
The girl is a mystery to me. She senses me watching her, looks over in my direction, and nods. I can see in her eyes: she’s been through a lot of crap, and this is just another day of it in a long string of bad days.
I can relate to that. I can respect it, too.
Below us is nothing but the southern ocean, and now it seems we’re falling into it. I can hear the pilots cursing to themselves in some languages I don’t understand. The water is dark, steel grey and edged with whitecaps—just the way oceans look in my dreams.
And then, without warning, the ship rolls over and we plunge into the middle of a storm of these fat, glowing bags of fluorescent water. Like big electric blimps, they’re suddenly all around us. They are everywhere in the sky now, great volumes of flashing light and water and air. They’re huge, each at least ten times the size of this old, tiny ship.
Kittiber fluvare,
right out of Sartosh’s old books. It’s freaking Gloaming Day, I think. And here I am to see it at last.
It's not at all like I thought it would be. It’s crazy how different your life goes from what you imagine as a kid. When I was looking at those books, for so many long hours while my aunt fumed in front of her hearth, I was always some great mage leading an army, the
fluvare
overhead, my enemies (the hunters, always the hunters) running from me.
Instead I’m broke. I’m starving. I’m stealing artifacts for some dead Earth gangster I met while I was drunk and wandering too long on the corpse roads, just to get by. I live in a dark hole in a dying city, and my friends are getting knifed over pieces of old fruit.
The podship sideswipes one of the
fluvare
, and sets off a jolt of electricity that crawls across the hull the ship. The hair all over my body stands on end. Josik looks like some strange red flower, with all that hair. Pirrosh’s two rows of teeth chatter so loud that I can hear them over the sounds of the ship.
The pilot curses again, and spits out the open hatch. She barks an order at the other guy, a thin man, wrapped in a mottled assortment of blankets and a pair of thick goggles so dark I think he’s probably blind, and he gets behind a big aethergun and fires off some blasts that open up a gap in the
fluvare.
But it also sets one of the creatures on fire, and it burns so fast it looks like it will blow.
The pilot hits a lever here, a dial there, and we drop like a rock through the gap. Sure enough, the fluvare goes up, a big ball of smoke and fire. Flaming jelly blows in every direction. Other
fluvare
start to burn, then, and I think Josik might have the right idea. Better not to watch. Better to pray to whatever you think is holy, if you're lucky enough to have something to believe in.
The pilot rolls the ship again to dodge the long tentacles. The gunner squeezes off some more bursts of energy to cut our way through. The sky is all on fire now. The pilot stomps on a foot pedal, throws three separate levers forward, and I hear the engines engage. My stomach drops, the metal bolts from the hull dig into my side, the goggled copilot howls like a dog, and Josik finally lets loose a cloud of pale vomit all over the cargo hold.
“I warned you guys it’d be rough! I was right, hey!” The pilot cackles back at us. She blows smoke into the air from a cheap, mech-rolled cigar that seems to be permanently adhered to the left side of her face. “Now this is fucking
flying
!”
I wipe the vomit off my face, blink to clear my eyes. Out through the scratched and dirty windscreen, through the flaming tentacles of the
fluvare
, I can see the black peaks of mountains rising up out of the sea.
We’re almost there.
The pilot accelerates. We’re squarely in the leiline now, and the ship has all the power it needs. “It’s going to be fast,” she yells back. “Get ready for your drop. Dead storm coming in from the north," she says. "No telling what direction it’s going to move in."
We skim in low over the mountains—there’s dirty snow still there, a herd of something that spooks and scatters—and then the black city of Tilhtinora opens up beneath us like a giant, rotting maw.
• • •
Tilhtinora, the dark city! I talk about it with earth humans, through the corpse roads, and they tell me stories about Atlantis, El Dorado, Camelot: these ancient cities that disappeared thousands of years ago that may or may not actually have existed, that may or may not have had advanced civilizations living in them, that just might hold ancient secrets or magical technology. If only they could be found.
I have to correct them. While there are some similarities, Tilhtinora is very real. We know exactly where it fell out of the sky. (It burned for a decade, so it got some attention.) We know roughly when it happened, about three hundred years ago, give or take a few years, during one of the worst parts of our world’s wars. (Kirythian years are a little longer, so I’m translating here for you earthers.) We know for a fact that the Tilhtinorans were in touch with many worlds through corpse roads that we no longer know how to reach, and we know there are a lot of artifacts deep in the broken towers and crumbling warehouses that are stronger, more powerful, and much more advanced than what we have now. (Our wars have really taken a toll on our science.)
And unlike some of the places that earth humans have rediscovered, say Pompeii or Troy or Ubar, Tilhtinora isn’t deserted. Now that the dead storms have cleared some, in the last six or seven years or so, we’re able to get some ships in and out. We know there are creatures in Tilhtinora that haven’t been catalogued on any of the known worlds, ones that that will rip you apart and eat out your organs for breakfast. (They’ll save your bones for later.) There are pools of residual energy that can detonate with the slightest shift in the wind, old wards that have gone erratic with the energy of the dying city, crazed mechs that will try to disassemble you for your spare parts, and intense dead storms that still whip through the ruins cutting through rock and concrete. There are these jagged dimensional rifts to strange worlds so far out into the aether it’d take years searching the corpse roads to get you back, if you fall in. Assuming someone cared enough to bother.