A blind child stands in her tent, and tells the ancient story of her ancestors. There is no happy ending.
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Glossary Concepts Arms-houses: enormous warehouse-fortresses, where weapons, armour and armoured vehicles are stored. Realspace: the dimension where physical matter exists, may be traversed faster than light by entering hyperspace.
Neocide: a protracted campaign of eradication directed towards those belonging to a particular race or culture, utilising indirect means such as mercenaries, bounty hunters and diplomacy. Crashbolt: a directed-energy weapon. Allows the user to fire electrical energy from their fingertips. Highly illegal in most civilised systems, its use in battle is considered a war crime. Star-sigil: a symbol of power and allegiance among warrior races, it represents one’s creed, one’s history, and one’s people. Sky king: a fallen warrior race, once the most powerful in the known universe, now entirely displaced.
The Sky Kings By Oscar Menaul
Sky-halls: the seats of power of the sky kings.
Characters Jotun, the star born: former sky-chief of the star kings, their betrayed, departed ruler; an orphan and legendary warrior. Mucor, the Defiler: a genetically modified assassin, created by the enemies of the star kings to resemble Jotun as much as possible. Eventual architect of the downfall of the star kings. 14
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the paint combines with the military-grade accelerant, and a feral roar echoes over the crackling of the fire. The firebowl has started to melt in the rising heat, the copper in the alloy turns the fire a sickening, spreading green. The heat keeps on rising; the tent fabric must be heatproofed. The mercenary feels the sweat on his brow beginning to evaporate, but he must know. He must know if the legends are true. Still holding the child’s limp body, he stoops to pick up a burning piece of timber that has fallen from the ceiling. He stares at the embered end of the wood, he feels the white, burning pain, but supresses it. He draws back the child’s hood and pushes the glowing cinders into the dead child’s cheek. The skin hisses and squeals in protest, steam rising from the skin, yet when he removes it from the youngster’s face, it’s as unblemished as that of a cherub. He stares for a second or two, then casts the wood aside. He has earned his pay, destroying a unique and beautiful life. He sighs and re-adjusts her hood, then elbows aside the flaps of the tent. Sunlight streams in, the smoke setting beams of light careening through the blaze. The backdraft causes the flames to surge, finally breaking through the fireproof lining. As he steps outside, he sees the flags set above the apex of the tent, painted with the ancient sky king sigel, are burning in a high blaze. Ironic, he thinks to himself as he marches into the uncaring crowds of the bustling shopping centre beyond.
LITTLE RABBIT BOOKS Published by Little Rabbit Publishing Co. Little Rabbit books Co, Brayford Way, Brayford Pool, Lincoln LN67TS, England.
Registered Offices: Little Rabbit books Co, Brayford Way, Brayford Pool, Lincoln LN67TS, England.
First Published 2018
Illustrations copywright © Oscar Menaul, 2018 all rights reserved. Set in 13.5 pt. Calibri
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quintillion credits for a dead sky king. The payoff was too rich to refuse – more than most bounty hunters earn in a thousand lifetimes - enough to forgive even the murder of a girlchild. This is what he tells himself as he grabs her limp body by the robe and drags it to lie next to the entrance of the tent. He shivers and deactivates his still crackling bracelets with a flick of his wrist and feels the static tingle over his skin. He selects a glass flask from his belt, cracks open the cap and begins to trickle the contents around the tent, splashing it on the canvasses and fabrics, he lets the liquid pour over the stage, stopping just short of the still sparking fire. He snaps the container shut and strides back to where he left his quarry. He pulls up her hood and lifts her to his chest with one arm. For all the world, he looks just like a parent carrying an exhausted child. So light - he can barely feel any weight at all. With a practiced pitch, he casts the glass bottle across the tent. It hits the still smouldering metal fire-bowl and explodes into an incandescent fireball. The mercenary turns his back on the spreading fire, and in the growing orange radiance removes his combat gloves. He watches the flames beginning to lick at the beautiful images. The stars on the celestial fresco glow briefly before one side bursts into flames. The fire tears across the painted galaxies like a return to the deadly glory days past. Real flames mix with the painted ones on the burning battlefield ceiling, repaying its debts to its origins one more time. The daubed tribal creatures appear to twist and squirm as the glowing tendrils embrace them. The blend of 12
The Sky Kings The fire glistens off the child-priest’s sightless eyes, her tribal scars appear to glow in the half-light. Hers is an ancient voice, centuries older than her juvenile form. Her hands weave in the warm, humid air as she speaks. The creature glyphs daubed onto the walls of the yurt seem to writhe and move in the flickering firelight. “Generations ago, our kind ruled the void-wastes of the stars.” She flings a shaking hand toward the great star-mural behind her. She appears as an infant before its enormous glory. “We journeyed far. Beyond the realspace, we rode. We laid waste to a thousand, thousand suns, all would know our kind, and despair. The greatest of us all was our celestial leader, Jotun the Star-born. He was a truly mighty king, towering over even our greatest warriors, unmatched in combat; legends tell of him defeating one thousand armed men in battle, armed only with his fists. But the true strength of Jotun lay in his godlike strategies. In our wars, we would slay millions without losing a single fighter. We demanded tribute from our scores of conquered, and like the cowed hordes they were, they all obeyed. And so, with the divine guidance of our great sky chief, we took treasures beyond our richest fantasies, whole mountains of gold, charms and holy relics. And we grew strong from our spoils. The spires of our great sky-halls stretched to the stars, our weapon-stores were filled with 5
arms and our warriors’ creed spread across the conquered worlds like a wildfire. We became so powerful, whole starsystems would submit at the mere mention of our kind. Entire galaxies fell to their knees before our might. All would bow before the knotted star-sigil of the Sky-Kings; our allies were many, our mead-halls were warm, our wars were legendary, and all was good. But then, like a rat comes to a feast, there came one to our home planet.” The storyteller’s face twists in disgust. Her milky eyes burn with ferocity as they stare into the fire. “A boy, a mere child of fourteen winters, starving and dressed in rags, yet in his eyes there burned the fury of a thousand vanquished, and his hands wielded unnatural strength. His name was Mucor, the defiler.” At the mention of his name, the child-priest casts a purifying sign over herself with her twisting, writhing hands. Her spectators, huddled around on the floor, hiss and mutter between themselves. The child raises her fist in the air, silencing them. “He demanded an audience with Jotun, who he claimed as his kin. He stood in the golden hall of our rulers and, with his forked tongue, he spoke twisted lies that enchanted all who heard them, even our star-born leader, who bid him sit at his right hand. He accepted him as his own equal, in both strength and power; and his poisoned word was the first in our beloved leader’s ear. Jotun was found as a wailing infant, stowed aboard a sky-ship, and so the rise of one to call his blood and
She extinguishes her story-brazier with a wave of her hand, plunging the tent into dusk, and prepares for her next performance in an hour. This has been her way ever since her mother abandoned her on this planet as a child, to save her from the life of constantly fleeing from those who would hunt herHer train of thought is interrupted. The quiet sound of fabric sliding over fabric shatters her nerves. “I hear you.” She calls into her blind darkness. “What is your business?” Nothing. Just the dry crackling of the cooling embers. Her sightless eyes desperately search the silence for any sign of the intruder. She hears a sigh, and it turns her belly to ice. “Sky. King.” Two words resonate from the intruder. Two words that spell her doom. She dives for her ember-stove, suddenly a caged firestorm in an instant. A crackling whine rings out in the tent as the mercenary pirate activates his Crashbolt bands. With a single gesture, electrical discharge illuminates the tent. The flames are extinguished, leaving only glowing cinders. The lightning has served its intended purpose, reaching out and touching her little heart. Her tiny body falls, steaming and motionless, to the ground. A combat gloved hand presses her neck to find a pulse. Her white eyes mirror the blue glow of the still-fizzling bracelets. No heartbeat. The mercenary shrugs, he had thought there would be more fight with this one. He doesn’t usually go for neocide type jobs like this, but a standing bounty of over twelve
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like a mother to her infant. “Like the phoenix of old, we will take back our glory, we will rebuild our golden halls, we will avenge our slain leader, and we will sit at our rightful place once more, atop an empire spanning hundreds of planets.” She replaces the burning coal; its flames turn indigo against the orange fires surrounding it. She turns to the astonished crowd and bares her pale, unblemished palms. “My kind were bred to hurl fire, to be burning vanguards, announcing the arrival of our warriors. Now it remains the only part of our former glory we still pass on to our children. We are a proud race bought low, awaiting our ascension.” She clasps her still smoking hands together and bows deeply. “Until then, I only ask that you share the tale of my people, so our story is not lost, like so many others.” The door of the tent is pulled back, flooding the tent with light. The crowd, a collection of multinational tourists and backpackers applaud briefly. Their camera flashes reflect off her bleached eyes. She stands stock still until they file out, back into their tourist traps, babbling excitedly about the authentic experience – a real sky king storytelling! How rare! Just wait until the photos are developed! She stands at her brazier, surrounded by her threadbare tapestries, and sighs. Few of them will remember her tale, fewer still will repeat it; this she knows, but the hope that one day, her story will spread, and she will meet another of her kind, keeps the fires of courage burning in her chest.
equal could not be contested. And so Mucor became one of our kind, accepted and celebrated. Thusly began the beginning of the end for our great empire.” She wipes the tears streaming down her face with the heel of her hand. She gazes into the flames before her. She takes a long, deep breath before she speaks again. “He was an assassin, of course.” Her head snaps up, her face fiercely defiant. “But can any of you say you would have acted differently? If you were suddenly offered a chance to finally have what you were lacking your whole life? To be whole at last, after being so long incomplete?” The men and women remain hushed. Silence reigns in the tribal yurt until the girl-child speaks once more. “We thought we had grown strong, but we had grown fat and lazy. We thought ourselves untouchable with our golden halls and our weapons of iron and glass. We were so dazzled by our riches that we were blind to the snake in our midst. He stayed many weeks in our hall, enjoying our hospitality all the time, and watching. Always watching for our weaknesses, any holes in our defences that he might slip through. And he found them, all of them.” “And on that cursed day when the snake-child struck we were unprepared. When Jotun fell from the highest tower, childless and kinless we, in turn, fell into anarchy. The corruption that had festered unabated in our banking-halls and our arms
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-houses was laid bare. Brother fought brother for mere scraps of power, and our marble hearths were stained red. When we turned to our allies for aid, we found them slaughtered. Slain by our myriad enemies who had waited generations for this very moment.” “Amid the whirlwinds of killing and plunder, we hunted for our freshly dead king’s assassin, but he slipped right through our grasp. The last we ever saw of him was the glowing streak of his extraction ship over the sunset, just as the jagged shapes of the attack craft began to appear through the shining atmosphere.” “The process of our subjugation was short but unspeakably brutal. Our ancestral halls were broken, our weapons destroyed, and our warriors crippled. We were scattered across the galaxy by our countless oppressors. Some of us were sold as slaves, others were exiled for imagined historic crimes. Our leaders’ brilliant minds were taken, used to create new tactical systems, leaving drooling husks, only able to eat and sleep. Our scourged planet was left, stripped and littered with the burning corpses of the fallen.” She gestures to a ceiling-mural, stretched across the roof. It shows a blackened, shattered, dead land. “And so, our people fell; we fell so far and so deep. We became a displaced people – our home world destroyed, our children enslaved; we were hunted across the galaxy; we found ourselves cast out of our federations, where once 8
we had been welcomed as honoured guests, now we were as beggars at the gates. We were forced to become a travelling, homeless people. We abandoned our old ways, of empirebuilding, of glorious pillage and feasting, and became mercenaries, tinkerers, merchants and-” She swings her hands apart, opening her hands to the tent around her. “Storytellers. We travel from system to system, doing what we can. One or two of us may make a name for themselves every now and then, but they quickly disappear, taken by those who seek to purge us even now, all these generations later. They send their mercenaries, their pirates, even their armies. They know no bounds in their endless pursuit of our kind.” She glares directly into the fire, her white eyes appear to blaze ferociously. “But in the heart of every one of us, from the travelling entertainers, to the blades-for-hire, here burns the spark of the warrior.” She pounds her tiny chest proudly. “Even now, the emergence of a new leader, one who would unite us beyond the blood-feuds, corruptions and rivalries that broke us apart, all those years ago, could still make that spark a mighty fire. We would rise again and blaze across this galaxy like a burning comet across the night sky.” With steady hands, she reaches into the brazier and picks up a glowing ember. She breathes upon it gently and it bursts into purple flames. She cradles it close to her heart as she stares into the violet fire licking around her fingers. She speaks softly now, 9