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‘Hmph. I had assumed that going all the way to Ede would keep my throat from being cut by scoundrels after my fortune, but look where that got me!’ he replied. ‘And to be accurate, they were not “whores”. They were Duke Goljar’s daughters. You would have found that out had you not knocked them senseless before proceeding to knife me.’ He pawed his neck.

  Nilith chuckled. ‘I couldn’t give a fuck. You could have surrounded yourself with an army and marched them past the edges of the maps, I would have still hunted you down. I’ve spent too long in your shadow, spent too long in that rancorous city. I long for change, Farazar, and your corpse is how I get it.’

  Farazar’s face fell into a bitter glower. His restraint was cracking. ‘The things you learn even after two decades of marriage, hmm? I thought taking a wife from outside the Arc was a safe bet. I never thought you had the stones for murder. Now I see your greed knows no bounds. Perhaps there is some Arctian in you after all,’ he hissed.

  That needled her. Nilith got to her feet, forgetting herself and her surroundings. ‘You prideful prick! You think it was for mere greed that I slew you? You’re a bigger fool than I thought!’

  As he too flew to standing, his face a snarl, she realised she had given him the reaction he had been digging for.

  ‘And you’re a filthy Krass peasant whose father couldn’t marry you off quick enough! And now you dare to claim me as your own? Good fucking luck! I’ll make every step of this journey a battle. I’ll wave at ever nomad and trader. Shout at the top of my lungs through every street. You’ll be lucky if you make it to the edges of the city alive! Whatever it demands of me, I will have my retribution for your crimes!’

  ‘Ha! You have so much faith in the people of the Arc and yet you forget what a murderous, cut-throat empire it is. Go ahead. Shout away! You think they’ll care for you? You’re not special. You’re a fresh ghost. They’ll have you bound in a blink! I’ve known you for twenty-two years. Every flaw and sin. You’re a man full of hate and spite and greed, but above all, you reek of pride. You could never be a ghost to some beetle farmer, and for that reason you’ll stay quiet as your corpse!’ Nilith patted her dagger in warning.

  His blue glow had taken on a darker hue, almost violet. ‘Then I’ll tear my body to pieces if I have to, or throw it in the nearest Nyxwell, coin or not. You will never bind me, Nilith, I promise you that. None shall! I’ll either be free, laughing from the afterlife, or in the void before I let you stand on my corpse and claim what is mine!’

  Nilith’s answer never made it from her lips. An arrow sliced against the back of her calf before burrowing into the sand. She half-fell, half-threw herself to the grit as another shaft buzzed through the air, clipping a rock. She stared down at the black fletching and the blood staining it.

  Farazar immediately forgot his rage and curled up in a tight ball, flinching with every clatter of arrows. He was safe; they weren’t copper-tipped. It appeared their attackers had no desire to harm their prize.

  Anoish, tied to a rock further up the hill, had started to buck and whinny. Nilith stole a glance down the slope. In the starlight she saw three familiar shapes flowing over the scree and boulders. Two loosed their bows while the other climbed, who then took his turn to shoot as the others overtook him. It was clever work; she had no pause in which to flee.

  Nilith grasped for her dagger and shuffled her feet, ready to spring. She didn’t have to wait long.

  The first figure bounded into the hollow, yellow tails of cloth streaming like banners. It was a man, judging by his stature, holding a curved sword high above his swaddled head. The ash-grey quills protruding from the cloth rattled as his gaze switched between the ghost and herself, crouching on the floor.

  He paused too long. Nilith pounced, throwing her weight into his chest despite the searing pain in her calf. She rode him to the ground, hearing the crunch of his spiny head against the rock. Her dagger passed across his throat, drawing an arc of blood in the air. She snatched his bow from his shoulders, nocked an arrow, and as the second man burst into view, she let it fly. His neck snapped back, arrow planted firmly in his forehead and raised like a flagpole. He teetered for a moment before disappearing into the darkness.

  Once the echoes of his tumble across the scree had died, silence fell across the hillside. Nilith’s last foe was hiding somewhere below, waiting her out. The next arrow quivered in her shaking hands.

  ‘Get up,’ she hissed to Farazar, still curled up nearby.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Stand up and start walking! They’re not copper-tipped, you idiot!’ She glared at him, but he refused to move. She heard the crackle of pebbles below her.

  ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your existence shackled to some goatherd? Move, Farazar!’

  The ghost wrenched himself up and marched across the hollow. An arrow hissed through him, making him yelp. It clattered on the stone beside him.

  Nilith wrenched herself up and sent her arrow into the night. It was a messy shot, catching the man in the thigh. He began to hobble away, but she was already marching awkwardly down the scree, dripping dagger in hand. It was a wretched sort of race: both limping and lame, where the only prize was not dying.

  The man took a stance on flatter ground, wrappings heaving around his mouth with each laboured breath. His crescent sword was out and shining. She beckoned with her copper dagger, and he cursed in a tongue she had never heard before.

  With great windmilling swings, he advanced. Nilith weaved with them as she hobbled backwards. Her timing needed to be perfect. There was no fancy blade work to be done here, no flourishes or parries. Her copper blade would be cloven in two if she tried to block the thick steel.

  He let loose his war cry, but it withered almost immediately as Nilith kicked at the arrow still protruding from his thigh. There was a snap and a screech, and it gave her time enough to drive her dagger under his blade and up into his belly. She stared into his dark brown eyes as she held the weapon in place. They rolled up to the whites as the life drained from him, his quills wilting with his strength. The words lingered on her lips, unsaid until it was too late.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  As she let the body drop to the gravel, the pain caught up with her. One leg was aflame, and the accompanying boot felt hot and wet with blood. With much cursing of her own, she made her way back up the hillside, a new scimitar balanced on her shoulder.

  Farazar was waiting with slack arms. His eyes were wider than when the arrows had been flying over his head. It was to be expected; in all their years of marriage, he had never seen her brandish a sword.

  ‘Some more to say, husband?’ she asked, seeking something to sit on after she gathered up the stray arrows. ‘Feel like waving at nomads now? Shouting to the night?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, watching her pour the blood out of her boot.

  Nilith caught his expression, and despite the throbbing pain and the gaping laceration across her calf muscle, she had to chuckle.

  ‘You must be losing your memory now that you’re dead, husband. You call me Krass as an insult and yet you forget what that means to me. Our mothers don’t push when we’re ready to meet the world. We have to claw our way out, and so we’re born fighting. You call me peasant, but you forget my life before Araxes was spent in Saraka’s training yards and hunting in pine forests. You have forgotten who I am, and in doing so, you have underestimated me, and that was a dire mistake. You wanted a lesson, husband, and there it is. So please, threaten me some more. We’ll see how little of you makes it to the city.’

  The ping of her nail against the scimitar’s steel edge punctuated her threat. As Farazar held her stare, she saw the realisation dawn behind those white eyes. Not only how deadly she was, but just how determined she was, too.

  Lip curled, Farazar looked away, seeking something in the stars. ‘And you wonder why I didn’t want to marry a Krasswoman,’ he muttered.

  Chapter 5

  The Soulmarket

  At current cou
nt, not including the Outsprawls, Araxes is comprised of three thousand and forty-six districts. Altogether they contain an estimated four million constant inhabitants, both alive and dead.

  Araxes City Charter, Arctian year of 1003

  They came to fetch us at the crack of dawn. Men with robes and gloves of copper thread.

  They called us out one by one, shouting our ghost names. I ignored mine until they were forced to come and grab me. A heavy rope was looped about our necks and something in its fibres itched me. When it was tightened, it pressed hard against my vapours, as if they were as firm as flesh again. It must have had a copper core.

  Boss Temsa and his soulstealers had been busy. There were twenty of us now, the product of two nights of hunting. Some hadn’t been dead more than two hours, still wild of eye and faint of vapour. They flashed me desperate looks, but I ignored them. My brief time in the cage had hardened me to any plight but my own.

  Temsa was waiting in a domed hall beside two covered wagons. A wide, half-open door revealed a street and sunlight. He was leaning on his cane, his leer framed by his dark beard, freshly oiled and combed. His entire outfit was a deep sea blue, trimmed with gold and silver chains. Copper rings claimed every other finger. His cane was an elongated shard of obsidian. Coloured dust had been dabbed around his eyes and their wrinkles. Jexebel stood at his side with a broad-headed axe in her hand, and behind her loitered a gaggle of black-clad sellswords.

  ‘Load them up,’ Temsa ordered, thumping a wagon’s wheel before addressing us. ‘You’d better be on your best behaviour at market, you hear? Buyers pay good silver for obedience and mild manners in a half-life. Perfect temperament for a house-shade. Play the fool, and you might find yourself heading north to work in the docks or factories!’

  The collective groan from my fellow ghosts was audible.

  ‘Jexebel!’ Temsa hollered. ‘Get the butchered ones up front and get them some shade-dust. The sun’s doing us no favours today.’

  I was one of six picked out of the line. One had a sword-cut so deep into his collarbone that his head looked fit to topple. Another’s guts peeked from a slash across his belly, all frozen in the moment of death. Kech was there too, with his glowing talon marks. He gave me the usual hateful and accusing glare, and I mouthed a polite suggestion to go fornicate with himself. It was his fault I was here. The second day in the cage, he’d tried to throttle me. All I’d felt was a cold waft of air at my torn throat and much amusement.

  The robed men came at me with clay dishes of crushed blue powder. They flicked pinches of it over my neck and stomach, trying their hardest not to touch me. The dust stuck to my wounds, even swirling with the slow movement of my vapours. The white scars dimmed somewhat, but did not disappear.

  I looked down at Temsa as he wandered close to inspect me. ‘You won’t get away with this.’

  It was clear he’d heard these sorts of complaints countless times before. ‘And so you have yelled for almost two days now. Tell me again how you have business in the Cloudpiercer! Of the injustice! The horror! Fear not, shade. It will sink in soon enough. That, or your new master will beat it into you.’

  I muttered something foul.

  Temsa wasn’t satisfied with me. He waggled the sharp metal tip of his cane in my face. ‘You curse like that at the soulmarket, shade, and I’ll have you put through a copper mangle. You think pain’s only for the living? Just you wait and see what death can hold.’

  That put a good measure of fear in me, so I held my tongue and let Temsa’s workers haul me away. We filled the interior of the wagons with our glow: ten ghosts and a guard apiece. With a whip-crack, we juddered out into the dawning daylight.

  All I’d seen of Araxes at this point was a few alleys, the sharp end of a knife and a dingy cage. I craned my neck to see the grand spires above me. It was almost as if I needed to prove, once and for all, that this wasn’t a nightmare, nor some devilish dream.

  But there they were: the mighty towers of Araxes. Sandstone, marble and imported granite occupied half the sky. Some coiling and needle-pointed, others wider and pyramidal. There seemed to be an unspoken challenge between the buildings of the City of Countless Souls; every one of them competed to touch the sun. They stretched into the brightening sky, gleaming yellow on one side while their western flanks took on a colourless shadow. The beauty was far from lost on me.

  Like a mountain range thrust up by some churning of nature, Araxes was not only mighty in its peaks, but in its foothills, too. Even at street level, buildings clambered atop one another. Houses and minor towers rose above in twisted shapes or clung like molluscs to older structures. Whitewash and adobe glowed pink and orange in the morning light. Ropes and cranes poked from every other rooftop. Billowing flocks of pigeons and starlings raced each other between pennants and spires.

  Above that, the rich held sway. The towers cast their long shadows over the streets. Spiderwebs of lofty roads and bridges spread between them, leading to the core of the city. There the buildings formed a crown about the mighty Cloudpiercer, staggering even at that distance. No other tower reached more than half its height. It dominated all.

  When I grew bored of the heavens, my gaze turned back to the gutters. I saw then how Araxes had earned its name. I watched the multitudes of ghosts flowing through the streets, swelling at every junction like tributaries of a gargantuan river. The living were flotsam amongst their numbers. Traders, citizens, beggars and travellers far luckier than I, all beginning their days by jostling with the dead. It was a gruesome sight, and a far cry from the streets of Krass cities, like noble Taymar or the capital Saraka, where the dead merely peppered the cobbles instead of infesting them. Then again, in Krass, we did not measure wealth by the number of souls one owned, but in good old-fashioned silver.

  I found myself wanting to see more of the living, and I searched for them among the glowing crowds. Copper and steel-clad knights took their places in guard-boxes, or on corners where headless statues of dead gods gathered sand. Bakers and smiths stoked their street-side fires. Shops and teahouses flung open their doors to set out cushions in the dust. Pipe and card-dens were already summoning a haze about their doorways. Some old bugger with a white beard wrapped around his head like a turban sat in a doorway, wailing away on some curly kind of flute. A yellow rat danced before him.

  Here and there a wagon or cart would force its way through the crowds, led by stout horses or enormous insects. We saw few of the latter in my country. I stared at the beetles and their tree-like horns of deep emerald and black, the hairy spiders creaking as they took their ponderous paces, and the centipedes in their long traces. Every now and again one reared up, spiny legs flailing as they hissed at something in their way. Whips would crack, and they came back to the earth with a bang. The armoured plates along their backs rippled as they moved along, their legs undulating like waves approaching a shore.

  I’d heard tales of the Arctian fondness for the large desert insects. We Krass trusted in smarter beasts: horses, ponies, goats, even wolves. There was more intelligence behind their eyes, instead of the black, deadpan gaze of a beetle. To me, it seemed the insects were constantly deciding whether to eat you or not. It was certainly true of their wilder cousins; the ones that roamed the deserts and gobbled up unwary travellers. Dunewyrms, they called them, giant creatures that had a frightful habit of hiding in dunes and luring in prey with a glowing tentacle.

  A puff of coloured smoke distracted me, and my attention was drawn to a seemingly endless row of street kitchens. Simple coals and grates smoked in doorways or under dangerously low-slung tarpaulins. On those black and dripping grills I saw chunks of meat on skewers, quarters of chicken and waterfowl marinated in lurid red and yellow pastes. Haunches of what I suspected to be beetle meat roasted in beds of hot coals. Glass jars of rainbow-coloured juices lay on slanted tables, surrounded by their associated fruits and vegetables. I didn’t recognise half of them.

  Besides the intoxication of cracking locks and pin
ching other people’s things, I am a man of simple tastes: fresh air, another body in my bed, and as my ample belly would suggest, beer and food. On the accursed Kipper, I had salivated over the idea of filling myself with western food. I had thought long and hard about the waves of heady spices and sugars Arctian cuisine was famed for. I sniffed, but found nothing but icy air in my nostrils. I snorted long and hard until the guard glowered, but the world stayed bland. My sense of smell was non-existent. Another insult for the pile. Strange, how one longs for something only after it is taken away. At that moment, I would have buried my face in a sun-baked gutter, just so I could smell again.

  The wagons came to a halt in a wide square lined by old brick towers and overshadowed by awnings of bright crimson. Temsa clacked his cane on the bench-backs, ordering us ghosts up and out. I could already see sweat on his forehead. I imagined the air was growing hotter by the minute, but all I felt was cold.

  We ghosts were poked into a smart line of height order, and I took the chance to look around the soulmarket, where thin groups of finely-dressed buyers hovered around clusters of stalls; merchants, eager to provide some distraction while the wares arrived. I could see sizzling pans for those who hadn’t yet broken their fast, and all manner of ghost-related paraphernalia for the buyers. Whips and switches, shackles and gags, all of them gleaming copper.

  Behind us was a squat wooden platform, standing about three feet high. A ring of gold rope had been stretched around poles on every corner. Packs of men and women wearing white silk cloaks stood about it with scrolls in hand and bags under their wrinkled eyes. They seemed official enough, and the fact that this wasn’t some cellar-room soul sale but a legitimate and sanctioned soulmarket was actually more disturbing. The Arctians seemed to approach death and slavery with fewer questions than a drunk being offered another glug of palmshine. Had I not already felt deathly cold, I would have shivered, and only the fear of being thrown into a factory kept me from cursing them all at the top of my voice.