Storming Heaven

by Miles Cameron

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Before iron helmets and steel swords, when dragons roamed the world, was an age of bronze and stone, when the Gods walked the earth, and people lived in terror.

A scribe, a warlord, a dancer, a mute insect and a child should have no chance against the might of the bickering gods and their cruel games. But the gods themselves are old, addicted to their own games of power, and now their fates may lie in the hands of mere mortals . . .

By divine plan a plague of cannibals has been unleashed across the world, forming an armada which preys on all who cross their path. Meanwhile the people who allied against the gods have been divided, each taking their own path to attack the heavens - if they can survive the tide of war which has been sent against them.

All they need is the right distraction, and the right opportunity, to deal a blow against the gods themselves . . .

An original, visceral epic weaving together the mythologies of a dozen pantheons of gods and heroes to create something new and magical, this tale of the revolt against the tyranny which began in Against All Gods is a must read from a master of the fantasy genre.

Release date: June 20, 2023

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 512

Sample

The damage from the explosion of the island of Dekhu and the resulting titanic wave was visible everywhere on the headlands of Hergos in southern Dardania. The islands off the coast had been washed clean of trees and shrubs, and the floating olive trees were a hazard to even the simplest navigation; the heavy wood lay deep in the water, invisible to any but the sharpest-eyed lookout. Above them, the heavy clouds of ash and the storm of heaven hid the stars and the sun, until the world seemed to lie under an iron-grey light.

‘Tree!’ roared Makeda. She was one of three nomad women from south of the Hundred Cities, a proven warrior with long scars on her forehead and torso and a fluttering black veil hiding her nose and mouth; her eyes were sharp enough to penetrate the gloom and the reflections of light on the waves.

At the stern, Lord Trayos made a precise gesture, and his two helmsmen turned the damaged ship slightly to starboard. They all felt it as the keel scraped through the sunken tree’s branches. Leaves boiled to the surface, as if the tree was a living monster spitting yellow-green bile.

Everyone on board had seen so much worse in the past days that no one reacted, beyond an exhausted sailor spitting over the side.

Trayos turned to the man beside him on the command deck: a tall, whip-thin man in a stained linen kilt and a gold and ivory swordbelt, bearing a sword so magnificent as to contrast sharply with the man’s rumpled, filthy kilt and his salt-stained brown cloak. Trayos was more richly dressed, with two gold rings, a fabulous amulet that glowed like a peacock’s tail, and a salt-stained kilt of his family’s red and gold tartan, but the man wearing the magnificent sword had the perfect carriage of a dancer and the muscles of a veteran warrior, and his face was set.

Zos looked ahead, over the bow, at the sharp brown hills of his native land. As a young man he’d vowed never to return, his disgraced and humiliated mother a weeping bundle at his feet as he piloted a small boat into the Great Green, the endless sea, towards distant Lazba and freedom.

Zos could almost see that bitter young man now. Indeed, he had the strangest vision: the past overlaid on the present; the fishing smack sailing on the opposite tack …

When they passed the long point where the mountain met the sea in the shape of the great stone lion, then he’d see the enormous bay of his father’s kingdom. His dead father’s fallen kingdom.

And Trin, once a mighty fortress topped with a palace, would be a ruin, as it had been throughout his adolescence. Kept that way as a sort of hostage by the ‘Great God-King’ of all-conquering Mykoax. And yet, deep in his heart, he always expected to see it as it had been in his youth: the temples shining and white atop tall walls built of stones so huge that men said that the gods must have wrought them.

‘Tree!’ Makeda roared again.

The helmsmen turned the ship a little to port, and she glided over the next wave, the reaching branches of a dead oak whispering against her sides like all of Zos’ ghosts asking to be remembered.

‘You are determined to do this?’ Trayos said.

He’d asked the same question four or five times since dawn had revealed the Dardanian coast, and it was clear that they would survive the storm.

Zos didn’t turn his head, or answer.

‘It’s a waste, my prince,’ the Dardanian pirate captain said.

He received no answer.

Pleion was the port of ruined Trin and now, of Mykoax. The huge wave born of the death of the island of Dekhu had broken on the long headland of the Lion, but the harbour had not escaped. The rising water had destroyed tavernas and warehouses all along the waterfront. Fifty war galleys were thrown high above the beach, and most were broken. The water was full of corpses and sea-wrack: wrecked ships; floating straw roofs; waterlogged bales of the famous Mykoan wool, and everything else – pomegranates and harvested grapes, half-submerged bales of grain, whole forests of cut lumber rising and falling on small waves.

Above the beach, perhaps half a hundred men moved like gidimu, animated corpses that necromancers used as eternal slaves. Just visible above them, a man in a chariot shouted orders.

He was motioning at the line of destruction at the tidal wave’s high-water mark, but even three hundred paces away, Zos could see that his head was turned to watch the ship come in.

Zos allowed himself a small smile. He understood the man’s amazement, because no ship should have survived that storm.

The rowers rowed, and the black ship crept in, her pitch-covered hull leaking in half a dozen places, her oar-banks thin on both sides from losses – dead men thrown over the side at the height of the waves and storm.

He must wonder if we are a ship of the dead.

‘I’m coming with you,’ said the boy, Daos.

Zos lifted an eyebrow. He’d been training the child, a little, but not enough for the boy to stand in a fight.

He shook his head, but his eyes widened.

‘You’ve …’ He felt like a fool. ‘You’ve grown.’

It was true. The boy, a whip-thin pre-adolescent of perhaps ten years, now looked like a muscled mid-adolescent. Narrowing waist, enhanced upper body …

When did that happen?

Zos had spent months contending with the supernatural – gods, demigods, the World Serpent – and yet, somehow, a boy achieving five years’ growth in forty days at sea seemed the most remarkable feat of all.

Daos looked down. ‘It’s confusing,’ he admitted.

Zos remembered his own adolescence, which had also seemed to happen at a ridiculous speed, and his slight smile became rueful and broad.

‘It’s always confusing,’ he said.

Daos shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m coming,’ he said. ‘I’m your papista.’

‘Boy,’ Zos said without anger, ‘every papista I’ve ever had has died. In combat.’

Daos shrugged again. ‘I won’t die,’ he promised. ‘And if you take me, you won’t die either.’

It was moments like this that made life with the boy so very difficult.

‘The Dark Huntress told you this?’ Zos asked.

The boy shook his curly head. ‘Oh, no. Her voice is silent now. I just know it.’

Zos looked at the boy – really, at the young man. Behind him was Persay, the heavily muscled former slave with the bull’s head tattooed on his chest. His mad eyes were too open, too glittery, to be normal. But the man put a hand on the boy’s shoulder as if they were old mates.

‘I’ll be coming, too,’ he said.

‘As will I,’ Makeda said. ‘And my sisters.’

Zos closed his eyes and took a breath. Opened them and exhaled slowly, trying to blow the unreasoning rage out through his nostrils.

Behind Persay, the man in the chariot was motioning to the men around him, and to the ship.

Zos looked at Persay, and then at Makeda.

‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘Whatever adventure we thought we might have, it’s over. The revolt against the gods? It fucking died in the volcano. The plan? Fuck it, you don’t even know the plan. It doesn’t matter. You’re free people. Take your freedom and go!’

‘Great,’ Persay said. ‘I’m free to choose? I’m choosing to come with you.’

Zos felt a great sadness replace the rage.

‘Friends …’ he began.

Makeda shrugged. She didn’t speak in Dardanian, and she didn’t show any sign of understanding it. Instead, she spoke in Betwana, the trade tongue of the far east.

Pollon stepped up behind her and translated.

‘You are our war leader now. We choose you. We make war when you make war.’ She crossed her hands on her scarred chest. Both of her sisters did the same.

Pollon looked at her, and then at Zos.

‘Nomads aren’t good at taking no for an answer,’ he said, spreading his hands.

‘I’m going to die,’ Zos said. ‘Tell her that.’

Daos shook his head. ‘Not if I come, you aren’t!’ he said. ‘You don’t die. And anyway, Era is still alive, and so are Aanat and Jawala …’

Zos froze.

And then he looked down at the boy.

‘What?’ he spat.

‘Nanuk sent a sea monster to save Aanat and the ship,’ Daos said.

Trayos made a sign – a forbidden sign. ‘Nanuk, Lord of the Sea, is dead, killed by Timurti,’ he said. ‘It is forbidden even to mention his name.’

Daos shrugged. ‘Nanuk was never exactly a god,’ he said in his crackly adolescent voice. Daos was cursed with sounding like every assertive young male who’d ever lived, carrying no conviction or authority at all, and most older people were immune to it. ‘Nor did Timurti kill him.’

But his words …

‘They’re alive?’ Zos grabbed his papista’s shoulders.

Daos grinned. ‘And quarrelling among themselves.’

Pollon muttered, ‘That sounds believable.’

Zos puffed up his cheeks and exhaled explosively.

‘So,’ Daos said, ‘we all come with you, you will do this thing, and then you make a plan and we …’ he looked across the sea, ‘go to Narmer.’

Trayos brightened. ‘I have friends in Narmer,’ he said. ‘But what does this boy – this ephebe – know?’

Zos, caught between rage, revenge, hope, and some other emotions, felt he had to defend the boy.

‘He is a seer,’ he said simply. ‘An oracle.’

Trayos looked at the boy, touched his peacock amulet, and pulled a face.

‘Of course you have an oracle,’ he said. ‘Boy, do I die?’

The boy looked at him. Finally, he said, ‘Do you really want to know?’

Trayos flinched. ‘No!’ he admitted.

Daos smiled. It was a wintry smile, and it never touched his eyes.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Really, you don’t.’

Trayos looked out to sea. ‘Do I go … with glory?’ he asked.

Daos smiled again, this time with his usual youthful pleasure. ‘At the moment of victory, on the deck of a ship,’ he said.

Trayos snorted. ‘Can’t ask for better than that, lad.’

In the end, they all came: Lord Trayos; all his surviving oarsmen; the six former slave-bullies; Persay, Daos, Pollon, the three nomad women and Zos. They beached the damaged triakonter in the ruins of ten other ships and hauled her ashore over the driftwood.

As they tied her stem to a piling set well above the normal waterline, a scared-looking man approached cautiously.

‘The priest-lord tells me to greet you,’ the man said in careful Dardanian. ‘What land are you from? Are you living men or a ship of the dead? Are you friend or foe of our god-king Agon of Mykoax?’

Zos was up to his knees in filthy water, looking at the chipped black pitch and the deep wound below it in the boards of the ship. Trayos was no slouch about work; he was also knee-deep in the water, despite it being full of dead things, but his hand was on the stern where it met the keel.

‘She’ll have to be rebuilt, he said bitterly. ‘Or burned.’

One of the blows the ship had taken had torn the stern away from the planking on the port side. It didn’t look as bad as the other damage, but it was a deadly wound for a ship.

Zos ignored the herald, or speaker, or whatever he was – perhaps just a scared slave – and sloshed over to where Trayos stood.

He waved over the harbour.

‘We could build ten good ships out of these.’ He pointed at a pentekonter, a fifty-oared galley floating upside down and looking like a giant turtle, or a monstrous basking shark.

‘I’ll wager we could right her and row her away today.’

Trayos’ jaw worked. He clearly loved his own ship.

Zos glanced back at the herald.

‘We’re busy,’ he said. ‘When we’re finished, I’ll be happy to answer your questions. But we’re living men, just like you.’

Daos, very cheerful, put a hand on the herald’s arm. ‘You should hide until sunset.’ The man looked at Daos, who shrugged. ‘It would be the best thing for you.’

Zos looked at Daos. ‘Are you just going to oracle all the time?’

Daos shrugged. ‘No idea. It comes and goes, you know?’

Zos smiled. ‘No, thanks to all the gods, I don’t know.’

The herald was still looking at Daos. But then he turned and went back up the wreck-infested beach, and a moment later they could hear his respectful tone.

Zos looked at Trayos. ‘This will keep,’ he said. ‘If we live, we do our repairs. If we’re dead, who cares?’

Trayos sighed. ‘I love my ship.’

But he and his oarsmen picked up their spears and shields and followed Zos, as did everyone else.

Zos had a pair of javelins, an old bull’s-hide shield that Trayos had loaned him, and no armour at all. But he led the way, and Daos carried his shield. They negotiated the rubble, the storm rack, the shipwrecks and the corpses, bloated and venting gas into the fetid air.

Zos glanced at Pollon. ‘You really don’t have to come, old man.’

Pollon had his bow, and a handful of arrows. He shrugged.

Zos shrugged back, then looked back at all of them. He wanted to say something grand about time, and revenge, but mostly he felt sick and light-headed and he hated the sheer waste of all the death and destruction. He wondered, with a sort of hollow guilt, if it was all his fault.

Persay clapped him on the shoulder.

‘You are in a black place, my lord.’

‘I am,’ Zos said.

‘Lay waste your enemies.’ Persay smiled. ‘You’ll feel better.’

Zos shook his head. But the madman raised his spirits for reasons he could not fathom. And he stepped over the obscenely swollen body of an old woman, and managed not to step on a dead dog. Then he was in a clearer area with the man in the chariot and a few dozen of his workers, or slaves. They looked as if they hadn’t slept or eaten; more than half were naked.

He walked towards the chariot. He still wasn’t quite sure why he had to do this. But he did. Agon had to die.

The man in the chariot raised a hand. ‘Stop there,’ he said.

Zos kept walking.

The man’s charioteer was young, but he had the haughty bearing of the godborn. The other man in the box was clearly an aristocrat – a palace bureaucrat or retired warrior, or both.

‘When my lord orders you to stop, you stop.’ The man spoke with casual authority.

Zos kept walking. He was perhaps ten paces away.

The man in the chariot raised his bow.

‘Last warning, stranger—’

Zos threw his javelin into the unarmoured man’s chest. It wasn’t a perfect throw; instead of a killing shot it went in low, just over the groin, and the man rolled over it and screamed. The charioteer tried to gather his reins, but it was too late for that. He reached for his short sword instead, and Persay killed him from his blind side, a single cut up into the thigh. The boy bled out in seconds, a look of puzzlement on his face.

Zos, stepped up into the car. He hadn’t been in a chariot in years, but one didn’t forget; his toes engaged with the laced sinew in the bottom of the car, and the car rocked under his weight, but his knees flexed like a sailor in a storm.

‘Daos?’ he asked. ‘Can you drive?’

Daos smiled. ‘Of course, Lord Zos.’

He put the bull’s-hide shield on his back and stepped past Zos in the small car. His hands picked up the reins with the familiarity of long usage.

‘Hello, my lovelies,’ he said to the horses.

The two chariot horses were unremarkable but very steady, unmoved by blood and death – warhorses. They responded instantly to Daos; their heads came up, one snorted, and they both turned their heads.

Zos hardened his heart and used his right foot to dump the young charioteer’s body onto the bloody gravel. The priest-lord was still alive, and his pain-filled eyes followed Zos. Zos leant down, pulled the javelin from his abdomen, and finished him. He didn’t do it in anger or rage. Mostly what he felt was revulsion.

I’m not going to be much use as a warrior if I start feeling bad for everyone I kill, he thought.

The workers and slaves were open-mouthed.

Zos cleared his head, and looked at the assembled slaves.

‘I’m Zos of Trin.’ He hadn’t identified himself as Zos of Trin since he was nine years old. ‘I’m a mortal man like you who survived the storm. In answer to the priest-lord’s questions, I’m from here – my father was king of Trin. And I’m no friend or ally of the king of Mykoax – I’m his enemy, and I intend to kill him.’

Some of the locals were flinching away now; none of them were smiling.

Zos leant on the chariot rail, and smiled.

‘Best thing you can do is run home and hide until I leave,’ he said. ‘I’ll be done in two or three days.’ He crossed his arms. ‘Unless you want to be done with him, too, in which case …’ He glanced at Trayos. ‘In which case, we’re recruiting, and we’d be happy to pick up seventy or eighty good men of Trin.’

Terrified silence greeted him. But one man came forward immediately, and then another, and Trayos had his helmsmen start organising them to land the best of the wrecks and see if their hulls could be dried out.

Zos nodded. Then he stepped down from the chariot and pulled his javelin from the priest-lord’s corpse. It took more effort than he’d expected.

‘Bring a firepot or two,’ Daos said.

‘What?’ Zos asked.

‘We may need to burn something,’ the boy said, and smiled his prophetic smile.

A sailor fetched two clay pots full of coals.

‘Let’s go up to Mykoax, then,’ Zos said.

He cleaned the head on the man’s good robes. Before he turned away, people were pillaging the body.

The road from Pleion Harbour to the old citadel of Trin was straight and well-paved with huge blocks of stone. A thousand years of noble chariots and peasant wagons had worn ruts in the stone, but the ruts only made the travel easier, and the horse’s hooves were hard from a dry summer and rang like iron on the old stone.

Trin remained a ruin. The walls were intact, of course, because their titanic stones would be virtually impossible to move anyway. Off to the west, Gosa towered over the olive-tree plain, the mightiest fortress of them all. The old king of Mykoax had taken Gosa by stealth and treason, massacred its inhabitants and burnt its palaces, but none of that was visible from here.

Zos considered. He knew where the survivors lived; the refugees had moved to an island in the Ocean.

He shook his head.

I won’t need to plan after this. I can stop plotting.

But Narmer …

The old king Atrios had burnt the palace of Gosa, as his son had burnt Trin. No palace was allowed to stand except mighty Mykoax, rich in gold, and for his success Atrios’ son Agon had been rewarded with the ambrosia of heaven, the title god-king and the promise of immortality.

Zos looked back, amused at his own insanity. He was planning to storm Mykoax with thirty-three people.

Not so much planning to, as coming on the wings of the storm and making it all up as I go, he thought. And then darker thoughts leapt in. Here, I saw them take my mother. Here, I was made to …

He had sixty stadia of chariot riding to remind him of his home, his country, and his anger. Four hours, rolling along at a walking pace with his friends walking behind him, or walking himself. The ground above Trin was too steep for the chariot to roll easily when loaded, so Zos stepped down and walked with Pollon while the boy Daos drove.

‘Where did he learn to drive a chariot?’ Zos asked quietly, trying to fight his own demons.

‘When did the skin on the back of our hands become so smooth?’ Pollon asked.

Zos looked down and felt a stomach-turning moment of shock.

Pollon, in his pedantic way, went on, ‘The Dry One didn’t just heal us, my friend. It gave us the ambrosia of the gods. Or rather …’ His voice held a variety of strong emotions: discovery, curiosity, anger. ‘Or rather, it seems to me that the gods’ entire rule rests on a single product – the blood of the Dry Ones. Indeed, I might theorise about the so-called godborn …’

Zos, whose head had been lost in the scenes of his mother’s degradation and his own endless humiliations as a boy, snapped back to the present.

‘Huntress!’ he spat, and then managed a smile. ‘What will we do for swear words if we have no gods?’ he asked Pollon.

Pollon raised an eyebrow. ‘An excellent question. Perhaps words that refer to copulation and defecation – they were quite popular with my contemporaries.’

Zos blinked slowly. ‘I wasn’t really asking,’ he said, with almost a grin.

Pollon smiled. ‘I know. But it’s an interesting talking point nonetheless. And I made you smile.’

Zos put a hand on his shoulder, and the ghosts of his past edged away. ‘Bless you, brother.’

Pollon nodded. ‘But all kidding aside, I have a point.’

‘Which is … ?’

‘We should strike their supply of resin. Somewhere, somehow, the gods must take and store it.’ He looked at Zos. ‘This is only a theory. But if my theory is correct, the gods are simply mortals like us, with endless access to the resin of the Dry Ones.’

‘Fuck, no wonder the Bright People hate us.’ Zos shook his head. ‘Pollon, you are brilliant. But they aren’t mortals like us. You saw them when they were hit. Monsters.’

‘It’s only a theory,’ Pollon said. ‘And look, I’ve made you smile again.’

‘Storming heaven sounds even more foolish than storming Mykoax,’ Zos said. ‘Untenable. But striking against the source of their immortality …’

‘Unless I’m wrong,’ Pollon said.

Zos fingered his beard, thinking of the demons and the shapes they’d taken in combat.

‘You know what, brother? A year ago, I thought I knew a great deal about how the world worked. It was cynical and dark, but I understood it.’ He looked up at the enormous fortification of Mykoax high on the mountain above them. ‘Now I wonder if I understand anything at all.’

Pollon frowned. ‘I feel exactly the same. Are all godborn warriors as thoughtful as you?’

Zos shrugged. ‘Are all palace bureaucrats as brave as you?’

Pollon met his eye. ‘I’m not brave. I just cannot bear to desert my friends.’

Zos took in a breath of air, looking over the little army of men and women, and the road that fell away down the hills to the iron-grey sea under the iron-grey sky. Suddenly, his mood was lightened. Suddenly, he didn’t want to die. Revenge seemed petty, but he could see a world beyond revenge.

‘That’s all courage is,’ Zos said. ‘Making up excuses not to run away.’ He looked back up. ‘But you know what? I think Daos is right. I don’t think we die today.’

‘Of course I’m right,’ Daos said.

The road ran past the magnificent gate to the underworld that was the Tomb of Atrios, the enormous doorway capped by a monolith as large as a house.

‘Incredible,’ Pollon said.

‘You’ve never been to Narmer,’ Zos said.

They walked up the dusty road to the citadel of Mykoax, standing on the windswept mountain. There were people on the road – beggars, and pilgrims going to the tomb. All made way for the chariot, because only godborn men had chariots, and the godborn were lethal to ordinary folk.

Zos had remounted the chariot as they passed the Tomb of Atrios. He didn’t make an offering, or salute it, which made him feel odd, as he had always done so before. When he was a hostage.

An elite slave. Face the facts.

How it all came rushing back.

Persay gave a mad laugh as he passed the enormous gate and its bronze doors.

‘Dead is dead!’ he called out. ‘No matter what you put the corpse in.’

Pilgrims in the road made the sign of aversion, and a woman made the evil eye sign.

They walked on. The chariot rumbled over the smaller paving stones – the god-kings of Mykoax had never invested in roads as heavily as the god-kings of Trin, and Zos could feel it in his bones.

And then they took the last turn in the road, and there was the Great Gate. Above it a great god’s eye in lapis and gold, and above that two lions stood to either side of a massive stone pillar, their onyx eyes gazing out at the traveller.

It was clear that even here, the storm had done damage – perhaps not the lethal damage of the great wave, but rooves had slumped off houses, and just inside the gate, a tiled, whitewashed stone house had been reduced to rubble by a titanic stone flung off the wall. The high winds and scouring pumice had driven most people inside, and a continuous wailing from the temple atop the highest citadel suggested that the rest were invoking the gods.

Zos was a veteran of this particular palace-fortress and he knew that most of these people were palace professionals: scribes like Pollon, craftspeople like Atosa, entertainers like Era, warriors like himself. He glanced up at the megaron that faced the temple. His target, the god-king Agon, the terror of his youth, would be within its red pillars.

Made it this far.

There were guards at the gate, of course – four men in bronze, none of them a day over twenty, all with the marks of a night spent on watch and a day spent in fear. They were too young to know him.

Men in armour. It was odd; in his day they’d have been bull-leaper ephebes – warrior-athletes in training, naked but for a kilt and a sword.

Zos raised his hand in greeting. He didn’t have a plan past this point. He was still a little puzzled by the ease with which they’d come up the mountain. The mighty storm must have had more effect even than he’d reckoned.

‘My lord,’ said the loxos. ‘I must ask you to dismount and hand over your weapons. This is a very … difficult … time.’ He didn’t smile; he clearly took himself and his role very seriously.

Zos looked at him and realised that this young man was about to die; it was almost like being Daos. There was no peaceful way he was passing this gate; there was no possibility of mercy. And he didn’t like that.

But it didn’t matter, because when the chariot rolled to a stop, it all unfolded as if the future really was a predestined thing. Perhaps, if he hadn’t taken the chariot …

No. He wanted his revenge. He wanted this. Even though that serious young man had never done him any harm.

Zos shrugged. ‘Kill them,’ he said.

And it was done.

Because it hadn’t really occurred to any of the four men at the gate that they’d be attacked, they didn’t land a single blow. Persay killed one and tripped another, and the three nomad women finished them, and it was done. There was a surprising amount of blood on the cobbles, and the horses remained unperturbed.

Zos found that if he went with the inevitability, it was less unpleasant.

‘Drive on,’ he said to Daos.

The boy was smiling.

‘Jawala makes some good points,’ Zos said.

He was thinking about Jawala’s insistence that all violence was murder, and never justified. She was Hakran, a pacifist. And in his current mood, his dark revulsion was still over-balancing his desire for revenge.

Daos glanced at him, a very adult smile on his young face.

‘She certainly does,’ the boy said. ‘And yet, sometimes, someone has to put down a rabid dog.’

There had been enough bystanders to the killings at the gate that they could hear the screams in the town as the chariot rolled past the sacred enclosure, where the old god-kings were buried. In the ancient days they’d buried their kings inside the walls, and a circular tunnel led to the underworld.

Again, Zos had to fight the urge to propitiate their shades and make his reverence. He was done with all that, and the chariot rolled by with none of them making any sign of respect to the dead.

‘I can feel their anger,’ Pollon said. ‘The dead.’

‘They’re about to be much angrier,’ Zos said.

Somewhere above them in the town, a woman screamed, and a man called, and someone beat a bronze bell.

Zos’ chariot rolled on. The horses were flagging, but it was an offence against the god-king to ride a chariot in the upper town, and Zos had always imagined entering the citadel in a chariot.

Halfway up the sacred way that led from the circle of ancient graves to the upper town’s temples, a line of armoured men barred the road. The road was narrow; it ran from the magnificent stone wall on the right to the cliff’s edge on the left, with a seven-hundred-foot drop to the dry stream bed far below.

‘Ready?’ Zos asked his charioteer.

Daos grinned. ‘Born ready,’ he said.

The chariot was going up a steep slope behind a pair of tired horses who’d walked all the way from the sea, and probably had walked half as far again that morning, and yet, as Daos tightened the reins, their heads came up. He said something to them in a language that Zos didn’t know, and their tails swished once, making an eerie sound.

Zos didn’t need to look back to know that his little war band was gathered behind him.

‘Go,’ he said.

The chariot horses leapt to full stride without further word or whip – fatigue falling away. The cart lurched forward so hard that Zos, trained from youth to fight this way, was almost flung from the car.

Daos, leaning forward, toes curled over the axle, looked like the living embodiment of a charioteer, reins in his left hand, and his long trident held aloft in his right.

The bronze-clad warriors waiting in two ranks across the cliffside road had perhaps forty paces to decide how to deal with the oncoming horses and chariot. It was rare a chariot attacked formed men; the cars themselves were too lightly built to survive the collision, and horses don’t particularly like planting their delicate legs among squirming men and their sharp edges.

No one had told these horses, or this driver, that.

Perhaps ten paces from impact about half of the warriors, including all those closest to the cliff edge, elected to either s