Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [0]
a father when you never had to be
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere love and gratitude to my parents, Kamal and Mick, for their continuing support.
Immense thanks to my agent, John Jarrold, who has been both consul and oracle; without his deeply valuable guidance and belief, this book would never have reached publication.
Peter Lavery, possibly the smartest man alive, and with a pencil in his hand, certainly the most ruthless. My deep gratitude to him, and also to Julie Crisp for helping to shape this book into something better.
Thanks to: Graeme Harris, for the late night conversations; Robert Thompson for the crucial advice; James Long for the wide-ranging discussions. And a special thanks to George Mann, good friend and sounding board.
And many writers continue to inspire and influence me, and I’m doubtlessly in debt to them all though they are too numerous to list. Nevertheless, keen-eyed readers will see open tips-of-my-hat to those who have shaped this genre, including Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, M. John Harrison, and even Arthur C. Clarke.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
About the Author
Copyright
“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”
—DON DELILLO, White Noise
PROLOGUE
This much was obvious:
They’d sent him to kill her. And here she was, weeks away from comfort, weeks across the Archipelago and halfway across the night. Still, at least it was a good time to be on the run.
The lanes of Ule were cold and body-thick. Flames illuminated everything, fire from within pits, or from torches. In the shadows you could see young men and women sitting up late, smoking, talking philosophy, all elaborate hand gestures, loud voices, a little laughter here and there. Children slumped bleary-eyed or asleep by their knees. Older people drifted past the stores behind, scrutinizing faded signs, something about their manner suggesting they might be hoping to find the moment where their lives had slipped away.
They just get in the way, Papus thought, such is the nature of an Empire island. You can’t stand still.
The island of Folke:
An outpost on the fringe of the Empire, with Jamur soldiers waiting to launch a raid to push back a tribal uprising at dusk, also crowds of locals, passing travelers, morbid tourists. Paranoid, she would frequently see something strange, an erratic gesture between two silhouetted figures, a moment where they’d stare back at her, then she’d wonder at the meaning behind it. On nights like this, it was as if everything happened out of context.
She needed to return to Villjamur.
This far east it was said that war inevitably brought out the curious. They’d come in droves, as if they had forgotten about all the possible ways in which you could die. Despite all the cover these people offered her, despite all the places to hide—he’d be waiting for her, maybe within the trading crowds of the iren, maybe somewhere between the packed fishing stalls where old men chanted their prices in hybrid dialects.
“A charm, lord …” A grubby woman speaking in broken Jamur. Dressed in rags, reeking of manure. In her muddied hands she displayed several blackened bones. Her face was wrinkled, smeared with smoke-stained sweat, a worrying distance in her eyes that indicated she was too far detached from reality for simple