Servants of the Nexus: The Wayfarer Chronicles, #1

By Amy Sanderson

There are a thousand thousand realms in the Nexus. Someone has to protect them from themselves – and each other.

As a Wayfarer, one of the immortal Kin, it's Saenumandua's job to police the illicit sale of information between worlds. Trouble is, only another Wayfarer could do the selling, and rogue Kin are dangerous beasts.

When one of them breaks into Saenu's home, she's left chasing a trail of clues that leads her to the city of Howl, a place of lumbering automatons and neon streets. With the aid of fellow Wayfarer Cam – and his guardian angel – Saenu must take back what was stolen and face an old foe, one who leaves nothing but devastation in his wake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amy Sanderson
• Release date: Jul 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513026657

Amy Sanderson

Amy has been writing for as long as she can remember, inspired by a childhood fascination with books. By the time she was fifteen and confronted with school 'careers guidance', she'd decided being an author was the only profession she could possibly enjoy - which, of course, led to a string of other roles, including Archaeology student, bookseller and library assistant. These days, she lives in the North Yorkshire countryside with her partner, where they run a bed & breakfast business and smallholding. When she's not working or writing, Amy enjoys reading, gaming, photography, and trying to pretend she's a grown-up.

Book preview

1

The crater stretched nearly half a mile, a great gaping hole in the earth from which only wafts of steam rose. Its rim crumbled beneath Saenu's boots, sending little avalanches of soil and ash tumbling down into the hollow. She took a step back, wrinkling her nose at the sulphur fumes and trying to ignore the pitiful weeping and mewling coming from the onlookers whose homes had been reduced to char. To ignore, not because she was heartless - though there were men aplenty who'd accuse her of that - but because it wasn't a Wayfarer's place to get involved. Well, it hadn't been, once upon a time. These days, their mandate was rather foggier.

She sighed, one hand going to rest on the hilt of her sword. It vibrated beneath her touch, a solid and comforting presence. Clear up this mess: that's what she was here for.

She chose one of the onlookers, though not at random: she needed someone with a clear head, a sense of detachment. Not that there could be a great deal of that when disaster struck a settlement of this size, but there would be strata of involvement all the same.

A young man stood at the edge of the crater, a little further around its edge. Saenu softened her stance, slumped her shoulders, took her hand off her sword - authority would draw suspicion and closed lips, but fellow gawkers were always worth a conversation - and approached him.

She needn't have bothered with the change of pose, as the young man was too entranced by the scene of utter devastation before them to even glance Saenu's way.

This was all Petyr's doing, he announced, fairly hopping from foot to foot in excitement. My ma always said it'd come to this.

Not a young man after all, Saenu realised, but a child on the cusp of adolescence. Still, he'd do. Come to what? she asked him.

This, he breathed, as though he'd never seen anything so beautiful.

There was, Saenu had to admit, something strangely compelling about the vista. The crater, a perfect circle, with a bowl of black earth fused to glass in the bottom; the teetering line of wooden houses leaning over its far edge; the cloudless blue sky spanning the two. It took a certain kind of dedication to create destruction like this.

You think he died? Saenu asked, making the question sound like casual gossip. Petyr?

I dunno. The boy shrugged, then gestured vaguely off to the far side of the crater. He sounded suddenly dubious of his earlier supposition. But his workshop's way off on the other edge of town. Maybe he wasn't even here.

Maybe he wasn't... but likely he was. In Saenu's experience, it was a fair bet that any town's notable maverick scientist was usually responsible when an event of this magnitude occurred. An event big enough to draw her attention, in other words.

Not that the people here would refer to him as a 'scientist', if the word or its meaning even existed here. This was a relatively marginal world, a realm still limited in technology and learning, at least compared to those at the centre of the Nexus. Marginal enough, in fact, that any power strong enough to cause that crater couldn't possibly have been native - it had to have come from another world. Which was where Saenu came in.

After all, the place of the Wayfarers might be fragmented and confused these days, but Saenu was certain it still encompassed one thing: to protect all the worlds, all the thousands upon thousands of them - from each other, and from themselves.

She skirted the crater, staying well back from its edge to take a meandering path through the wooden houses. Their uneven walls leaned over the street like a tunnel, water dripping off the eaves to form runnels in slushy mud that had once been snow. Dogs yipped and fought in the gutters, and children in rags stood on street corners, selling scavenged trinkets and buttons to feed themselves. This world was a backwater, not modern enough to interest her, not ancient enough to feel like home. The whole place smelled of ditch water and refuse, of smoke and impoverished despair.

Petyr's workshop was easy enough to spot. Little more than a series of interconnected shacks, it stood on an isolated plot, frost-blackened weeds surrounding it and only a slender path trampled through them. Such was the home of a man who'd chosen to set himself apart, by his work, his lifestyle, his mode of thought. The sort of man who might buy details of a weapon from another world and think it mere scholarly curiosity to use them.

The wooden door was unlatched and creaking in the wind. Saenu reached for her sword again; no need to glamour it in a world like this, at least. She shouldered her way inside, pausing to let her eyes adjust to the gloom. Dust motes floated in a stray beam of sunlight - the rest of the room was still and silent.

And what a room it was. Tools and constructs littered every surface, little things of gleaming brass and vast edifices of steel and chrome that rose to the shadowed ceiling. Papers were stacked precariously on worktop corners, pinned to the wooden walls, scattered across the earthen floor. Glass vials set on a windowsill refracted jewels of coloured light across a table strewn with broken quill pens and a spilt bottle of ink. In a distant corner, something clicked three times, whirred once, then fell quiet.

Saenu left her sword in its scabbard. The workshop was strange, yes, and likely stuffed to the gills with creations that might do her harm, but she felt no sense of danger; there was no sentience or malice in the machines, no watchers in the shadows. Instead, there was only-

She spun on her heel, raising her hand just as the club fell. There was no real strength behind the below, and Saenu turned it easily aside. Her attacked yelped, more startled than she was, and the weapon -