Armand’s opening, The Stars Askew

Here’s another little unedited snippet, to whet your appetite:

Later, when he looked back on it, Armand couldn’t be sure exactly when he knew someone was following him. The knowledge had rattled around in his unconscious mind well before he arrived at the roadhouse at the edge of the small town of Scaptia, a week after having fled Caeli-Amur.

Exhausted from the ride, Armand didn’t so much sit as collapse into the rough wooden seat, his core muscles giving way, his head tilting back, as if any effort was too much. For some time he looked blankly across the dingy hall. In one corner, a group of merchants leaned towards each other, discussing events. Varenis had begun a blockade and this group would be the last to make it to Caeli-Amur, they said. Other traders had been halted at the Palian Wall. Varenis’s grip on Caeli-Amur was tightening.

“Be happy about it,” roared a merchant, whose beard was huge and wild like a mountain-man’s. “Think of the profits we’ll make.”

He slapped his hands on the table to emphasise his point and his beard shook with the reverberations.

“This is the last of it though,” another struck the table in response. “What will become of me, later?”
Armand drifted off to thinking about the following day, when a road would lead off to his left into the Keos Pass. Wastelanders had been streaming away from there, escaping the Site where the forces of Aya and Alerion had clashed almost a thousand years ago. There the two Gods had had bent the air, twisted time and space themselves. Now there were rumours the Site was growing inexplicably, engulfing everything around it. He shuddered at the thought of that strange zone, where the air warped under the strange physics and creatures emerged, horribly changed.

Even now a small group of wastelanders sat in a corner. One leaned back against the wall, weary it seemed. Hundreds of small tentacles wriggled energetically on his forehead. Beside him, a woman stared balefully through eyes that had dropped low around her nose. Her face had grown goatlike and terrible. They were headed to Caeli-Amur, it seemed.

Only then was Armand suddenly aware of the shadowy figure, watching him from the corner of the room. The man’s hood was thrown over his head, his features obscured. Armand felt a chill rush down his spine. It came to him then: he had been vaguely aware of the man earlier in the day, in the way some obscure knowledge can lurk at the dark edges of one’s consciousness. Armand had been riding north alone, occasionally passing carts headed south. One had been carrying wool for the weavers in Caeli-Amur, a handsome young man sat on the bales carving a scene from wood. After the cart had passed him, Armand had glanced back, his eyes falling onto the young man. Yes, the ripe lips, the large brown eyes – the young man was dashing indeed. In another life, at another time, thought Armand. From the edge of his vision, Armand had barely registered the hooded figure further behind.

Now sitting in that lonely roadhouse, surrounded by strangers, the reality of the situation struck him. The seditionists had sent a philosopher-assassin after him. Of course they had, for he had been seen rushing through the Technis Palace by several of the officiates. Everything had been mad in those moments after the suicide of Technis Director Autec, with intendants crying in the corridors of the Technis Palace, subofficiates trying to hide in cupboards or beneath desks, the officiates spitting recriminations at each other. Officiate Ijem had used the sphere to connect with Varenis, but the Director had promised only damnation for the officials who had failed to contain the seditionists. Officiate Ijem had run laughing absurdly – he was always laughing – about how they would all die. The seditionists would slaughter them, he laughed bitterly.

Armand stole the Prism of Alerion, the lists of seditionists compiled by House Technis before its overthrow, and the maps of the tunnels beneath Caeli-Amur. He slipped the letter from his supporters into one pocket and he was ready to flee. Dashing to the stables, Armand took the most valuable of horses, a snow-white beast he had called Ice. Using the maps, he slipped through the underground passages beneath the mountain and to the road north. It was only then that he realised the letter had somehow fallen from his pocket. He cursed and railed, but there was nothing he could do.

Ijem or one of the other officiates had clearly talked, and now a killer faced Armand from the opposite side of the common room. The assassin would catch him alone on the road, tomorrow or the day later, and slip a razor-sharp stiletto between his ribs.