Beneath Ceaseless Skies #202

by Ann Chatham

  I had done that to them.

  The third time the lash had fallen I only grunted, and thereafter made no sound at all. I held my companions’ gazes because I owed them at least that. I held their gazes because then I would not think of a blood-reddened ravine, or Adhai’s silence, or the hope and pride being flayed from my flesh.

  In the barn, the whip descended again, and the musty air clogged in my throat.

  Another lash, another time and place, but halted in its onslaught by the voice that would come to rule me.

  “Stop!” she commanded. I blinked against the sun that glared off the polished stone wall I faced. Rarely had the ambassador shown how capable of rage she was, but I had heard it then. “What is this?!”

  “Ambassador, he is a savage, and it is the Empire’s way to convert–”

  “No, it is your way, you brainless ass! Leave me with him.”

  “Ambassador, this man is unnaturalized—dangerous!”

  “If he is, what does that make me?” she snapped.

  I was silent. The sun baked my opened back and coaxed the filth at my feet to awaken its stench to the bright morning. My blood trickled to my worn woolen prisoner pants, and I listened to the approaching steps—light, but confident beyond measure.

  I was unchained from the whipping ring but never slumped. A woman imagining herself my savior faced me, though if she had looked past her nose she would have seen that I needed no saving, and was not savable.

  Already, even then, I was not, though I did not know.

  “The Empire does not treat our brave volunteers so.” She sighed apologetically, shaking her head. “These fools do not understand who you are. They do not know from what you have come.”

  Neither did she, but I cared not to say.

  “Forgive me; I have misplaced my manners! I am Tanla, Ambassador of the Empire.”

  She waited for my name, but I had many. I was known by the peal of silver hammers in the forge-caves; by the roaring plains-bears and the hunt-horn’s chase; by the steady sky upon ancient trees and seas of grass. My name was noble steeds’, countless children’s, women’s, men’s. My name was fire and earth, blood and bone: the silence of a people, and I had not given it, then or ever again, for no one understood who I was, and only I knew from what I had come.

  Through my silence, her smile never wavered. “Come. Let me show you the wonders you will earn.”

  She had shown, and how eagerly I had earned it all.

  * * *

  “Stop, stop!”

  The voice was not a Vransian voice, and it more than the quitting of the whip brought me back to the barn, that point in time my body existed most fully in.

  “Who gave you the right?” this voice—a woman’s voice—demanded of the farmers.

  “He is an Empire’s Man, crossing our lands in secret—an Elite Guardsman, part of the Summer Slaughter!”

  “He cut the very arm from Franstet’s shoulder!”

  “Move,” the woman commanded.

  She approached, and the hot grease of a lantern’s light lit upon my face and hers.

  Her Karthian face.

  I saw her again in that city square, marching with her fellow guards at my request to reluctantly ask their spiritual leaders to leave, but of course, the shamans would not.

  “I know those eyes,” she said in disbelief. “Raw as iron, full of too much pride to bend beneath the whip.”

  It was not pride that held me up; nothing so complex was left to me.

  “You sound as a lover scorned,” a Vransian muttered.

  “Or have seen a geist,” added another, warily.

  “Both, perhaps, beneath the awe,” she answered, her gaze unwavering from mine. “For he is a Dumrikhat. The Dumrikhat.”

  * * *

  When the shaman had observed such, in that crowded Karthian square, it had shaken me completely. I was Captain of the Fourth Elite Guard, veiled in Empire’s armor, disguised behind decades of denial. Yet his eyes were truth, and I saw the ice they proclaimed, the past I had forgotten at what I before believed were the machinations of the Empire but had come to understand as my own.

  “I only wish to keep peace, Shaman,” I told him quietly, eyeing the crowd.

  And with utter simplicity, he said it. “Yet you are Dumrikhat.”

  I staggered as if struck, never believing a single word could have such force. But that forgotten facet of my being lived in his gaze where, walking again after so many years, was the line of people in the snow.

  His mouth tightened at my reaction. “Does your masters’ corrupting control run so deep? Has your very identity been denied?”

  The line staggered on, became a hundred, twenty, ten. Like a stone long lost to the depths, a violent anger resurfaced in me, emotion so long subdued it felt invasive.

  The ambassador’s gaze settled on me from where she spoke atop the stage, and I found words for the shaman, but words so inundated with the voices of others and bereft of meaning that even then I tasted their bile: “The mention of that obliterated race is forbidden by the Empire, and you dare–”

  “Yes, I dare.” His eyes, those great eyes, filled as they were with truth as obvious as the shining sun while for so long I had pretended there was no light, held me with incredulity, and disgust. “I dare where men like you fail to even remember.”

  And despite the truth, I responded exactly as the Empire had wished, with the sliding of six inches of steel from scabbard. That well-oiled silence was menacing enough to halt him, widen the eyes of nearby Karthians and drown out even a resurrected blizzard’s wail.

  “Leave this square,” I told him. “I do not wish any death.”

  His face shifted then. I did not see it at the time—did not wish to see it—but looking back, I knew what it was.

  Regret.

  “No, Dumrikhat,” he said. “You were born for it, as was I. Yet we cannot fault each other our natures.”

  I wanted to ask what we can fault, but I did not, and as he walked away I realized that I already knew.

  * * *

  “Dumrikhat?” the Vransians whispered. Even here in the dead night and darkened barn, in this single crop-country among dozens feeding the Empire, they were afraid to say it too loudly. “How is it possible? They were-”

  “Yes,” the Karthian woman interrupted. “But he was not.”

  She cut me free. The Vransians looked at me anew, warily.

  “How do you know him, Diel?” the Vransian leader, Jansen, asked.

  “He was there, at the start of the resistance, when our shamans performed their final miracle...”

  The behemoth, boulder-body, tree-trunk limbs, bear paws that could hold a horse, serpentine tendrils writhing from its back, thirty feet tall, had charged our double pike wall, shattered itself upon the Empire’s Fourth Elite Guard, stomping, tearing, rending. We did the same back, each thrust and slash cutting bits from it, bits that returned to the individual shamans who had created the creature, and we killed them and they killed us until the first moment I had breathed again.

  Of all my men, only Falnio and Weslavn yet stood with me, facing the behemoth that had been all but reduced to rubble, its few remaining shamans flickering in and out of form as they fought for their dying spell. And its eyes held me steadily.

  The ice-eyes of my shaman.

  But Falnio swore its eyes were the burning black of butchered pasture and endless funeral pyres, and Weslavn vowed they were the pale rot of poisoned fish and drowned corpses, littering the beach so thoroughly they replaced the sand between land and sea.

  I only saw ice.

  With roars Falnio and Weslavn charged, and the behemoth’s claws descended one final time. They screamed, I breathed it in, and in their agonized death throes they plunged their blades thankfully into that massive thing. Then with utter serenity that invoked my bitter envy, they embraced the bliss of ending.

  Only I remained, and my ice-eyed shaman naked and kneeling in the mud.

  �
�You have no hope,” I said to him. “Do you not see?”

  I heard the plea in my voice and realized it had come too late—decades too late, for me.

  “Clearly,” he answered softly, “we did.”

  I looked around at the dead—not my men, for I understood then that they were not my men, and had never been. Like me, maybe, but not mine.

  I looked at the shamans.

  Then the ambassador appeared beside me, looking down upon the bodies with amusement. “How much the Empire owes to you, Captain...”

  “He obliterated your very faith!” the Vransians yelled at Diel.

  “Yes,” she acknowledged. “He severed our spirit-lines. But I watched as he also turned his back on Venom-Tongue Tanla herself, and I watched as she ran him through with his own sword.”

  “Fool!” the ambassador spat at me, pulling my blade free and shoving me to the mud. “Did you think I could let you—would let you!—walk away? You belong to the Empire!”

  She kicked my face. I sprawled.

  “Pathetic,” she snorted. “Slaughterer of Soldiers, Survivor of the Ice, last of the fabled Dumrikhat, and I, less strength than a maid, able to stab you in the back with your own sword!”

  Suddenly, against the rending freeze in my gut, I grinned. I grinned, and I laughed for the first time in decades, and the last time ever.

  “We cannot fault each other,” I whispered, “our natures, Ambassador.”

  “I watched,” Diel continued, “as despite that mortal wound, he found his feet, and walked away. The mob closed in on cowering Venom-Tongue Tanla, and she called after him for help, promising riches and forgiveness. But he kept walking.” Diel lifted her chin to me. “We saw clearly that day what the Empire would bring to our country. Because of your defiance, Dumrikhat.”

  I did not tell her my actions were not born of defiance. They were not born of hate for the Empire or for the ambassador. I did not tell her that from the moment I had looked into the shaman’s eyes, only one thing had mattered.

  “What happened to him after?” Grent asked.

  Diel shook her head. “We searched for him, but found nothing. We were sure he had died.”

  And I had, crossing that frozen lake a lifetime ago.

  The barn fell into uneasy silence, everyone present pondering these revelations of my person. Everyone except me, for my thoughts turned ever toward the snow.

  Jansen cleared his throat. “Even if you speak truly, Diel, he has too many wrongs to avoid judgment. He has done too much for the Empire.”

  “And what would you have of him?” she asked skeptically. “He has already been flogged without my leave.”

  “An arm, at the very least!” someone called, and others agreed, clapping old Franstet.

  “An arm for an arm,” I intoned.

  They nodded. “It’s fair.”

  “And that is what you want,” I said. “Fairness.”

  “Justice!” they cried. “It’s what we deserve.”

  “From the Empire.”

  “And if your fairness is followed,” I asked, “what will you lose?”

  They blinked, and I did not, for there was a ‘they’.

  And then that they shifted, argued, yelled, and were lost.

  “We seek justice upon you, who have wronged us,” Jansen called over them. “What do you say to this, Dumrikhat?”

  They quieted, watching me.

  “There is no justice,” I said. “Only people.”

  And the people said nothing.

  Diel the Karthian stepped forward. “Then I say this.”

  She drew a blade, a blade I had not thought to see again. Its silver etchings shined coldly, pushing the Vransians back to the greasy heat of the lanterns, while its hilt, forged in the likeness of a plains-bear—no, a Khatri, for that was their name—roared silently at them all.

  Diel held it out to me, roaring carved Khatri-hilt first.

  “Take back your blade, Dumrikhat.”

  My blade, my people’s history and blood. My blade, gleaming, the Spirits that strengthened its steel calling to me.

  “Take up your beautiful sword, my friend,” the ambassador said, presenting it to me again after that final test. The dust had not settled across the arena, and the blood of the other ‘brave volunteers’ yet pooled at my feet. “And welcome to your wonderful new life.”

  “You arm our captive!” Jansen roared hysterically at Diel. Weapons bared, frantic teeth. “An Empire’s Man—a Dumrikhat—and you arm him!”

  The Vransians shouted, and I ignored them, for they were yipping hound pups against the claws of a Khatri; my blade was in my hand.

  “He could have taken it himself,” Diel snapped back, “and at our loss! Lower your weapons, fools!”

  She stepped into my face.

  “Only people, you say—” her voice began to tremble with fervor— “but when the few fight to oppress, the many must resist. We resist! Stalking the streets of Halis, prowling the ports of Sharonad—even here in Vransian barns, we resist. But we are scattered! I and other Karthian survivors have tried to unite them, but failed. And then out of a ghostly night walks you, Dumrikhat. You, Captain of an Elite Guard, trained in Empire’s ways and politics... you, a Dumrikhat, living to deny the Empire its greatest genocide! So many wait for a chance to fight back, and with you they will flock to our cause!”

  Vransian faces flickered between fearful distrust and fanatic possibility at this unimagined hope appearing in their barn.

  “Fate brings you here, to end the Empire!”

  The Spirits within my steel whispered around my hands, into my blood: glorified death-cries, roars of marvelous beasts... and the voices of an entire people that had yet to find rest.

  “To end the Empire...” my ghost dreamed.

  We cannot fault each other our natures; we cannot fault ourselves.

  “Join us, Dumrikhat,” Diel called. “Join us in our war for peace!”

  I looked up at her and paused, seeing a different face.

  “You will belong to a mighty company of warriors,” the ambassador told me, marching through a crowded market of smiling, wine-sipping citizens beneath bright canopies and a brighter sun. The citizens dipped their heads at our passing, thanking us. “Warriors from across the Empire, forming my personal Elite Guard. We will see the world, and you will be the Empire’s shining beacon of everlasting peace. For that is the ultimate goal: peace.”

  The citizens sipped more, the markets’ canopies grew brighter, and the shadows they threw lengthened.

  “We bring the light of civilization,” the ambassador proclaimed in the market.

  “The lies of their prosperity and progress!” Diel’s curse rang flatly through the barn.

  “They will see our ways,” someone promised, “and lament their wrongs.”

  “Imagine a new beginning!” sang another.

  “End suffering!”

  “Spread joy!”

  “Fight for freedom!”

  “Fight for fairness!”

  “Fight for us!”

  “Fight!”

  “Fight!”

  “Fight!”

  Their shadows of peace covered the world, darkening the battlefields where bled ever more people. In Empire’s armor and not, all eyes were closed in equal measure of forever. After each victory, I lay down with them, too, and closed my eyes. But each time, I opened them again, rose, and carried on for the Empire.

  “You will do great things for us,” the ambassador whispered in my ear, lovingly. “For the Empire.”

  And for the Empire I had cowed and captured and killed people after people, shifting my Spirit-whispers to cries of terror as I danced those shadowed bleeding-grounds to the tune of my vengeance to come. The Empire had pointed me to the sun, and I had pretended that once I reached it I would use it against them. But as I stared at their sun, cutting away their enemies between me and it, I cut myself away, too—first fingers, toes, then hands, feet, limbs—until I cared not to ev
en reach, for I had nothing to reach with; I was left only my blade to bear witness to what I had done.

  Not ‘they’, but what I had done.

  And the shaman, ice-eyes reflections of truth, had shown me that.

  My blade fell to the barn floor, like it had before in that mud-churned square with the bodies of self-corrupted Elite Guardsmen stolen from so many proud, defeated peoples, and the bodies of the newly conquered Karthian shamans.

  I turned away from the Vransian farmers, from Diel the Karthian, and from their world’s never-ending fight.

  “You would leave us?” Jansen sputtered. “You condemn our fates!”

  “How can you turn away?” Diel’s dumbfounded voice called. “This is our moment!”

  They cried out for answers, all of them, old and young, and they did not learn, and would never know.

  “Do you remember what they did to your people, Dumrikhat?”

  The last was young Grent. I stopped. I could have said many things to that. I could have told him he had no right to judge me, had no idea what I did and did not remember. I could have told him the Empire’s claws work their way into you until no, you do not remember. I could have told him that yes, I remembered, and I also remembered the Hushlen tribes, the Boigvuk clans; the Yorntish and Therises; Weslavn’s people of the coast; Falnio’s shepherds of the sun-dappled riverlands; the Karthians in their own city square.

  I could have said nothing and instead taken up my blade and cut them all down, just as the Empire would have done, just as I had always done.

  “All I remember,” I said finally, “is that we did it to ourselves.”

  I hoisted my pack and left. I do not think they parted before me, but I shifted through them regardless, the shadow of a ghost.

  * * *

  Despite the drunken Empire’s Men’s surety, the ravine had allowed survivors, and those pitifully few had found and freed us. Through swollen eyes I watched a narrow view of the Empire’s Men as we tied them to trees to be whipped, beaten, and pissed upon before we finally slit their throats.

  When I returned to our sacred forge-caves, I found our chieftain with half his heart past the gates of death.