The Iron Ship Read Free Page B

unpredictable gusts deflected from the cliff face to return to their roosts. By day they feasted on the crabs and worms and other things that gorged on Karsa’s shit. Thousands—tens of thousands, some said—plagued the new cliff edge districts in aerial hordes, worse off to the north where the Slot climbed down to the sea. There the city proper tumbled eagerly about the locks, coming as far as the high watermark one hundred yards above the marsh. There were clouds over the tight streets of the Slot and the Locksides, dark and thick in resolute defiance of the wind. Hard to tell from that distance if it was smog or yet more of the blasted gulls.
    There were no gulls over the Path of the Dead, their cries were always distant. There was a war on in cliff-edge Karsa, unofficial but earnest nonetheless, between the gulls and the people. Each side regarded the other as trespassers on their territory, but the stair was kept out of it. That was for the dead.
    Aarin was one of a very few with a key to the gates, and therefore had little fear for the height, the path or the haunted marsh it crossed.
    Aarin was a tall man, heavily built around the shoulders if gangly in the limbs. One eye was a milk-white orb crossed by a ragged scar. Despite this disfigurement he was handsome if seldom smiling. He wore robes of green and gold under his weather-beaten cleric’s coat. His hair, a mix of his father’s red and mother’s sandy tresses, was in the stark Guider’s style, shaved all over but for the front part of his skull. Further signifiers to his vocation were the rings he wore, and the chain about his neck of linked, stylised skulls. Anyone who set eyes upon him, living or dead, would be immediately aware of his calling as a minister to the deceased.
    If that did not prove informative enough, then his companions surely were.
    The twins were some three dozen yards back and upwards, between Aarin and Pasquanty. The chest they carried was heavy, but the twins, neither twins nor any longer alive, lacked the capacity to feel discomfort at bearing its weight or to complain about it. They marched onto the ledge, and stopped before the priest. One had been a pale-skinned Karsan, the other a darker northerner, though both had become somewhat grey in death. Their dead eyes rolled ceaselessly, seeing nothing, oblivious to the dread of the place.
    Pasquanty came next. Aarin’s deacon was a habitually anxious man, and so he was very afraid. He glanced at the sky fearfully as he stepped onto the ledge. Evening was coming. Light was draining from the sky surely as water runs from a tipped basin. The horizon blushed pink over the distant ocean. Above the cliffs the clouds were purple, and brooded sullenly at their bruising.
    “You will not delay the coming of dark by checking its progress every half minute, deacon,” said Aarin irritably. “I am not by nature a vicious man, Pasquanty, but your nervousness is testing me. Remember what you are!”
    “I... I am sorry, Guider Kressind.” Pasquanty’s Karsarin had a slight accent, that of Corrend. His apology did not stop him from anxiously checking the sky once again.
    “Do stop that! We have nothing to fear, you or I. We will pass unharmed.”
    “But the spectres, Guider Kressind. The roaming ones, the...”
    “There is nothing to fear from them either, if you are wise. Be wise! And stop looking at the sky! It will be dark soon, do you need to know the exact moment that dusk comes? Take a care or you’ll fall.”
    Pasquanty had a pair of large eyes whose soulfulness was somewhat undone by their watery nature and the mountain of a nose that divided them. Pasquanty’s blink was unusually expressive, indeed, all his facial configurations were as melodramatic as those of a mime. No one was ever in any doubt as to how Pasquanty felt. At that moment, he broadcast misery. This endless play of emotion was one of the many factors that provoked Aarin’s irritation.
    “I am sure that you do it on