Cage of Souls Read online

  Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  SHADOWS OF THE APT

  Empire in Black and Gold

  Dragonfly Falling

  Blood of the Mantis

  Salute the Dark

  The Scarab Path

  The Sea Watch

  Heirs of the Blade

  The Air War

  War Master’s Gate

  Seal of the Worm

  TALES OF THE APT

  Spoils of War

  A Time for Grief

  For Love of Distant Shores

  ECHOES OF THE FALL

  The Tiger and the Wolf

  The Bear and the Serpent

  The Hyena and the Hawk

  Guns of the Dawn

  Children of Time

  Spiderlight

  Ironclads

  Feast and Famine (collection)

  Dogs of War

  Cage of Souls

  The Private Life of Elder Things (with Keris McDonald and Adam Gauntlett)

  CAGE OF SOULS

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2019

  The moral right of Adrian Tchaikovsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

  A catalogue record for this book is available fromthe British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781788547246

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788547376

  ISBN (E): 9781788547239

  Cover design & illustration: Leo Nickolls

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  Contents

  Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Welome Page

  Copyright

  Part the first In which I arrive at the Island

  1 A Game of Chess

  2 An Undesirable Residence

  3 Conversations with a Madman

  4 Father Sulplice and His Machines

  5 Symptoms of the Fever Victim

  6 Master of All He Surveys

  7 The Fairer Sex

  8 A Night at the Races

  9 The Great Disaster

  10 Knights Errant and Gallant

  11 Repercussions

  Part the Second My Life in the City

  12 The City at the End of the World

  13 The Expedition

  14 Alma Mater

  15 Saving the World

  16 Repercussions

  Part the Third My Further Adventures on and off the Island

  17 Visitors for the Condemned

  18 Attempted Murder

  19 Further Conversations with a Madman

  20 Alarums and Excursions

  21 A Game of Chess

  22 Crime and Punishment

  23 The Secret Life of Peter Drachmar

  24 Professionals at Work

  25 Further Alarums and Excursions

  26 Secrets of the Swamp

  27 Secrets of the Swamp (Part 2)

  Part the Fourth My Life in the Underworld

  28 Ward of the Temple

  29 The Lost Soldier and the Transforming Man

  30 Alarums and Excursions

  31 Faith

  32 Meeting the Family

  33 Bride of Sanguival

  34 Repercussions

  Part the Fifth In Which I Leave the Island

  35 The Battle for Underworld

  36 Echoes of the Fall

  37 The Shadow of Death

  38 The Rule of the Marshal

  39 Requiem for a Tyrant

  40 An End to Cells

  41 Tales from the Riverbank

  42 Tales from the Riverbank (Part 2)

  43 The Cage of Souls

  44 Shadrapar Desolato

  45 The Underworld Desolato

  46 The Reckoning

  47 Thelwel Through the Looking Glass

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  PART THE FIRST

  IN WHICH I ARRIVE AT THE ISLAND

  1

  A Game of Chess

  Where to begin?

  Not with the rioting crowd hurling stones and screaming, blood on their fingernails.

  Or the white desert, and the things that deal death amongst the ruins.

  The caverns of Underworld; the mad genius who was the subject of his own experiment, in hiding from the sun. No.

  And not with the cells of the dock, shoulder to shoulder with all the scum they could scrape from the streets. Thieves, murderers, debtors and me. Not yet.

  I might as well begin with a jaunt on the river; sounds jolly enough, no?

  *

  There was a boat, a metal-hulled antique some forty feet long. Shadrapar was its birthplace, as it is mine, but it took us east down the river into the unmappable and hungry jungles. The thump of its engine was a constant companion to all of us aboard her. We dreamed in time to its artificial heartbeat.

  I take you to the point in time when that indefatigable engine proved mortal after all, and was stilled.

  Some several of the crew and passengers came out on deck to consider this development. For those passengers, it was the first sunlight they had seen since setting off. The crew, armed, formed a semicircle before the boat’s captain. The passengers, a ragged, stinking sample of seven from the various vintages chained below, were the focus of their hostile attention. Convicts all, bound for a final exile, and your narrator one of them.

  There are extenuating circumstances.

  The boat was listing as the current took it gently towards the bank behind us, and the river – my first sight of it – was wider than I had expected. It was opaque, brown with silt, loose vegetation and the reflection of the jungle.

  I had never seen it before, this vast living thing in whose guts we were stewing. It had been a constant idea on the fringes of my mind: the wild eastern marches, festering in the heat of their own decay. The jungle was life, ravenous and abundant. There was no sharp line between land and water: the river glinted still between the boles of trees with roots like reaching fingers. The leaves were huge and drooped with their own weight and the whole smelled of rot and death. What struck me most was the darkness. It never got beyond twilight under that dank canopy. It scared me. I felt that it was one living thing, and that it was watching me. The relentless sun boiled down like the eye through which the jungle’s presence was focused. There was no wind and it was humid enough to stick my clothes to my skin from the first moment on deck.

  Everywhere there were animals.

  Animals had no place in my home of Shadrapar. We were civilised. Life was humanity; animals belonged in books. The fecundity of the jungle was a rioting horror. Birds with necks like serpents hunched on branches at the water’s edge, watching the boat sourly. The air whined with insects. I was bitten within a moment of stepping outside and the biters themselves were prey to larger bugs that darted and zigzagged over the water. Some were as large as my hand. A lizard a man’s-length long caught my eye, basking in the oppressive heat, its head decorated by a crest of lurid red.
Wherever there was nothing to be seen, there was the suggestion of life: a sound, a movement. The trees thronged with unseen man-eaters.

  “What’s the problem?” asked the one man there who was neither convict nor crew.

  “Weeds have choked the prop,” said the captain. He was a solid, brutal-looking man. Anyone would have to be half-mad to start with, to make a living shipping into those fetid stews.

  “Good,” his questioner said, and then, after some reflection, “And that means what?”

  “It means this batch of the cargo gets to go down there and cut it loose.”

  I was better educated than either of them and knew what a prop was. The idea of being lowered into that poisonous river made me feel ill. On land, no matter what the beast, there is a chance, a warning. In the water it is different. A sudden tug, some expanding ripples, then nothing to show that a man was ever there. I knew some of what was supposed to live this far east. There were a dozen separate volumes of Trethowan’s Bestiary that I had dragged my way through at the Academy. Trethowan himself had never returned from his thirteenth expedition.

  The passenger – the lone non-convicted passenger – stepped forwards, looking us over like a man going through a pauper’s personal effects. “Any of you wretches play chess?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. At the captain’s raised eyebrow he added, “Look, I know this is what you do, but I am so bored on your boat, and I have a chess set.” His expression, turned back to us, was not optimistic.

  I played chess.

  I recall raising my hand timidly, because even that early on I had learned that, for prisoners, singling yourself out was seldom wise. At the passenger’s prompting look I admitted that, yes, I did play chess. On such small matters are lives bought and sold.

  “Fine. That one doesn’t go,” the passenger said confidently. “He’ll be my catamite.”

  I choked. A moment later I saw that he had not the faintest idea what a catamite was. Neither did the captain, but the passenger had given the word such authority that it would have been unthinkable to challenge him.

  Two of the boat’s crew were preparing a hoist at the stern, a shaky platform which could be winched down to water level to let the chosen men hack away at the weed that tangled our propeller.

  “Get them on!” the captain ordered gruffly, and the three of us watched as the tattered band, my erstwhile fellows, was driven onto the platform. A riverman threw a bag on there with them, and I watched their blank faces as one opened it. It contained big, saw-edged knives.

  The captain had clearly done all this before. “Listen to me, you bastards,” he said. He used the word as though it was the correct technical term for prisoners drafted in as weed-cutters. “We’ll send you down, and you get to cut us free. Cut off anything that’s snagged on the machinery below the water. Then we’ll haul you up and you can hand over those toys before we take you back on.”

  The prisoners stared narrowly at him, wondering where the flaw in his plan was. None were well-read enough to realise just how far we all were from home.

  “Do I make myself clear?” the captain demanded. The mumbles he received in reply seemed to satisfy him. More pertinent in the prisoners’ minds, no doubt, were the crossbows in the hands of three rivermen. A fourth even had a flintlock musket. They just held the weapons loosely in plain sight, pragmatic men who were not being paid to bring any of us back. Even so, I was sure that at least one of the work party would make a break for the shore. For myself, I knew that I was the equal of these men in fate and impotence, but I was monstrously, guiltily glad not to be going with them. I was not ready, then, to co-exist with the water and the living jungle.

  “All right, chess-man. Might as well give me your name,” the passenger said. “Mine’s Peter Drachmar.” As though I might have heard of him. As so often in these unequal relationships, he was far less aware of the gulf that separated us than I was. That would change, where we were going.

  “Stefan Advani,” for such am I. I’d have you picture a man of aristocratic feature, as of a good family: a long face, dark straight hair and brown-olive skin. A high forehead – a sign of intellect and not just, as Helman always claimed, receding hairline. The nose is finely shaped but, even in the owner’s opinion, a trifle long. Eternally clean-shaven, a gift from my genes, my loose, ill-fitting clothing is dirty grey and does not flatter. This is your narrator contemplating the fate that was so nearly his, something I have made a career of.

  Peter Drachmar, seen there on deck, is quite a different sight. His hair is the colour of wet sand and there are laughter lines on his face even when he is not laughing. He has broader shoulders than I and wears clothes from a far better tailor. Luckily for his future employment, black is his preferred hue for a shirt. His trousers are of mustard colour and he has a short half-cloak of burgundy red that was the height of fashion the year before last. It is edged with gold trim that has faded slightly. If my description of him is more accurate, remember that, from this point on, I seldom crossed paths with a mirror.

  The man Peter Drachmar, my benefactor and someone who was to loom so large in my future, stood between me and the hell of the river, and I was desperate to bind myself to him even closer. Sadly, for me, this meant pedantry, and I asked him, “Just for information, what do you think a catamite is?” The squeak of the hoists sounded over my words.

  “A servant, isn’t it?” he said. “Some kind of servant.”

  I told him what a catamite was. He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully.

  “Right. Learn something new every day, don’t you?” He went to lean on the rail overlooking the stern and I joined him. Work was progressing slowly as the platform tipped and tilted on the water, and the men had to lean in almost up to their shoulders to cut at the weed. For a moment, as I stood barefoot on the hot metal deck with the air drenching me with sweat, it looked cooling.

  We were all men, we convicts, and apart from that and our incarceration we had little in common. Many were thieves, some were killers, others abusers of women. Still more were forgers, agitators, dismissed officials and political enemies of the Shadrapar Authority. No doubt a few were even innocent. Reduced to a common state of servitude it was impossible to tell which had killed a wife and which had only stolen a piece of fruit. I realised then (it had been long in coming) that, aside from my place on deck, I, too, was inseparable from the toiling wretches. Pluck me from thence and place me on the waterline and who could have picked me out? Who would care enough to?

  “You can go down if you want,” Peter suggested.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You were looking so damn miserable I assumed you were missing the exercise. I’m only keeping you around ’cos being a guard on the Island sounds hellish dull, and I could use a chess-foil.”

  “It’s going to be a fair sight duller for me,” I said immediately, without thinking, and Peter replied, “Really? Because you sound like a very educated type, and I think your life’s going to be more interesting than you’ll want, after we fetch up.” His look to me reminded me that I was going to eke out my days in penal servitude, whereas Peter Drachmar was staff. For reasons of his own, as complicated and personal as mine, he was to be the newest Warden of the Island.

  The captain stomped over to look down at the workers and shouted, “Well? How is it? If you bastards haven’t done by the time we touch the bank then I’ll have the lot of you shot and get some more bastards up from below. You think anyone cares how many I turn up with each trip? Marshal’d thank me for taking your worthless corpses off his hands.”

  There was a sullen silence from the working men until one of the rivermen sliced a crossbow bolt into the water beside the platform, which prompted someone to say that they were nearly done.

  “About bloody time, you lazy bastards,” the captain shouted down to them. “Could have done it with my bare hands in less.”

  It happened then, just as one or another of the workers was no doubt about to invite him to join them. Something rear
ed out of the water by the platform.

  It was like a serpent, with an arrow-shaped head that was almost entirely a mouth filled with back-curving teeth. Grey-green and dead-looking, it seemed to have no eyes. I caught the faint ripple that showed where its huge, turtle-like body was hanging in the water.

  The workmen had time for a confused babble of fear before the head struck at them like a fisherman’s spear. By some miracle it failed to snag any of them, although one man was sent crying back with blood on his arm. A crossbow bolt flitted across the thing’s face like one of the ubiquitous insects, and then the musket spoke with a short, dry sound. The musketeer was firing into the water at the monster’s body, and must have hit something because the head reared up at us. It really was nothing more than a set of jaws on a neck. I have no idea how it found its prey. Trethowan had neglected to mention it in the bestiary.

  A crossbow bolt was abruptly flowering from behind that head, and the monster decided that the odds were bad. It submerged all at once, swamping the workmen, and was gone in an instant. Throughout the attack it had made not a sound. It was as the crossbowmen and the musketeer reloaded their weapons that the captain called out, “One of the bastards is gone.”

  However bad I might have thought life on the Island would be, nothing would have persuaded me to make a break through those vile waters. I think I would rather have been summarily shot than try what that man tried. He must have known that crossbows and muskets take a deal of reloading, and he swam well. Even so, he could not have got to the shore before the rivermen were ready to shoot again.

  It did not even come to that. Whether the eyeless creature took him, or some other unseen river horror, I never knew, but it was just as I imagined. The sudden break in the man’s swimming, the moment of confusion, and then he was gone and there were only the ripples.

  The workmen were looking up, expecting to be hoisted. “Don’t you slack now,” the captain warned them. “If I were you I’d finish up before that thing comes back.”