The Gaslight Dogs

by Karin Lowachee

Genres: Action & Adventure; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

At the edge of the known world, an ancient nomadic tribe faces a new enemy-an Empire fueled by technology and war. A young spiritwalker of the Aniw and a captain in the Ciracusan army find themselves unexpectedly thrown together. The Aniw girl, taken prisoner from her people, must teach the reluctant soldier a forbidden talent -- one that may turn the tide of the war and will surely forever brand him an outcast. From the rippling curtains of light in an Arctic sky, to the gaslit cobbled streets of the city, war is coming to the frozen north. Two people have a choice that will decide the fates of nations -- and may cast them into a darkness that threatens to bring destruction to both their peoples.

Release date: April 1, 2010

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 360

Sample

From the black ship spilled all manner of tall Kabliw—men from the South land, men from a world past the barrier of stunted
trees that Sjennonirk’s people called the Hackles of the Dog. That stick barrier was a warning laid by the spiritual ancestors
of the ankago: no Aniw should venture farther than their tundra plain and frozen seas. Instead the People stayed to the ends of the rivers
that flowed below the beginning of the sticks.


But the Hackles of the Dog couldn’t stop the Kabliw of the South from sailing to North shores. These Kabliw, these people
of the boats, went where they would and did as they pleased. Through late winter ice and the onset of spring their dark ship
forged a passage, some great black whale to blot out the blue and white of her home.


Sjennonirk, an ankago of her people, named after her grandfather, stood on the small rocky hill overlooking the inlet where the Kabliw ship had
anchored and watched these tall men unload their long wooden crates upon the Land. They’d rowed ashore with their load in
smaller boats that still sat twice the size of her people’s kayaks. One of the men, bundled in black and brown wolf pelt,
pried open the lid of the nearest crate to reveal the steel contents glittering within. She knew them to be guns. Father Bari
from the South, a priest of his Seven Deities, had told her grandfather long ago about Southern hunters and their guns.


Now, it seemed, he had brought them to the Aniw. She recognized Bari’s thin silhouette in his heavy gray robes, standing just
to one side of the rougher-shaped men and their determined task.


Sjennonirk turned and fled down the opposite side of the hill, sealskin boots scratching over the crust of hard snow. She
did not stop until she reached her family’s camp.


In her mother’s snowhouse they gathered, a small tribe of nomad Aniw that traveled together to hunt and fish. Sjennonirk sat
upon the wide sleeping platform made of packed snow, the stone lamp by her side burning seal oil into the close quarters,
creating a warmth she did not feel inside. All around her the white walls of their winter home glistened, narrow light glowing
from the lamp. She saw many shadows.


“What has your little spirit seen?” her mother asked, kneeling on a bed of tan caribou skins and white bear fur. All of her
family and the other Aniw they traveled with, her small tribe here at the corner of their Land, gazed up at her for answers
and direction. Her father Aleqa, before he’d been killed by the great white bear, had been her tribe’s ankago, and his father before him. They traced her ancestry of the little spirit straight back to the First Female, the great Dog
that now resided in her and paced in the pit of her chest. She felt the paw steps behind her ribs, beating softly like a drum,
like a heart.


She was the ankago, and she had no answers.


In the middle light, where her little spirit roamed, she had seen nothing but the smoky depths of the Kabliw world. They moved
against the wind lines of the winter tundra, and the direction they pointed was nowhere she wanted to go.


“I will speak to the priest,” she said to broad hopeful faces and dark fearful eyes. Though they’d traded with the Kabliw
since the spring season of her birth, some Southern deeds weren’t wanted on the Land.


When she was a child, Father Bari had talked of war.

The priest met her at the feet of the rocks, some distance from the men, who paid her little attention. They knew the Aniw—she
was nothing spectacular to them anymore. The captain from that black ship had sat among her people, and captains before him,
and eaten of seal meat with the Elders. Through all of these changing Kabliw, Father Bari had remained, the first of them.
He kept a notebook and scratched in it often. He’d taught her with books from the South, and from these things she’d learned
of war.


She looked up at him and the black freckles on his dark cheeks. His eyes were pinched. “Why do you bring guns?” she asked
him.


“They say they’ve come to protect the Aniw. The people they fight with, the Sairlanders from across the ocean, they say the
Sairlanders might come to the Land.”


“Why would they come?” She knew the only reason the Land was not flooded by Kabliw was that most Kabliw couldn’t sustain in
the weather. They were too warm-blooded against the gouging cold and knew no way to navigate the terrain. They had no little
spirits to guide them, and their gods were snowblind.


Father Bari shook his head.

“We trade,” she said. This was a fair arrangement made long ago. What reason would any Kabliw have to bring force of arms?

“I’m sorry,” the priest said. “I couldn’t stop them. I tried. My church tried. But these are army orders.”

She stared at the men and the crates. More of them treaded on the shore, and they weren’t the sailors she knew. They wore
black uniforms beneath their furs, and from their belts hung long blades and short guns.


She heard them singing even with the tundra and the jagged hill between their camps. The Northern air carried the boisterous
male voices, and she spied a glow of orange fire over the bumpy cranium of snow-dusted rocks. The dogs whined, restless, and
two of them pulled at their leashes in the direction of the noise, curious and wary. Sjennonirk stroked the lead dog’s white
ears, calm for them both.


Her cousin Twyee stuck his head out from the low entrance of her family’s snowhouse and whistled to her. “You’re going to
stand there all night? These Kabliw don’t sleep.”


Twyee loved to laugh. He loved to laugh mostly at the lumbering Kabliw and their odd Southern ways. Sjenn patted the dog’s
ears once more, then crawled into the house as Twyee scrambled back. Inside was warm from the burning lamp and the clutch
of bodies of her family: her mother, her aunt and uncle, and Twyee’s little sister, Bernikka.


“They make a lot of noise,” her mother said, sitting cross-legged on the sleeping platform, sewing up one of Twyee’s mittens.

“What are they celebrating?” her aunt asked. She was stroking Bernikka’s hair of knots with an ivory comb, and the little
girl winced. Uncle was already asleep on the spread of caribou skins, snoring. He was older than her father had been when
he had died, and not even a horde of Kabliw could keep her uncle awake.


“Celebrating? I don’t know,” Sjenn said. She didn’t want to scare them with talk of guns, not now when sleep pulled at them.
Tomorrow would be a day to consider these Kabliw. The dogs outside began to settle; she felt their bodies burrowing into the
snow, tails over noses. Her little spirit twitched her own tail in response, a feather tickle in the curve of her ribs.


“Sleep,” her mother said, looking up with pointed insistence, the sinew thread between her blunt teeth.

Sjenn may have been the ankago of her tribe, younger than all but Bernikka, but she knew to still respect her Elders. She set her parka down and curled
up onto it, beside her mother on the platform of snow.


Her dream was a black expanse, like the tundra in the dead of a winter night. Moonlight and wind made the landscape moan. The
Land’s spirit grew restless, like her dogs were, and on the long horizon line stood the silhouette of a black Dog. Aleqa’s
little spirit.


“Father,” Sjenn called.

He threw back his head and howled.

Breath pushes against her cheek, rank with hours of alcohol. “The tattoos on your face.” The voice scratches against her skin.


Awake and the snowhouse is still, as quiet as her dream before her father spoke. Quiet except for the Kabliw bending over
her, his large hand pressing into her stomach. In his other hand is a gun. Her family are shadows by the white walls, and
Sjenn breathes up against the man’s touch. Across from her, the snow entrance lies obliterated. This big Kabliw broke through
the blocks and let in moonlight. Outside the dogs bark. There is no more singing, no noise but this.


The dream had pinned her and she hadn’t heard this man come in. Now his gun waves around like the horn of a narwhale above
gray waves. The gun shines above the shadows and keeps her family at bay. The Kabliw jabbers, every other word in a language
she can’t understand. His chin tilts up, blue eyes like shards of sea ice reflecting a sky only he can see.


In her chest her little spirit growls, but there’s no time to Call and release her. The Dog bites at the back of her heart,
making it leap.


Kill him.

She yanks the knife free from his belt and sticks it up below his chin. Through the skin and muscle, deep into his skull.

There is the sound he makes as the blood flows out, following the pull of the blade.

Her family shouts in dismay. The dogs bark in fury, scenting the blood. Soon the Kabliw men will hear it and come.

But through it all, she hears his dying. Her Dog falls silent, appeased. The Kabliw man collapses to the snow beside her.
His cries are stangled and wet, like a baby born with the cord around its neck.


Sjenn drops the army blade into the snow, where it leaves a streak of red on the white, like a scar.

“You must go!” Twyee hisses, catching her trembling arm. “Run, Sjenn, before they get here!”

So she scrambles from the broken mouth of her snowhouse. The night stands clear above her, looking down upon her with countless
glittering eyes. “Father.” The shadows on the snow could be the form of a black Dog. But they begin to break apart as light
from the Kabliw camp, voices, and the clatter of steel break above the rocky hill and rumble closer like a storm.


They were three days’ ride from Fort Girs, at the squatting end of a thundering rain that did nothing to drown Captain Jarrett Fawle’s dreams. The day knew no acquaintance with the sun, had not shaken hands or tipped a hat to any but dark clouds. The farmers called this spring, but nature was a moody bitch, no less than an alley dog or a wanton wife. With the rain came a bite of cold. He’d been dreaming of rabid dogs now for five nights running. And for five nights he ran in the dreams but could never get away.


Ten rode in his patrol, all ahorse, hooves squishing through the flooded grass. They made obscene noises in their going, in
between ear-splitting cracks and shards of light in the sky, some god up there rattling a saber upon all who dwelled beneath.
Jarrett hadn’t slept more than three hours in the past three days in the field, so the shadows weren’t all beneath his eyes.
In every corner of his vision they hung and billowed, like funereal drapery at an open window, calling his attention. But
he had no desire to look out at the world. His bones felt as creaky as a spinster’s, or like a rocking chair left too long
to bleach, dried out by nightmare despite what the waking world poured on his head.


His men had not commented the entire way about his mood, but he knew their whispers when they thought him asleep in bedroll.
And perhaps their three days of going and coming, unmet by savage vengeance like Major Dirrick had predicted, had tightened
enough to squeeze out some voice. Because now Sergeant Malocklin edged up beside him, another shadow on a black horse. This
one spoke.


“The weather is passing strange, cap’n.”

Jarrett stared at the matted blond hair of his own mount. The mare’s mane looked like the bedraggled locks of a drowned old
woman. It had been raining all day. “There’s nothing passing about it, sergeant.” His thoughts held no barrel through which to fire idle conversation. His gaze remained fixed ahead,
and he clamped his jaw tight.


Malocklin tried again. “The Soreganee’s too wet to fight.”

“Revenge isn’t fairweather,” Jarrett said. Luck did not often accompany the absence of an abo warband. More likely they were
lying in wait. “The Crawft farm should be a grim reminder of that fact.”


Malocklin grunted. Two days ago they had come upon the unfortunate family and what remained of their fetal homestead. The
Soreganee warband had made a bloody abortion of the grounds, and his men had spent the day gathering and burning what remained
of the dismembered dead. Three had been barely past their mother’s skirts, but abo warriors did not distinguish between Ciracusan
children and the adults. The grudge went deep and beyond a single generation.


“That beady demon’s worse than his grandpa,” said Malocklin.

“You won’t hear me debate it.” Jarrett had seen old Chief Qoyoches before the battle at Four Pin Ridge forced the war leader
through a quick exit from this world. A wily bush fox, he’d fallen with a corporal’s severed head in one hand and a rifle
bayonet in the other, its point embedded in his chest.


The grandson and beady demon, Qoyotariz as he was called by his people, was the wolf to the wrinkled chief’s fox, reared on
tougher meat. He had developed a taste for war that knew no season. Stories about the first clash between the early settlers
and the Soreganee tribe more than two hundred years ago had been passed down in blood from his grandfather.


If it came down to a choice between fighting their backward ancestors from Sairland and the hostile tribes of the Nation,
Jarrett would take up arms against the Sairlanders and call it a day. That war bobbed and flailed into recession sometimes,
but no respite followed the trail one shared with the abos.


Respite wasn’t his task or his choice on this patrol. Instead they attempted to track Qoyotariz after the Crawft discovery—while
the rain pelted down. He thought of turning back, but the raids were a menace, encroaching closer to Fort Girs. So Major Dirrick
had ordered this venture, and the gods help any hapless farmers who stood in Qoyotariz’s way. The abo bastard was bold and
some said a little mad.


“Tracks’re long gone,” Malocklin apparently felt a need to point out. Working wetly through the fields on a hunt for that
warrior didn’t sit well with the men.


Jarrett rose in his saddle momentarily and looked over his shoulder, stretch and assessment of the glum and disgruntled faces
of the eight behind him. One was their abo tracker, and he motioned the man forward with a flick of his fingers.


Not Soreganee, of course. A quiet Whishishian with a gaunt face, skin stained black around the eyes in the savage way. But
so far he’d proved dependable, his tribe a well-worn ally; a sunny disposition was not required in army company.


“Well?” Jarrett asked him, though he knew the answer from the downturn of the abo’s mouth.

“River’s flood up,” was the short pronouncement, which was the tracker’s way of saying one step farther and they were in threat
of a drowning. Damp-curtain weather, some dark caul across the landscape, made tracking difficult and ambushes likely. Trees
aplenty stood soldiering against the horizon and from their ranks many a vileness could spurt. Qoyotariz was known for his
fleetness.


Jarrett didn’t favor returning to Fort Girs with a spectral report, all ghosts of dead settlers and no enemy to show for it.
But three days of this and the dampness of his despair made his muscles ache and his will retreat. His horse had stopped already,
shivering in the driven rain, cued by the shifting of his weight if not the tug of the reins.


“All right,” he said, beneath a sudden racket from the sky. The men watched him out of drenched gazes with childlike hope.
“All right,” his voice, louder. He tipped his hat back in an attempt to shoo the shadows, but to no avail. Whipped air made
a mark across his skin, and the rain poured upon his shoulders from the brim, sliding down coated arms, sogging his trousers.
They were all overrun by misery. “We go home. The bastard will live another day.”


They set a picket that night while the storm subsided to a low growl, all barking at bay for now. Jarrett took first watch
with young Corporal Grabe, as he’d noted the boy sleeping in his saddle with a fascinating ability to stay upright. The other
men needed the shut-eye, and Grabe was fairly fresh from his nap. Jarrett knew he wouldn’t sleep and so put himself to use
in the dark, clammy and restless, one hand on his gun. The fire burned low and too distant from his position to provide any
warmth, and the far landscape rooted the sky like an upside-down hole—no light in or out of the trees and their cousin bushes,
no light upon the sodden field. Rainclouds obscured most of the moon, forcing a squint as he looked out upon the darkness
and shivered.


Too easy to dream, even standing. The peep, hoot, and rustle of every nocturnal critter pulled his senses to a paranoid point
on which he balanced precariously. Blue night bled into black and made bruises of his sight. Thoughts wandered, no matter
how much he tugged their leashes, drifting toward memories of headless babes and limbless longer bodies. Though only in his
grim imagination, blood soaked the earth beyond rain spatter, made red pools in which he saw his own hollow-eyed reflection.


Such things had damaged his attempts to sleep in previous nights. He thought himself cursed, for even before they’d come upon
the unfortunate Crawfts, blood had tracked him into the slumbering hours. Four paws and long fangs, pointed ears and a gimlet
gaze, a slow blink manifested the creature out of the shadows and he gasped himself awake. The night progressed in staggered
breaths and taut twitches until he nearly reeled from the buffeting of it.


There came a battle cry.

Sudden gunfire spat around him as the dark fields erupted, popping up abos upon their camp. Weapon in hand, he saw no ready
target past his nightmare reverie and panicked in the jolt, spewing wide all bullets from his chamber. Heart fled up his throat,
an uncommon feeling when steadiness tended to grab hold and shake loose some action sense. He choked on it just as a demon
cast him to the ground.


It sat upon his legs, copper shining eyes in a face beset by tiny red beads. Droplets of blood solidified on skin. The demon
said, “I see you now,” in the trade language of the Nation tribes. It seized his jaw and leaned forward as if to kiss.


The long, warm tongue of the creature pasted a line right across his mouth, then shoved between his teeth. The exploration
drove in, heedless to his hand finding desperate life to gouge at muscle and skin. Some wild scent like burning grass and
stale smoke surrounded his head from the banner of dark hair grazing across his cheeks. “Dog,” it said as it withdrew, and
laughed. “You shine like the moon. I mark your men by you.”


Shock pushed for residence against his ribs, elbowing with fear. The struggle kept him pinned as the demon bent low again,
grazing its face against his cheek, into the side of his hair. Breathing him in as his own breaths stopped. “Soon,” it said
into his ear, then gave a shove on his shoulders and launched back into the dark.


Rain pelted anew into his upturned eyes.

“Qoyotariz!” one of his men yelled from up and behind where he lay. “Captain, the abo’s running!”

The abo ran and he couldn’t move. Qoyotariz had kissed him with the flavor of blood, drawn from the gods knew what. It would
not leave his tongue, and it drowned out even the rain.


Sleepless, they trotted back to Fort Girs, four men short. One was his Whishishian tracker; of course the Soreganee went for
the other abo first, blood enemies as they were, and yet Qoyotariz had spared him. He told no one of the night-obscured encounter, and they buried the dead in the field, in silent grief. He managed some mumbled
form of false comfort, but his troopers knew—no gods were listening, and the blessed trees did not truly salute. His nightmare
had allowed this living terror to wreak havoc on his patrol, and he sat with the guilt behind his teeth, mud and smoke in
every corner of his mouth.


A day closer to the fort and luck or the gods bestowed on them a boon. Not the warband they sought, but six straggled Soreganee
youths, out on a forage or an animal hunt. Pups by the looks of them and, as such, easy pickings. Jarrett had the flame of
humiliation and some stifled fear from his unprepared intimacy with the bastard Qoyotariz—they burned through his sleepless
state and he drew his gun and fired.


Pups grew into dogs, after all—that was the steady strain of any soldier’s thoughts. There was no excitement to it. The troopers
remembered their freshly dead comrades; it was in the sudden silence of their ride.


So Jarrett led his men in a furious gallop and cut the abos down.

He was not one for church of any kind but found himself in the wooden wonder, waiting on the garrison priest—a man of single
score and five years, spry faith, Father Timmis. The chapel sagged from weather and smelled of incense and candle wax. No
smiling sun shone down upon it or through its dirty blue windows. The Seven Deities bestowed no favor on this chapel any more
than they did out in the field, and that equanimity perhaps was what drove him here at last. Some funeral moment would be
held in the near future, but for now Jarrett sat on one of the hard pews, hoping for respite against shadows and mad abos.
He held his gun in his hand and gazed down upon its sheen as if it could tell his fortune. It had told the fortunes of those
he shot.


Father Timmis sneaked up on him from the rear door, and Jarrett turned and nearly aimed that gun at him.

“Easy, captain.” The father’s voice was of northern lilt, some deep ancestry from Ioen Aidra. He slipped into Jarrett’s line
of sight, a gray falcon in his long robe, though his face was more pleasant owl. “You’re here late, I see….” Voice trailed
and Jarrett stared back.


He knew how he looked. Death had more lively dancing partners on the battlefield.

“I lost men,” he said. Not outstanding news in his business and the father knew it, two years in service to the frontier fort.
The man sat one pew ahead, gaze heavy as Jarrett caught it, and it caused his words to stumble. “You… you worked a little
with the abos, yeah?”


“In schools, early in my clergy studies,” Timmis replied. He was not a priest of bombast oratory, but rather waited upon others
in conversation. A rare enough quality in some men, and it made him tolerable to those who weren’t as faithful and likable
to those who were.


Jarrett lost the live end of what he wanted to say and flailed in silence.

“Rough patrol?” the father prompted.

It made him laugh. Not the most logical reaction in a holy house after the week he’d endured. His voice sounded hollow as
it rose to the pointed ceiling. The rafters tittered back, some hill mouse scampering in the dusk. Jarrett gestured up toward
the unseen rodent with his gun—that wasn’t logical in a holy house either, but he didn’t care. Fatigue ran respectful concern
into the ground, even as the priest’s eyes tracked the weapon warily.


“The abos are like those furry things,” Jarrett declared. He was drunk on sleeplessness.

“How so?”

“Well,” he said, “do you ever understand the intentions of a mouse? Occasionally they slip into your bed and bite your toes.”

“Surely the warbands do more than bite your toes.”

“No. No they don’t.” He leaned forward, arms on the back of the father’s pew, gun pointed down between them. “Have you ever
seen a man try to walk without toes? Don’t underestimate the intelligence of a mouse. The little furry bastard can bring down
an army just by nibbling away at its toes.”


Father Timmis didn’t reply, but his stare took on a cast of concern. He said eventually, “Have you been sleeping, Captain
Fawle?”


Jarrett laughed and stood. He shoved his gun into the holster at his hip and turned his back on the priest and the altar.
His stride grew long as he made for the double doors at the rear of the church, calling to the ceiling: “The spirit of sleep
has found better bodies to haunt than mine.”


As if the gods could hear him.

Sjenn saw the priest from the corners of her eyes, a rib bone of a man standing on the opposite side of black iron bars. His
long robe blended with them in shadow, his dark hands too. He looked in at her as she lay on the deck, called her name, offered
water and words. She didn’t reach out, and soon her eyes shut. The rocking motion of the great wooden ship was one she’d gotten
used to, though this prison still retained the sharp edges and relentless unease of something dark and foreign. Like guns
and gods. She was well-worn, kin to the slats of wood she lay on, well-worn like her hands and her clothing for how often
she picked and clawed at the sealskin wrapped around her body. These they hadn’t taken, at least, though they had taken her. These, at least, still held a scent of home.


*   *   *

“But you killed a man,” Father Bari said, as if the dry red stain on her parka did not exist, as if she could not see it with
every cant of her chin.


Looking out at the priest from behind the iron bars she said, “You brought them to my people. His death is on your head.”


Yes, she had killed a man, but she still protested this prison, this inability to see sky or sea or to ground herself in the
long horizon. The waves beneath her resisted anchor, but they were vast like the tundra. She wasn’t fond of water, not these
black depths that sounded like groans from inside the ship’s belly, but she would trade the sight of the skinny priest for
the sight of crashing waves. Or sky. She’d pleaded for it and they had laughed, the men of this ship. They thought her breathlessness
a ploy. It had taken despair to chase her panic, to find herself curled to the wall.


She didn’t know walls like this, scarred and gouged, giving splinters to the touch and black dust at every scrape; on the
land the walls were white. They were snow, and in the evening light they sparkled like stars. The cold she knew had a smell
of open air and it was not this; this was Southern cold, suffocating and stinking and hemmed in by waste. She felt it now
steeped in her skin, and she hated these men for it. She didn’t used to speak harshly and think violent thoughts. But she
remembered once when her uncle had made the mistake of hitting one of their sled dogs, and the dog had bitten his leg in answer.
Who was to blame for the injury?


The yellow lamp swayed behind the priest from its ceiling hook, and the light made his dark cowl and ebony skin seem deep-ice
black. “I tried to stop them,” he murmured, over and over. “I tried to stop those army orders.” And with those orders, violent
men. She used to see this priest’s regret. But days and nights had rubbed down the bristle of her attention—and her care.
What were his words worth when everything he had exchanged with her grandfather and her father had been disregarded in favor
of barreling whale hunters or raucous soldiers, and their deep imprints in the giving green of her tundra spring? They trod
without heed or caution, when once there had been care.


So once she’d had care for the well-being . . .