Crowded with reptilian corpses. Rotting, reeking, in pools of thick ichor and rank blood. Twenty, perhaps more.

K’Chain Che’Malle. The makers of this city.

Each one throat-cut. Executed like goats on an altar.

Beyond them, a spiralling ramp climbed steeply upward. No one said a thing as they picked careful, independent paths through the slaughter. Taxilian in the lead, they began the ascent.

The ghost watched as Breath paused to bend down and run a finger through decaying blood. She slipped that finger into her mouth, and smiled.

Book Two

Book Two

Eaters of
Diamonds
and Gems

I heard a story
Of a river
Which is where water flows over the ground
   glistening in the sun
It’s a legend
And untrue
In the story the water is clear and that’s
   why it’s untrue
We all know
Water Is the colour
Of blood
People make up legends
To teach lessons
So I think The story is about us
About a river of blood
And one day
We’ll run clear

OF A RIVER
BADALLE

Chapter Seven

The horrid creatures jostle in their line
A row of shields and a row of painted faces
They marched out of my mouth
As slayers are wont to do
When no one was looking busy as they were
With their precious banners and standards
And with the music of stepping in time As the righteous are wont to do
Now see all these shiny weapons so eager
To clash in the discord of stunned agreement
Blind as millipedes in the mud
As between lovers words may do
In the murky depths swans slip like seals
Scaling the ice walls of cold’s prison
All we dream is without tether

CONFESSIONS OF THE CONDEMNED
BANATHOS OF BLUEROSE

T

he errant walked the flooded tunnel, remembering the bodies that had once drifted there, shifting like logs, flesh turning to jelly. Now on occasion, in pushing a foot forward, he kicked aside unseen bones. Darkness promised no solitude, no true abandonment, no final resting place. Darkness was nothing more than a home for the forgotten. Which was why sarcophagi had lids and crypts were sealed under stone and barrows beneath heaped earth. Darkness was the vision behind shuttered eyes, little more than the dismissal of light when details ceased to be relevant.

He could find such a world. All he needed to do was close his one remaining eye. It should work. He did not understand why it didn’t. The water, bitter cold, lapped round his thighs. He welcomed its gift of numbness. The air was foul, but he was used to that. There should be nothing to hold him here, chaining him to this moment.

Events were unfolding, so many events, and not all of them shifting to his touch, twisting to his will. Anger was giving way to fear. He had sought out the altar Feather Witch had consecrated in his name. He had expected to find her soul, her fleshless will curling in sinew currents round the submerged rubble, but there had been nothing, no one. Where had she gone?