The Dawnhounds Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Little Hook Press

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  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First Printing, 2019

  ISBN 978-0-473-49682-1

  Sajti, I have petitioned the wind

  and listened at the small places

  but heard nothing in reply, save wind;

  must all our stories end in death?

  Nobody would meet Yadin’s eye, but that was fine. They didn’t understand what it meant to be a captain, to make the hard choices. He paced the deck, hands in the pockets of his coat. He’d kept the coat on despite the muggy heat, because it made him look the part of captain and the crew needed to know there was still somebody in charge. He was the captain now: the chain of command was clear. Some of the men weren’t happy about the alchemist being in charge, but they were scared, and emotional—they’d thank him when he brought the ship home. The Thrice-cursed coat made him sweat like a pig in a cookpot, though; he’d sell his soul to the birds for a bath filled with fresh ice.

  They’d been hearing gulls through the fog for almost a day: home was close, he knew it. After two gods-damned years, he’d see his Betej again (and his child. A son? He didn’t know. They’d set sail before he knew) and he’d kiss her and call her ‘sugarcane’, and then he’d have a nice long bath, and then he’d kiss her again, and then they’d screw until the bed broke, and then he’d have another damned bath. Then he’d put on his clothes, saunter straight through the great wooden gate at Heron Hill, hand in his commission, have another bath for good measure (salt salt endless bloody salt! In his hair, in his eyes, carving little white roads through the lines of his hands and through the notches where they’d chiselled his tattoos. The sweating made the itch worse) then he’d start his own clinic, raise his kid right and never think about going to sea ever again. Hells, he’d probably have to think twice about crossing a canal. Maybe move the family inland, to Nahaj Kral or one of the garden cities. Betej had always wanted to, but he’d worried about one of the old volcanoes blowing its top. This whole mess had left him less afraid of fire. There were worse ways to go.

  The waters around Hainak Kuai were usually easy sailing, but the Fantail had been becalmed in fog for at least a day. It had come on them out of nowhere, and the weather wasn’t right for it: too hot. You’d sometimes get whorls of it over the surface of the water this time of year, but this was something else. They’d been in sight of the lighthouse, when it came roiling up over the gunnels, but now the light was nowhere to be seen. The smart money was on waiting it out, but there were other concerns.

  There was no water left, nor food. Well, that wasn’t quite true: there was water, and there was food, but they were in the hold and the hold was off-limits. The crew had nailed the hatch shut and piled barrels of grub food atop. A few men had protested, because they hadn’t seen—

  —it. They hadn’t seen it. Amazing how quickly it’d spread. A single broken vial of the stuff. Lots of food down there, of course. The rations, and the water, and the—

  The ship had set sail from Gostei with twenty men, and they had nine left. Even with the men on double shifts, sleeping no more than four hours a night, they struggled to make the cutter sail true. Exigencies of command: unavoidable, no sin in triage. The expedition’s backers would understand, and everybody would get hazard pay, and the crew would thank him for getting them out of a difficult situation in one piece. The admiralty had sent them deep into Suta looking for botanicals with ‘military applications’ and by that metric, the journey was an unmitigated success. They’d found the vials in an overgrown dumbtech lab, deep beneath a ruined city of white stone. Ancient electric lights had come on and the screens had spoken to them, but the linguist from the university had been less than useless. He was dead now. Well, not dead but—

  A moan came from below-decks. Lady in Yellow, Bird in the Sky, Great and Mighty Ox, it was a disaster. He toyed with the worry-beads in his pocket. Elvar, the bosun, shot Yadin an evil glare. Elvar was a big man, with a mop of sandy blonde hair, armor grafts on his forearms and a mouth full of iron teeth. Northerner, from—

  —the North. Geography had never been Yadin’s strong suit. There wasn’t much worth investigating up that way anyway: snow, cannibals, steel-cults, engineers. Worthless stuff. The savages didn’t even know alchemy, though they were always trying to crack it. Elvar’s metal teeth’d gone to rust in the salt air of course, but he didn’t seem to care. He glared at Yadin. His hand wasn’t on his knife yet, but there was something about his poise: pent and coiled like a snake. Yadin took a step forward. Exigencies of command, a need to assert authority and all that, but violence would lead to violence, and the crew could ill-afford more casualties. He needed to take a more subtle approach; he tapped his foot on the deck once, twice, then he began to sing. He’d been a choirboy when he was younger, but fear and decades out of practice left his voice stiff and crackling.

  I know the place where dead men dwell

  But I’ve never met their master

  The wind stayed silent. Elvar took a step forward. They’d never got on, even when the ship had been riding high. Elvar didn’t talk or dance or tell jokes. Elvar watched, and took notes in very neat handwriting in his little brown notebook, and did exactly his duties and not one thing more.

  A wet, choking cough reached out from somewhere below. Yadin could almost feel it in his own chest: cancerous, thick, oily. Pulmonary edema? Possible. No, no, no time for diagnostics. He brought his foot down harder on the deck, on the beat. One two three four one two three four.

  ‘cos all good men must sail to hell

  And I must follow after.

  A voice cut through the muggy air behind him. Raspy, female: Ajat, the tall woman with the pale patches of vitiligo staining her dark Hainak skin. She spoke all the guttural island languages, and a few more: Ahwari, Torad, Dawgae, and uh, Northern. For a moment he almost lost the beat, wary that she might move to hurt him, but her voice turned into a pleasing alto harmony as they rounded into the chorus.

  With a hey and a ho,

  And a wail and a woe

  Oh, In my boots I quake sir.

  Another voice now, and another. Surprisingly good voices for ruffians and thugs. The evil moans from below-decks got louder and more insistent. Something had wiped out the people of Suta, so long ago their names were lost to history, and so completely that nobody dared settle there ever again. Something had turned their cities into charnel houses, and their memory into smoke. When Yadin was a kid, they’d played make-believe and pretended they were valiant explorers in the Ghost Cities, cutting through jungle and climbing cloud-piercing towers. They never stopped to ask why the whole continent was silent; Suta belonged solely to the dead, and nobody asked why. He was furious with himself, and his superiors, and every single soul who saw the marble-white spires emerge from the mountains and got very interested in the whats and very absent-minded about the whys.

  The crew’s chant moved to match the awful groans of their colleagues. It was a song from the war, and most of them hadn’t had reason to sing it in a long time.

  With a hey and a ho,

  And a wail and a woe

  The Lions met their maker.

  Was it a trick of the mind, or did Yadin feel the wind in his hair? The fog didn’t move, but a pleasant chill ran down his spine. He scrambled for another verse. Had it really been ten years? But of course, it was a sea shanty: simple, repetitive, vulgar enough to turn
the wind blue. The words came to him.

  Oh I know the place that can get fucked

  Where kitties run for cover

  So grab your gun and have some fun

  And bring me down another.

  The whole crew singing now, except Elvar. He had death in his eyes, but it wasn’t about the song. The North hadn’t been in the war: they’d vultured around the edges but never actually picked a side. No, the ship had lost the captain, the chaplain, the lieutenant, and right beneath them in the chain of command was the alchemist, then the bosun. They’d lost them because Yadin had a Parliamentary Warrant to collect samples, and somebody had mishandled one of the flasks—somebody curious maybe, or just clumsy. It made sense for the alchemist to take charge in a medical emergency. It had still sat ill with some of the crew, festering in their minds. Yadin hadn’t seen quite this much hatred before, but he’d seen strains of it; he’d heard whispers. He couldn’t mention parliament without Elvar spitting out a ‘provisional’—the war wasn’t over after all, it was just a decade since anybody had seen a Ladowain warship anywhere south of Dawgar.

  The hatred was different, right in front of him, front and center. He could almost feel Elvar’s dagger in his heart. He rubbed the tattoo on the back of his hand: a pig in a crate—an old sailor’s charm to ward against drowning. Ajat had given it to him—they’d gotten exceedingly drunk about a year back and he’d let her go to work with her knife and a bottle of ink. He’d asked why and she’d shrugged and said “pigs float.” It still itched on cold days, and he was worried the damage might be permanent. He’d need to get a proper fleshsmith to look at it back in Hainak.

  With a hey and a ho,

  And a wail and a woe

  Oh, In my boots I quake sir.

  Elvar took another step forward. His hand perched on the hilt of his dirk. He was close enough to smell now: salt and shit and stale rum. The sounds from below ceased, and so did the singing. The scrape of drawn steel cut through the night—metal weapons, gods. Yadin didn’t know how to fight. He’d patched up a lot of men afterwards though, and he knew one thing: you got no winners when weapons come out , you just got the dead and the suffering. He drew his own pistol, and raised it. It was long-expired: the grubs inside had starved weeks ago. He cleared his throat and—

  “LIGHT” shouted Ajat.

  They’d almost missed it in the fog, to their port side. It was smaller than Yadin had imagined: its beacon struggling to pierce through the fog. He couldn’t even make out the lighthouse but he didn’t care—just one little light changing the whole shape of the evening. It flashed on and off, in short and long bursts. The codebook was on the captain, and talking to the captain wasn’t an option. It didn’t matter: the crew were hooting and hollering, cheering and crying.

  In the midst of it all, Yadin made eye contact with Elvar. The hatred remained, but then Elvar smiled. Slowly, with exaggerated care, he put the knife back in its sheath and looked towards the light. It would do, for now.

  “Light the lamps! Drop anchor! Break out the oars!” said Yadin. He was the captain now, dammit. Well, acting captain. Same thing. The ship sprang to life around him. The Fantail itself was becalmed, but they could row the boats to the lighthouse and get their report in to Hainak. Somebody from the Parliament could pick up the ship; somebody with quarantine experience or failing that, a box of matches and as much liquid fire as they could carry. It was done. It was somebody else’s problem.

  The sails were already trim, but they dropped the anchor to be sure. They put red filters in the lamps to warn of danger, and strapped them along the gunnels. There was a single yellow lamp hung on the starboard side and Yadin didn’t remember hanging it, but he had other things on his mind. When it was done, they dropped the boats. They only needed two, and Yadin made sure he wasn’t in Elvar’s.

  Yadin was not a sailor: he didn’t love the sea. He’d taken the job for his country, and because the little man with the Parliamentary Seal had offered a bigger number than he was willing to say no to. Nevertheless, the slap of oars on the glassy sea filled him with immense pleasure. He hummed as he rowed, and didn’t even complain about what the crush of oars against waves would do to his excellent surgeon’s hands (nevermind the tattoos—wine makes men do strange things). He was going to go home, and kiss his wife and call her ‘sugarcane’ and never go to sea again.

  The first shot took him just below the clavicle, perhaps an inch above his heart. He dropped the oar and tried to cry out as the grub began to do its vile work under his skin. The first wave of neurotoxins hit his nervous system and he screamed. He knew in an instant it was fatal, but he wasn’t dead yet. The thump-thump of borer fire came from the direction of the lighthouse: little blooms in the fog, almost beautiful. He drew his pistol and tried to fire, but nothing came out: it had starved long ago. He fell backwards into the dinghy. The other crew fell, or dived overboard, or reached for their own guns. The bottom of the boat was full of water and Jadin realised that some of the grubs had hit their hull; they little bastards would go through wood just as happily as flesh. His mouth was full of blood. He rolled onto his stomach and then shrieked in pain as salt water rushed through the hole in his chest. The little lifeboat yawed, then broke in half. Jadin went under. Shots smashed through the surface of the water above him. His nerves burned, but his skin was so very cold.

  The red lanterns on the Fantail winked at him. They may as well have been a world away. The yellow lantern too, blurry and indistinct through the surface of the water, which he didn’t remember hanging. Elvar sank beside him, his eyes sightless and jawline a ragged mess of muscle and bone. Yadin slipped further through the water, and darkness took him.

  Jyn Yat-Lorn wiped sweat from her forehead. The weeks before the rains came were the worst: climbing humidity, but not a drop of water from any of the Four Heavens. Even in the dead of night, it was too damn hot. A hawker grabbed at her arm, and thrust a platter of bean-cakes in her face. She flashed her badge at him, and he suddenly saw the boundless opportunities available in bothering somebody else.

  Sergeant Yit Kanq-Sen walked beside her. He whistled as they walked, and didn’t say much. She enjoyed his company immensely. He possessed a perishingly rare ability on the force: knowing when to shut up.

  The Tinkers’ Horn growing from a nearby vines turned its petals up to face the moon. “One a.m.” it said, “one a.m.”. It was an older model: its trilling voice didn’t sound human. Nobody had bothered to update the network in this part of the city—the older vines met and merged with the new ones beneath the titanic wall at Arnak-Vonaj. When she’d been a kid it was all dumbtech, all machines and steel: amazing how fast alchemic botanicals had come up. She could barely remember a world without the wonders of botany. The first prototypes had sprung up a few years before the revolution, and they’d been just what the city needed to throw off the crumbling remains of the Ladowain Empire. She didn’t even recognise it as the place she’d grown up: the myths and songs were the same, but the rapid change from iron to cellulose had filled the place with holes. There were districts that had never caught up: where they just didn’t have the money. It was an explosive age, good for the well-heeled and the strong who could take advantage of it but awful for the slow, the sick, the poor. The wonders of science didn’t reach some corners of town until after the rich had bled every drop from them. Not that the old order was better, but at the end of the day, bootheels were bootheels. Hainak Kuai: The mismatched city; the ragtag city; the city of walls and gardens.

  Yat took out her bell, and rang it. “One a.m. and all’s well,” she said. End of her shift, finally.

  “Shut up!” said somebody from a nearby rooftop. Male, cracking—a roof rat? Sounded like a teenager: his roof-running days were probably numbered. It was a life that didn’t end in a lot of open doors or hot meals. She put her bell away: no need to make his day any worse. The officer’s manual said that citizens would often
become belligerent or even bellicose, but that this was not a crime in-and-of-itself. She wasn’t entirely clear what bellicose meant, but it had been double-underlined in the regulations so she assumed it was pretty exciting. The manual was very clear on how to deal with these situations, and she didn’t have the energy to do more than the bare minimum.

  She saluted the boy on the rooftop, and said, in her loudest voice “THANK YOU FOR YOUR INPUT IN THIS MATTER, SIR. THE CITY WATCH WOULD LIKE TO CONGRATULATE YOU FOR ENGAGING IN FRUITFUL DIALOGUE WITH US, AND WISHES YOU A MERRY EVENING. A GOOD NIGHT TO YOU.”

  Sergeant Kanq-Sen nodded. Yat did a neat about-face, then stomped off through the streets muttering to herself, with the sergeant trailing behind her. This was hardly what she’d thought her job would be when she signed up for the academy. What else was she meant to do, though? She’d grown up in the south, but in the shadow of the wall—her father had been a botanist whose work was too strange to be popular, and too useful to be fashionable. When dad died, he’d left almost nothing. She hadn’t expected much but even then, it amazed her how little was left: how much work he must’ve put in to put food on the table and seem like everything was fine. The chemicals he worked with had burned so many holes in his lungs that it was a wonder he could breathe at all. Between dad’s death and her joining the force, things had gotten difficult for a while. She felt for kids like that, and did what she could for them. Sometimes doing what she could meant following the absolute letter of the law, and not one letter more.

  A few inquisitive faces poked out from nearby windows to investigate the shouting, then popped straight back in when they saw who was doing it; they didn’t trust cops on the north side of the wall. They had their reasons, but it didn’t make the job any less difficult.

  Arnak-kua-Vonaj loomed in the distance: one of the only old buildings in the city to survive the fall of the Ron-Yaj Ladowai, the Lion. They said it had been kept in place as a symbol of what Hainak could overcome, but she’d lived rough too long to believe that: it meant the same to the new lot as it had to the old, which was to keep their people and everybody else apart. They were free from foreign occupation, but it didn’t mean much unless you’d been in the right place to exploit it. The wall stretched from east to west, bisecting the entire city between haves and have-nots. Even overgrown with engineered vines, it looked alien and frightening. In Hainak, there were little bits of metal all over the place—some things just didn’t work in botanicals—but it was rare to see so much in one place. It was a great, monstrous thing. A cluster of mu-go amanita hovels clung to the side, lower down. Their gills heaved; little faces peered down from their windows. The vines and a network of mycelium kept them solidly in place but they still made Yat feel slightly ill. You didn’t live that precariously unless you were really desperate, but desperation was easy to come by.