A Time of Ashes Read online

  A TIME OF ASHES

  Fate and the Wheel Book One

  Copyright 2018 Ru Pringle

  Version: 22nd June 2018

  https://rupringle.com/fiction

  This eBook is licenced for your personal enjoyment and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you’d like to share it, please purchase an extra copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book but didn’t purchase it, or it wasn’t purchased for your use only, please go to an eBook outlet and purchase your own copy. Many thanks for respecting the author’s hard work and livelihood. For permission requests, write to the author at mailto:[email protected]

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.

  Cover and artwork by Ru Pringle

  Proofread by Sophie Houston mailto:[email protected]

  For Martyn

  You were right, you awkward bugger

  PREFACE

  The Fate and the Wheel series has been a long time gestating. It began as a very vivid dream in around 2003, which I immediately knew had to be turned into a written story. Since then the idea, and the universe of the Thousand Worlds, developed greatly in scale and complexity, as did the lives of Murrin and his fellow travellers in their existential voyage of discovery and survival. The first two books were written around 2008, and edited during a hectic few years living as a touring musician.

  My favourite stories, both in books and moving pictures, have always been serials. I therefore hope readers will forgive my decision to tell the full tale over a series of books, and that reading them gives you some of the immersive pleasure I’ve had writing it so far.

  Any feedback – praise, constructive criticism, observations, requests, suggestions, questions and so on – is gratefully received (please feel free to join the Fate and the Wheel group on Facebook or to post on my blogs).

  A List of Principal Characters and a Table of Contents are provided at the end of the book.

  PROLOGUE

  ____________

  AFTERWARDS, Dana found that she could not even recall the stranger’s name.

  If he had provided one.

  So much for the gift of hindsight.

  THERE HAD, she saw only now, been something subtly wrong about him from the start. Minor inconsistencies to which she had been blind at the time were retrospectively obvious. Tailored from exotic fabrics, the colourful clothes he wore had been somehow a little too clean; the weave and cut of the cloth, the polish of the buckles, and the finish and decoration of the leather just a little too perfect for someone claiming to be just another itinerant merchant.

  And then there had been the way he had moved.

  Softly. Like a hunting animal.

  Besides flattery, he had shown her phials of scented oils and boxes of exotic spices. They were from the east, he had said, towards the foothills of the mountains of the Great Barrier. A land where knowledge was worshipped like a god, where troublesome angels and friendly daemons lived in the forests and rivers, and where common people enjoyed lives of leisurely prosperity.

  His face was both younger than the years he claimed, and older. Younger in the vigour which animated him; older by the white streaking his reddish-brown hair, the weathered creases exploding at the corners of his heavy-lidded eyes, and the depth she saw in their clear gaze. He was a man to seduce her with tales of places and lives, and creatures and wonders she could barely imagine and was unlikely ever to witness.

  Well. If she thought about it, he had made her no promises.

  Although that was not the way it had seemed at the time.

  THEY HAD MET amongst the stalls of the daily market.

  Here, at the neglected fringes of the town’s largest square, Dana squatted in the heat, watching snot-nosed children and scrawny dings fight for scraps of food between cane-framed shelters of sun-bleached hemp and stalls whose wood was split with age. On the low trestle table which was the only useful thing her father had bequeathed, she cleverly spread her small stock of shawls and blankets to emphasise, as far as possible, its variety and colour. But the dust, as ever, got into everything, and after groceries, water and the rent of stall-space and her tiny dwelling-room, there was never money left to spend on luxuries like a sun-shade. Each day, the unsold, unprotected fruits of her labour faded a little more.

  It was when she stood to ease the kinks out of her back that she had first noticed him. Long before he had noticed her, she thought. He had been a headscarf of vibrant turquoise moving through a jostling sea of broad-brimmed hats, coarse linen and unkempt hair. Breath held, she had watched the headscarf approach, dodging between the stalls like a ding following a scent. And then, passing her tiny stall on its way somewhere else, the headscarf had turned …

  And she had been captured, instantly, by eyes the colour and lustre of burnished gold.

  The eyes of a desert beast.

  SHE REMEMBERED other things about him now in generalities, sensations, and fragments, with little of a narrative to link them. She recalled that they had begun talking, unaccustomed words spilling from her like a long-dammed torrent; that – somehow – they had still been talking as the orange sun dropped behind the town walls, chilling the air and sending other vendors scurrying to night-stores, homes and tents with rolls, bags and trunks of unsold or freshly bartered merchandise, dismantled stalls, and backwards glances.

  ‘We mustn’t linger,’ she had told him in a half-whisper. ‘Silvern infest this place. They come out after dark.’

  His brow had creased. ‘Surely, lady, you are not feared of silvern?’

  He had laughed, then – deeply and heartily.

  ‘But they are to be pitied! Has any silver caused harm, that you know of? Save in the minds of the superstitious.’ He gave a carefree toss of a hand. ‘They are but shadows. Echoes, fading after the sound is gone.’

  She shivered, feeling his fingers brush hair away from eyes she knew would seem anxious and careworn. The fingers gently tucked the tangled strands behind her ear.

  ‘Sweet, sad lady. No one should live in fear of echoes.’

  She had shuddered then, skin prickling to be talking like this. ‘Well, sir – be that as it may, they are said to be echoes of the dead. It is ill-luck to meet one, and I don’t wish to.’

  An unreadable look had clouded his eyes, and he looked away. But just as unpredictably, the light in them returned. ‘Then, my lady’ he said, with a grin and a small bow, ‘besides pitied, they are to be thanked. For it will be my honour to escort you safe to your dwelling.’ And with a flourish of his travel cloak and a slick ringing noise, he had drawn out the curved sword he wore concealed beneath it. In the light of sunset clouds, the blade had gleamed, like his eyes. ‘And woe betide any echoes or more substantial foes we meet ‘ere we reach your door.’

  He made a crook of his arm. Nodded to it.

  ‘Come.’

  His heavily accented speech was as unfamiliar and charming as his dress. It seemed to her archaic, though she could not identify why. She had stared at the proffered arm, then in bewilderment down at her petticoat, which in his presence seemed little more than a rag. Yet still she had managed to laugh at his exaggerated chivalry.

  And so, as the sky deepened and the Wheel of the Gods appeared, a blue-white swirl spattered across the sky to the north, they had walked arm-in-arm across the town, she bearing her basket of wares on one hip, he with her rolled mat under his other arm and the heavy, folded table swinging from his big fist.

  They had laughed. And although it seemed fascinating at the time, she could not afterwards recall the nature of their conversation, nor how it was that, following a small meal of her own simple fare embellished
with aromatic spices from the seemingly endless supply of wax paper sachets he produced from beneath his cloak, and mugs of a fragrant, soothing tea of boiled leaves from the same source, she had found herself allowing him gently to bathe her sore, dust-grimed body by lamplight in the bronze tub which had lain in a corner, unused, since the days when it had been her mother’s prized possession, using a flannel and pails of hot water he had purchased from a wealthy neighbour down the street; nor, with the nightly wind sighing in the paneless window-hole in her dwelling’s low walls of ochre mud, and fire dancing in the room’s central pit, how he had come to lay her down on the worn furs of her sleeping platform and put his mouth gently upon hers, and then his body across hers, nor how he had come to show to her such sweet agonies and tenderness she had never dreamed could exist, until eventually she had felt him pierce her like a glowing brand, his essence flooding through her like light.

  ‘A storm is coming,’ he had told her, at some point during the night. His voice had seemed wistful. Sad, even. And she had listened dreamily to the words, not placing upon them any particular importance. ‘May my gift offer you protection.’

  And with that he had kissed her, and she slept.

  AND THEN, in the thin light of morning, as some part of her had always known he would be, he was gone – leaving only a crust on her thighs, a tarnished pewter pendant embossed with a circle of stars enclosed in a triangle, an assortment of herbs and spices, and an evening’s backlog of weaving.

  ‘This is your gift?’ she screamed at the sky as she stood in her doorway, clutching a fistful of sachets and pendant chain. ‘Dried leaves? A cheap locket?’

  She hurled the pendant into the dust. Herbs and spices scattered in the breeze like ash.

  ‘Bastard!’

  PART ONE

  ____________

  THE REALM OF ISLANDS

  CHAPTER 1

  ____________

  A Message from the Gods

  ‘A SEASHELL FOR YOUR THOUGHTS?’

  No response.

  ‘Two shells, then.’

  Still no response.

  ‘Some other commodity? Perfume, perhaps? Not keen myself, but island ladies seem to like it. Or gemfruit? Sweet, juicy ones.’

  Trying to think up any commodity which would be of the faintest interest to Sheehan was providing quite an exercise in applied thought.

  ‘How about … some nubile young apprentice? I’m certain I can arrange something. Well-connected, wealthy parents …’

  Not a flicker. He coughed.

  ‘Hello? I was hoping to speak with someone called Sheehan. Perhaps you could help?’

  He waved a hand at her, to no avail. Sheehan resembled a clockwork doll whose spring had unwound. Like most Shi’iin, she seemed heedless of how disconcerting these sudden quiescences could be.

  Abruptly, her eyes flicked up to where a lone bladderfish was floating high over the tallest rocks of the headland. The cart-sized creature was straining against the wind, its bloated body twitching from side to side in a stiff parody of the serpentine larvae of the species swimming in their shoals in the deep ocean. Life returning, she cradled her pointed chin in a slim, grey-blue palm as though silences long enough for the brewing of beer were an expected part of conversation.

  ‘This god of yours is a curious one.’

  He raised his eyebrows, amused that it had taken a literal bag of gas to drag her from her trance. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, for a start – He? She?’

  ‘Genderless.’

  ‘How diplomatic. Anyway, I still fail to understand what “it” is supposed to accomplish. The work of our gods, the Shi’iin ones, is obvious. Storms, islands falling into the sea, mountains of fire or whatever. But this thing of yours, this Mathmax …’ Her forehead crumpled in a fascinating frown. ‘You claim it talks to you?’

  ‘Your gods are ours too,’ Murrin admonished. ‘Only their names differ. This is something additional. Which, I might add, is also recognised by Shi’iin scholars.’

  He shifted his broad behind on the rock, toying with an eel-pod the waves had washed up. The receding tide had striped the dark rocks of the shore with flotsam. Below the tidal peninsula (a dyke of dolerite he knew had poured millennia ago from a volcano), a brilliant arc of coral sand curled towards the headland where the town lay. Stalking seabirds and stiff-legged, amphibious quarls prodded their mouthparts into it, looking for worms and molluscs.

  The eel-pod was the product of a recent storm. At the end of their larval stage the eels would crawl up on to land – often in their thousands – bury their heads in soil or sand, and then stiffen and sprout. In favourable conditions, Eel-trees in this part of the ocean could grow thirty mytors high. But just as often a cyclone would undermine a shore, and the stiffened eel-pods would be sucked helplessly out to sea to wash up on another island’s driftline: food for creatures of the sea or air with sufficiently tough teeth, claws or beaks.

  ‘You could say that the Mathmax talks to us,’ he mused, tugging the ceramic ring which clasped his greying beard into a tail. ‘Figuratively. Although, and I doubt that I am breaking much of a secret here, it’s not strictly any kind of being – or force, depending on which school of theology you follow. It’s more like … a set of rules. Or a map, to hidden treasure, where each treasure you find contains another piece of the map, leading to more treasure. Sometimes it takes you to places you never imagined! I suspect people came to view the Mathmax as divine because it was easier than understanding what it actually is.’

  Silence.

  ‘How can some collection of rules,’ Sheehan spat the word, ‘be expected to possess godly powers of creation?’

  ‘But you have it backwards,’ he protested, smiling. ‘It is the world, created by the gods, which speaks to us, via the Mathmax. Although there is a school of thought which states that, as we understand more of the Mathmax and ourselves, it is the world that is created, incrementally, by us.’

  ‘This Mathmax makes gods of us, now?’

  ‘“By the act of perceiving the world and its mysteries,” he quoted, “we call them into being.” The words of Horgosh Manna, an ancient philosopher revered by both men and Shi’iin.’ He shrugged. ‘By extension, nothing can exist unless someone perceives it. Which might sound bizarre, but it has proved an annoyingly difficult conjecture to counter.’

  Sheehan had been crinkling her nose through all of this in increasing disgust. ‘But none of that makes sense at all. Far from making mortals godly, how can something so tedious tell us anything? Except what old people don’t want young and interesting people to do.’

  He almost guffawed at that. ‘But rules give the Mathmax its power, Sheehan. Each supports the rest. In the beginning …’ he spread his hands. ‘Say, for argument’s sake, that what we now call the Mathmax began with just two ideas. Then someone looked at the world and saw how these could be shaped and linked in ways that not only made them more useful, but implied another idea.

  ‘This idea, or rule, as it became known, did not contradict the first two: it supported them, increasing their power. And from it came another, also supporting its predecessors, and so on and so on. Each time, gifts came from the rules. The gift of fire, of wheeled machines, the gift of metals … All were given, directly or indirectly, by the Mathmax – and they are things whose existence cannot be denied. No matter how incomplete our understanding.’

  Beneath the show of superior amusement, he saw curiosity in her smooth features.

  ‘You know,’ he pushed on, ‘the way an island looks from a distance? It seems no more than a blue outline on the horizon. But as you draw closer, you can see that the outline is made of hills and rocks, trees, dwelling-places and such-like. Closer, and colours become visible. Now, perhaps, you can see that amongst the trees and dwellings are people, dohgs and other creatures. Closer still, and you begin to see palm leaves, blades of grass. Even grains of sand. And closer still …’

  He raise
d a hand, palm upwards.

  ‘Well, without the Mathmax, the world is still that shape on the horizon. That is what you see, young Sheehan hahe Seeheeli, because you are out hunting and socialising with your aristocratic friends when you should be at your classes. In everything, there lies an infinity of detail and inter-connectedness beneath what seems obvious. With the Mathmax, we can take the world apart, revealing its hidden workings. Once such workings are revealed, we can achieve new things with them. Things you and I can scarcely comprehend! Sheehan … we should be able to do the most incredible things.’

  ‘Should?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ he said, more defensively than he would have liked, ‘this is where it gets messy. Our knowledge is incomplete. Somewhere, the gift became tainted – or so the legend says. Some believe the gods found mortals wanting, and reclaimed much of the power of the Mathmax, allowing us only to imagine what once had been. The power to shape mountains, to build furnaces hotter than volcano-fire – to fly, like birds. To understand fully the motions of the stars, and the meaning of the Great Wheel and its slow spread across the heavens – to live, perhaps, as the immortal gods themselves. And so, now …’

  He pursed his lips and looked at the sky.

  ‘Now we search the stars with our crude lenses, or peer down our microscopes, and gain incremental advances using the formulae of the Quantax, dreaming of what such a world could be like.’

  ‘Which is where the faith comes in.’

  Not for the first time, it occurred to Murrin that more went on in Sheehan’s sleek little head than she liked to pretend. He was starting to wonder if she had been teasing him. ‘Hm.’

  ‘A sad tale,’ Sheehan pronounced, snapping an arm from a recoiling starfish. ‘You know, I don’t think I would want to be a scholar. Even if you let females into your stuffy old order. Scholars are so dark and melancholy.’