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Trajectory

Kicca trembled in the coal bunker for a long time after the Guard took his mother.

By now, he knew, she would be branded; banished from the Citadel; beaten by circumstances and by the Guard. A wife of tainted blood, she faced whoredom or starvation in the Hinterland, or barbarism in the distant mountains. If she survived the beating, she must decide whether to live or die.

Kicca faced no such decision. Boys of tainted blood died with their fathers. The sons of black marketeers lost their lives in the marketplace, their tainted blood flowing in the gutters.

No bolthole remained for him, in the Citadel or the Hinterland. His tainted bloodline could stay here and stop, or it could continue in the mountains or on the sea. Recalled snippets of tainted conversation informed him that Citadel dreams extended to the coast, where Citadel screens monitored trade with ever-tightening efficiency. Danger there, then, or barbarism in the mountains.

He chose danger, as danger had chosen him.

Ragged, cold, and coal-blackened, he crept out of childhood; walked in shadows through threatening streets; slipped into the sewers and swam south, leaving the Citadel in an appropriate fashion: stinking and shivering, scared of death and scared of life.

A night at the Standing Rig Inn

Kicca wiped his rainbow knife clean and checked his reflection for traces of image powder, pattern radiation, or track identification. The slightest clumsy key would betray his genes upon the Citadel-controlled screens of Oldcobble Harbour.

He avoided the window, left the tassled lamp unlit, and used friendly moonlight to eye the straw pallet for signs of rodent life. He’d not hand the Revenue Men his head on a plate.

He wedged a chair under the doorknob and gauged the drop to inky water from window; stretched out on the straw, hungry as ever, fully-booted, with his knife and sharpened horseshoe to hand; and fell into a light and wary sleep to the creak of hawser, the wet slap on timber, and a sad harmonica in the distance.

Dreams lent him the faceless warmth of family and friends, until another cold dawn woke him to healthy danger.

A day of discovery

Kicca worked his passage on a freebooter and sailed north up the west coast, selling weaponry to barbarians; happy as ever to increase Citadel insecurity, and yet never happy.

He jumped ship at Inisrock, stole a horse, and headed for clean air, for solitude and cleansing, for cold mountain streams and freedom from screens; discovered a timeless peak, where the view showed him a dozen futures waiting to be chosen.

The one he chose led him to a holy woman: a wise hermit in a cave, blessed with bamboo wind chimes and a warm well, blessed with votive offerings from barbarian women, blessed with calm serenity and a Citadel brand on her cheek. He discovered his mother and shared her final weeks, her forgiveness for his father, her patience and her balance.

When her last smile died, he buried her body and took her spirit back to her Abbey for release from pain.

And he stayed there to study.

Slogan

He heard their approach and searched with sapphire arrows through the grey place where snowladen sky met frozen moor; watched the past winging in to merge their futures with his.

Three local horses carried the village girl Vira, and two foreigners. Powerful frames: mountain merceneries far from home; warriors about their business, about to discover him.

“That’s Kicca,” he heard Vira whisper. “He’s our holy man.”

“Kicca the Vicar,” sniggered the warrior youth, to Vira’s hush and his father’s flared glare.

Kicca saw himself through the father’s eyes: an ancient figure sitting cross-legged in a small island of greenery amid melted snow and bluebells.

“You are?” he asked.

The warrior blinked away a snowflake. “My name is Slogan.”

“And Slogan means?”

“In my language, it means war cry.”

“Of course it does.” And Kicca smiled in the knowledge that, one day soon, Slogan and he would gather their diverse forces and breach the Citadel walls together.