The Blood Debt Read Online Free PDF

clucked, brayed or hissed through bars, muzzles or harnesses. Cockroaches scuttled. Spindly, four-legged creatures with curling tails scampered up drains and through windows; some of them wore embroidered vests, signalling that they were pets. The sky above, visible through rips in the canvas shade angled over them, was a faded pale blue. Laure didn’t appear to have seen rain for years. The air was dry, the cobbled road beside them parched; with water strictly rationed the stink of spices was strong in the air, covering the smell of unbathed humanity.

    Behind the general hubbub, Skender could hear the wailing of the city’s ruling guild of red-robed weather-workers, the yadachi, as they exhorted the wind to bring relief. They sat on thin, vertical poles high above street level, distant from everyday concerns. Skender knew that on certain days, when significant winds blew, giant pipes caught the superheated air and turned it into notes so low they were felt as much as heard. That music was silent for the moment. The only other melody he could detect in the city’s babble was the mournful lay of a duduq, a double-reeded instrument that in skilled hands could make of every note a lament.

    ‘Then what?’

    ‘She went into the Divide,’ he said, ‘at a natural pass called the Devil’s Elbow, which is protected by charms against things trying to come up, not down. They camped at the top, and that’s obviously where they argued about who was going to go and who wasn’t. I found signs suggesting that the porters stayed for a while after she went down the pass. Maybe they genuinely waited for her to come back; maybe they waited barely as long as was decent. Either way, they left no tracks to suggest that they went after her, or that she came back that way later.’

    ‘Did you go down the pass?’

    He shook his head. ‘Her trail was old, and I didn’t know what I’d be walking into. I followed the top of the Divide instead, heading northeast along the Interior side.’ Even from the relative safety of the escarpment, he had felt on edge during that day-long journey. The far side of the Divide was kilometres away, and the yawning emptiness had tugged relentlessly at him. The buggy bounced over rough ground, following a faint track that hadn’t been used for decades. Every bump seemed to twist the wheels toward the Divide. He gripped the steering wheel and concentrated on keeping his heading straight.

    At the same time, he looked for any sign of his mother and her expedition on the parched valley floor, dozens of metres below. The earth was pitted and scarred down there, as though an ancient battle had churned the soil and split the bedrock in thousands of places. Dust devils and heat distortions danced in the air above gaping rents, as capricious as ghostly birds. Fleeting glints of light drew his eye to shadowy clefts, but disappeared before he could see what made them. He was reminded of descriptions of the Broken Lands, where the earth lay in endless disorder, terrain of all sorts jutting into each other like a jigsaw puzzle dropped by a giant.

    Between the rents were sheets of startlingly smooth sand dunes, white, grey and red. Some of them were hundreds of metres long, stretching like melted caramel along the centre of the Divide. On these sheets he saw tracks that might have been made by a reckless Surveyor and her party. Nowhere else did he see a single sign of human life.

    Then he had seen Laure, the walled city, and her destination had become obvious.

    ‘I don’t know much about your home,’ he said to Chu. ‘Laure is mentioned only briefly in the Book of Towers. Fragments three hundred and ten to three hundred and twenty-four tell of a town sundered by a great rending of the Earth. The story goes that each of the city’s two halves thought the other was responsible, and they fought for years, causing still more damage to what remained. The war was won by the northern half, and the southern half