Beneath Ceaseless Skies #140

by Brian McClellan

  “No,” I said. “Chesha convinced me the Queen had been hasty. So I broke it and threw it away.”

  “A good soldier obeys her orders.”

  “A good soldier protects her country,” I replied. “Whatever the cost.” We traded sour smiles, recalling a conversation outside Surnam where our roles had been reversed.

  Chesha elbowed me in the ribs. “Are you going to ask him?”

  “Forgive me, sir,” I said, giving her a quelling look. “Sergeant Chesha is worried you might have come to Dahar to devour its ghosts and make yourself a daeva.”

  “And what do you think?” the General asked, taking his staff in both hands and putting his weight on it.

  “I think if that was your plan, you would lie to my face.”

  “So I would,” General Turghar agreed, and I heard no anxiety in his voice. “But that’s not why I’m here. Would I have saved you if it was?”

  “Possibly,” I said, and was rewarded with a grim chuckle.

  “Suspicion over gratitude,” the General said, shaking his head. “I taught you well, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” I said, gesturing at the ruins surrounding us. “Did you?”

  “All of us make mistakes, Zrana,” the General said, his expression hardening as he followed the sweep of my arm. “Only some of them can be rectified.”

  “As you hope to cleanse Dahar of its ghosts?”

  “Yes,” General Turghar agreed. “Before some sick fool uses them as a stepping stone to godhood.”

  “We’re with you, General,” Chesha assured him. Neither of us looked at her.

  “Are you with me, Zrana?” the General asked. For an instant, his voice cracked and he sounded like what he probably was: a tired old man whose chosen heir was thinking of cutting him down.

  “I am,” I said at last, praying I wouldn’t regret it.

  * * *

  Chao Zhen and the rest of the Old Guard were waiting for us in the Yard of Sighs, and Irkan sprang to his feet as I strode onto the execution ground. “Captain! I knew you would—” His jaw clicked shut as he caught sight of the General.

  “Stand down, Sergeant,” I said, touching my sword’s hilt as Irkan drew steel. “Things have changed.”

  “Oh?” Irkan snapped, pointing his sword at General Turghar. “Did new orders come over the city wall, tied to an arrow?”

  “Did the Queen promote you while I was gone?” I retorted. “We need to cleanse Dahar before some necromancer devours its ghosts and wields their power against us.”

  “We had orders,” Irkan said, his eyes narrowing. “They came from the Queen’s own hand.” With a sinking heart, I realized he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

  As Chao Zhen gaped in disbelief and Zymt and Ishifan and Avya eyed each other, Irkan started across the yard, and Chesha and I drew our swords.

  “Stop this madness!” the exorcist cried, dodging Ishifan as she reached for his sleeve. Chesha saw what would happen before I did and let out a strangled cry as Chao Zhen grabbed Irkan’s arm.

  Irkan’s blood was up, and he expected an attack. Without pausing to think, he pivoted and thrust his sword through Chao Zhen’s belly.

  “You idiot,” Avya bellowed as Chao Zhen screamed and collapsed, blood pooling around him. “You’ve killed us all!”

  “General?” I asked as the moonlight turned arterial red, and headless quartered forms took shape in the deepening shadows. “Your advice?”

  “Get to the White Spire!” General Turghar barked. “Leave the exorcist; he’s done for.”

  “And Irkan?” Chesha asked as our comrades fled the Yard, leaving us with Irkan and the ghosts he’d called up by spilling blood.

  “Him too,” the General said, and ran.

  As Chesha and I followed suit, Irkan shook himself and sprang after the General. I spun to intercept, but Chesha was quicker, blocking his path and engaging him blade to blade. “Go!” she said. “I’ll hold him!”

  Blocking out what I could see of the Yard’s dismembered ghosts, I took a position at Chesha’s side, forcing Irkan to retreat. “No cowards,” I mouthed, and then there was no time for anything but murder.

  Irkan never fought so well in all his life. He parried thrust after thrust that should have pierced his plate shirt, and cut after cut that should have severed tendons or opened arteries. One overextension on my part, and he swept my leg from under me, sending me sprawling.

  By the time I regained my feet, he’d severed Chesha’s windpipe.

  Moonlight stained the world red, and as blood spilled down Chesha’s chest, my vision narrowed to a tunnel. All I saw was Irkan and his blade; my only thought was his destruction. “Ahriman take you!” I spat, and our blades kissed once, twice, three times.

  Irkan was a heartbeat too slow, at the end. I beat his blade out of line, stabbed him in the armpit and again in the throat as he dropped his sword.

  There were ghosts all around us by then, and as Irkan toppled, they swarmed over him like locusts. A glance at Chesha showed me she’d been drained dry, and then I was running towards the General and the White Spire, hearing a susurration I thought was laughter.

  Fool that I was, I’d thought the General and Ishifan’s group would be safe. I’d forgotten what sort of woman Nawyata was, and why we’d had to kill her.

  The moon’s light was still blood-red when I stepped into the shadow of the White Spire and found Zymt sprawled on the ground, his neck snapped and limbs in disarray. Ishifan, Avya, and the General faced down a single specter, clad in luminescent white, and only as I approached could I see that the fabric of her gown extended to cover half the plaza. Periodically, Nawyata’s train would seethe with the faces and hands of other ghosts before smoothing itself flat.

  “Another woman?” Nawyata sneered as I took up a position beside Ishifan. “Really, Turghar. How you beat my husband with a mob of girls and cripples, I’ll never know.”

  The General’s reply was to brandish his staff and chant his sutras more loudly.

  “What in hell is she?” I asked Avya.

  “Cannibal ghost.” Avya spat at Nawyata’s gown. “Who ever heard of ghosts eating each other?”

  Ishifan gave an expressive growl, and my mouth twisted. “Not a ghost. Not any more. She’s a demon.”

  “So she’s a daeva?”

  “Do I look like a priest—?”

  Nawyata’s glow flickered, and Ishifan made a strangled noise. The General struck his staff against the ground, making its rings chime, but by then a section of Nawyata’s train had seized Avya and swept her high into the air. Before I could react, Nawyata flung Avya like a stone, hurling her against the face of the White Spire. Her body left a crimson trail as it slid down the tower’s face and fell broken to the ground.

  “So fragile,” Nawyata murmured, running her tongue over her lips. “And delicious.”

  Ishifan and I traded looks, and I shifted closer to General Turghar. “Sir,” I said. “We can’t fight that thing.”

  The General never paused in his recitation. Gripping his staff with one hand, he reached into his robes and drew out a ruby that blazed with inner light. At the end of a verse, he tossed the gem to me and jerked his chin at the White Spire.

  I ran for the Spire without thought or hesitation. Only as I passed its gates and climbed its steps did it occur to me that the gem must contain the Sacred Flame the blind priest had spoken of, and that I had no earthly idea what the General meant me to do with it.

  Momentum and the habit of obedience carried me up the tower, to the chambers Nawyata had occupied. Though part of me expected to find her waiting, her rooms were empty aside from moth-eaten rugs and rotting furniture. Horrible noises filtered up from the plaza—the General and Ishifan were plainly keeping her busy.

  “What should I do?” I asked, even as my feet carried me to the balcony from which we’d flung Nawyata. For a heartbeat, as I stepped into the moonlight, I thought I saw Chesha and Irkan flanking me, as they had all those year
ago.

  The wind was a scourge, flaying the heat from my skin, and as I approached the railing, I realized with mounting horror that I did know what to do. The susurration I’d heard earlier wasn’t laughter or the wind howling round the Spire but something worse: a chorus of daevas, muttering their approval.

  Wickedness calls to wickedness. How many people had I slain in the sack of Dahar? How many deaths had I ordered? I’d flung Nawyata from this very balcony; opened Irkan’s veins and left him to be drained by hungry ghosts.

  I’d feared General Turghar might call on the daevas’ corrupt knowledge. How much less capable was I, who had been his accomplice, his agent, his executioner?

  I stopped an arm’s length from the rail, sucking panicked breaths through my teeth. Terror gripped me in its jaws and shook me like a doll. Surely there was some other choice, some other path to be taken?

  As Nawyata let out an inhuman screech, I forced myself to look at the ghosts submerged in her train, doomed to drown forever. That was the alternative to the General’s plan. Chao Zhen was dead, and the Old Man was busy. Either I would consume the ghosts of Dahar, or Nawyata would.

  Sometimes there are no good choices.

  I clutched the ruby tight and spoke the words that resounded in my mind, performed the mudras I knew by heart. And as the spark within the gem flared sapphire and violet, I devoured every ghost in the city.

  As Dahar’s ghosts passed my lips in an endless torrent, I tasted ash and mist and bone meal, ice and ink and hot blood. I kissed the floor of the Queen’s audience chamber and licked the sweat off another woman’s skin; drank jasmine tea and the milk of the poppy. The water from my home village made me want to weep, while a banquet of chicken cooked in pomegranate roused a savage satisfaction. Old ghosts and new; strangers, friends, and enemies—I swallowed them all, and was not sated.

  By the time I was done, the flame within the ruby had guttered out. The gem was riven with cracks, and it crumbled to dust as I flexed my palm.

  A captain of the host of evil, the blind priest had warned; a monster clad in human flesh. But in a sense, I had been both those things before I even entered Dahar. And though the wind no longer chilled me, and I could taste incense and camel dung on the wind from Xiong, my first thought was for my companions.

  I found Ishifan closing the General’s eyes as I left the tower, and she planted a kiss on his brow before rising. I parted my lips to ask how he’d died, then tasted horse sweat and leather and shut them again.

  Without speaking, I knelt by his side. The first tears that escaped me froze on my eyelashes and left icy trails down my cheeks. And as I bowed my head and dusted the General’s robes with frost, an upwelling of anger more powerful than anything I’d ever felt before blossomed in me, like a spark leaping from scroll to scroll in the depths of a bone-dry library.

  “This—” I breathed, and the stones of the plaza shifted and splintered as I spoke. “This is wrong.” The General was dead; all but one of my comrades were dead; the entire population of Dahar was dead—and for what? So the Queen could sleep easy? So the Xiong would stay on their side of the pass?

  What the hell had any of it been for?

  “This world is broken,” I snarled, each syllable abrading the edges of those stones that were still intact. All joy was transient, while suffering could soak into the stones of Dahar and hang in the air like a stench. The prayers the blind priest had sung at sunset rang in my memory, but now I recognized them for what they were: the pleas of a child, begging a cruel parent to beat someone else in their stead.

  I glanced at Ishifan, almost wishing she would contradict me, but her answer was a wary nod. Of course. Ishifan knew better than anyone that the world was full of cruelty and horror. She’d borne the scars of that lesson for all the years I’d known her.

  I wiped the rime from my cheeks as I rose, determination solidifying as my fury receded. The world was sick beyond any hope of redemption, just like Nawyata and Zhar had been. A more compassionate woman might have hoped to cure it, but that had never been my way.

  All I could do was cut out the sickness—one life, one tribe, one country at a time.

  “The Queen sent us here,” I told Ishifan, and this time my words didn’t split stones or make the White Spire tremble. “Set us against the General. Set Irkan against us.” I paused, searching her eyes for understanding, then added, “She has to die.”

  Ishifan nodded, then spread her hands, as if asking, When?

  “Once I know my own strength,” I said, running a finger along the jagged edges of the flagstones my words had splintered.

  Once I knew what sort of monster I’d become.

  We took the Street of Lilies to the western gate, and before leaving the city, Ishifan halted and turned one of her palms heavenward, glancing at our company’s encampment.

  “We were too late to stop the General,” I said, fixing in my mind the lie I would tell everyone. “But not too late to kill him.”

  Ishifan nodded slowly, then pointed at her eyes.

  “The priest?” I asked, and got a confirming grunt. “Slit his throat if he makes trouble.”

  We left Dahar together: daeva and mortal, soldier and enemy of creation. And in the silence before dawn, you would have been hard-pressed to tell the difference between us.

  Copyright © 2014 Alec Austin

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Alec Austin is a game designer, media scholar, and an alumnus of the Clarion West and Viable Paradise writing workshops. In addition to BCS, Alec’s fiction has appeared in Apex, Daily Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons, and he has stories forthcoming in Analog and On Spec. He’s @AlecAustin on Twitter.

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  COVER ART

  “Ruins,” by Stefan Meisl

  German native Stefan Meisl studied art at the University of Passau, where he went on to become a teacher. Beginning in 2006, Stefan became a freelance painter and a graphic artist. Stefan is a member of the German Professional Artists Association and has had numerous exhibitions in both Germany and abroad. In 2008, Stefan had received the Award for Young Artists of the Free State of Bavaria. View more of his artwork at his gallery on deviantArt.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press

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