The Iron Ship Read Free Page A

kept the agony at bay with thoughts of the pool waiting at the top of the stairs. She prayed to her reawakened god that it still possessed the power to heal her. The journey to the pool was endless, but there was joy in her heart that grew with every agonising step.
    After dozens of lifetimes of waiting, it had been her that had received the sign.

 
     
    CHAPTER ONE
    The Haunted Marsh
     
     
    “‘A S YOU GAZE on where I lie, have a care, you too shall die.’”
    Aarin Kressind moved so that his good eye was better positioned, and reread the words. The grave marker was exiled from the burial grounds atop the cliffs, half hidden by the wooden stair of the Path of the Dead. A commemoration for a criminal, the inscription was worn by time and weather and barely legible. A stylised face of a man, described entirely by arcs and circles, gaped at the top of the stone, staring out to distant sea in dismay.
    That was the resting place referred to; not the cliffside, but the ocean, the ultimate home of the dispossessed and the criminal. Aarin wondered who the marker had been raised for, and if their ghost still roamed the marshes.
    Aarin looked back up the greyed wood of the Path. If he held his hands boxed so, either side of his face—hands that were smooth and inkstained yet strong—he could shut out the city. Karsa did not encroach on the Path of the Dead. Through his hands he was looking back a hundred years to a time before Karsa had swollen with self-importance and burst its guts all around the county. He saw the Path of the Dead as it had been for a thousand years. A notch in the cliff edge closed by black iron gates leading down from the plateau, turning the instant it crossed the edge to lead down smooth, treacherous rock to the top of the wooden stair. The land around the steps was free of the spires and roof ridges that crowded the sky both left and right. Once all the dead of Karsa City had been brought this way and on out to the Black Isle. No longer. That lone and dismal outpost of the cliffs in the marsh had become choked with bones two centuries ago. Cemeteries lined the route to the head of the path, a plot in one of those was the best a man could hope for.
    Aarin’s moment of reflection passed. His irritation overcame him.
    “Pasquanty! Move yourself!” he yelled upwards.
    His deacon’s reply was reedy with distance and broken by the wind, but his fear was unmistakeable. “Coming, Guider Kressind!” The stairs vibrated quicker with his tread.
    The ledge broke the precipitous descent in two. Black rock stretched down six hundred feet to the marshes. The stairs were rickety, grey wood pinned to the cliffs by rusty iron. Aarin would have to report their condition to the Order. This was not fitting. The living forgot the dead at their peril.
    On both sides of the path, Karsa City spilled over the brinks of the cliffs as if pushed. A static avalanche of shacks teetered over the marsh. Wood and sheet metal huts held in place by braced diagonal beams and optimistic cantilevers, connected by bridges and walkways woven from equal parts rope and hope. The shanty extended eighteen fathoms down and stopped in an abrupt line. The high water mark was still some eight hundred feet below the bottommost shacks, but it was not the vagaries of the tides that discouraged people from building lower.
    Ordure streaked black rock and wood. Privy holes opened in the underside of the buildings directly onto the roofs of their neighbours. Between the shanties the sewage of the upper city spewed from modern culverts piercing the cliffs. All part of Per Allian’s plan to clean up the capital. No thought had been given to the marshes. It appeared neither Allian nor his sponsor Prince Alfra cared for them or their sanctity. Aarin seethed at it. The slums were a disgrace. Every time he came here it was worse.
    The sewer’s rank bounty supported its own indelicate web of life. Gulls screeched in wheeling formation, fighting the