She took an uncertain step forward as Waray rushed past. The confidence she had displayed for the sake of the others had begun to crumble, but she was doing her utmost to hold it together. They had decided she would attempt to parlay. Failing that, star-reckoning would be their only hope.
Ashtadukht planted her feet shoulder width apart and bellowed. “Div! Hear me! I’m Ashtadukht, star-reckoner, and I’d—” Her voice cracked. “I demand you cease this madness!”
The giant faced them, which threw light on its gnarled snout and squat, creased face. It spoke like the thick, squelching muck of a quagmire. “Star-reckoner? I’ve heard that somewhere. Three somewheres.”
It parted its toothless mouth and vomited three half-digested corpses, which landed in a rank mess just in front of her. The div waved half of its many arms. “That’s your one warning, puny Ashtadukht. I know who you are, and it’s only out of respect for the clemency you’ve shown my kind that I don’t squash you underfoot. Now begone.”
Ashtadukht grimaced at the steaming, mangled bodies. That could be her mere moments from now. But she did not relent. “You know I can’t do that. Forget whatever it is that has you on this path of devastation, and turn back.”
“Forget? I’m expected to forget what you wretched humans did to my son? You cut down the onager that protected his phylactery.” His voice popped like a muddy bubble. “You drove me to this!”
Ashtadukht never quite understood why divs chose animals—even formidable animals—to safeguard their lives. She decided it’d be a bad idea to bring that up now. “So you’re just going to blame all of humanity for the actions of a few?”
The div took a mountain-shaking step forward. “Enough chatter.”
“Be reasonable!” yelled Ashtadukht, whose fear and frustration were quickly giving way to rage. “Your son’s gone! This accomplishes nothing! All you’re doing is bringing the same loss to others!”
“That, poor star-reckoner, is exactly what it accomplishes.”
The div reached all forty of its arms overhead then brought them crashing down. Where they struck, the earth ruptured. A network of fissures spread from that crater like cracks on a frozen lake. Tirdad snatched Ashtadukht and leapt free of a fissure that threatened to swallow them up. She had already begun her retaliation.
“Mercury drags Venus into the Sturgeon, where they’re immolated by the Sun. Mars plummets into the Crab. Saturn’s kept at bay by the Scorpion. Jupiter extinguishes the Twins. The Generals celebrate from afar. The lot has been drawn.”
Ashtadukht prepared for a catastrophic failure: the night was far from favourable. The essence of the Twins bore upon her like an airy yet dissident shawl. An octahedron scraped along the inside of her mind as it bounced irritably. She blinked.
“It . . . worked,” she said with a sigh of relief.
“Do not sound so surprised,” replied Tirdad, who had carried her clear of the fissures. He eased her down. “So what will happen n—AHHH!”
He clutched his head and began a scream that wouldn’t end even after he’d run out of breath. It felt as though every molecule of his being were chained to horses that ran in every direction. Tirdad violently shook his head and staggered backward.
“Stop!” warned Ashtadukht as she reached out to grab him, but her swipe caught only air. Another step took him over the edge into a chasm. She sobbed once and turned away from the unnerving cry that still bellowed from the depths.
Her plan had failed. The idea of being digested really did not sit well with her, so she decided she would jump if worst came to worst. She clenched her fists, determined to go down with a fight even if it meant recklessly casting another lot on such an inauspicious night.
A deafening chorus of feral cackling erupted, and Waray dashed past her.
“Waray,” muttered Ashtadukht with a forlorn smile.
Waray dashed past her.
“Waray?”
Waray dashed past her. A swarm of Warays surged by and Ashtadukht realized she’d created forty armed half-divs to combat the forty-armed div. It was a small victory, but a victory nevertheless.
The forty Warays leapt over cracks in the ground like a host of fleas bearing down upon a buffalo. Some stopped to fire arrows that flew mostly unerringly thanks to having a target the size of a ridge. Others immediately seized the forty-armed div’s legs and began climbing.
Ashtadukht knew it wouldn’t be enough. Sure, one Waray was vicious; forty were a menace to be reckoned with. But the sheer size disparity meant they’d be little more than a nuisance. She retrieved Tirdad’s sword and began star-reckoning once more.
The octahedron clattered especially painfully this time. Where it rolled, it dug searing trenches into her mind, bringing with it a gust sharp like cold air on a broken tooth.
She finished on her hands and knees, vision blurred with tears, and fingers clutching a chunk of earth. Blood, hot and tinny, ran from her nose and over her lips. Ashtadukht wiped her eyes with a dirty sleeve and looked up. She didn’t know if it’d worked—it’d hurt too much to tell.
“Are we . . . alive?” one voice asked incredulously.
“Not quite,” answered another. “She disturbed our rest.”
Ashtadukht swallowed. One star-reckoner was convulsing on the ground while the other two stood—still half-digested but raised from the dead—as if nothing were wrong. “I didn’t intend for this to happen,” she tried to explain. “Something, I had to try something.”
“You . . . have done it,” said the taller of the two.
“We do . . . not have long,” observed the other. “I know her. Ashtadukht. Her star-reckoning is . . . weak, volatile. And I am finding it difficult to . . . speak.”
Incensed by the insult, Ashtadukht fought to restore her footing, which was made more difficult by the quaking earth. “Just do what you failed to do the first time,” she harshly commanded.
The star-reckoners grumbled and turned on the forty-armed div. It was swatting at the many Warays with moderate success: a dozen already lay like broken dolls in the snow, and some had been thrown into the fissures.
“Vega prevails over Mars. The Bear grapples with Jupiter. Tishtar and Sadwes are recumbent. The Moon greets the Ear of Grain. The Sun subjugates Truth’s enemies in the Sturgeon. The lot has been drawn.”
With their star-reckoning completed, they collapsed. The upper reaches of the ridge creaked like a screaming tree frog. The creaking rose to a breaking point, and a field of millet vigorously broke through the ground, which jeopardized its structural integrity. This in turn provoked a landslide.
The landslide roared into and around the forty-armed div, knocking it off its feet and crushing several Warays. The div bellowed, more infuriated than injured, and began chucking a salvo of enormous boulders toward Ashtadukht.
Well, she thought as the rain of rocks loomed overhead, this must be it then. I did my utmost.
She pivoted and stepped into the nearest cleft. The fall was briefer than expected; softer, too. A hand the size of a house swatted the incoming boulders aside, and Ashtadukht rose out of the fissure and high above the ground.
“You were not giving up, were you, cousin?” Tirdad boomed mirthfully, now forty-armed and enlarged to monumental proportions. “And here I thought you would go down fighting.”
“I fought damn hard,” Ashtadukht fervidly rebutted. “Without your help, I might add. I’m surprised that second lot didn’t kill me!”
She had landed in one of his many palms, which now cradled her and offered a view of the gigantic—and, she noted with peripheral satisfaction, naked—man as he pulled himself free of the fissure. He must have been very happy with himself, because the gleaming grin he wore could have been mistaken for the moon (it was large enough, too).
Tirdad chuckled as he placed her well beyond the fractured earth. “I was worried I would never endure your cantankerousness again. Your tenacity is heartwarming. Now, let me do my part.”
He turned to the forty-a
rmed div, who was eyeing him uncertainly while slapping at the few remaining Warays. “Your rampage is finished,” he dictated, and it carried for farsangs in all directions.
“Never!” bellowed the forty-armed div.
It just so happened that the div’s rampage would never really come to an end. The rest of its life would be best described as a rampage with the odd intermission. So it had its convictions if nothing else.
It also happened that Tirdad had just experienced the rearrangement of his physical form, and was just then not in the mood to parlay. So he charged.
Her skull crying out in time with her heartbeat, Ashtadukht lowered herself to the thin layer of snow and rest there. She watched as her cousin collided with the div, and twenty right crosses connected with a thunderclap. The ground groaned and complained.
A blur of eighty fists exchanged blows like a bag of annoyed snakes: blocking, striking, parrying, grabbing. Tirdad reared back and kicked, which connected squarely with the div’s chest and sent it into the ridge. He was on it immediately, pummelling with abandon.
When it became clear to Ashtadukht that the fight was won and Tirdad had no intention of stopping, she called out. “That’s enough, cousin! You needn’t kill it!”
Tirdad pulled his fists back for another blow but leashed them there, poised to strike. He glanced her way in astonishment. “What?”
Equally surprised, the forty-armed div lolled its bloodied head to squint at her through two swollen slits.
“Don’t—ngh.” She struggled to sit up, which only amplified the throbbing in her skull. “Let me take it from here.”
“Do not let you take it from here?” asked Tirdad half-jokingly. He really did not like this div in particular.
Ashtadukht only swayed. She didn’t have enough fight in her to so much as glare at him.
“You’re beaten.” She said this without bluster or condescension, simply as a factual statement. “Any other star-reckoner would kill you without blinking. I’m offering you a choice. Indenture yourself to me, and in doing so return forever to your homeland. Or die.”
“Cousin,” boomed Tirdad. “This, this beast is reprehensible.” He snorted indignantly and hit the div again for good measure. “It destroyed villages, it took lives. This is what divs are. They are all so much death and hatred.”
“It lost a son,” Ashtadukht limply retorted.
“He lost a son,” corrected the forty-armed div with a slur. “And I accept your proposal. I’m your slave, star-reckoner.”
Tirdad readied another assault. He growled through his teeth and fought the urge to bring all forty of his fists down in a final strike.
“Have it your way,” he eventually complied and climbed off. He crossed his arms and levelled a disgusted glower on the div. “What are you waiting for? Get out of here.”
“I won’t forget your compassion,” said the forty-armed div to Ashtadukht. “Forgive me for,” he surveyed the battlefield as he pulled himself up by the lip of the ridge. “For all of this.”
“Go,” said Tirdad.
The div nodded and stumbled back the way he’d come.
The last thing Ashtadukht saw was the disappointment with which Tirdad regarded her.
• • • • •
When she came to, bright-hot pain lashed at her head like a flaming whip. “Nnngh.”
Ashtadukht opened her eyes once, and the burning was enough to convince her that wherever she was, she would rather not see. “Ngh.”
“Are you awake?” asked Tirdad, and the concern in his timbre came as a relief. Mainly because she did not wish to argue over her decision to let the div live.
“I wish I weren’t,” she half said, half groaned.
“I can knock you out if you like. I would not mind at all. Might even make me feel better about the agony your star-reckoning inflicted.”
Ashtadukht got out the briefest chortle before her body firmly and decisively told her no. She curled up and hugged her head. “Ngh. Sorry about that. Unintended.”
A prolonged quiet intervened in which Ashtadukht mostly moaned and dug her fingers through her hair. It hurt to think. This was more than her illness. Her mind had always been a refuge, a place beyond its influence.
“Are you okay?” asked Tirdad. His voice had either softened considerably or her hearing was impaired. “You do not look okay. There was blood.”
“Am I still silver-skinned?” she managed.
“And moon-faced.”
“What about my ass?”
Tirdad laughed. “It is doing fine, cousin.”
“And Waray?”
“Your other ass has recovered.”
“Recovered?”
There followed another pain-filled gap whose edges were limned by a faraway argument too indistinct to grasp. When Tirdad returned, his words were sharper. “You will not believe what she did with our spoon.”
Ashtadukht reached out mentally, but the thread of the earlier conversation was fleeting. “She?”
“Waray.”
“Oh.”
“She was in a bad way when I found her. Kept going on about all the deaths. Describing them. Something about it being too much.”
Tirdad paused, clearly unsettled by what he’d heard. “I do not know what made you think forty of her would be a good idea in any scenario.”
“I didn’t. Is she well?”
“As well as one can expect, I suppose. She has pulled two pranks already if that is any indication.”
“And you?” asked Ashtadukht. “I thought you were dead.”
“Very much alive. Still not used to having two arms, though.”
“Ngh. Still nude?”
“Afraid not. The horseman from earlier returned with a star-reckoner and militia. They took care of us. We are in Tawresh now.”
“Too bad. I rather liked you nude.”
Tirdad chuckled heartily. “Oh, cousin. I should see to your being injured more often. You are more personable this way.” He gave her arm a pat. “Get some rest. We will talk more when you are hale.”
She would have dearly liked to oblige, but her searing skull did not allow it until exhaustion took her hours, or what seemed like hours, later.
• • • • •
Ashtadukht next awoke to a serious headache. She no longer thought beheading would be a preferable alternative, however; so all things considered, it was a welcome headache.
She eased her eyes open and found that her surroundings weren’t so disagreeable this time around either. With the exception of the sun. “It’s so bright,” she complained and shielded her eyes.
“What is?” asked a voice like a bird impersonating a snake.
“Waray?”
“I’m bright,” the half-div responded as if reluctantly conceding the point. “Maybe.” Ashtadukht imagined her tilting her head.
“Why am I outside?”
“You must watch over her while I’m working,” Waray quoted in a mockingly deep timbre. She grunted. “Being in there is like having too many pillows, so I dragged you outside. Found some eggs.” Something crunched, and an ebullient hum followed.
Ashtadukht squinted to gather her surroundings. It was too tranquil to be in a city. There was only Waray’s crunching and the susurrus of rustling leaves. She lay in a modest, unkempt courtyard where weeds reconquered neglected flagstone, the walls were so faded that only a sad tint hinted at the ghost of a colour, and debris was scattered throughout.
“Where am I?”
“You do not recognize your own home?” asked Tirdad as he entered the courtyard and strolled over. “How long has it been?”
“Not long enough,” Ashtadukht solemnly muttered. “Why am I here?”
Tirdad squatted before her, generously blocking the glare of the sun. He looked dirty and worn out—more than she was used to from their travels. “It is your home,” he replied.
Home. Ashtadukht pushed the thought away.
“And well, the physicians were no help. I
thought you would rest easier here. I did not know you had let it fall into disrepair.” He looked around. “Serves its purpose anyway. It is a nice sort of quiet. No one visits. Your room is in better order. I do not know why Waray has you out here.”
Ashtadukht creased her brow. “Why’ve you been working?”
“Working?” Tirdad glared at Waray, and the slapping of bare feet on stone swiftly faded into the far reaches of the estate. He expelled a weighty sigh and took a seat. “You work when you need money.”
“I don’t understand. I’ve money. Our family has money.”
“Anything we had on us was lost to the cleft. When you decided to take six months off—well, you do not get paid for sleeping.”
“Six months?” Ashtadukht stared at him in disbelief, waiting for a grin to break his grim features. She leaned forward. “Six months?”
Tirdad did grin. It was tempered at the edges, warm like apple cider, but not at all comforting. “I cannot express how relieved I am to have come home to find you awake. We were worried that . . .” He dropped his stare to the ground. “We were worried.”
There it was again. Home. It distracted her from his response, and she in turn fought it off with a question. “You could’ve simply gotten the funds from father. He knows where my investments are.”
Tirdad shrugged. “I suppose so. Somehow I got the impression that you would not have wanted that. I decided not to discuss it with him without your consent. That is also why I brought you here. Too much attention in Tawresh.”
“You . . . hid this from him?” Ashtadukht could not conceal her surprise.
“I am your guardian, not his spy—much as you would like to believe the contrary. My loyalties lie with you, with the choice I made. So I did what I thought you would want. Besides, I am no stranger to getting my hands dirty. A little hard labour gives a person time to think. To question things, appreciate others.”
“I see. I would thank you but it feels . . . insufficient. Still, I won’t forget this. I won’t.” Ashtadukht tried to sound sincere—she was sincere—but she was also preoccupied with trying to reconcile her most recent memories with the time lost. Nowruz had come and gone.
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 8
