by Stephen Case
Eris groaned, and Fawkes had to bite his cheek to keep from making a noise of his own. He sent a negotiator, but he knew it was too late for that. Otto was taking the messenger into the heart of his capital for an interrogation in the royal dungeons. Fawkes’s hand came unclenched.
The automaton gestured for him to give up the intelligence.
Fawkes shook his head. “None,” he said. “Messenger knows nothing.”
Otto gestured again, impatiently.
Fawkes inhaled. “Messenger knows nothing,” he repeated. “Except that my doctor fed him a black vial. Sub-chapter 820, under Medicine. Read it yourself.” He offered a dog-eared book of rules. Otto snatched it away, flipping to the page with blinding speed. Next he snatched up the tiny figurine of the messenger and peered at it in the morning light.
Miniscule black dots were growing over its exposed limbs.
“It’s a pestilence,” Fawkes said. “Your capital city is already a pit of disease. Within a month, it will have spread across the entire kingdom. In a year, the entire continent.”
Otto flattened his hands across the game board, shaking his head.
“Total attrition,” Fawkes agreed. “But your kingdom goes first.”
Otto froze.
“Gods damn,” Eris breathed into the silence. “Gods damn. You’re ruthless.”
Fawkes slumped back in his chair, sweat sticking his shirt to his shoulder blades. His cheeks ballooned around a long exhalation. Otto stared down at the table, still disbelieving, until finally, slowly, he stood up and walked over to the stone altar. He crouched down for a moment, then plucked the crude crown from its resting place.
“It’s within the rules,” Fawkes began to protest, then stopped as he realized Otto was not donning it. Instead, the automaton creaked back to the game table with the crown clutched between two iron fingers. He motioned with his head. Fawkes gave a pained look. “That wasn’t the wager, Otto. You don’t have to...”
“Go on,” Eris said, with no trace of irony on her face. “Your Majesty. Respect the crown.”
Fawkes slithered down from his seat and stood in the sand. Otto’s joints rasped together as he leaned over, placing the crown delicately atop matted hair. Fawkes couldn’t help but grin. Eris’s mouth, on the contrary, was a solemn line. Fawkes watched incredulously as she knelt down at his feet, and the hulking automaton beside her followed suit. He felt the smile drop off his face.
“Please, get up, the both of you.”
“That altar,” Eris said, getting to her feet. “All those marks on the left side. You said those are yours? Your victories?” Her eyes were hot and full of sparks. “So you really have beaten him before. Even at this game?”
“Occasionally,” Fawkes admitted. “Every eighth or ninth.”
“But nobody beats an automaton.” Eris shook her head. “Your Majesty, nobody even comes close. Not ever.”
Fawkes shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of time to practice. But it’s only a game.”
“A war game.”
“A game,” Fawkes stressed, but he felt something bubbling within his chest.
Whatever Eris had planned to say next was interrupted as Otto put his hand on her slim shoulder and revolved her towards the cellar. He mimed in the air. Eris shot Fawkes a strange look he couldn’t pin down, then darted away to get her provisions.
All at once, the flushed exhilaration of victory vanished. “You’re leaving right away?” Fawkes demanded.
Otto nodded.
“How long of a journey?” Fawkes’s voice was faint. “A week?”
Otto shook his head.
“A month? Two months?”
Another shake, this time accompanied by raised fingers.
“Six months?” Fawkes rubbed at his temple. “Six months. Damn.” He tried to picture it in tally marks. “Otto...” He paused, a terrible suspicion seeping through him. “Did you give me the crown because you don’t think you’ll come back?”
Otto was still for a heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Then slowly, slowly, he nodded. One hand flashed a gesture that Fawkes knew referred to only one specific person.
“If you go to the capital, the Illusionist will find you.”
A nod. Fawkes felt sick to the pit of himself.
“Then you can’t go,” he snapped. “Forget the wager. Forget the wager, forget the game. It never happened.”
Otto pointed towards the altar, and Fawkes saw what he’d done while retrieving the crown. The tally mark had already been carved into the stone by the metal tip of the automaton’s finger, crossing four others in a jagged dash. Fawkes looked up at Otto, mind buzzing with protests, angles, arguments. None came to his lips.
“Then I’m coming with you,” he realized.
“You are?”
Fawkes turned and saw Eris at the top of the steps, stretching a water skin, her eyes dark and wide. He looked to the decimated game board. He thought of his thousand books of wars and battles and rebellions. He took a deep breath.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve decided I like being a folk figure. Address me as the Desert Lord.”
Eris’s nose wrinkled.
“Or Fawkes,” he suggested, adjusting his twisted crown.
* * *
He spent the day pillaging his library for the pages he thought would be most useful in regards to desert travel, finding schematics for Eris to fashion flat sandals from a leather cushion and for Otto to carve slitted sand goggles from old wood. They filled all the skins they could and bundled most of their supplies onto a sling across Otto’s broad shoulders. The sand had never seemed to affect him—-Illusionist’s cunning, Fawkes suspected—-but they wrapped his joints in fabric just to be safe.
When Fawkes emerged with his final selection of books to carry, he found Eris cross-legged on the floor, Otto razoring the long dark locks from her head.
“I’d scrape off the tattoo, but I can’t chance an infection,” she said.
“You trust him with that big knife on your scalp?” Fawkes asked.
Eris shrugged. “You do. Want next?”
Fawkes slipped the crown from his head in answer. Eris grinned and patted the place in the sand beside her.
Hours later, as dusk finally began to drop and everyone was prepped and attired, the undercurrent of excitement reaching a crescendo, Fawkes gave his first and last order as Eternal Ruler of the Cathedral. “Smash the altar,” he said. “We don’t want him sending anyone after us from this end.”
Otto didn’t hesitate, setting to it with his bare hands. The stone fractured and splintered, sending flakes of shale in all directions, then finally, under a terrific two-fisted blow, it groaned and split down the center with an echoing crack.
“No more games,” Eris said, with a grimness Fawkes was beginning to find almost endearing. But as she refastened the scarf around her shaved head, he leaned in close to Otto.
“Back to zero each,” he whispered.
Then the three of them marched through the ancient arch of the cathedral, out into pale and rippling sands.
Copyright © 2015 Rich Larson
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Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island, and now lives in Edmonton, Alberta. His novel Devolution was selected as a finalist for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short fiction appears in magazines such as AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Daily Science Fiction, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and is forthcoming in the anthologies Here Be Monsters and Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
COVER ART
“Floating Town,” by Takeshi Oga
Takeshi Oga is a Japanese concept artist and illustrator. He has worked on games including Siren 2, Siren: New Translation, Final Fantasy IX Wings Of The Goddess, Final Fantasy XIV, and Gravity Rush. View more of his work at his online gallery, www.takeshioga.com/524159.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
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