Kraken's Claw Read online

  PRAISE FOR BRUCE FERGUSSON'S SIX KINGDOMS NOVELS

  The Shadow of His Wings

  “Fergusson has imagination and style to spare. The story keeps the reader guessing what will happen next.”

  ~ Publisher's Weekly

  “Fergusson is a master...In each chapter he gives us more life than most writers can put in a whole book.”

  ~ Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game

  “Impossible to put down...compelling.”

  ~ Christopher Stasheff

  The Mace of Souls

  “Richly imagined...Will confirm the praise accorded his debut effort, The Shadow of His Wings.”

  ~ Publisher's Weekly

  “Fergusson's deftness and creativity override the conventions of the genre. An extraordinary and highly entertaining read.”

  ~ Booklist

  “One expects excellence, and Fergusson delivers.”

  ~ Fantasy Review

  Pass on the Cup of Dreams

  “Pass on the Cup of Dreams quickly immerses the reader in the imaginatively detailed world of the Six Kingdoms. Fergusson's writing is excellent, the plot relentless, the characters wonderfully complex. If you enjoy gritty, dark fantasy you will find a feast here.”

  ~ Robin Hobb, New York Times bestselling fantasy author

  “Bruce Fergusson's two previous Six Kingdoms novels were a breath of fresh air in the often predictable genre of secondary-world fantasy. He hasn't lost his touch with Pass on the Cup of Dreams. It's inventive, quirky and unpredictable—all the things I love in a book.”

  ~ Charles deLint, World Fantasy Award-winning author

  Kraken’s Claw

  a novel of the Six Kingdoms

  Bruce Fergusson

  Falca Breks, a rapparee from Draica, left much in the northern wilderness of the Rough Bounds—the riches and renown that could have been his had he stayed at the lake-isle fortress of Scaldasaig he captured, against all odds, from traitorous Wardens of Lucidor.

  He also left something else that no measure of fortune or fame could have replaced.

  By choice or not, he'd lost everything.

  So when Falca decided to head farther south, he cautioned himself to keep his expectations low: when you undertake a long, solitary journey through the past and two of the Six Kingdoms to find a woman you've never met before—who may not even still be alive—and tell her the bitter-sweet truth of what happened to a man she once loved and believed tragically lost, who had become like a father to you...well, you've got to be prepared for things not to go the way you hoped.

  But Falca could never have prepared for what he found in fabled Milatum, the city he'd often dreamed about escaping to as an orphaned youth in Draica, that tough Lucidorian seaport where the only legend available to him was as a crouch-alley reiver, street buster and dock-heave.

  Only days after his arrival Falca was desperate to move on yet again—and quickly—though still far from realizing that sometimes escaping is the only way to find what you never knew you were looking for all along.

  A Lucky Bat Book

  Kraken’s Claw

  A Novel of the Six Kingdoms

  Copyright © 2019 Bruce Fergusson

  All rights reserved

  Cover Design by Joe Calkin

  LuckyBatBooks.com

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  CONTENTS

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Also By

  Table of Contents

  To my mother, for Ulysses.

  And to my father, for the ‘what-ifs’.

  Book One: MILATUM

  From Daughter of the Labrys

  I HAD TROUBLE falling asleep before the events of that terrible mid-summer night. The reason wasn’t any lurking, shadowy awareness of what would happen later. The truth of it is, I lay awake thinking about the long voyage that would begin two days hence, taking me to a place to which I did not want to go, and marry a man I did not wish to wed.

  It must have been close to midnight, when only a few starflies still winked about the room, that I parted the canopy drape of whisp and left my bed to go over to the settee under the open window. I pulled aside the curtains of spun glass, the moonglow becoming ribbons that ended where I’d just been, restless and wide-eyed. Usually the curtain music was softer—a tinkling—lulling me to sleep, but the breeze off the Queensmere was strong, though the night air was warm as it always is in Milatum except for a few months of winter. Regardless of the season, however, I could always hear the song of my city: the wind—gentle or fierce—playing our five bridges as if they were lyres of the gods.

  I hadn’t been sitting for long by the window when I heard someone coming into the room. My younger sister must have seen my silhouette as she paused only briefly by the bed, and joined me on the settee.

  “I didn’t think you’d be sleeping,” she said. “I couldn’t either.”

  I’ve been fortunate that Cymra and I are so close, because our temperaments and interests are different. Perhaps one reason is that the four-year difference in our ages is neither too close nor too far apart. I’ve been told she began talking much earlier than I; evidently I was well past three years old before I was speaking in sentences—which evidently caused concern for my mother and father. And then, as it happens, Cymra grew to be a shy girl, comfortable only in talking to her older sister; whereas I grew to be someone whom my parents must have often wished had remained mute or could be fitted with a muzzle otherwise suitable for a Demizell of the House of Keshkev.

  If my mother and father—Epona and Rhakotis, queen and king—thought that something was wrong with me as a three-year-old, that opinion didn’t change significantly. When I was sixteen, I overheard my mother saying to my father: “Cyalla will be a beauty, more so than her sister; but at least Cymra isn’t disfigured by a difficult nature and inappropriate interests. Cyalla seems to have a new one with every book she reads.”

  I don’t remember Cymra and I saying much immediately after she came in that night, though we did later, about Vaience Loquin. I was silent because the view from my chamber already seemed like a treasure lost. From my window you could see, almost on a straight line across the Queensmere, the dawnstone colossus of Pelagia that rose near the Cleave, the main and southern entrance to Milatum by ship. In two days’ time, throngs of our citizens would be on Mago’s Bridge that spanned the Cleave, throwing flowers cut from the royal gardens and distributed from wagons at either end of the bridge, to celebrate the coming union of Keshkevar’s Labrys Throne with Myrcia’s Cascade Throne.

  That night, as always, the lights of the city reflected on the edges of the Queensmere, and from the height of my room in the Kelefion on the royal isle of Mereshaven, my home within a home, the street lamps of Colza’s Way that linked the bridges and the hilly Linnises of Milatum, seemed like earthly constellations. Of those above, Kyria’s Lyre was especially prominent for the summer.

  By the time I was eight I could name most of our southern constellations. I asked my parents for a spyglass fixed to a tripod, so I could better see the fainter ones like the Hammer and Anvil, and also the fainter markings of the moons, Cassena and Suaila.

  My father indulged me, grudgingly: “So it’s not enough for you to simply know that they were named long ago for Roak’s wives?” To which my mother added: “And should you discover that the heavenly fable is true—that they reside there in eternity—I’m sure you will inform Sulserra’s thedrals; you’re there often enough.”

  Indeed I was, always with an escort of Labryssons, our royal guard. Increasingly, my parents became alarmed that their eldest Demizell was growing up to be more of a thedral than a daughter they could marry off to advantage. They offered to have books brought to the Kelefion a
nd returned to Sulserra’s. But I was adamant: how would a messenger, literate or not, know what books might interest me; especially those I did not know existed until I saw them there myself?

  The visits ended a few months after I met Vaience Loquin at Sulerra’s.

  But for years there were never enough for me to read. I began writing my own stories, though I was better at hiding them from my brother and parents than crafting them. I still have one of those early stories—a fable about how Milatum’s five bridges were built. Given what the truth has turned out to be, the effort was not so childish, considering I was twelve when I wrote it. Still, I was lucky in my imaginings.

  That night, Cymra broke the silence at the window settee. “You could always run away, you know; there’s still time. We both could, together. I don’t want to go to Myrcia either, because Mother and I will be coming back without you.”

  I took her hand in mine, squeezed it, glanced at the moons now high over the Orphic Gate in Linnisheer. Cassena and Suaila had been sisters, too. But the legends differed as to whether they missed each other after Cassena’s famously unsolved disappearance.

  Cymra went on: “Maybe we could disguise ourselves and find an edificia somewhere; aren’t there other ones?”

  “Small ones, in the north mostly. Semetros, Maraine.”

  And far away from the one in Girvan.

  “Well then, we could go to one of them. You’re almost a thedral, anyway. I’d find something to do besides be your sister. They wouldn’t know who we were if we didn’t tell. We’d be safe.”

  She was being so sweet I had to hug her.

  “I mean it.”

  “Cym, never mind the getting there—do you really think we could keep our secret for long?”

  “Vaience would, in Girvan.”

  “But the other thedrals there might not.”

  “You should try, anyway. Because…well…they say your husband-to-be…they say he can’t mount a horse without help. You’re eighteen and he’s…how old is he again?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Oh Cyler, that’s…ancient. Vaience is a lot younger than that.”

  “He’s the same age as me.”

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “Another one?”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Cym, we saw each other only six times; seven if you count the first time when we said only a few words to each other.”

  “Is that enough?—when do you know it’s enough?”

  Before I could give an answer I wasn’t sure I had, she said: “I wanted you to, so I could see what it looks like. How else could I know?—I don’t read nearly as many books as you.”

  I smiled. “You’ll know someday, with or without books.”

  “I hope so. But I think you do. If you didn’t you wouldn’t have shut yourself in here for two days after they sent him to that Widow Yist’s in Girvan.”

  “What happened was really my fault. I shouldn’t have kept going back to Sulserra’s. For a mazer thedral like him…to be forced to leave an edificia like Sulserra’s and go to a pizzling one in Girvan…it’s like being on a ship with only a mizzen sail.”

  “Pizzling is the same as a mizzen sail?”

  “Yare; not the biggest.”

  “Well, you do love him; close enough, anyway. You sent him the mating pair of oikoes his mother gave you as a gift, that mother and father wouldn’t let you keep—did he love you? I mean, even if someone doesn’t say he does, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t, right?”

  “Em…I think so.” My sister’s tongue sometimes got the better of her words. “I…liked him very much. I’m going to miss him and I think he’ll miss me, too.”

  “I liked him, too, because he never seemed like I was in the way when I went to Sulserra’s with you to make it seem like you were there just for the books. They say you can be in love and not really like someone, but I don’t know if that’s true. I think you can have one without the other, but not the other without the other one.”

  I hugged her again. Cymra’s hair smelled of sweet tryony-scented soap. “What I know for sure is that I love you.”

  “Me too. I wish you were coming back after, but it doesn’t work that way, does it?”

  “No, Cym, it doesn’t.”

  Father had arranged the marriage months ago, though he left it to mother to explain to me the reasons for linking the House of Keshkev with the Cascade Throne of Myrcia. I’d heard our spies in the east—the city of Attallis in particular—had reported unsettling news about the activities of the Skarrian Priaptor, Vulsa Hork, the grandson of Gorta Hork who had led an army into the River Roan valley of Myrcia many years before, and besieged Castlecliff. Even in Milatum the story of what happened to that Skarrian army was well-known: if not for the heroism of a miner’s son named Lukan Barra, and the intervention of an Erseiyr, one of the winged beasts revered as gods in Myrcia, Castlecliff would have fallen.

  My father and his Council of Ephors could not ignore the intelligence about this Vulsa Hork, nor the benefit of closer ties between Keshkevar and Myrcia, should his ambition—or that of Skarria’s High Priest, the Tholarsh—threaten either kingdom. I, too, would have seen the advantages of closer ties—had someone else been chosen for that purpose.

  But there was no one else.

  The Myrcian Sanctor, Urias, had no daughter for my older brother, Lerrist. And Urias had insisted upon me and not Cymra for his only unmarried son, Joffreck.

  Our mother would be accompanying Cymra and I. Our father had to stay, of course; Lerrist as well. Otherwise, if anything should happen to the ship carrying us, Keshkevar would be without an heir to the throne.

  “I do not expect you to be happy with this, Cyalla,” my mother said. “But there is more to life than happiness, especially for a Demizell who should have been married off by now. As you recall, we’ve had three previous offers for your hand. And while two of the offers were middling enough, and would have seen you in Helveylyn or Lucidor, the third, to that Summer Prince of Trigel should have been acceptable to you and would have eased our concerns about nearby Gebroan.

  “But you refused all. We have indulged you long enough and will not now allow you to spurn this offer from the Myrcian Sanctor himself; not with so much possibly at stake.”

  And those stakes rose considerably in the weeks after my mother spoke those words. There were reports of the Priaptor’s army moving toward Phaistos, a provincial capital northeast of Milatum.

  My father’s legacy will forever be overshadowed by the events ushered in by that terrible night. He was an innately cautious king, yet he expanded our already renowned fleet and brought to heel most of the pirates infesting the Shelter Isles. At mother’s urging—to her credit and his—he had been about to make long-overdue improvements in the living conditions of the Skellig, the underground prison in Linnisheer. He opened the royal Chase twice a year for the general population to enjoy—something that had never been done before. He convinced the Council of Ephors of the necessity of bringing aqueduct water to Linnisheer and Linnismorn via underground channels. He refurbished Neskayuna, and replaced her corroded barrier chains which protect the entrance to the Cleave. He was a patron of half a dozen theaters and provided a royal subsidy for the Night of the Mistra festival enjoyed by all. Most recently he’d listened to grievances of Attalls laboring in Milatum’s last quarry in Slagtown, and had been prepared to stop the abuses.

  Some said he was weak and tardy in dealing with Myrcian encroachment in the Lakes, and in the depredations of the Wolf and Iron Lords of the Crumples who crossed the Girvan Awe into Keshkevar and came through the mountain passes of the Skysheaves, sometimes raiding far into the fertile vales of The Coombs. People certainly blamed him for what happened at Laggunsea, in Skarria.

  Perhaps he was not the strongest king Keshkevar has ever had. Over the years I’ve come to realize that my father must have felt the burden of his own father’s legacy. He wanted people to say about him what the venerab
le Ephor, Thanage the Elder, had once famously said about King Shimsinnion: Give him a shovel and he’ll find a way to make a mirror of it; give him a mirror and he’ll find a way to move a mountain with it.

  All too often a yearning for greatness is commensurate with the fear of losing it; one may become reluctant to act, and so is acted upon.

  Still, my father acted on his chance with a mirror: marrying off his eldest daughter to the advantage of his kingdom.

  There were days of sulks when I hated him for that, as well as days of guilt and shame for thinking only of my fate and not what might be best for so many others….

  Cymra squeaks when she yawns and and after more of those she left my room that night. And when I finally fell asleep on the settee, I was not the only one on Mereshaven or in the surrounding Linnises; in the towns of Bannery and Humber at the far ends of the causeways east and west; or in the countryside close to Milatum, who was concerned about Vulsa Hork…but not overly worried.

  Protected by the Kingsmere water surrounding the Linnises, a fleet unmatched by any other kingdom, and the outer bluffs of the Linnises themselves, Milatum had been successfully besieged only once before—by Hestimion, a renegade scion of the House of Keshkev who sought to begin his own House in the name of the long-dead prophet Attallis. And this was before Milatum’s city wall was built atop the outer bluffs.

  To be sure, there undoubtedly were Skarrian spies among us, easily hidden in such a large and diverse city like ours. I am sure father had in mind those spies during the course of planning the events for the scheduled leave-taking of the royal mother and daughters.