A Ruin of Shadows Read online

  A Ruin of Shadows

  L.D. Lewis

  Published by Dancing Star Press, 2018.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  A RUIN OF SHADOWS

  First edition. April 24, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 L.D. Lewis.

  ISBN: 978-1732141810

  Written by L.D. Lewis.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  A Ruin of Shadows

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  For Athena

  General Édo stood on the bow of the Nimbo Preto beneath black sails, staring east in the night toward home. She enjoyed the glow kissed by moonlight into her deep brown skin. The stench of blood and sweat and pine embers had embedded itself in her shirt for about the hundredth time and no amount of sea air would shake it loose. The flag of the Boorhian Empire billowed gently overhead, a black field surrounding a great circle of orange. It was supposed to be the world, but the thin black outlines of continents were barely visible on any scale; their boundaries were only theoretical to the Empire.

  A roar of laughter behind her. The Boorhian Empire’s Shadow Army — a band of gunners, steel wielders, and creative arsonists who bled other people for the State — spread themselves about the stern where they’d been able to see and bask in the burning coast of Bastiat up until about an hour ago when it disappeared over the horizon. The novelty, the thrill of conquest hadn’t vanished on them yet. They hadn’t been at it for thirty years.

  She took a breath and tried to exhale the years weighing on her soul. It didn’t work, so she headed toward the laughter and her quarters beyond it.

  Shadow Army, one might think, is a bit of a misnomer. After all, there were only seven of them. That's more of a team or cadre number. They were dubbed an army because of the sweeping efficiency with which they did their jobs. The General was their matriarch.

  The seven nameless Shadows snapped to attention as she descended the stairs. Three men, four women, all young enough to be her sons and daughters had she ever had the mind to have children. They bore themselves still as Boorhian stone, save for the smiles still playing on some of their lips. That was likely Daynja’s corruptive influence.

  “As you were,” the General waved their freedom and they melted back into something more casual. “What’s funny?”

  “Three got Five with a rope. He thought it was a snake,” said Six. She and Seven, the youngest Shadows, were twins and shared the same grin over it.

  Three was the Shadows’ lone bomber and that’s what she’d proudly tell anyone who asked about the three missing fingers of her right hand. She’d been a brawler once, but there was rarely a need for it as an assassin. Turned out she had a good mind for explosives, too. She smirked as she retracted her fuse line with black-smudged fingertips into a bundle circling her forearm. Indeed a thin, oil-slick bit of rope-end lay lifeless between Five’s feet. A couple of Five’s daggers nailed it to the deck.

  “You? Afraid of snakes?” The General raised an eyebrow.

  “Not afraid, Xir. I just don’t trust them.” Five replied, snatching his blades from the wood.

  “Yeah, no. He’s afraid,” Six deadpanned.

  “He wouldn’t shut up about some serpent following him on the continent.” Daynja’s first Shadow, One’s baritone interjected from where he sat off to himself, reclined on a pile of rope and heavy chain with a cap down over his eyes.

  “We tried to tell him ain’t a snake been spotted on Bastiat since you took out A Víbora, Xir,” said Two. She was the other elder Shadow and sat at a table made of planks over barrels, hammering the brass ends from her bullet casings to fit them as cuffs to her locs. She glanced up occasionally, still amused by her sibling assassins. Four, the other gunner, sat at the table with her, focused intensely on cleaning her own weapons.

  “A Víbora? When was that, 30 years ago?” Five scoffed and then blushed in the firelight as everyone stared at him for implying the General was old. He snapped to attention and bowed at the waist. “Apologies, Xir.”

  “Thirty-four years.” The General said coolly.

  “I don’t think I ever heard this story completely,” said Six.

  The story of A Víbora was one really only Daynja could tell because everyone else who’d been there was dead. Still, she liked listening to how far tales of her exploits spun out over the years. And she liked having Three tell them.

  The bomber Shadow smiled and put her knife away. “See, when she was a kid,” she started, “they sent General Édo to Bastiat with this crew to put down some zealots north of the rocky coast. And while they’re camped, the crew’s attacked by swarms of serpents. One even bites the General, and she rips it out of her arm with its teeth still under her skin. She’s the only one who doesn’t die.”

  Six and Seven eyed the General as she showed them the scar tissue in her forearm, the teeth still distinct and embedded beneath it.

  “Where was the mask?” asked Seven. That was always everyone’s question. The General had come to Citadela as a child with this enchanted black mask that spawned an impenetrable armor over her entire body when worn. It had a fandom all its own.

  “I was asleep. No time to put it on,” said the General.

  “So this snake’s bitten her and she’s poisoned and punchy and still hacking snake heads off with machetes. The remaining snakes flee,” said Three, clearly excited. Fuse line coated her forearms in black grease as she gestured through the story. “She leaves the crew. They’re dead anyway. For a day and a night she follows these snakes back north of the rocky coast to this cave with pits just full to fuck with vipers. Apologies, Xir.”

  “It was a quarry.” The General almost laughed.

  “Yeah? Alright, a quarry.” Three shrugged. “Pits fifty meters long, filled to the tits with squirming, writhing, eat-your-face snakes, right? And who’s at the center of all of it?”

  From all their corners, the Shadows who’d heard this story before muttered, “A Víbora” dramatically with chuckles and snorts of laughter.

  “A Víbora.” Three grinned. “Twice as tall as One over there and pale as ash. He’s a snake lord, and one of the Os Vazios legends. By the time Édo’s there, she’s tired and mad and her armor’s not working well enough to cross a viper pit without dying half a dozen times. So she torches it.”

  “Torches it.” Five echoed, shaking his head.

  Six and Seven exchanged impressed nods.

  “You’d think it’d be something elaborate, right? No. Just set the place on fire.” Three kissed the fingertips of her left hand and made an exploding gesture. “Then she armored up long enough to cross the flames without getting burned just to cut him down with her own machete.”

  “My weapons arsenal wasn’t nearly as refined back then.” The General said.

  “That was it?” asked Seven.

  “More or less.” The General shrugged. After that, she’d returned to Citadela with the gray, poisoned bodies of the crew and the head of her enemy. How they hadn’t assumed she just killed them all herself was beyond her.

  “It was unfortunate. I rather like snakes.”

  “That was your first kill for the Empire, Xir?” Six asked eagerly.

  “First out of how many?” said Five.

  “I don’t keep count.”

  Even the busy Shadows stopped what they were doing to stare incredulously at her.

  “You don’t?” said Seven.

  Daynja didn’t know why she was surprised. “I just said I don’t. You all do?”

  “43,” said Two.

  “64. Give or take,” Three smir
ked. “Bombs.”

  “40 even,” One yawned.

  Twenty-seven. Thirty-two. Thirty-one. Five was indignant about his paltry twelve.

  Daynja’s headache returned unexpectedly, but she gave her Shadows an impressed nod. “How thorough of you,” she said.

  “You’ve got to be in the hundreds by now, Xir.” Two added as if the General was somehow in doubt about her prowess.

  “Well, we will never know.” The General stretched. “I am going to bed. Don’t stay up too late. Drills at dawn.”

  The Shadows snapped to attention again and she put them at ease as she descended the stairs to her cabin.

  After decades of dealing death at her own hands, how was it that her Shadows’ glee in their jobs disturbed her now? Her glory days had been over for a while. In the beginning, there had been kings to kill. There’d been conquerings that required at least a little strategy and the use of her considerable wit. The war to turn back Os Vazios’ colonization of Boorhia was over by the time she came to Citadela at thirteen. Her job had been to wipe them from the face of Irth by hunting down their legends and living gods. But all the big game was gone now and all that was left was the rabble, fledgling rebel clusters scattered across the continent with ideals toward growing and ridding themselves of Boorhia’s suppression. All Daynja Édo was doing now was maintenance.

  What she was now was tired. Tired or bored.

  The last of the heat left in the room from a now-dead fire hit her as she entered her cabin and shut the door behind her.

  Sixty-four?

  “So I was thinking...” a voice mused unexpectedly. She spun to find a black youth — blue, by the moonlight — perched atop her desk by the one long window. She could make out the subtle glow of one gold eye as he watched her.

  “Damn it, Djinni.” She sighed at the umpteenth incarnation of the Artful Djinni and calmed the adrenaline in her blood.

  “Yes, hello.” The djinni replied cheerily. They’d been in the form of a leathery old woman when the General was a child, and any number of sentient things between then and now. Tonight, they were a dark, loc-haired kid in a galley boy’s uniform, unfolding themself from the shadows and wondering at her with the twinkling gray and gold eyes that gave them away.

  “How long have you been in here?” Daynja asked. She clicked up a lantern’s light and dropped onto a small batik-print couch to scrawl numbers on the edge of an old sea chart.

  43. 64 — give or take...

  “What time is it?” Djinni asked.

  “Late.” Daynja replied absently.

  40. 32....

  “I jest. Time is—”

  “—is immaterial. Right. Got it.” She finished for them. The djinni was a timeless, ancient creature. Not immortal, but too clever to die easily and they liked to throw that in her face regularly.

  12. 27. 31.

  Were there really over two hundred lives here?

  The General wasn't a remorseful woman. In fact, she relished her Imperial Warlord title, and the magnificent tales spread of her particular brand of refined brutishness. Still, she frowned, tapping her pen in dots against the paper before dropping it entirely in favor of pouring herself a drink from the near-empty cachaça snifter on the table. Her famed mask lay idle and unremarkable beside it. The mask was plain, made of ebony with a gold ring through its septum and could probably do with a polish. It was a revered thing because as far as anyone knew, it was the source of all her power.

  Far be it from her to correct them.

  “All that immaterial time and you couldn’t build a fire while you waited?” She sat back and swirled the white liquor in its mottled glass. A small burst of orange flame appeared before her in the fireplace.

  The General smirked and got up to feed the fireplace from the neat stack of wood beside it.

  “I was saying,” Djinni continued, “We never vacation, you and I. Why do you think that is?”

  Daynja scoffed. “What would you do on vacation that you don’t do anyway?”

  “The company makes all the difference.” They winked and swung their legs over the desk. “So. If you were to, say, develop interests that had little to nothing to do with killing for the Empire, where in the world would you go to test them out?”

  She rolled her eyes toward the engraved map of the world mounted over the fireplace. The Empire’s territory was marked with dense, slanted hash lines and extended the entire massive Boorhian continent and some colonies in northeast Timber that were pleasant enough. The Bastiat continent Daynja was regularly charged with torching to some degree, was marked in less-dense hash lines. The Empire controlled it, of course. It couldn’t be trusted to control itself. But it bore no Boorhian colonies because of the evil that always seemed to sprout from its soil.

  “Everywhere is Boorhia,” Daynja said. “Unless you’re talking about South Timber which... interesting. But cold.” She sipped her drink.

  “Cold is what fires and furs are for,” said Djinni.

  Daynja’s eyes wandered westward toward the specks of land beyond Bastiat. Eros was an archipelago leagues further from eastern Boorhia than any other nation. The islands themselves were united under Royal Saints, a king or queen who kept the nation’s relationship to the Old Gods most of the world used to worship.

  They were pacifists, so she had never had reason to go there. She imagined it was warm, quaint, and perfectly boring.

  “Something else on your mind?” Djinni asked.

  “Do you remember when we met?”

  “When I met you or when you met me? In either case, yes.”

  “What did you think I’d end up doing with my life by now?”

  “Oh I thought you’d be dead already,” said Djinni. Their glibness sounded strange in a young boy’s voice.

  “That right?” Daynja blinked.

  “When I met you, you were a very small creature cradled in the dust of your parents’ bones. When you met me, you were taller and lacked the sense not to steal from me.”

  “I was surviving at ten and thought I was stealing from an old woman who could spare it.”

  “My point exactly. Your parents didn’t live long enough to teach you not to underestimate mysterious old women. You were already repeating their mistakes at an impressively accelerated rate.”

  Daynja shrugged. Djinni had a point.

  Djinni’d been there the day her vagabond parents conned a bitter old nun named Gigi who just so happened to know enough Old Magik to make them regret it. Daynja’s mother was heavy with her at the time. Bearing no ill will to an unborn child, Gigi cursed the couple to accelerated age but blessed the child to be impervious. And so Daynja’s once young and clever parents aged as many decades as years that passed until one morning, when she was five, she woke in the Vazios monastery ruins where they lived to find herself lying on the cobalt blue of her mother’s dress. Her mother’s bones had turned to ash within it as if she’d been dead a century already. Her father’s lay beside her.

  Djinni’d been there that day, too.

  “What did you think you’d be doing?” They asked.

  “When I was ten? I don’t know. Career thief? Scam my way into something comfortable?”

  “Well you might have pulled that off...”

  “Djinni...”

  “What I mean is, you’ve fared better than either of us imagined, haven’t you?”

  Daynja looked at the map on her wall and was surprised how many won battles she could recall over its surface. She wondered...

  She picked up her pen again and began to count.

  ∴

  From the western shore of the continent, Citadela was a day’s driftcar ride into the heart of the jungle. High-speed magnetic throughways were cut into the sprawling bases of ancient kapok trees so the Empire’s hovering commercial and military vehicles could careen toward destinations all over the continent without bothersome friction. The technology had only recently begun trickling down to civilians. Soon, Daynja imagined, more of the f
orests would be cross-cut with slick black veins and the constant, nauseating, ear-popping hum of two metallic tons zipping through magnetic relays at high speeds would become the music of the continent.

  If there was any kindness in the universe, she’d be long dead by then.

  Ruins dotted the jungle along their route. Gray stone remnants of Os Vazios missions and burnt, toppled statues of legends were slowly being consumed by the living forest. The war had only just ended by the time Edo was born but she knew the stories well. Os Vazios had been a skeletal gray people with an air of perpetual hunger about them. They’d swarmed the continent and had used their sickly visage to worm their way into cities as beggars. They’d brought a sickness with them; something to do with white flies, something only they could cure.

  They’d built these stone missions to treat those they afflicted. But the sick emerged from their care dead-eyed, un-emotive, barely recognizable to their families. And Os Vazios grew healthier. Like parasites. Missions became temples where worship of foreign gods was exchanged for healing. Temples became targets for Boorhia’s revenge. Targets became ruins. And Os Vazios were driven from the continent.

  They put in at a transit station about a mile from Citadela’s gates, and in an exchange that was never not bizarre, traded the driftcar for ceremonial black rhinos.

  Every time the General and her Shadows returned to Citadela, it required a celebratory parading down the city’s main avenue on the backs of armored rhinoceros. The premise was ridiculous, of course. She who would ride a damn rhino in a battle charge cared nothing for the intact state of her spine. But the tradition extended back centuries before Citadela became the center of the world, so here she was for the umpteenth time eating an apple and staring at the ass-end of Deus, her rhino being dressed in his stall.

  “All right there, General? You look a little grim.”

  “Huh?” Daynja glanced up to see the old man who ran the rhino stables staring at her with his eyebrows raised and a half-eaten apple in his fist.