Published at 29th of December 2023 10:38 am

Prologue

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Kai stood before the old-stone, a single rough block set upright in the days when men knew nothing but wood and rock and hunting. Or perhaps they knew more than that, for they had set the old-stone in a place of seeing. A point where veils thinned and lifted and secrets might be learned or told. A place where the heavens stood a little lower, such that the sky-sworn might touch them more easily.

The local men called the promontory ‘the Finger’, which Kai supposed was apt if dull. And if it were a finger then the old-stone stood on the knuckle. Here the finger lay sixty yards across and at the edges fell a similar distance to meet the marsh in a series of steep and rocky steps.

Kai took a deep breath and let the cold air fill his lungs, let the dampness infect him, slowed his heart, and listened for the high, sad voice of the old-stone, less of a sound than a memory of sound. His vision lifted from him with just a whisper of pain. The point of Kai’s perception vaulted skyward, leaving his flesh beside the monolith. He watched now from a bright valley between two tumbling banks of cloud, watched himself as a dot upon the Finger, and the promontory itself a mere sliver of land reaching out into the vastness of the Reed Sea. At this distance the River Rill became a ribbon of silver running to the Lake of Glass.

Kai flew higher. The ground fell away, growing more abstract with each beat of his mind-born wings. The mists swirled, and the clouds held him again in their cool embrace.

Is this what death is like? A cold whiteness, for ever and ever amen?

Kai resisted the cloud’s pull and found the sun again. The sky-sworn could so easily lose themselves in the vastness of the heavens. Many did, leaving flesh to die and haunting the empty spaces above. A core of selfishness bound Kai to his existence. He knew himself well enough to admit that. An old strand of greed, an inability to let go. Failings of a kind perhaps, but here an asset that would keep him whole.

He flew above the soft brilliance of the clouds, weaving his path amongst their turrets and towers. A seris broke the pillowed alabaster, ghost-faint even to the eye of Kai’s mind, its sinuous form plunging in and out of sight, a hundred feet long and thicker than a man. Kai called to it. The cloud-snake coiled on itself; describing lazy circles as it drew ever closer.

‘Old friend.’ Kai hailed it. As many as a hundred seris swarmed amid the thunderheads when the land-breaker storms came, but each seris knew what every seris knew, so to Kai’s mind there was only one. Perhaps the seris were remnants of sky-sworn who had forgotten themselves, forgotten all that they were to dance among the clouds. Or maybe they had always been, requiring no birth and knowing no death.

The seris fixed Kai with the cold blue glow of its eye-pits. He felt the chill of its mind-touch, slow and curious. ‘Still the woman?’

‘Always the woman.’ Kai watched the light on the clouds. Architectural clouds, just ready for God’s hand to shape, ready to be cathedrals, towers, monsters … It amused him that the seris thought he always brought the same girl to the Finger.

Maybe seris think there’s just one man, one woman, and lots of bodies.

The seris moved around Kai in a corkscrew, as if he were there in person, cocooning him in its coils. ‘You would have one shadow?’

Kai smiled. The seris thought of human love as clouds coming together, sometimes brushing one to another, sometimes building to a storm, sometimes lost one in the other – casting one shadow.

‘Yes, to have one shadow.’ Kai surprised himself with the heat in his voice. He wanted what the seris had. Not just a roll in the heather. Not this time.

‘Make it.’ The voice of the seris spoke beneath his skin, though he had left that far below.

‘Make it happen? It isn’t that easy.’

‘You do not want?’ The seris rippled. Kai knew it for laughter.

‘Oh, I want.’ She just has to walk in the room and I’m on fire. The scent of her! I close my eyes and I’m in the Gardens of Bethda.

‘A storm comes.’ Sorrow tinged the seris’s voice.

Kai puzzled. He’d seen no sign of a storm brewing.

‘They rise,’ the seris said.

‘The dead?’ Kai asked, the old fear creeping over him.

‘Worse.’ One word, too much meaning.

‘Lichkin?’ Kai stared, he could see nothing. Lichkin only come in the dark.

‘They rise,’ the seris said.

‘How many?’ Don’t let it be all seven! Please.

‘Many. Like the rain.’ The seris left. The mist from which it wove its body drifted formless. Kai had never seen a seris fall apart like that. ‘Make one shadow.’ The voice hung in the air.

Kai’s vision arrowed toward the ground. He dived for the Finger. Sula stood at the fingertip, on the very edge, a white dot, growing swiftly. Sight slammed into body, hard enough to make him fall to his knees. He scrambled up, disoriented for a moment, then tore off toward Sula. He reached her in less than a minute, and bent double before her, heaving in his breath.

‘You were a long time.’ Sula turned at his approach. ‘I thought you’d forgotten about me, Kai Summerson.’

‘Forgive me, my lady?’ he gasped, and grinned, her beauty pushing away his panic. It seemed silly now. From on high he’d seen nothing to worry him.

Sula’s pout became smile, the sun reached down to light her face, and for a moment Kai forgot about the seris’s warning. Lichkin travel at night. He took her hands and she came to him. She smelled of flowers. The softness of her breasts against his chest made his heart skip. For a moment he could see only her eyes and lips. The fingers of one hand locked with hers, the other ran along her throat, feeling the pulsing heat of her.

‘You shouldn’t stand so close to the edge,’ he said, though she stole his breath. Just a yard behind her the tip of the Finger crumbled away into two hundred feet of cliffs, stepping sharply down into the surrounding marsh.

‘You sound like Daddy.’ Sula cocked her head and leaned into him. ‘You know, he even told me not to go with you today? That Kai Summerson is low-born trash, he said. He wanted me to stay cooped up in Morltown while he did his business deals.’

‘What?’ Kai let go of Sula’s hands. ‘You said he agreed.’

Sula giggled and put on a gruff voice. ‘I’ll not have my daughter gallivanting with a Guardian captain!’ She laughed and returned to her normal tones. ‘Did you know, he thinks you have a “reputation”?’

Kai did have a reputation, and a man like Merik Wineland could make things very difficult for him.

‘Look, Sula, we’d better go. There may be trouble coming.’

The tight little lines of a frown marred Sula’s perfect brow. ‘Trouble coming?’

‘I had an ulterior motive for bringing you here,’ Kai said.

Sula grinned where other girls might blush.

‘Not that,’ Kai said. ‘Well, that too, but I was scheduled to check the area. Observe the marsh.’

‘I’ve been watching from the cliff while you were gone. There’s nothing down there!’ Sula turned from him and gestured to the green infinity of the mire. Then she saw it. ‘What’s that?’

Across the Reed Sea a mist was rising. It ran in white streams, spreading from the east, blood-tinged by the setting sun.

‘They’re coming.’ Kai struggled to speak. He found his voice and tried a confident smile. It felt like a grimace. ‘Sula, we have to move fast. I need to report to Fort Aral. I’ll get you over the Mextens and leave you at Redrocks. You’ll be safe there. A wagon will get you to Morltown.’

The darts flew with a noise like somebody blowing out candles, a series of short sudden breaths. Three clustered just below Sula’s right armpit. Three thin black darts, stark against the whiteness of her dress. Kai felt the sting in his neck, like the bite of horseflies.

The mire ghouls swarmed over the tip of the Finger, grey and spider-like, swift and silent. Kai ripped his short sword from its scabbard. It felt heavier than lead. The numbness was in his fingers already and the sword fell from his clumsy grasp.

A storm’s coming.

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