How Black the Sky

by T J Marquis

  The horrid things came nearer, and Pierce remembered to keep singing. He'd forgotten at some point during his work.

  "Keep mining!" came a distant voice from above.

  Right, he had to keep going. No distractions. Trust the music.

  He turned back to the silicon, fighting the urge to look back at the banshees. He wasn't so much afraid of them, it was more that his instincts were screaming for him to defend himself. Yet even if his sword were able to cleave the flesh of the ghoulish beasts, there was nothing he could do to harm their evil spirits.

  So he mined, and sang, and up above, the horn player serenaded.

  After several minutes, his curiosity got the best of him, and he checked on the status of the banshees. They had entered a holding pattern, flying in anxious loops just a hundred yards away, faces locked in perpetual expressions of confused anger. They wanted to come and rip the cliff-danglers to shreds, but the music held them at bay.

  After an hour or so of working and sweating at the end of the rope, with the cacophonous song of the banshees stabbing his mind, Pierce finally began to feel the sickness and fatigue he'd always heard about. Toxic banshee song. He needed to end the shift before he made a stupid mistake.

  Reluctantly he tugged out the signal on his rope, and shortly the men above began hoisting him up. The shrieks of the banshees grew frenzied, sticking needles of vertigo into his brain. He glanced backward again. They had pressed closer, despite the pain or discomfort the music caused them. They didn't want this prey to get away.

  Pierce got his arms over the top of the cliff, and the men up there helped him mount it. They gave him hearty pats on the back and congratulated him on a good take.

  It didn't seem like much to Pierce, compared to what he imagined Sev needed for the enchantment. Just three chunks the size of a man's chest, and a handful of other small pieces and scraps.

  Pierce looked out over the Chasm. The banshees were already gone. No meal for them this day.

  He looked down the line of the cliff's edge. Everyone else had already come up. How many times would they have to do this? When would somebody's luck run out? He didn't fancy finding out first-hand what the banshees could do to a man if they caught him.

  Sev was duly impressed by the day's take, and that did Pierce's heart good. He may not have trusted his own sense of what constituted a victory when mining the Chasm wall, but he trusted the forgemaster's.

  Everyone who'd worked this shift was treated to a sumptuous meal back at Chasmverge. It had only been a few hour's work, but Pierce felt like he'd tried to fight a duel after drinking too much the previous night. Knowing his own impressive endurance, he felt sorry for the garrison soldiers, and a little proud of them, too. To brave that Chasm without any special Skills, without enchanted armament, well, it was brave.

  They spent days like this, sometimes squeezing two or three shifts in, if the banshees happened to be a little less taxing on everyone's psyches. Gradually the stockpile of painstakingly mined silicon grew, and Sev set to work growing his crystals.

  He was all too willing to share his methods with the First and Second, much to their wizardly delights. Eff had provided Sev with equipment and a laboratory, and the three of them spent hours in it discussing the forgemaster's art in terms Pierce couldn't understand.

  He would spend his breaks watching Sev work, though, just curious about how the forgemaster had passed his days down in the Underlands. The process was slow, methodical, precise. Sev must have had legendary patience. He had to be still, his mind quiet, with no thoughts for things outside of the lab. Pierce didn't think he could do that, but he supposed in an abstract way Sev's work was similar to his own life's calling. In a fight, a duel or a battle, Pierce couldn't allow himself any distractions, any doubts about his ability. He couldn't let his mind be drawn toward things that didn't pertain to the fight.

  That focus and passion for their work - it was something the two of them had in common. Maybe that was why Pierce had ultimately been drawn to his new friend.

  Six days into the project, and they were a little over half done by Sev's reckoning.

  Sev had praised the pureness of the silicon the teams were bringing up. He said the veins in the Underlands, though plentiful, were often shot through with other elements - silver, gold, platinum - that had to be discarded for their uselessness. He seemed to grow more excited, working quickly and smiling often.

  Pierce had taken the first shift as usual, and now he was over the edge, sweating as he chiseled at the cliffs. He swore his voice had grown stronger in the last few days. He sang his songs boldly, and the banshees continued to remain at bay.

  He was chipping away mindlessly at the stone when he heard a yelp from the next position eastward. The soldier working there must have lost his grip on his tools - Pierce could see the gleam of metal as they fell into the Chasm. The man flailed, trying to catch the tools, and swatted away his hauling sack. The spotter and trumpeter up above took the movement as their signal to haul both the soldier and his sack up, and the man stopped singing to try and holler that he wasn't ready yet. The banshees, forgotten for the moment, took their chance and rushed in, keeping unusually quiet as they did so, coming in low. They had learned. They had been waiting.

  Pierce hollered at anyone who was listening, trying to keep a melody in his voice as he did so. He didn't know what to yell, so he just ended up stammering loudly. He tried to gauge the distance to the soldier in trouble. If there were any kind of foot or handholds, he could make it. But the cliff was sheer, slick. His boots wouldn't get a grip. He'd left his sword up above, knowing it would do no good against the banshees anyhow, so he couldn't cut into the cliff. He kicked it, propelling himself away. He kicked and kicked again, making a tiny crater in the rock. He pushed off of it, trying to generate a lateral swing.

  The banshees had almost reached the man. His spotter had almost gotten him to the top of the cliff and might have finished if the trumpeter had been helping, but he was busy unloading the silicon from its sack. It wasn't surprising, this lapse in procedure. They'd been at this for days. It was easy to let one's guard down when one had repeated an action a hundred times.

  The banshees shrieked at last, pouncing on the hapless soldier, grasping his legs with clawed hands. They yanked him away from the cliff-face violently, pulling the spotter up above off his balance. He stumbled toward the edge of the Chasm, screaming in shock as he finally saw the banshees. He tried to scramble backwards across the ground, but the lowering rope was tied around his waist. He fumbled at it.

  Pierce had gotten a good swing going, and his trumpeter was looking down from above in confusion. Pierce waved him away, put a thumb to his lips to indicate the man should make sure to keep playing. He nodded and played all the louder, looking toward the man who had been caught.

  There was no way Pierce could reach him, and if he did, there was nothing he could do to help.

  The dangling miner was in the grasp of a half dozen banshees, and they tore at him in mad rage. One bit into his leg below the knee and Pierce heard the snap of the bone, the rip of the flesh as the banshee tore his lower leg off entirely. It didn't even care to feast on the limb, just carelessly let it fall into the Chasm. The banshee noticed the spotter, fumbling at the rope around his waist, unable to get free. It grasped the rope and began to pull while its brethren continued to rip the first man apart. The trumpeter tried to hold onto the spotter, and both of them were getting pulled toward the Chasm's edge. The banshee yanked another time, and the spotter went over the side, hanging from his waist and swinging down below the miner he'd been responsible for. The trumpeter had let go, and was laying on his stomach at Chasm's edge, staring in shock.

  The banshees relished in their kills, now swarming both men that had fallen, rending flesh. One cut into the spotter's belly almost carefully, drinking in his screams of pain.

  When there was nothing left to tear apart, the banshees wheeled away into the dark below, and the air grew eeril
y quiet. Pierce stopped swinging and just let himself hang. He couldn't believe what he'd just witnessed, and he'd never felt so powerless.

  Morale took a plunge after that incident, and the mining teams agreed to call it quits for the day. Of course, everyone knew that tragedy could strike at any moment. Dipping into the Chasm for any amount of time was known to be a deadly risk, but knowing something could happen was a far cry from actually experiencing it.

  At first, Pierce was accepting of it, watching the Chasm while leaning back on the wall of the annex tower and sipping at some mead. The more he thought about it, though, the more he began to feel a burning inside. He hated that he hadn't been able to stop the banshees from claiming their prey. All those garrison troops had left was each other. Their families were gone, and the city they'd called home. He knew of course that he couldn't have done anything significantly different if he'd been up top of the cliff, and armed. He simply wasn't equipped to fight creatures like the banshees. It seemed no one was. That didn't make it sting any less.

  An indignance mounted within him and he started pacing.

  What about those two wizards, cooped up in the tower. Could Ess or Eff have done something to repel or destroy the banshees? It certainly seemed that they were powerful enough, but if that was the case, why hadn't they been down on the ground helping? Pondering this, Pierce found it difficult to stay put. He didn't know if his thoughts were rational on this count, but he quickly got to the point where he didn't care. He stomped off around the curve of the tower, making for its open doors.

  He climbed the steps inside, making for the forgemaster's lab. At least one of the wizards was likely to be there.

  He opened the door to the lab impatiently, storming in, at this point ready to holler, but his eyes found Ess there, watching Sev's work intently, and his rage dimmed a little.

  She looked innocent, like a perfect little doll, eyes half-lidded as she gazed down at Sev's hands. Her silver hair hung down on the right side, and the left she had tucked back behind her ear. Her white lips were slightly parted and a small crease had formed in her brow. She'd finally deigned to change out of her robe and into work clothes. They were too big, but still managed to hug her slender frame. Pierce realized he was staring. He'd almost forgotten why he'd come.

  "Ess," he said. She looked over at him, eyes not quite focused, as if she was still lost in whatever thoughts she'd been having.

  "Ess, why weren't you or Eff down at the cliffs?" Pierce asked, more softly than he'd meant to. "Why haven't you been all this time?"

  Finally she registered his presence fully and surfaced from the depths of her thought.

  "Pierce," she said. "What do you mean?"

  "You, in all your power, or Eff, who you say knows even more magic than you do. Why aren't you helping to protect the men from the banshees?"

  As Pierce thought about it, some of his ire began to surface again. He felt a mixture of guilts. One, that the mere presence of this lovely girl could so easily disarm his rage, and another, that he had started to speak sharply to her.

  "Pierce, no one can harm the banshees," she said patiently. "You know this. Everything that can be tried, has been."

  "No," he said. "There's always a way. Maybe you just haven't found it."

  "There is no way," Ess asserted. "I assure you."

  Sev kept working as if he didn't hear the argument at his back.

  "Even if you really think that," Pierce said, "why do this instead of trying something new?" He gestured at Sev, working his magic on the growing crystals. "Be out there, amplify our music, cover us with protective wards, try something."

  "Pierce," Ess sighed. She didn't look insulted or challenged at all. She looked vaguely weary, in fact.

  "No," he continued. The argument was doing good for his determination. Her beauty did not abate, but it was having less of an effect on him. He wouldn't back down.

  "You, both of you, should be giving this expedition priority. What else matters?" he said. "If Kash takes Overland, if we die, what will it matter if you know how his forgemasters work their enchantments?"

  "Pierce," she said, still unnaturally calm, "you are young..."

  "Me? I can't be that much younger than you," he said. "That's beside the point."

  "No, Pierce, it's not," Ess said. "And I am not young. I have seen a hundred years as of the last green moon. You have heard our stories - how could you imagine I was not your elder?"

  Pierce's jaw dropped. It was one of those odd things the mind refused to put together. He felt foolish. "A hundred? No."

  Ess chuckled and smiled. "Yes. I may not look it, but such is the blessing of these magics, combined with the blood of my heritage. But that's not the point of mentioning it," she said. "There are many things one can learn, do, and try in a century. My Master has been learning for over four hundred years. There is little he does not yet know. And, as any good student, my primary goal is to surpass him in all ways. Capturing Kash will help me achieve that."

  Pierce couldn't say anything in response. Despite himself, he was looking at the highness of her cheeks, the suppleness of her bare arms sticking out of the sleeves of the work shirt. A hundred?

  "When I say you are young, I mean that you have not yet learned to accept what you can and cannot change," she said.

  "I'll never --" he started, but she held up two dark fingers to stop him.

  "And you won't learn until the years have taught it to you. I can tell you the things that I know about life, about our Overland, but I cannot make you grasp reality in the same way I do. I can ask you to make your choices as if you understood the wisdom I would give you, but I cannot ingrain that wisdom in you by force."

  "I can appreciate wisdom, and philosophy," Pierce said, his spirits dimming slightly. It was hard to stay riled when she was so calm, when she did seem wise, when she continued to be so lovely. He groaned softly without thinking, hoping she hadn't heard it.

  Ess laughed. "You are like a puppy that has been reprimanded. And I do not mean that as an insult. It is endearing, Pierce." She put a hand on his arm, and his blood rushed.

  "You do listen to your elders," she said. "You do learn, and it is much to your credit that you have the discipline to submit to us. What I am saying is that you cannot know fully what we would teach you until you have both practiced it and grown into it. Only with experience and age do the mysteries of youth begin to make sense. Just in time for new mysteries to appear."

  Pierce was calmed, but not placated. "I just can't stand for it, when there could be another way," he said. Not that he knew what that way could be.

  "And again," said Ess, "it is to your credit that your sense of justice refuses to be quenched. Keep that quality, Pierce, and let it grow to be girded with wisdom." She glanced back toward Sev and his work.

  Pierce guessed that was it. He'd been dismissed. He couldn't think of what else to say to her in that moment. He would have to think about it. He turned toward the door.

  "Sorry about the noise, Sev," he said to the forgemaster.

  "It is no trouble," said Sev. "It is hard to distract a forgemaster from his work." He didn't turn, but Pierce imagined the man's flat smile appearing for a moment. What had he thought about all of that? And how old was Sev, anyway?

  Not for the first time in this group, he felt a bit like a child. There seemed to be an entire chasm between himself and the legends he'd fallen in with. Usually, he didn't mind, but now it left him unsettled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Recon and Kisses

  Scythia reveled in the race with her husband, hooves and claws of their mounts scraping the hard ground, wind pulling her long, dark hair out of its restraints. She watched Axebourne ahead of her, riding his raptorion with masterful control. He moved fluidly with the beast, and she could see the muscles of his back flexing as he rode, through the thin material of his tunic. Despite the circumstances, she could tell he enjoyed the mad gallop too.

  Peace had sounded nice, ba
ck in Nux. Resting there for a time, allowing their guard to drop, would have been a welcome relief from the years they'd spent at war. They could have settled in, maybe even considered a family again, but the winds had shifted all too soon, and here they were, one battle behind, more ahead. It was good, though, to come up against these things together. Scythia could no longer imagine surviving life in all its violent fits of surprise without a love, without Axebourne, by her side.

  Every now and then, he would turn his head to check her position. She saw the squint in his eyes as he considered letting her catch up, and the gleam when he decided not to.

  Good, she thought, let it be a contest.

  The bloodhoof was naturally the faster beast, but Axebourne had always been the better rider. Even Nova's love of her new master could not compensate for Scythia's imperfect skill. Still, Axebourne would brook no lack of enthusiasm on his wife's part, and Scythia pushed on as hard as she could. She meant to catch him, if not pass him up.

  They were sprinting toward the town of Shiv to catch up on news from the wider world. It would have taken long for news to reach this far-flung place, but Eff refused to fold somewhere blindly, and Ess said she needed to watch over the silicon miners from atop Eff's tower. Pierce had apparently convinced her to stand guard.

  Scythia was just hoping a well-trained messenger-mage would have been considerate enough to bear tidings of the invasion out here.

  A wave of relief washed over her when the town appeared on the horizon. It had only been a few days since they'd ridden through on the way to Chasmverge, but anything could have happened in that time. The town wasn't razed, or even on fire, and there were no signs of those wicked, singing obelisks, or any of Kash's monsters. There wasn't much traffic in the streets, but it had been a sleepy town anyway.

  Scythia spurred Nova on hard, and the bloodhoof seemed to understand. This wasn't about reaching Shiv sooner, it was about trying to beat Axebourne. He turned his head and laughed mirthfully, digging his heels into the raptorion's sides. It surged forward, and Nova strove to match it.