Django Wexler - Ashes of the Sun

ASHES

OF THE

SUN

B URNINGBLADE & S ILVEREYE

Ashes of the Sun

T HE S HADOW C AMPAIGNS

The Thousand Names

The Shadow Throne

The Price of Valor

The Guns of Empire

The Infernal Battalion

ASHES

OF THE

SUN

Burningblade & Silvereye:
Book One

DJANGO

WEXLER

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK by Head of Zeus in 2020

Copyright 2020 by Django Wexler

The moral right of Django Wexler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover illustration by Scott Fischer

Map and chapter ornaments by Charis Loke

Author photograph by Rachel Thompson

ISBN (HB): 9781788543149

ISBN (TPB): 9781788543156

ISBN (E): 9781788543132

Head of Zeus Ltd

First Floor East

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WWW . HEADOFZEUS . COM

For Dad

Gyre and Maya were playing ghouls and heroes. Gyre had to be the ghoul, of course. Maya would never tolerate being anything less than a hero.

Summer was in full flower, and the sun was alone in a pale blue sky, with only a few wisps of cloud at the horizon. Theyd already had the dramatic sword fight, and Gyre had been defeated with appropriate hissing and choking. Now he lay on his back, dead, and Maya had planted one foot on his stomach, hands on her hips in a heroic pose.

an now Im queen , she shouted at the top of her lungs. An therell be peace an justice an all, an everyones got to do what I say. Stupid Billem Crump an his stupid brothers have to help Mom dig the new well, an theres going to be apple pudding every day with dinner. An my brother Gyre can have some, she added generously, even if he never beat a ghoul all by himself.

If we had apple pudding every day, youd get sick of it, Gyre said.

Would not.

Would too. And anyway, queens are for barbarians. We have senators and consuls.

You shut up. Youre dead.

She pressed down on Gyres stomach, and he let out an oof . At five, Maya was heavier than she looked, plump and broad-shouldered, with their mothers light brown skin and curly crimson hair. Everyone said Gyre, darker and black-haired, took after their father.

Ill be consul, then, Maya said. Everyone still has to do what I say forever an ever.

You only get to be consul for a year, Gyre said.

Thats practically forever, Maya argued. An

She stopped, and a moment later vanished from his field of vision. Gyre sat up, brushing dirt and dried vulpi dung off his back. All around him, yearling vulpi snuffled over the rocky ground, looking for tender green shoots. Yearlings were Gyres favorite age for vulpi, soft-furred and playful, before they grew into bristly, irritable layers and then huge, sedentary terminals. They didnt take much watching as long as the gate to the pasture was closed, which was why he had time to fool around.

Even so, Gyre had a guilty moment while he made a quick count of the herd. He relaxed when he came up with the requisite thirty-three. He was eight and a half years old and had never lost one of his fathers vulpi, not even the time when the fence had washed out in the rain and six of them had made a break for it.

Gyre! Maya shouted. Gyre, its a centarch ! Hes riding a warbird! She was standing at the fence with her feet on the second rail, leaning as far over as she could. Gyre , you have to come see!

It cant be a centarch.

Gyre hurried to the fence, absentmindedly grabbing the back of Mayas dress with one hand in case she leaned too far over. Maya was reckless, and often sick to boot, spending months with fevers and racking coughs. Keeping his sister out of misadventures was as much a part of his daily chores as tending vulpi. But her excitement was infectious, and he found himself leaning forward to get a better view of the cloud of dust coming down the main road. It was moving awfully quickly.

It was too a centarch! Maya said breathlessly. I saw him an all. He had white armor an a blaster an a hackem!

Haken, Gyre corrected. The legendary bladeless sword, weapon of the centarchs of the Twilight Order. What would a centarch be doing here?

Maybe hes come to arrest Billem Crump for being an ass an all. Dad said he was going to go to law with him if he kept picking those apples.

Gyre pulled his sister back. Centarchs dont arrest people for stealing apples .

They arrest people whove gotshe lowered her voice to a stage whisper dhak . The word, with its connotations of filth, infestation, and immorality, was inappropriate in polite conversation. If Gyres mother had heard Maya saying it, shed have gotten a smack on the ear. Maybe Billem Crumps got ghoul dhak in his shed and the centarch is going to drag him away!

Gyre watched the dust cloud with something less than his sisters wide-eyed wonder. He still didnt believe it was a centarch, and if it was , he wasnt sure how to feel about having one of the Orders champions on their farm. Hed caught on to the hard expression his father and the other farmers wore when the subject came up. Everyone knew the Order kept the people safe from plaguespawn. But

Nothing else, just the significant but. And Gyre knew, as Maya did not, what was in the locked shed off the south field. Last summer, when a plague of weevils had threatened their potatoes, Gyres father had taken him out there by night. Theyd both equipped themselves with a double handful of bright green seeds, like hard young peas, from a half-full sack, and spent the evening planting them between the rows of potato plants. By the next afternoon, the field was full of dead weevils. Gyre had swept them up and buried them in the compost pile, proud and guilty with the shared secret.

Was that dhak ? Gyre suspected it had been. Dhak was anything from the Elder times, before the war that had destroyed both ghouls and Chosen, unless the Order had approved it as safe, sanctioned arcana. But his father had assured him it was fine and that every farmer in the valley had something like it laid away. A centarch wouldnt come after him, just for that. Would they?

We should get back to the house, he told Maya. Or, he discovered, he told the empty space where Maya had been, since his sister had already jumped down from the fence, wriggled out of his grip, and set off up the path as fast as her short legs would carry her.

Gyre looked at the dust cloud. It was rounding the point of the hill now, going past the turn for the Crump farm and definitely heading their way. He wanted to run after Maya, but there were the vulpi to think ofwell behaved or not, he couldnt just leave them on their own. So he spent a few frantic minutes rounding the animals up, ignoring their affronted blats and whistles at being turned out of the pasture early. Only once they were safely back in their pen, jostling for position at the water trough, did he hurry toward the house.