Tirdad set his jaw and looked to Ashtadukht, who gave her consent with a troubled nod.
“Super,” said Ahriman from where he reclined on her lap. “That’s settled then. You know what I enjoy? Those candy-coated secrets I dangle above your oh-so-eager lips. And you part those pulpy, glistening gates and I feed you something like Waray’s heritage. What’ll it be today, I wonder? That your mother was the Whore in disguise? That Jeh misses you dearly? Well, not quite dearly. Once a year, maybe. And that’s something to be proud of. I should know: she’s given birth to many of my children. Hardly bats an eye when they die.”
Ashtadukht ground her teeth. Ahriman or not, that was too far. She reached into her robe, wrapped her digits around the rigid, metal-cool likeness of a rutting ram, and drew it out with the sort of calm that was best described as quiescent: undoubtedly temporary and assuredly explosive.
The quiescence gave way to immediate and furious stabbing. She sunk her dagger into his spine twice before he seemed to attempt to phase out, becoming smoky and ethereal, but failing to leave his corporeal form. She drove her dagger home four more times, gleaning great pleasure from the way he squirmed and cried, before Ahriman finally managed to disappear in a plume of smoke.
He regained his human form on his mount, and didn’t seem at all dissatisfied. “That was certainly unexpected,” he mused, doddering to the side. “And here I’d come to fancy this mortal husk. Until next time, dearest Ashta.”
With that, his dodder gave way to gravity and plunged him unceremoniously off his horse and into the dust beneath its rear hooves.
“Good riddance,” she spat, wiping the blade on her trousers and slipping it back into her tunic. That felt good, better than she’d felt in ages. Just lashing out and the consequences be damned.
“Nice work,” said Tirdad, who had turned around in his saddle to peer at the limp body they’d left behind. “Although I should have been the one to do that. Since when do you own a dagger?”
“It belonged to . . . got sick of using your sword,” she explained.
“Well,” he began, facing forward as he did, “I appreciate your taking the bull by the horns and standing up for yourself. And killing a manifestation of Ahriman. I really do. But what about them?” He gestured to the soldiers that’d boxed them in, weapons ready.
“Didn’t think that far ahead.”
“And now?”
Ashtadukht shrugged, deliberating the streaks of blood on her trousers. She asked herself why she’d used them to clean the blade after she’d managed to kill a man who was reclining on her lap without getting his blood on her. She censured herself for being so absent-minded and looked up at the more pernicious issue at hand.
“Nothing’s coming to mind,” she replied.
“If that is the case, we have your star-reckoning to turn to.”
“These are humans, not divs.”
“They have been corrupted by Ahriman himself.”
“That isn’t true. Perhaps their leader has, but they’re only victims.”
Tirdad huffed. “We are about to be run through and you are splitting hairs. Just do something.”
“The rules clearly forbid this,” Ashtadukht argued, though the adrenaline of stabbing a div to death still coursed through her heart. She probably would have welcomed their nasty-looking swords and spears if it didn’t. As it was, she felt as though she could take on an army.
She drew a lot.
Her mind careened through the heavens, and the heavens in turn careened back. The clashes of the luminaries arrived with a clarity she had never known, surrounded her in the full brunt of the celestial host. If it weren’t so blindingly bright she might have picked out the forces of the Truth and the Lie. The cosmic, untamed cacophony of a war engine was all around her. This was all wrong.
“Saturn is bestride the Nourishing Pot, with Jupiter as its indefatigable general. Venus and Mercury set upon the Bull only to have the Sun intervene. Mars fetters the Twins,” she uttered. “Having—”
“Do it!” Tirdad’s voice snapped from somewhere within the din. “Forget the smoke and mirrors!”
She would have retorted that the rote methods of her training had engrained in her a necessity for drawing lots aloud, if she weren’t caught up trying to avoid being burnt to a crisp by her closeness to the stars.
“Having been subdued by—” That was it. She’d been too listless, then too reckless to take heed of the fundamentals of her training. She hadn’t even bothered to check the state of the luminaries. She let out a self-deprecating chuckle. After all these years, to be brought low by such a stupid mistake.
“The planets all recoil out of sight.”
There was nothing for her to call to: the celestial theatre was below the horizon, where the war of the planets and stars was beyond her reach. It was the sort of complacent error that a person might make after taking the same stairs for a lifetime, only to find that, one day, the first tread had disappeared and they were falling into oblivion. Ashtadukht reeled.
When the clattering multi-hedron of star-reckoning began its roll it did so with all the gusto of a rockslide. Her mind reacted by attempting to scramble over, a clumsy response which did nothing to free her of its terrible tumble.
Ashtadukht screamed, though she couldn’t hear herself over the cacophony. It wasn’t necessarily that it hurt; this was nothing like pushing herself to draw a second lot on an unfavourable day. It was driving her mad. The stars saw her as a comrade in arms. Their shouts reached her, emboldened her with their spirit of victory.
This might have been exhilarating if they weren’t heavenly bodies trying to clap the shoulder of a mortal. The multi-hedron rebounded off her mental barrier, clipped her sense of self, and just avoided obliterating her psyche where it lodged in her mind.
In the heartbeats between being shunted out of the heavens and returned to her corporeal coil she observed concepts she would never remember yet never forget. Concepts her mind stuffed wherever it could find space—under the carpet, between the cushions, it didn’t matter.
All that remained of that experience was an intense unease. She lifted her face from the—she squinted—from the fleecy sand as the edge of a wave washed over her cheek. She got to her knees and gazed out over an endless ocean.
She felt fine, physically; in her terms anyway. Nothing hurt more than it should have. But something gibbering and most assuredly shifty-eyed bleated from the nooks where it’d been hastily concealed. The ocean drowned her. Or it didn’t. Or it did. Maybe the sky had a claim in her asphyxiation. Maybe it’d suffocated her with its clouds. She let out a feeble whine and turned away. The date palms. Maybe the shore was out to get her. To strangle her with the date palms. Those malodorous date palms. Those spiked, irascible date palms. Always spiked. Always stinking. She scratched at her throat; her chest was heaving, but she couldn’t breathe. Too many maybes, as if Shkarag were haunting her.
“Are you okay?” asked Tirdad. His voice calmed the rockslide, settled the ground beneath her. She craned up at him, and though she’d done so many times, this particular session brought to mind a break on the road to their first mission many years ago.
He reminded her of an eagle. It was his nose. There were other, deeper reasons, but right then all that came to mind was his nose: aquiline and accusatory.
“Are you okay?” he asked again.
“I . . . uh, I think,” she said at length. And she would have responded immediately if she didn’t have to go off in search of the part of her brain that had absconded when it seemed a catastrophic mental failure had been imminent. “I mean, yes. Oddly enough considering. But where are we?”
“I do not have the slightest idea. The soldiers were on the verge of attacking us, then I was—” He pointed farther down the coast. “Standing knee-deep in water over that way. I spotted you and came over. That is when you came to. So I am still very baffled. I was hoping you would know what is going on.” He extended a hand.
She
ignored it and got up on her own, though a noxious thought or two did cross her mind. “There were complications.”
Tirdad smoothly retracted his hand as if he’d never expected her to accept it to begin with. “You mean when you were star-reckoning?”
“Yes.” She screwed up her face. Something bugged her incessantly, only she couldn’t figure out what it was. At the corner of her—she turned around. At the corner of her vision.
“You’re a disappointment to your entire family, especially your father.”
“Shut up!” she snapped, spinning on Tirdad. “You shut up!”
He narrowed his eyes and raised his palms. “Calm down, cousin. I just think we should see if we are on an island.”
Ashtadukht stared at him hard, fists clenched, and keenly aware of the worked metal ram that pressed against her bosom.
“I will go alone,” he offered, leering at her uncertainly.
“No,” she muttered, backing down and lowering her volume to hide her desperation. She wasn’t sure what had gotten into her, but whatever it was, she feared what it might do with solitude.
“I’ll come, too,” she said, sticking behind him to avoid walking where he could see how disconcerted she felt. It occurred to her that Shkarag had undergone similar trouble once, and wondered if there were any connection.
They walked until the first streaks of dusk, Ashtadukht cursing the sting of the light and her complaining bones, until they came upon a hill with enough of a view to confirm that they were on a peninsula if not an island.
“This does not bode well,” said Tirdad, which was the first thing he’d said since they set out. He seemed to have sensed the disruption in her usual bearing, and respected her rumination.
“It doesn’t,” Ashtadukht agreed. She’d been doing her utmost to extirpate the peripheral nagging, but its roots were dug deep. And her knees were killing her. She gave them a rub, grateful Tirdad had spotted the hill and consequently an excuse for her to sit.
“I do not suppose you can whisk us back?”
“To our deaths?”
“You seem to be looking for yours as it is.”
She eyed the lower stretches of her tunic. It was filthy, stained, and the ram-in-rosette motif had all but vanished under the wear of her travels. Yet when it came to replacing it she could never convince herself. “You’re imagining things,” she eventually replied. “I thought it’d be brave.”
“If being stupid is being brave.”
“I think the latter often calls for the former.” Ashtadukht sighed. Without accounting for the disruption in time—it had been night when they left—there waged in her homeland what may very well be an internecine war. A war that she was meant to prevent, or at least take part in. What really bothered her is that she didn’t feel all that concerned or responsible. She was grateful it was, for all intents and purposes, a world away. That made her wonder whether she’d meant for this to happen all along.
“What if this is an island?” she asked.
Tirdad shrugged, evidently giving it some thought before replying. “Then I suppose we are better off than the soldiers we left behind.”
Another day of plodding along the shore revealed that they were indeed on an island, which was fenced in by uninterrupted horizons. If they were near civilization there was no sign of it.
Fortunately, they were familiar with survival techniques, even if Ashtadukht wasn’t especially motivated. And while the island didn’t teem, its resources sufficed. They lived on a day-by-day basis: constructed shelter, gathered, hunted, weathered a typhoon, repaired shelter.
The several months that passed did so calmly and without stories worth recounting. They weren’t miserable—staring into the gusts of a typhoon notwithstanding—but they didn’t exactly prosper. They survived.
This commonplace existence might have continued uninterrupted if, while moseying along the shoreline, Ashtadukht hadn’t kicked up a bowl.
“Huh. What’s brought you all the way out here?” she asked it, giving her aching back a hard time by snatching it up. She flipped it over and pondered the inscription that spiraled its concave side. “Oh.”
She recognized it as a Bowl of Warding, a magical apparatus she’d mainly used between assignments. When laying the groundwork for a new home, it was customary to bury these bowls upside-down beneath the entrance to deter divs. The pay had always been wanting, but it was a public service expected of star-reckoners and priests. Less often, she’d employ it as a measure to trap the less dangerous yet slippery divs.
Ashtadukht trailed her fingers over the inscription. The cuneiform was ancient, well beyond any contemporary or near-contemporary lexicon. Even stranded as she was, her profession hounded her.
“Were you protecting something,” she asked it. “Imprisoning a div? I hope not.”
On cue, the sand shifted beneath her feet. She shuffled back and watched as something like a bloated, oversized mosquito emerged from the sand where the bowl had been. It gave her a look that, while utterly expressionless, left the impression of gratitude. Then it set its wings to buzzing and bobbed away, its engorged gut limiting its flight to just above the waves.
Ashtadukht trained a pensive stare on its departure. The trouble with identifying divs lay in the scores of breeds and interbreeds; it veered vexingly close in its complexity to languages that used different counting systems depending on what you were counting. You could spend a lifetime studying and never have a strong grip on the ever-changing div climate. Just now, Ashtadukht was reminded of that. She hadn’t the foggiest idea what she’d just unleashed.
That train of perplexed thought was soon overcome by a greater perplexity caused by the lurching of the island. Suddenly, she was thrown to the ground. And after getting to her feet, thrown again in the opposite direction. Her stomach rose in her throat. She fought for purchase on the sand without really thinking there was no such thing. She saw the ocean, then her perspective pitched to show her the clouds, then the island settled into a less severe rocking, and finally a gentle sway.
“Please be over,” she muttered. “Please be over.”
Ashtadukht could deal with excitement—danger, even. But she could not suffer the constant ups and downs of the island rocking as if it were a typhoon-tossed ship.
When she finally chanced a peek, she found herself peering down the gradual slope of a shell. She brought her gaze along its massive girth like gleaming cobblestone, where sand and sea creatures and water still cascaded over the rim, and realized she would soon be part of that cataract.
She clambered to the tree line where the root systems did a better job of keeping the island from falling apart. It came to her then that the gentle sway was the result of lumbering locomotion, of some island of a beast carrying her off. If it were any taller her head would have quite literally been in the clouds.
Once her balance adjusted to the constant motion, she fought her way through the dense underbrush without a care for how often her now threadbare tunic snagged or tore on branches. Something had to have caused the island to decide its plot in the ocean no longer sufficed. And she had marvelled at enough tales as a wide-eyed child to have a well-founded suspicion as to what that something was.
An hour of trudging finally brought her to the edge of the leafy morass, where she clung exhaustedly to the trunk of a tree held firm by two defiant roots. Out there, beyond the glimmering expanse of its shell, the massive head of a turtle hung over the horizon like a jade sun.
There had been times when she’d inserted herself into those tales of luckless sailors washed up on an island only to find it was a giant turtle. Those times had long passed, and were too innocent to grasp the threat involved. Because staring out at that head, stretched far beyond its body as if it moved with a purpose eons in the making, all she could think about was what if it submerged. She did not want to drown. Drowning seemed like a dreadful way to go.
“Where do you think you’re taking me, you lousy tortoise?” she called
out, clamping her lips around the end of the question. She’d decided too late that she shouldn’t throw insults at something large enough to be mistaken for an island.
“Oh, so sorry!” she hurriedly amended. “My mistake! You’re a turtle! Turtles are noble creatures, especially sea turtles!”
It paid her no heed, which she appreciated. She’d rather that than risk its ire; all it’d take was an earnest shake of its shell. Ashtadukht decided she’d make for the hill. A vantage would be nice, and she wagered she’d find Tirdad there if anywhere.
After another round of tramping through the jungle, she was really beginning to miss the shore. The detour had made so many trips that much more bearable. As it was, she braved the foliage by way of cursing.
“Damned fingernail-swallowing—” She shoved a fern aside and reached the bottom of the hill. “Goat-fucking turtle could’ve left a tract to walk on.”
She scaled its side and found Tirdad standing at its peak with a troubled look trained the way they were heading.
“I am glad you are safe,” he said without looking at her.
“Yeah. You, too.”
To say their time in isolation together had been rocky would not miss the mark. They hardly talked these days, and both parties seemed happy with that arrangement. There were times when Ashtadukht would admit to herself that she’d been the problem. Otherwise, she accused him of undermining her, or playing tricks on her when that gibbering runt showed its face.
“So it was a turtle all along,” Tirdad mused. “Reminds me of the stories.”
“Yeah.” She lowered herself to the ground with a heavy groan. She’d regret hurrying so madly through the jungle later on—more than she already did.
Moments of habitual silence followed before Tirdad spoke up. “I would have come looking. I just thought I might have a better chance of spotting you up here.”
“I know.”
“I think we should address this seriously.”
“What?”
Tirdad sighed and spread his arms, his timbre taking on an edge of impatience. “This.”
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 22
