Grim Solace (The Chasing Graves Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  ‘Bezel,’ Nilith said, drawing a stare from the bird. ‘How long has Sisine been your master?’

  ‘Seven years, I’ve belonged to your daughter.’ His reply was a mutter.

  ‘You didn’t mention how she came by you.’ Nilith’s conversations with the falcon had been scant. The threat of the Ghouls meant they hadn’t even got down to bargaining.

  ‘That northern tit, Prince Phylar. He was my master before Sisine. The idiot never figured out how to use the silver bell I’m bound to. Instead he gave it as a gift when he came to court your daughter. Remember that?’

  Nilith did. She also remembered not having any choice in the matter. Farazar’s idea, as usual.

  ‘Sisine figured it out fucking quick-like. Summoned me up and put me to work spying on you two, or sereks and tals, paying me with whatever joys are left to a strangebound. Food. Wine. Fucking. Freedom to roam. She never told a soul about me.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me one bit. She’s always been secretive. She barely talks to me, and whenever she does her words are full of spite, contempt, blame, or all bloody three. You know, in the last year I’ve perhaps traded a dozen sentences with her. She’s avoided me ever since Farazar locked his vault.’

  Twenty-two years, and the closest they’d ever been was the day Nilith birthed her. Farazar, the tutors, and – before their banishment and death – Farazar’s parents had all tried their hardest to turn Sisine into the perfect Arctian princess. It had worked, and now she had come of age she was scheming like the best of the family line, hungry for her father’s throne.

  ‘Does it worry you, leaving her behind? Alone?’ asked the falcon, shuffling his wings.

  ‘It should,’ hissed Farazar, eavesdropping as always.

  Nilith nodded. She had spent more than a few sleepless nights worrying about what her absence and her daughter’s ambition could mean. The Ghouls had distracted her, but with the arrival of the falcon, those worries had slid back into her mind like smoke seeping under a bedroom door. At the very least, as long as Nilith held the body of Farazar, Sisine was limited in her ability to wreak havoc.

  Bezel clacked his beak. ‘Seeing as it’s fucking question time, here’s one I’ve been itching to ask.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Bezel cast a look at the ghost. ‘How’d you catch him? How’d you track him down?’

  Nilith chuckled softly. ‘Well, falcon, I’ll tell you. But first, tell me what you want in return for your help. Why are you here?’

  The bird cleared his throat haughtily. ‘Not yet,’ he said, and the conversation was shattered as he launched himself into the sky with a throbbing of wingbeats. A keening wail chased his path to the strip of blue above them.

  Nilith watched him, feeling that jealousy once more. She wished he was a gryphon, strong enough to carry her and Farazar’s corpse all the way to the Grand Nyxwell before it was too late. Without the thud of hooves beneath her and reins to control, she was at the mercy of the Ashti’s flow. She could not control it any more than she could the tangible passing of time, and together they conspired to make her continually anxious. It felt as if she stood in a gigantic hourglass, with the minutes hammering down on her head.

  Fortunately for her, the Ashti no longer languished as it had. The river was starting to gather speed. Their path was becoming narrower in places, pinching the river and making it run faster.

  Nilith shuffled to Anoish, who had taken to sleeping through the pain of his deep arrow wound. The shaft had been snapped and the arrowhead dug out of his back leg with much thrashing and whinnying. Nilith had been kicked halfway across the barge more than once, almost cracking several ribs, but the grisly business had been completed. A heavy poultice of herbs and oil, fashioned from food scraps Ghyrab kept on his vessel, was now tied about the leg. It looked like a crest of stuffing perched on an undercooked haunch of meat. She wished she had a spare ghost and some Nyxwater instead, like in Abatwe. Her own wounds were now almost healed, and somehow that made her feel guilty.

  The horse was in a blue mood. His tongue poked out between his grey lips from the heat. His eyes were two dark orbs of sadness that followed Nilith as she pottered about him. She poked, she checked, she whispered nothings in his flat and dejected ears. He thumped a hoof in reply, but that was all she got from him besides the staring. Nilith sighed and found a spot on the deck near his head, where the flat hull nosed the water.

  When she could bring herself to watch the flow, she saw a shadowy brown bottom beneath the diamond-clear waters, strewn with boulders the size of carriages and slick with opportunistic algae. The rocks looked uncomfortably close, but Nilith knew water could play tricks with light. She scooped up a handful to wash her face, and found it cold enough to make her gasp.

  The sky and sun gave the water the colour and sparkle of lapis lazuli. The further ahead she looked, the more of the sky’s colour the river stole. Where the canyon walls overshadowed the waters, they were a mirror to the red rock.

  An hour, maybe more, Nilith sat there, growing attuned to the bobbing of the barge. It took time to reason with fear, especially the irrational kind. Logic was of little use. It took real proof: the sort that eyes could witness, not the sort the mind could conjure. The longer the barge stayed afloat and proved itself to her, the weaker the knot in her stomach became, the calmer the throb of her heart.

  It was short-lived.

  ‘Rapids!’ Bezel screeched, swooping between two knuckles of rock that almost touched overhead. The word stabbed Nilith in the gut.

  ‘What?’

  Farazar chuckled snidely. ‘Afraid of the water, wife?’

  ‘Shut your face, ghost.’

  Ghyrab scoffed at their wide eyes, like a father to a bothersome child. ‘Ain’t rapids, bird. Just eddies.’

  ‘Who’s Eddy?’ Farazar asked.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Nilith asked of Ghyrab.

  The bargeman snorted back some phlegm as a response, but he still wrapped his arm around the tiller. That was cause enough for Nilith to squat down in her usual spot at the centre of the barge. She just wished the craft wasn’t so flat. She could feel the ripples slapping at the wood beneath her fingers. The river felt as though it was speeding up, and the approaching rumble of rushing water filled her ears. Once more, she envied Bezel, soaring above like an ambivalent balloon.

  ‘Eddies.’ The word was too soft for the way the water churned against the rocks, or gathered in spinning whirlpools in the hollows of the canyon walls. Nilith eyed their watery mouths, funnelling down into darker waters. She found a new and chilling fear in them. She didn’t want to imagine what it was like to tumble into such a thing. Ahead of them, she saw a faint curtain of spray obscuring tall, dark shadows. Rainbows filled the air, but their beauty did nothing to assuage her fear.

  ‘Ghyrab?’ she cried.

  ‘Trust me!’ he yelled over the hiss and roil.

  Nilith pressed her cheek to the jittering deck as if it was another hand she could hold on with. Through half-closed eyes, she watched a tall spur of rock sail past the barge. Its cold shadow fell across her.

  ‘Ghyrab!’

  ‘They’re just the Fangs. Don’t worry!’

  A morbid curiosity betrayed her. Before burying her head, Nilith glimpsed three more ugly spines of rock in the barge’s path. ‘Don’t worry? Really?’ she yelled into the deck.

  Under Ghyrab’s expert tutelage, their craft twisted this way and that through the whirlpools and eddies. Nilith finally understood why they called these craft “barges”. Using his oar-like tiller, he threw his vessel into every bank and swell of water, shoving them aside with enough momentum to weave around the sharp rocks.

  Nilith felt the turmoil beneath the deck calm as soon as the last shadow passed over. The fear faded quickly. She had managed to hold her breath for the entire duration of the rapids, and only now did she exhale. A peek showed her the canyon walls were retreating, like the sound of the churning water. Instead, she heard the hiss and
snap of reeds meeting the bow. She saw them poking over the bulwarks, dappled green and yellow in the slanted sun.

  A polite cough from Ghyrab brought her to her feet. He held her eyes, his chin high and confident, and she gave him a curtsey. ‘I was wrong to doubt you.’

  The bargeman hummed. ‘Many are. You aren’t the first. Won’t be the last.’

  Nilith’s gaze followed the edge of a skinny teardrop lake. It was like the bulge of a swallowed rat making its way through this snake of a river. Fields of reeds hugged the lake’s edges, pink-edged lily and lotus flowers blossoming amongst their stalks. They were giant, and spun like wagon wheels in the barge’s wake. The stickled backs of small albino crocodiles lurked between their green, platter-like pads. Ibises stood guard in the shallows on legs as long as broom handles. They moved so infrequently Nilith fancied them sculptures until she saw one bend and stab the water in a blur of white feathers and catch a wriggling fish.

  Nilith raised her face and arms to the last of the day’s sun, breathing in the perfume of the lake flowers. It was a rare moment of bliss, despite Farazar’s insistence on pacing about the barge.

  ‘No sign of your friend Krona,’ called the falcon, his voice a whistle on the wind. He circled the lake once to make sure there were no marauders in sight before landing on the barge. ‘Just a herd of goats, a village, some more salt flats, and maybe a wild camel or two.’

  Nilith didn’t doubt him. Bezel’s golden orbs could probably spy a mouse at fifty miles.

  ‘I don’t like being in the open,’ Farazar was mumbling.

  ‘We’ll be out of it soon enough. Then we’ll pass through Kal Duat,’ said Ghyrab.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Hell… Majesty.’ Ghyrab cleared his throat, probably unused to his passengers having such titles. The concept of royalty seemed somewhat loose out here on the fringes. The reach of the emperor extended into the wilderness only so far. His name counted for little outside the Sprawls. ‘The White Hell. I would’ve thought you types would be aware of such a place. Isn’t this your country?’

  Nilith had never heard of it. Her gut wrenched. ‘More rapids?’

  The bargeman smiled. ‘No, madam. You’ll see.’

  ‘Bezel…’ she began to say, but stopped at seeing the bargeman’s smile die, quickly and ruthlessly.

  ‘Still don’t trust me?’ Ghyrab challenged her.

  ‘I… Fine. Bezel, stay on the barge.’

  The falcon shrugged his wings. ‘All right. But if this ugly bunch of planks starts going under, I’m fucking off sharpish.’

  Even though Nilith’s breeding afforded her little respect, Bezel spoke to her as if she were a chamber-shade. It had caused her hackles to rise at first, but it was refreshing and welcome. There was no ceremony in him, no fawning, no senseless drivel courtiers were so fond of. Just truth and sense.

  She gave him a mock scowl. ‘See? We trust you, Ghyrab.’

  ‘Hmph.’

  The bargeman said no more. Nilith moved to his side, sharing the job of the tiller with him as he guided the barge back into narrower waters, scattering the white crocodiles. Her teeth pulled at her bottom lip. Her heart still hadn’t calmed from the slalom through the Fangs.

  Back in a corridor of red rock, the sun had fallen too far to give them much light. After the lake, the shadows fell heavy and cold. Anoish whinnied ominously. Animals had a sense for danger, be it storms or approaching swords.

  Even with the lack of sun, Nilith found that same old sweat creeping down her brow. She looked to Ghyrab and found him lazy and slouched, eyes half closed. Not a bother in the world. She found a scrap of comfort in the old man’s posture and tried to adopt something similar. Leaning against the bulwark, she focused on her heart, trying to drown its hurried beats in the burble of water. Despite its capacity to drown, flood, and otherwise inconvenience her, Nilith had to admit there was something calming about a river’s song. It even put a stop to the ghost’s infernal pacing. Farazar took up a stand in the centre of the barge instead.

  This stretch of the Ashti had a deeper tone. At first Nilith thought it an echo of the rock, but with every twist in the route, the louder it became. Even when the strip of sky widened and the canyon walls became stunted, the noise overpowered the river.

  Nilith shot a look at the bargeman beside her, all sorts of words for crushing amounts of water running through her mind. He just sucked his teeth.

  ‘You said no more rapids,’ she ventured.

  ‘That’s right. I did.’

  Farazar turned. ‘A waterfall, then?’

  The question gave Ghyrab cause to snort. ‘Oh, no. Not a waterfall. That sound you’re hearing is hammers of a big ole limestone mine, almost a hundred years old and still churning. They say the place has eaten more souls than it has hours and stone. That’s the Kal Duat. The White Hell. You royals really ain’t heard of it?’ He looked between the ghost and Nilith, apparently surprised.

  ‘The Arctian Empire is a vast domain, my good man,’ Farazar explained through a sigh. ‘The largest in the Reaches.’

  ‘And don’t you ever wonder where all the white stone for your fancy towers comes from?’

  ‘From the Chamber of the Grand Builder or the Chamber of Trade, of course.’

  The bargeman had an imperious look on his face. ‘And where do they get it from, hmm? Tsk.’

  Farazar blustered. ‘Did you just tut at me, peasa—’

  Nilith silenced both of them with a stamp of her foot. ‘What Farazar means to say is that’s what the Grand Builder is for. Royals are not directly involved with the dealings of the traders and architects. Especially the emperor.’

  ‘More important things to do,’ muttered the ghost.

  Ghyrab nodded. ‘Like making merry in your famous vault and making war? Well, Majesty, you’ll soon see what happens when you don’t pay attention to a kingdom.’ His words made Farazar seek out a corner of the barge, and Nilith grin rather widely. She couldn’t have put it better if she tried.

  For an hour, the hammering grew from a hum to a roar. It could almost be classed as thunder by the time she saw a fat gatehouse stretching over the river. She reached for the trident that leaned next to the tiller and held it like a staff.

  Armoured planks and bars formed a heavy gate that blocked their way. A swathe of green slime besieged the sun-bleached wood. It had already conquered half the wall and looked intent on claiming the rest sometime over the next decade. Twisted black spikes adorned the jagged battlements. Between them, black shapes stood against the dimming sky, flat, wide-brimmed hats on their heads and triggerbows in their hands.

  Bezel clacked his beak at the sight of their bows. ‘Yeah… I’ll see you folks on the other side of this place. You can tell me the story later.’ With that, he burst into the sky, becoming nothing but a wheeling fleck.

  ‘Leave this to me.’ Ghyrab thrust the tiller into Nilith’s spare hand. He strode for the bow and used a pole to stop the barge from butting the gates.

  ‘Stop there!’ yelled one of the figures.

  Nilith peered upwards, just about understanding his thick desert dialect. On the flat barge, under shrewd eyes, she felt like a delicacy on a platter being served up for dinner.

  The voice hollered again, this time accompanied by a dark face with big ears and a sprout of hair. Nilith heard the cautionary creak of bowstrings and wished once more for a vessel with a roof.

  ‘Announce yourself! Business, passage or bandit?’

  Ghyrab banged the pole against the gate. ‘It’s me, Thaph! You know it’s me. Twice a year I come through, and every time you ask! And why would a bandit tell you he’s a bandit?’

  ‘Bandits are stupid. Might trick ’em,’ suggested another voice from behind the parapet. It was barely audible over the hammering of the quarry. Nilith could smell acrid tar and rot on the air.

  ‘Orders is orders.’ Thaph banged a palm against the wood. ‘Business or passage, Ghyrab?’

  ‘Passage, curse it!’<
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  ‘Your name?’

  ‘You’ve just—’

  Thaph cleared his throat loudly. ‘How many passengers?’

  ‘You’ve got eyes, haven’t you? Two living. One shade. And a horse, if that counts.’ Ghyrab struck the gate again. ‘Just hurry up.’

  After much muffled discussion, the gates split in half to the clamour of chains. They moved at an aching pace, revealing their precious secrets so gradually that Nilith had soaked in most of the horror by the time the barge passed under the wall.

  Once more, the river reached an open clearing, though this one was far deeper, wider, longer, and infinitely more sinister than the last. Nilith craned her neck to take in the breadth of milk-white rock walls. They had been cut into mighty steps, fit for the feet of titans. Machinery and scaffolding sprawled like a city across their angular slopes. A tangle of ladders and ramps stitched it all together, like sutures trying to stop a vast, gaping wound in the earth from bursting open.

  The thunder emanated from this foul sprawl. It was not just comprised of hammers, but of countless feet and barrows and voices as well. Both the scaffolding and the surfaces of the bare rock writhed with activity. Even as the day turned to evening, hordes of miners toiled on fervently. They dug, they chipped, they cut, they drilled; ghosts toiling alongside the living. The former gave the limestone a cold glow, while the latter might as well have been corpses for the amount of dust and blood that caked them. More than a few shapes lay prone amongst the piles of stone chips and rubble. Whether dead or dying, nobody tended them. Beasts toiled alongside the miners. Horses, beetles, spiders and ponies hauled blocks or heaved on rope. They looked in no better shape than the humans who worked them; shaky, emaciated creatures.