scraping against glass as she unscrewed the lid with care. Sasheen rolled her right sleeve up to her elbow; leaned forward and took a sniff of the substance within.
‘Royal Milk,’ she said, without taking her eyes from it. Che blinked. He’d never seen the Milk before, only knew of its existence, the excretions of a queen Cree from the land of the Great Hush, renowned for its powers of vitality.
The wealth of a small kingdom lay inside that single jar alone.
Even from here, he could smell the liquid over the sweetness of the frying butter and sandshrimps. It was an unpleasant scent, like bile. With care, Sasheen dipped her hand into the white liquid within. She grasped something and began to pull it out; a handful of matted hair.
A scalp, Che thought… but then the rest of it followed: a forehead, a pair of closed eyes, a nose, a mouth fixed in a grimace, a dripping chin, a roughly hewn neck. She held this apparition over the jar as the white liquid ran from the severed head and her own hand like quicksilver.
It was the severed head of a middle-aged man, Che could see as the Milk flowed clear from it. Dark hair turned grey at the temples. A wide full mouth, a long nose, sharp cheekbones and brows.
As the last drop dripped clear of it, Sasheen swung the head over the table and settled it by its ragged neck on the dark surface of tiq.
The face flinched in pain or surprise. Che stiffened where he sat, his wide-eyed stare fixed on the thing before him. The Matriarch backed away from the head as its eyes flickered open, blinking to clear them, bloodshot and tormented. White Milk spilled from the corners of its lips as it saw Sasheen and glared.
‘Hello, Lucian,’ she said to the thing.
The head closed its lips, seemed to swallow a mouthful of air.
‘ Sasheen,’ the man croaked in a strange, wet voice, almost belching the word.
Che’s eyes darted to the Matriarch then back to the head. It was Lucian all right. Sasheen’s one-time famous lover and general, one of the first of the Lagosian nobility to join the ranks of Mann when the island had first fallen to the Empire – before he had betrayed her, by leading the Lagos rebellion in fighting once more for independence.
Che had witnessed the pieces of his hung-and-quartered corpse hanging in Freedom Square, with the soldiers stationed below them chasing away the hungry crows. He’d thought that had been the end of the man. It seemed though that Sasheen had other ideas for her ex-lover.
The Holy Matriarch turned her back to the head. She smiled at Che, sudden mischief in her eyes.
Sasheen raised her right hand to her mouth, licked her fingers one by one. Even as Che watched her do this, he could see the blood rush to her skin, her eyes begin to dilate even further. She finished with a greedy smack of her lips.
‘Nothing like it in this whole wide world,’ she said breathlessly, and took a step towards Che, hungry for something.
Once more Che fought an absurd impulse to laugh. It only worsened as she leaned down towards him, becoming a jostling pain in his chest as she placed her hand against his cheek, pressed her mouth hard against his own. Her tongue darted, parting his lips.
So easy to kill her, he thought, right here and now, if his lips had still been smeared with venom.
The taste of the Royal Milk was like nothing he had ever tasted before. It was neither sweet nor sour, bitter nor salty. His tongue began to sting, and then to go numb, as Sasheen continued to kiss him.
‘ Whore,’ came the strange belching voice of Lucian from behind her.
And then the rush of it hit Che, like a breath of fire blossoming through the blood-ways of his body. It jolted him out of his tiredness in a snap so that his blood surged, pounding, and a sense of weightlessness overcame him, filling him with light instead, and air, and the first real glimmers of lust.
Sasheen pulled clear with a moan, and glanced quite obviously down at his crotch. She whirled away with a satisfied smile.
He gasped, close to losing himself entirely, and sprawled back against the settle as though falling.
Two pulses, he thought distractedly. I have two pulses in my neck .
‘Ah, breakfast,’ she declared, as the old priest entered with a tray of food.
Che tried to move and then thought better of it. He clung to the settle as though he would fly from it at any instant, while the sounds of Sasheen preparing to eat filtered towards him from far behind.
‘What is this?’ snapped her voice. ‘I can hardly see them, they’re so small.’
‘Sandshrips are always small this time of the year, Matriarch. They are still young.’
‘What? And they can’t be fed up a little? And what’s this? Grubby marks everywhere. I suppose the kitchen staff are also too young this time of year to keep the silver clean?’
‘My apologies, Matriarch. I’m still training the new replacements in the proper ways. It will not happen again, I assure you. I can have something else prepared, if you wish?’
‘And wait even longer? No. You may go.’
Che looked at the grim face of Lucian glowering at him with his maddened eyes. With a loll of his head Che looked to his right, where the old woman Kira still sat unmoving.
There was a definite glimmer beneath her eyelids now – those bird eyes of hers staring across the space at Che as though they could see right through him.
Che closed his own eyes and soared.
CHAPTER THREE
Without Wings
Whoah, thought Coya, as a gust of wind buffeted the figure that dangled between the two skyships, and set the man swinging like the pendulum of a clock.
‘Hold there!’ shouted the startled deck charge, raising a palm to the crewmen heaving away on the secondary line. At once they stopped hauling, and stood there frozen in their positions, watching the swaying figure with the uncertainty of men who’d never attempted this feat before, and were aware of its possibility only because others were telling them of it.
Out there in the gulf of air between the two vessels, bobbing from the line strung between them both, the figure on the wooden chair opened his mouth to shout: ‘ In your own time, gentlemen! ’
Coya smiled despite his concerns for the man.
‘Bring him in, Seday, quickly now,’ he told the deck charge smartly, and although Coya appeared young for his twenty-seven years – young even with his body stooped over a walking cane – the men snapped to with the respect of earnest sons for a father, and started to haul on the rope once more.
Just then another gust hit, stronger than the previous one, setting the distant figure pirouetting again on his seat. Coya heard the wind pressing against the silken envelope overhead, saw how the two skyships were drifting from their relative positions. Manoeuvring tubes fired along their sides, at the hurried commands of their captains. Still, the skyships drifted slightly apart, the line playing out on the far Khosian deck. The slack was lost, causing the man to bob even more dangerously beneath its tightening length. With an inrush of breath, Coya leaned forward with his weight on his walking cane and his hand clutching the ebony grip tightly.
To lose this man now could very well equate to losing the entire war.
‘Quickly now!’ he urged, without taking his gaze from their charge.
The figure was well past the halfway mark and nearing the ship at last. He looked calmer out there than Coya did merely watching from the deck. With his feet dangling over an abyss of several thousand feet all the way to the choppy sea below, he was turning his head to take in the rugged coastline of Minos, and the bay in which the city of Al-Minos lay like a gleaming pearl. Drawing closer, Coya saw his long black hair whip around his wind-reddened face; his hands with their many plain rings; his heavy bear-skin coat covering his great bulk.
Suddenly, Coya felt his pulse grow faster from the sheer anticipation of the Lord Protector’s presence.
‘Easy, lads,’ General Creed boomed as they pulled him roughly onto the decking; and suddenly there he was, towering over them all, feigning an easy nonchalance when in truth Coya saw only exhilaration in his eyes.
The crewmen released the general from his safety harness while Creed clapped a few shoulders for good
