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The Strategist
Gerrard Cowan
Ruin is coming.For ten millennia, the Machinery Selected the greatest leaders of humanity, bringing glory to the Overland. But the Machinery came with a Prophecy: in the 10,000th year, it will break, and Ruin will come.Now, the Prophecy is being fulfilled. The Machinery has Selected a terrible being to rule the Overland, an immortal who cares little for the humans she governs. Some call her the Strategist. Others call her the One. Everyone knows her as Mother.Mother will do anything to find the Machinery and finally bring Ruin. But only one creature knows where the Machinery is – the Dust Queen, an ancient being of three bodies and endless power.And if Mother wants the Dust Queen’s help, she must ready herself for a game. A game from older times. A game of memory. A game in which mortals are nothing more than pawns.
The Strategist
GERRARD COWAN
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017
Copyright © Gerrard Cowan 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017.
Cover image © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Gerrard Cowan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008121822
Version: 2017-08-09
For my parents, Marie and Ronnie, and my sister, Rosaleen
Table of Contents
Cover (#u5be4ab8a-0a17-5fa0-8475-f0b27f1d3e92)
Title Page (#u1c8aec69-9fb5-523c-8446-041ae8dd053b)
Copyright (#uc76c9c0b-ad3f-5f2a-8726-6bbe13cd9357)
Dedication (#u5413f423-3f3e-5099-846a-52e88e298c3e)
Chapter One (#u40837cff-6068-5e33-8595-7581fe71ce07)
Chapter Two (#u61a4e52c-6f6f-5d6d-ba8e-a61bd2460ef4)
Chapter Three (#u67372125-a90e-53e6-9652-4abcfe9f7417)
Chapter Four (#u262f60c7-ac7a-55bb-b027-16206b304f89)
Chapter Five (#u502d723f-e4db-5a46-aff8-5a26898cb342)
Chapter Six (#ub2fadae9-09ea-5cbd-abdc-ea3c78a4b8e6)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Gerrard Cowan (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ud6eded5f-c42b-5a3b-9075-148af20b11db)
‘What is the Machinery?’ the man asked.
There was silence for a moment, and then a great sigh, somewhere far away.
The man opened his eyes, to a black, starless expanse. He was alone, held up by invisible strings: a puppet in the abyss.
The man flexed his fingers. He reached up to his face, felt the stubble, and confirmed he was what he had always been: Charls Brandione. A physical being. Not a nothing.
He looked into the dark, and searched for her.
The Dust Queen.
‘Ask me another question,’ she said.
It was strange, that voice of hers: three people speaking at once, and one voice from three mouths. He sensed she was impatient, and the thought sent a spasm of laughter through him. How could he hold such power over her?
He turned his head, focused on another stretch of darkness. She had taken him here before, many times. What was this place? It was a void, yet there was something there, in the darkness: a deep intelligence, like that of the Queen, but older even than her, its thoughts stretching across age after age. He could feel it. He could hear the whispers of its greatness. There was a conflict within this unknowable mind; he could taste it.
The darkness changed. Three sets of unblinking eyes appeared before him.
‘Ask me another question.’ The eyes narrowed. He could ignore her no longer. But only one question ever came to mind. It was a question she would not answer, but it mattered more than anything else. Everything was tied up with it: the old world and whatever had taken its place; the rules they lived by, all their fears and dreams.
‘What is the Machinery?’
The eyes blinked.
**
He was back in his tent.
No: not tent. He had been in many tents before, in the wars. The wars, the wars, the endless wars, now a bloody dream. This was a great hall, a monstrosity of flowing silk, dyed into violent shades of red and gold. In the centre stood a magnificent table, covered with maps of the Machinery knew where and bowls of fruit in a riot of colours. Candles burned on thick iron stands, and a gigantic bed dominated one wall. Along another was a series of wooden shelves, groaning with incomprehensible books. Brandione sat at a gleaming mahogany desk, the knobs on its drawers shaped into likenesses of his own face. In a corner was a bust of the Queen, or rather three busts growing from one base, staring at him with wicked intent.
Wayward was standing before him, smiling his usual smile. Tonight he wore a velvet coat of dark purple; shreds of cloth of the same colour were threaded through the braids of his hair.
Brandione turned his gaze to the entrance, a flapping segment of parchment. Outside, the sand was cold and blue in the moonlight. There was a desert, there. Was it the Wite? He did not know. Questions, Wayward, and the tent. That’s all there is. Questions, Wayward, and the tent.
‘You were gone for a long time,’ Wayward said.
His accent was familiar to Brandione, echoing with the heavy cadences of the South. My old home, in an old land. But it could not be so, for Wayward was surely an ancient thing. Perhaps he alters his voice to put his companions at ease.
Brandione shrugged. ‘No longer than usual.’ He looked down at the desk, and saw that his hands were intertwined. There was a small scar on his thumb from some unknown wound. For a moment he was jolted back to reality, to his old self: the commander of the armies of the Overland. But those days were gone, now. He was no longer a General. What are you, then?
‘You are the soldier and the scholar,’ Wayward whispered.
Brandione met the courtier’s eye. Wayward had been there from the beginning. The General had been taken prisoner, accused of murdering the Strategist and three Tacticians, and sent to the Prison. He suppressed a bubble of laughter. I fought to declare my innocence. But in the end, it didn’t matter. I was always going in the same direction: to her.
He had met her in the Prison of the Doubters, in a tower in the sun. She had formed before his eyes, taking her shape from mounds of sand, coalescing into three beings: three women with one voice. He tried to picture her, in his mind, but the image was broken, incomplete, a thing of red and black and grey and white, a thing of glass crowns, a thing of mighty thrones. The Dust Queen.
She had been expecting him. The Last Doubter, she called him. A soldier and a scholar. She had enveloped him, shown him things he could not comprehend, strange things from other places, abandoned cities and broken fortresses. He saw the Strategist, in shadows and towers: the new Strategist, the one that had been prophesied. She had taken the form of a girl he recognised, a girl he had searched for long ago, in that strange museum …
The Queen always told him to ask a question, and threw him back here, to Wayward, when he asked the same one, over and over and over again.
Wayward. What is he? A guide, on this journey. The man who led him through the Queen. The one who steered him in the right direction.
‘Did you ask her the same question again?’ the courtier asked. There was an edge of impatience in his voice.
Brandione looked away for a moment. Outside, in the desert, a person had appeared. It was a man, but it was not a man. It was a creature, formed of sand, wearing a yellow cloak, holding a glass spear. He was one of the Queen’s soldiers, a member of the army Brandione had seen in the Prison of the Doubters. Her army, for him to command, she had said: his army of dust.
There was a gust of dry wind, and the soldier disappeared.
Brandione turned his attention again to Wayward. He nodded at the courtier, who frowned back.
‘What is the Machinery?’ Wayward asked. There was mockery in his words. He turned from the desk, and made his way to a golden sofa, throwing himself down and spreading out his lengthy frame. ‘She will not answer that question. Do you know why?’
‘No.’
Wayward sighed. ‘It is not a good question. It is too … precise. The Queen is old indeed. She thinks in …’ Wayward screwed his eyebrows together, and clicked his tongue in his mouth. ‘How to describe it? How to describe eternity?’ He smiled. ‘She thinks in great, sweeping, movements.’ He accompanied each word with a swing of an elegant arm. ‘Her thoughts are the circuits of the stars. Her wishes are the birth of mountains. She is the sun, hmm? She is the moon.’
