Beneath Ceaseless Skies #98
Page 6
When the booming rifle-shot came from beside him, it was no more than a clear peal near-forgotten behind mountains, and the answering scatter of lesser gunfire from the guards a fleeting memory of rain. Only when the shockwave struck, pushing Nessus back on his haunches and Five Legs to his knees, did he recover the presence of mind to look for its source.
Bienor was gone from the cliff’s edge, leaving only the rifle, smoking, in a smear of alcohol and gore.
Nessus launched himself again on the attack, now wielding both knife and chain, too fast for Five Legs to do any more than fall and roll, flailing wildly with his hooves in blind hope of warding off the blows.
Then the rushing wall of smoke and steam boiled up out of the canyon’s depths. And astride it came the thunderbird, screaming, beak and talons outstretched, brown and golden feathers filled with fading light, its eye the eye of hurricanes, calm in the face of pain.
Among Nessus’s deafening amplified screams and the thunderbird’s steam-whistle howl, among flying bullets, smoke, the frantic plunging motion of fasces knife and chain and beak and threshing claw, Five Legs heard Nessus speak a name, an accusation. “Eurytus.”
They were so much the same, the lords of the centaurs. Eurytus would never have accepted that Nessus could change, and Nessus couldn’t believe defeat was possible at any other hand.
The Echidna’s explosion ignited rockslides. Old tunnels in the canyon walls collapsed. Centaurs fell in curtains from the cliffsides among cascades of earth and stone. Humans, like tenacious desert pines, resisted and were crushed.
* * *
When it was over, Five Legs struggled upright. A few centaurs who’d kept hooves beneath them and guns in hand aimed at him, but he ignored them.
Nessus, governor of the Northwest Plateaus, legate of the armies of the New World, controlling shareholder of the New Ilium and Acheron Railroad, was dead: his throat torn out, those terrifying black eyes pecked away, his steel beard shredded, slick bones exposed through gouges in his flesh. Dried flowers, spilled from a pouch at his withers, were scattered everywhere.
The thunderbird was gone, replaced by the body of a broken, frail old woman in an ugly mask and tattered cloak of feathers. Five Legs lifted her easily into his arms—she was lifeless, limp, her body soft in places where bullets had shattered bone. The fasces knife protruded from her heart. He left it there and pulled away the mask.
The eyes were familiar—haunted, proud, but less accusing now in a human face he’d never dared imagine; so old, so intensely fraught with lines it reminded him of a map of the world. He knew it had been made before the conquest, because none of its features were named.
He laid her down. Let her lie here, between the aeries and the sky.
He didn’t venture to raise the mask to his own face, nor even to look at the back of it. From the front, it was the face he knew. Gingerly gripping its edge, hesitant even to touch the smoothness of its inner side where it had pressed against the elder’s skin, he held it close against his side, lifted the Pyretus rifle slicked with Bienor’s blood and dust, and began to pick his way down the into the changed canyon. To pull survivors from the rubble. To look for Thin Crow.
As he went, centaurs followed.
Copyright © 2012 Michael J. DeLuca
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Michael J. DeLuca brews beer, bakes bread, hugs trees, and curates a precolombian thought broadcast out of the back of his head. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005, belongs to the Homeless Moon writers’ cabal, volunteers at Small Beer Press, and operates Weightless Books, an indie ebook store. Look for more of his short fiction upcoming in Jabberwocky, Bibliotheca Fantastica, and Live Free or Never Die. Read his blog at www.michaeljdeluca.com/.
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COVER ART
“Knight’s Journey,” by Raphael Lacoste
Raphael Lacoste is a Senior Art Director on videogames and cinematics. He was the Art Director at Ubisoft on such titles as Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed. Raphael stepped away from the game industry to work as a Matte Painter and Senior Concept Artist on such feature films as: Terminator: Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Repo Men. Raphael now works as a Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts and now Ubisoft. His artwork “Chinese Steampunk Village” was the cover art for BCS in winter 2010. View his gallery at www.raphael-lacoste.com..
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press
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