In Wake Of The Dead: Jeniche of Antar, #5

By Graeme K. Talboys

Jeniche of Antar

Once a shadow in the storm, now the daughter of lightning.

The Occassan civil war was over and the Order crushed, freeing the world of their oppression. But peace eluded Jeniche. All she really wanted was a warm, quiet place where no one knew her and where she, too, could be free - free of her ghosts and her guilt. But she also wanted to know what had driven the events that had driven her from her adopted home and taken the lives of friends and loved ones. That meant the longed for quiet library and observatory where she could study the stars would have to remain a dream.

She hoped that answers she wanted might be found with the Pilgrims in the fabled land of Ekador. What she did discover, during her search, was that you cannot outrun your troubles and that answers not only present themselves in unexpected places but also in unexpected and often perilous ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monkey Business
• Release date: Jun 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781909295308

Graeme K. Talboys

Graeme K Talboys is an English writer and teacher. Graeme Keith Talboys was born in Hammersmith on Thursday 26 November 1953. He has written both non-fiction and fiction titles and was nominated for The Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker Prize’ in 2011. His work includes the Shadows in the Storm series; Stealing into Winter (2015) and Exile and Pilgrim (2016).

Book preview

Part One

Elusion

Chapter One

Caught between the shadow and the light, brought to a standstill by a blend of emotion both complex and overwhelming, she felt the world begin to come apart around her yet again. Fear, anger, love, frustration, guilt – for long barely confined – broke over her like a wave and pinned her to the spot. She writhed, struggling to draw breath, filled with the need to scream. It felt for a moment as if she had slumped against the wall and slid to the broad stone step. But out of the swirl of darkness and pain that had engulfed her, out of the long hours, the endless grasping for a receding past she knew she could not change, out of the haze of irrelevancies with which she had tried to distract herself, she emerged into the unforgiving light of the here and now where she had hesitated for just a fraction of a second at that same spot from which she had seen a fatally wounded Alltud fall.

Time collapsed. The fragile shell that she had constructed around her bewilderment, crumbled and fell away. Fresh air hit the raw wound of her soul and she staggered forward, making that final step from shadow into sunlight where she could no longer hide – from herself or from anyone else. Other dams broke as well. They were not feelings she could articulate. All she knew was that she had emerged from some suffocating womb and that she was not at all sure she was happy she had done so.

With a steadying hand against one of the newly rebuilt walls, she climbed up onto the terrace. Dislocated, frightened, she turned to Kenak. It had been the most difficult climb of her life. Cliffs, buildings, flying ships, rooftops, icy ravines, all meant nothing. She had climbed those steps a number of times before, yet she could not accept they were still the same ones. It seemed like a dream where you know you are in a particular place, but everything is completely different.

A sheen of sweat prickled on her brow. She had climbed those steps and she had fought on those steps. Now, though, the narrow and functional staircase had been rebuilt. Bloodstained stones had been removed, the steps made broader, the opening widened to allow sunlight deeper into the building. Yet her memories were stronger than the reality. She could still see the shadowy way, hear the noise of battle, smell the fear. Her own perhaps.

Kenak was saying something that she could not hear. Her head span and this time she did slide down the wall, to sit on the top step, her back to the warm stone. It felt like she had been there for an eternity, lost in misery, before a hand touched her shoulder and she looked up.

Pulled back once more to the here and now, she saw Kenak looking down at her with a pale, drawn face. Sadness replaced the misery. Alltud would never look down at her again with that smile of his. He was lost forever. But she knew that she was not the only one who mourned.

Holding on to Kenak’s proffered hand, she stood and stepped out onto the sunlit terrace. Words were pointless. For a moment she gripped his hand hard and felt a returned pressure before letting go.

She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. The terrace came into proper focus and, as with the remodelled stairs, she found her memories of the place at odds with the reality that now confronted her. For, in a city rebuilding itself after a monumental battle and the further devastation wrought by the destruction of the machines in the mountain, someone had taken the time to transform this particular killing ground into a garden.

Jeniche held back more tears. In the months that she had been hiding away in the libraries and the museum of the Order, deep in the heart of the city of Amparo, the old paving stones had been torn up and taken away, too deeply stained with blood to be washed clean. Beneath had been discovered the soil of a garden. Slabs of honey coloured stone had been laid leaving two large beds between which a stone bench had been set. Flowers had been planted and started to bloom. Someone had even contrived to bring two mature apple trees up to the high garden and set them in the ground either side of where Alltud had fallen.

One hand still on the arch, Jeniche stepped forward a pace. A gardener on his knees turned and saw her. He climbed to his feet and backed away. She was conscious of others behind her. Her head span.

How?

They are from an orchard in the city. Many of the trees were damaged in the fighting. These were lifted here by an airship. Each is planted in the remaining ashes from the pyre. He was a Derw. I know trees are important to his people, to his beliefs. I found what I could in the libraries here.

Kenak faltered in the face of Jeniche’s silence. But she dared not speak. It was all she could do to hold back the tears, fight off the guilt. Instead she crossed toward the bench.

Apple trees, added Kenak.

Jeniche nodded, reached out and touched a leaf as if she were caressing the face of a loved one. The blossom was sweet and clean after all the grime of death.

It was a good choice. It is the tree of their paradise, a tree of healing. There’s an apple orchard... She managed this time to hold back the tears from her cheeks, but they still flowed in her heart.

Touching with a light caress the cylinder on her belt that held Alltud’s ashes, she passed between the trees to the spot where she had slept with Alltud cradled in her arms. The bench was there now, bathed in sunlight. She moved to the wall and leaned on its broad top, looking down on the city. Kenak gave her some time alone before he followed.

She had eaten well, her shoulder had healed although it still ached in the mornings, and she had begun to exercise. As well as the daily walk across the city to and from the museum and archives, she spent an hour each day in a large room set aside for her use where she did the exercises she had learned in Gyanag, slowly restoring strength and suppleness to her frame. There, also, she performed the steel lotus, wholly absorbed in carving the air with her Tunduri swords.

Although her body was beginning to heal after years of abuse, her mind was still badly damaged and her heart was irreparably broken. The new routine and the exhaustion from all the physical exercise helped remove the edge from her desperation, pushed it beneath the surface for a while. Lost within the steel lotus she found moments of existential calm, but it was only a temporary respite. Always there, waiting to kick the feet from beneath her were the memories that could be triggered by the slightest sight or sound, the slightest word or action, even an act of kindness.

Drawing on reserves she had not been aware of, Jeniche remained calm and in control of herself. She refused to be drawn inward to the shadows where ghosts lurked. Instead, she continued to look outward and over the city.

Below, the people were rebuilding, just as they had been from the day after the fighting stopped and the mountains fell. They had torn up the great square below where the dead had been laid out for relatives to claim. It too was a garden now. Beyond it, the great administrative buildings of the Order and Bureau of Reports had been torn apart and the material used to repair houses and shops, warehouses and workshops.

All day and every day the sound of demolition and building, the pounding of hammers, tumble of masonry, rumble of carts and calls of workers could be heard wherever you went. Even in the depths of the Order’s library and museum where Jeniche had spent most of her time, the sounds had reached her.

However, despite the remodelling, the new gardens, and the warmth of the people who had thrown off the dictatorship, for Jeniche Amparo would always be the place where Alltud had died. For that reason alone, and she could number many others, she would never grow to like the place.

The dead haunted her. All those who had fallen in the liberation of Amparo, all the people she had never known who had been cut down, gathered round her like an airless mist. And in that miasmic surround the faces of those she had known came and went. They did not accuse. They did not need to. She was weighed down with guilt as she struggled each day through the cloud.

Sometimes the faces of those she had known and loved would fade and she feared she would never remember them again. Now she had become reconciled with the fact they had gone for good, that hurt most of all. Many were the sleepless nights, the constant touching of the cylinder of ashes on her belt, the turning of Tohmarz’s ring on her left thumb.

Kenak, who had long since learned to read her moods, stepped up quietly beside her. He said nothing but it was enough to pull her back from the edge of the deep well. She turned her back on the city looking once more at the trees, watching the blossom shimmer in the breeze.

Blossom.

How long...?

Months.

No time at all and forever. And she was still there in the city of the dead, afraid in the staying and afraid to leave; the broken city in the shadow of the mountains she had mutilated using the machines that had then refused to allow her to die.

What was it all about? asked Kenak, finally finding the courage to ask the question that had been on his mind since... he wasn’t sure. Perhaps for much longer than he cared to admit.

I should be going.

Kenak frowned, not sure if Jeniche had heard, if he had even voiced the question out loud, absolutely certain what she meant. He took the path of least pain. It’s too nice a day to go back to the library.

Jeniche studied his face. You are right. I’ve done with it.

It was as she reached out to touch his arm to acknowledge his feelings that she saw his frown change. Afterwards she was able to reflect on just how many emotions can burst up from normally sterile ground. His emotions, so easy to read on his face in the split second before she reacted. Her own emotions that after months of quiet, violence was about to erupt again.

Another thing she would later reflect on was how easy it was to read the direction of attack, push Kenak so that he staggered into the cover of one of the trees, turn, assess the nature of the threat, reach for swords that were not there and execute a forward roll that took her beneath the mosket ball and brought her to her feet close enough to her assailant to grab the muzzle of the weapon and wrench it from his hands.

She didn’t worry about how he had managed to smuggle a mosket into the heavily guarded Pinnacle, simply used the inverted weapon as a club to bring the man down and leave him unconscious in a newly planted flower border for others to deal with.

Into that moment, the sound of voices and the movement of people penetrated. Keeping low, Jeniche made straight back to where she had left Kenak. Chips of stone pierced the flesh of her legs through her trousers and she slid to an ungraceful halt in a small pile beneath the seat of the bench.

There’s at least one person up on the closed level, Kenak managed to say.

With a new kind of mosket, replied Jeniche, stating the obvious, as mosket balls ate in quick succession into the stonework nearby.

Guards appeared in the entrance way to the level and Kenak pointed up to the closed level above. From the shelter of the bench, they both heard the clattering of boots on stone steps, more shooting, silence.

Jeniche signalled Kenak to stay where he was, but as she climbed out from under the bench, she knew he had ignored her.

Confusing them with more targets, he replied to her quick look. She sighed and surveyed the short length of terrace on the closed, top level. Up there was where the table room had been. It was destroyed now, filled with rubble and sealed off. The small terrace there had clearly been chosen for the attack as a symbolic gesture.

A guard appeared and looked down. Safe, he called, immediately contradicted by the sound of mosket fire from the city below.

Kenak ran to look down and Jeniche pulled him back from the edge. We need to get back to the compound, she said. Now. Have you had much practice with your sword?

He shrugged. Daily exercises. And one of the troopers has been sparring with me...

She read enough in his face and reached out her right hand. He nodded and she removed the blade from its sheath.

As they headed for the stairs that Jeniche had recently climbed, guards fell in with them. Jeniche was still considered, much to her embarrassment and sometimes anger, a hero of the revolution. It made her a well known figure in the city. Easy to target. There had been other attempts in the months since the uprising, lone assassins who blamed her for the chaos. This, however, felt like something different.

On the descent, one of the guards handed her a mosket. She was about to refuse it when he told her it was a new type. On a landing she stopped to examine it for a moment. The guard pointed to a narrow box attached to the underside.

We’ve been trying to perfect this ourselves. It allows for a series of balls to be fired in quick succession and when it is empty, you detach it and replace it with one that is full.

Jeniche handed the mosket back to the guard. Some demon had been released and was growing in malevolence. Weapons grew more deadly; people grew more aggressive. It was easy to see where it would lead.

Kenak was trying to get a look at the new mosket. There will be time, she said. First we have a city to cross. Turning to the guard by the main entrance to the Pinnacle, she asked: Any sign of trouble out there?

He shook his head and Jeniche grimaced. There were only two ways out of the Pinnacle, and if this attack was planned by someone in the Order, they would know where the secret back door was. Into a street where they would easily be caught in crossfire at ground level or from windows in the surrounding buildings. At least with the main entrance the enemy would have to show themselves and be exposed to fire from the walls of the Pinnacle.

Spread out when we are beyond the gates and don’t move in a straight line. She took a deep breath. Be safe.

With that, she led the way out into the open.

Before them was one of those hints of silver on the edge of the storm cloud. What had once been a huge, bare, open concourse, a place where the dead had been laid out after the revolution, was now a park with shrubs and young trees, places to sit with shelter from the sun and rain. There was not, however, much cover for those intent on harm. Although one or two people shot at them as they followed the winding paths, protecting fire from the walls of the citadel behind them ensured they reached the first line of buildings safely.

Pausing to draw breath at the entrance of a residential street, Jeniche recalled other times she had become soft and been surprised by events. We never learn, she thought to herself as grim memories began to crowd in again.

A shout dispersed the shadowy cloud around her and she followed the line of the pointing finger of Kenak. A small group running straight through a recently planted flower bed. Directly toward them. Heavily armed. The sword she had borrowed seemed useless.

We’ll hold them, said one of their escort.

Jeniche nodded and pulled Kenak into the street. As they ran, they heard mosket fire behind them. And, inevitably, the pounding of booted feet.

Kenak, who knew the city better than Jeniche, led the way. She had spent most of her time shut up indoors, hiding in books and manuscripts. Kenak had worked tirelessly with reconstruction crews, especially on Alltud’s memorial garden, dreaming all the while of flying again. And he had become familiar with the city, especially this quarter.

Each time mosket fire tore into nearby pavement or wall, with people dragging themselves and their children to safety and slamming doors, he was able to make a turn to lead them to safety. Jeniche was soon lost.

Watching their backs at each turn she missed seeing the young woman straight away. She was standing quite calmly at the far end of the broad alley.

Another route! she yelled at Kenak.

He turned, confused.

Not this way. We cannot lead them this way.

Panic inhabited his eyes for a second before he set off in a different direction along a passage between two buildings. Jeniche followed with a last glance to where the woman had been standing.

In all the tiredness of running, the worry of reaching the safety of the revolution’s headquarters, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. She had seen a younger version of the woman before, just for a brief moment, in the middle of the battle in the market in Makamba many years before. And she was as disturbingly familiar now as she was back then. Tall, thin, cropped red hair. No shadow.

Whoever she was, and Jeniche had her suspicions, now was not the time to stop and find out, any more than it was to lead the insurgents in her direction. Although, as they darted across a wide road and into another alley, she did wonder whether the roles had been reversed, whether the woman had been blocking that route to keep them safe.

Absorbed in her speculations she ran into the back of Kenak.

I’m lost, he said as she helped him to his feet.

Keep going. We’ll find somewhere you recognise.

She led, turning a corner to keep them out of sight of pursuers. In the open courtyard, two men with moskets stood. Jeniche didn’t wait. As the weapons were raised in her direction, she ran toward them, diving into a sideways roll that took her beneath the deadly lead balls and brought her up against the assailants’ legs, her borrowed sword hacking. They both went down with howls of pain and were hauled off by a shaken Kenak.

He picked up the discharged weapons and looked around for the best exit. Jeniche followed him, trusting he had spotted a familiar landmark.

They didn’t get far. Ahead of them, the young woman stood once more. Kenak, fighting for breath turned and looked at Jeniche. The only way out was back. The sound of horses came from where the woman had been standing. Jeniche grabbed Kenak by his tunic and pulled him into a doorway, hurling herself at the door. It burst open and they tumbled into the cool shadow of a passage.

As Jeniche shut the door, horses thundered past on the other side.

Lungs burning, Jeniche kept hold of Kenak and pulled him along. At the far end of the passage, steps led up into deeper shadow. She went first, sword raised. All that waited for them was dust and empty cobwebs.

Kenak found a corner and slumped down, his legs aquiver, hands shaking. He placed the moskets beside him and let his head drop. Jeniche felt like doing the same. Instead, she explored, found more stairs, and made her way up through the empty building.

Even here the sound of mosket fire could be heard, sporadic bursts from different parts of the city. It would eventually be quashed, of that she had no doubt, but she wanted to get Kenak to safety, wanted to find out from the commanders on the ground what was happening, wanted to gather her things and leave.

A harsh sliver of brightness guided her to the top of the final flight and when she opened the door, sunlight burst into the stairwell. She stood on the small landing, bathed in the warmth, waiting for her eyes to acclimatize. Warm air blew into the space, touched her face, and she was aware of what had been lost, of the beast awakening once more, of the things yet to happen, of the tears that flowed.

It hurt. A deep ache that had not and probably never would be exorcised. Had it been just her, she would have curled up at the top of the narrow steps in sight of the sunlight and gone to sleep forever. Instead, she wiped her eyes with the back of her left hand and stepped quietly out into the day.

The rooftop was a dusty maze of spaces weaving between stair heads, chimneys, and shacks. It seemed deserted, but Jeniche moved with caution, all too aware of the fighting in the streets around. And footsteps behind her.

Has no one told you about creeping up on people with a sword in their hand?

Jeniche turned. Kenak stood rooted to the spot. Sorry.

She made herself smile. Anything out there you recognise? she asked, sweeping the sword around the narrow horizon of buildings.

Kenak turned slowly on the spot, nodded his head. I can see the warehouse roof.

And I can see people on that roof. She pushed Kenak back toward the doorway. Can you find your way from ground level?

Yes, he said as they descended into the cool, musty darkness of the building.

They made the last part of the journey at a slower pace. The moskets had been hidden in the deserted building to be collected later. And free of that burden and the urgency of immediate pursuit, they walked along the now deserted streets of the district, moving from doorway to doorway and alley mouth to alley mouth, one eye always on the next bolt-hole and escape route.

Sounds of fighting reached them still, but it was more sporadic, further away. Kenak began to relax. Jeniche, all her old faculties rudely re-awakened, took even closer note of her surroundings.

Although they went at a slower pace it was just a matter of minutes before they came to the street that led to the main gates of the revolution’s headquarters. The building itself was a commercial complex – warehouses, factories, workshops – built around a large courtyard.

At Jeniche’s prompting, the whole block had been fortified. Windows on the lower storeys facing outward had been bricked in. Sentry ways had been built on the roof. The double gates that led through a large arch into the courtyard had been reinforced. Within there was a source of water, stockpiles of food and weapons, stables, kitchens, barracks, and private sleeping quarters.

As they approached the gates, it was clear the place was locked up and silent. She could no longer see anyone on the roof.

Slow down, she said quietly to Kenak who had started to walk more quickly.

He turned and then turned again as the gates were unbarred and one of them swung back.

A lone figure appeared, stepped forward. Two more appeared just behind. They stayed on the line of the gateway and Jeniche could see they both carried moskets with long barrels.

Kenak called out, recognising the gatekeeper who smiled in return. Jeniche saw he was relaxed; saw the eyes of the armed guards searching along the buildings that lined the approach.

She took her cue from them. They tensed and swung up their moskets. Kenak froze, confused, perhaps thinking they were aiming at him. The blow to his back as Jeniche tackled him to the ground knocked the breath from him. Just as the shooting began again.

Chapter Two

Armed messengers had come and gone until late in the night. Sleep had been disturbed by dark dreams. A breakfast was taken whilst listening to reports. And now, finally, there was silence. In her own room. High in the complex of buildings that were used as the headquarters for the new, provisional, government. Or the revolutionaries, depending on your point of view.

As rooms in her experience went, it was not bad. Clean and bright, with a large window where a door and hoist had once been. A bed in one corner with a chest to store her things. A lock on the door. The rest of the considerable space that had once been used to store bales of cloth was given over to tables. Tables piled with charts, maps, plans, documents, books, and even small artefacts, all plundered from the archives and museum of the Order.

It was this that had kept Jeniche busy in the months since the uprising. This that had kept her sane since the loss of Alltud. Every day she had walked, with an armed escort, to the museum. There she had searched the store rooms and the archives, the great library of ancient books, returning each evening with all the things she had borrowed. After a hasty meal she would meet with the council, the shopkeepers and tradesmen and women elected in the wake of the uprising, to report on her findings and present ideas she had formulated based on the information she had gleaned.

The Order had kept a lot of ideas suppressed. Social engineering was more important to them than hydraulic engineering. The right level of poverty to keep people down but not restless. A military presence that was constant without being too overbearing. In the end, of course, they got it wrong. They kept the countryside under control through a feudal system, but as the cities grew in size, so did an urban underclass that felt it had nothing to lose. And it was in Amparo that the uprising began, spreading rapidly to other cities in Occassus

Much of what Jeniche passed on to the council was raw information. She had no time for formulating policy. It wasn’t her place. It wasn’t her country. Besides, she had other concerns. And as the flow of information useful to the council began to dry up, she turned more and more to her own obsessions, searching for the slightest piece of information about the Evanescence in an archive that had been used to re-write the country’s and the world’s history; sift for any mention or hint of the Pilgrims.

Although she had no will to indulge in politics, she did undertake a programme of destruction. During the uprising itself, fires had raged in the upper parts of the archives, those rooms closest to Zamler’s inner sanctum where he and his people had kept information on technology and the secrets of the ancients. The flames had not taken it all, nor had they reached into lower levels. Jeniche made sure the job was finished. There might be a place for such things in the future, but she knew it would be better if that is where they were discovered or reinvented. And there was no question in her mind that she had the right so to decide. It had been paid for. Many times over.

That she had finished in the archive was the reason she had taken the day off with Kenak to visit the memorial garden. All that remained now was to sort the material in her room. Burn the small pile she had selected. Return the rest.

She looked up from the documents in front of her and gazed into the corner where her bed was, her swords hanging on the wall where she had placed them the day she had moved in. Perhaps it really was time now to take them down and wear them permanently again.

Once she had strapped on the harness, she stepped into the centre of the room where she had cleared a space. She moved slowly through the positions of her own version of the steel lotus – so called for the shape the sword tips inscribed on the air. And then she tried it at full speed, knowing her body remembered every last move.

The air blazed with light reflected from the blades and for those precious moments she was cocooned from the world, intent only on allowing her material being the freedom to dance.

After a moment of calm, she sheathed the swords and reached for the buckle to undo the harness. There was a knock at the door.

Come in Kenak.

Kenak stepped inside the doorway. He still did not understand how she knew. No matter how quietly he approached, and it had become something of a test, she always perceived it was him.

Your swords, was all he could manage to say.

Close the door, she replied. We have things to decide.

Is it safe out here?

Jeniche didn’t really hear. She was aware that someone had spoken, was aware of all the activity below, but she was thinking other thoughts.

Jeniche?

It took a moment to return from the distant place to which she had drifted. When she did, it was to see the ever-anxious face of Kenak; comforting and annoying in equal measure.

You are exposed up here. And that was always his saving grace. And what made her so angry. He never thought of himself. And it would get him hurt. Or killed. Like Alltud. And all the others.

She nodded and stepped back into the shadows inside the great doorway. The courtyard was just as easy to see from there yet she was almost invisible now to anyone beyond the outer walls of the building. And today there were plenty of those.

Kenak’s particular concern had been the opening of the gates to allow the newly arrived convoy of wagons to enter the courtyard. After the attempt on Jeniche and the ensuing street battles three days before, the people of Amparo were still on edge. The wagons were being searched one by one before being allowed forward. The crowds were being kept well back. The courtyard was filled with armed guards.

Jeniche had been standing on the open terrace at the top of the steps where she had come to a standstill after helping with the early morning activity. During the previous two days, after her private conversation with Kenak, she had supervised the return of items to the museum and archives, burned the documents she feared, and packed her few belongings. And all the time, despite the fact the cylinder of ashes never left her belt, she felt as if she were abandoning Alltud. The well of loneliness within her seemed always to get deeper and darker.

Now it was all done. Kenak had made all the travel arrangements. She had said her goodbyes to the council. It was time to leave the city of the dead. In the shadows where she stood, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Did not trust herself to speak or look at anyone.

In the bright courtyard the wagons that had been cleared by the guards were being manoeuvred into place, forming up ready to leave for the northern port of Tifhaven. The horses had been