“This isn’t a game, Shkarag.”
Waray bared her fangs. “I’m not Shk—I’m not—” She scratched her head with the butt of an axe. “Lostmyfamily. Lost my chum. Neverreallycared for her justice or her revenge. It’s a šo-tantalizing treat, but mostly, Ididn’twant to be alone again.” She cocked her head and stared sullenly at the toes of her boots. “I know I’mnothero material. Heroesare like silky legends; I’m linen at best. Fucking šo-waterloggedlinen.”
The half-viper levelled her gaze on Tirdad, and though it seemed foggy and unfocused, it still glinted perniciously. He would have likened the sorry look she gave him to a night they shared in the Lut Desert long ago, when he’d endeavoured to improve her archery, during which she’d almost seemed to be human. “I can stillbe heroic,” she said. “Heroicsbelong to anyone.”
“This is not what you—”
She leapt.
Even with her exaggerated swing, Tirdad only just escaped his skull being hewn—inebriation had not blunted her swiftness. He sidestepped, and her drunkenness snagged on the abandon of her swing to send her lurching by. She hissed as she did, pivoting on her bad leg, and somehow managed to come around at the end of her stumble without toppling over. She brought her axes up as she did, looking to score an underhand chop on his torso, only to find that Tirdad had shuffled well out of range. He’d freed his sword from the double-locket scabbard that hung obtusely from his waist, and interposed it between her and himself. He scowled, but didn’t seem all that eager to fight.
“Do not do this,” he warned. “Please. I have no quarrel with—”
Waray hurled her off-hand axe, kicking up dust as she scrambled to follow close behind. Tirdad leaned to one side, and the axe missed its mark, whirling end over end into the night. She followed immediately behind, axe primed to lash out from her shoulder.
Tirdad raised his blade to intercept just as she snapped the bit forward. Despite her wiry appearance, Waray had the strength to match her ferocity. He gritted his teeth, and pressed his palm to his blade as her axe whined down its length. Tirdad managed to turn the strike in time for it to glance just shy of his unguarded knuckles.
Another hiss. This one was incontrovertibly incensed.
Waray spun on him, and began hacking wildly. Drunk and livid, her blows came without rhyme or reason; there was only the flurry, and behind it, that terrible, crooked grin. Her attacks were sloppy: she left many an opening. But it was all he could do to fight off the assault.
She had him on his heels, slowly losing ground, until an especially vehement overhand gave him an opening he could take advantage of. He capitalized on it by kicking her square in the sternum. This halted her advance, but she avoided staggering backward by adjusting her stance to redirect the blow. When his foot came down, he darted forward and hooked his sword under the head of her axe.
Tirdad meant to disarm her. Instead, the force of her swing pulled his sword with it, where the tip scored a thin line along her neck.
It was a deceptive line, misleading in its innocence. By the time she’d flung herself into another flurry, her swings were limp. Blood rushed from the wound to drown out the stain on her tunic. Another enervated chop lobbed her axe out of a failed grip. She bared her fangs, and turned an offended scowl on its trajectory, as if it’d betrayed her—as if it’d seen the outcome of the battle and absconded with its head intact.
She strained to press on, but the fight in her was quickly being soaked up by her tunic. Her left knee gave out, and that was enough to compromise the rest. Unable to compensate, she collapsed, flailing as she did. Waray ended up on her back, one foot stowed awkwardly beneath her waist. She parted her lips, and her last words were utterly lost to a fit of choking gurgles.
Tirdad loomed over her, the crescent of a waxing moon at his back. “You were more than just heroic,” he sullenly comforted her, the words nearly catching in his throat. “Tonight, you were a hero. Ballads of The One Most Slithered will surely inspire future heroes for generations to come.”
Waray’s gurgling quieted. She produced a soft, blood-coated grin untarnished by crookedness. She seemed proud. Victorious.
Mercifully, Tirdad drove his sword through her heart.
• • • • •
Brow creased, chin knotted, Ashtadukht stood on the verge of tears. She clutched the wall of her litter, both to keep from collapsing, and to ward off the gale of sorrow and rage that threatened to consume her. But the rage flattened all resistance.
“Kill them,” she mumbled. “Gut every last one.”
Then, when she realized she was only screaming in her head, she bellowed, “Tear them limb from goat-fucking limb! Throw everything we have at the sorry fucks! Siege, arrows, sorcery! Pile the dead so high they smother the life out of the living!”
Ashtadukht tightened her grip and leaned out of the litter. “I’ll level your cities!” she screamed. “I’ll have my host rape everyone you love. Until they’re vacant sacks of flesh. Until they’re, until they’re ripe and pregnant! Then I’ll send them home. You’ll either be child killers, or every time that half-div babe calls you Pa you’ll weep, and you’ll be reminded of the unthinkable cruelties its mother endured!”
She didn’t notice it at the time, but at that moment, a haze wreathed everything she saw, everything she thought. She might’ve described it as pomegranate-red.
She drew a lot.
“Saturn hews the filthy mane of the Lion, makes a trophy of its head. Below, the wretched heat of a loveless Sun marks Mercury’s fall in the Sturgeon. Jupiter joins Mars in slaughtering the fallen Ram in its sullied Estate. Venus makes ablutions with the Bull’s seed. The lot has been drawn.”
The tetrahedron of fire squelched along the furrows of her mind, its celestial tumble hindered by the yellow mucus that seeped from its four corners. Ashtadukht retched, emptying half-digested apricots over the side of her litter. When the tetrahedron’s bile-slathered course came to a close, she stared in disappointment at the contents of her stomach; it was not a favourable roll.
Massive boils swelled across the battlefield, combatants struggling to fight as they were lifted toward the heavens. A great many—the majority—were well within the bulk of her host. The boils grew larger and larger until the plateau could no longer contain their contents. At that point, they burst. The mucus that was ejected swathed anyone in the immediate area, and in doing so inflicted the terrible instability of the burrow of the divs: the victims began a horrid cycle of shape changing.
Ashtadukht turned a grim frown on her handiwork. She’d inadvertently wiped out a good portion of her host. “Again,” she growled, and drew another lot.
There was only Saturn, and only the Lion, which meant that only the properties of fire were hers to beseech. It didn’t even cross her mind that drawing a second lot was risky. Waray was dead. Iran was laying waste to her host before her eyes—with her aid, no less. Risk was not a factor. It never came to that.
The tetrahedron of fire seared through the ridges of her mind without regard for the shape of the terrain. There, it carved a path of sizzling gashes. It wasn’t just sharp; sharpness was too commonplace. It’d been forged from metals reserved for the war of the luminaries, heat treated in the belly of a star, and cooled in the void between galaxies; a moon had been its anvil, an asteroid its hammer; its edges had been stropped on the vault of the heavens.
It lodged in her mind like an axe in a tree stump. She wasn’t sure whether it was favourable, and the white-hot agony that burned behind her eyes convinced her that looking wasn’t worth the effort. Ashtadukht fell to the floor of her litter.
She wasn’t sure what was going on outside, but the sound of the keenest blade slicing through parchment somehow carried over the din of battle.
Her litter lurched to one side, seemed for a moment that it’d right itself, then crashed into the ground. Ashtadukht was thrown free, her fall cushioned by a devolving mass that’d once been a div. She fought the debilitating effects of
her second lot—it felt as if the tetrahedron had become corporeal and lodged in her brain. What’s more, one lung outright refused to inflate. She turned a miserable grimace on the fletching of an arrow that protruded from her side.
“Oh,” she mumbled, her rage having dissipated. “That’s going to be trouble.”
Something like a golden-brown leaf lackadaisically descended to the dirt beside her. It was soon joined by dozens of leaves, most of them nothing like the first, or one another for that matter. A quick look around explained the flurry. What she initially mistook as leaves were actually divs; she’d torn her host to shreds. Only isolated pockets of divs remained. Those that could flee did so by whatever fey means they had.
One of the behemoths that’d been carrying her litter had survived, and was now staring at it stupidly.
“Hey,” she called. “You. Litter carrier.”
It turned its stupid stare on her, and pointed confusedly to itself. She’d never spoken to it before, same as she wouldn’t stop to chat with any other beast of burden.
Ashtadukht sighed, or would have anyway, if her lung didn’t forbid it. Every other div in her guard was dead. “Yes, you. There’s no other—” She flinched, and clutched her side. “Just carry me.”
XVI
The Mazandaran plain wasn’t far off, which meant the same could be said for her estate. The div was far from gentle—every stride jostled the arrow between her ribs and shook the tetrahedron-shaped agony in her skull. Between the two, she’d passed out twice.
When she returned to consciousness the second time, Ahriman had manifested alongside the behemoth, and was keeping pace by floating at its side.
“On the lam, are we?” he crooned.
“No thanks to you,” Ashtadukht wheezed.
Ahriman pouted, placing his hands on his half-transparent hips. “It’s nothing personal, Ashta. I’m very fond of you.” He floated closer, and sunk his fingers into her thigh. “Have I not been forthright?” He withdrew his hand, seeming to reconsider what he’d said. “Forthright? Me, the Stinking Spirit? Seems strange, doesn’t it?”
His scrutiny crept up her legs, growing more libidinous as it progressed, until it stopped to smolder where her thighs met beneath her tunic. He applied his teeth to his lower lip. “You seemed healthier when we last met.”
“There’s a fucking arrow in my chest.”
“Yeah,” he distractedly replied. “Suppose there is.”
“You—” Ashtadukht started. Her eyes rolled into her head, but she fought it enough to cling to consciousness. “You knew this would happen all along.”
“Well . . .”
“Why not tell me? Give me some warning? It could’ve been prevented.”
Ahriman shrugged, now furiously masturbating with both hands. His eyes were locked on her crotch. “You’re hard-headed. Any endeavour on behalf of the Lie is destined to fail. I can’t go around telling people that, though. It’d be a waste, wouldn’t it? I mean, why have the rule if it isn’t tested, given a reason for being in place to begin with? Besides, failure in the grand goal doesn’t forbid smaller successes along the way. Trees for the forest, my luscious, tantalizing Ashta.”
He craned his head back; his breathing intensified. “I might be convinced to help if you can swallow it all,” he said with a timbre of such manipulative silver it made hers sound tarnished by centuries. “Serve one thousand years as a thrall to my manhood.”
“Fuck off.”
“Don’t be that way.” The silver in his tone abruptly gave way to stark disapproval. “What? You’re going to die where you killed your brother? He would’ve been a champion of Truth, you know. That’s why—”
“I said fuck off!” Ashtadukht snapped, followed by a weak sob that issued without her approval.
“Fine. Just thought you’d want some company,” Ahriman replied, vanishing in a plume of smoke halfway through the sentence.
“Good riddance,” she grunted, trying to find a more comfortable position in the behemoth’s grasp. It stunk of decomposing onions, and its hispid coat felt bristly on her face.
The massifs were soon behind them, replaced by the briny scent of a nearby sea and comparatively level terrain, which went a long way in improving the comfort of her ride thanks to less violent jostling.
Before long, they’d reached her estate. As far as she could tell, it hadn’t been burned down, or so much as touched. Ashtadukht didn’t have an explanation, and she didn’t need one either.
“Thank you,” she said to the behemoth after I’d lowered her to the ground. “Now leave. Return to Down Below . . . or anywhere that isn’t here. You’re free.” She shooed the stupid div without looking back, and stumbled through the front door. “Begone.”
Ashtadukht clumsily made her way through what had once been her home, clinging to anything more stable than her failing body as she did, which happened to be most anything within arm’s reach. After much effort, she made it to her bedroom, where many a clutch of eggs still carpeted the floor.
“Waray,” she mouthed. Ashtadukht reached into her tunic, grasping the drugs she’d been saving for her friend and accidentally pulling the spoon out with them.
“Howdy,” it said.
“Oh.”
“You’ll be a goner directly.”
“Guess so,” Ashtadukht muttered. She found that attempting to focus on anything in particular worsened the unending tumble behind her eyes, so she just turned a contemplative stare in the general direction of the arrow. She pulled in a shallow breath, and raised the spoon in front of her. “Could you do me a favour?”
“A favour, huh?”
“Remember me. What I strived for. That I . . . that I only wanted justice.”
“Can do. Fling me into the mess, would you? Wouldn’t do for them to find me on you. Might arouse suspicion.”
Ashtadukht hurled the spoon as far as she could manage. The brief crackle of disturbed shells answered. “Farewell,” she said. “And thank you.”
She unfolded the drugs and summarily swallowed both doses.
• • • • •
Ashtadukht let out a belaboured groan without really knowing why. Then she was greeted by a throbbing, obstinately hunched side; the searing insistence that something unnaturally sharp had been wedged in her skull; and as it turned out, her condition had decided it’d be a good time to flare in earnest. Never in her life had she come out of a high feeling so utterly beaten—and she’d come out of many.
“I was worried you were dead, cousin.”
She blinked. Doing so incited streaks of pain behind her eyes, but she gritted her teeth and picked out the source of the voice. Tirdad.
“Not quite dead,” she said. “But I guess that’s what you’re here for. You’ve a real knack for finding me. That’s how many times now?”
Tirdad sighed. “If I do not do it, you will either have to wait to succumb to your injuries, or until someone else comes along. You do not want that.”
Ashtadukht nodded sombrely. “Yeah. It baffles me, though—” She drew in an uneven breath, wincing as she did. “Even now, after everything that’s happened, you’re still so kind.”
“I . . .” Tirdad cleared his throat. “I love you. There is no getting around that. About that night—”
“I swear, if you’re going to chastise me while I sit here dying, I’ll draw another lot. Damn the consequences.”
Tirdad walked over and took a seat in front of her, eggshells rustling all the while. “That night, I was angry—more than angry. I felt betrayed. You did not just lie to me, you deceived me. There I was doing my utmost to treat you with respect while you slept with all those men. Not to mention what you did afterward.”
“Saturn—”
He covered her mouth. “Do not. I am not chastising you. I only mean to say I was not level-headed for all those reasons. What you did, I can never agree with. But what I said back there was said out of anger. I would have tried to make it right somehow. I would have liked
to spend my life with you.”
Ashtadukht diverted her gaze, which was now permanently out of focus. “Should’ve said something then.”
“I wanted to, but you were still too obsessed with Gushnasp.”
Ashtadukht had begun to knead her cuff. “Yeah,” she conceded.
A bout of uncomfortable silence intervened before Tirdad finally mustered up the courage to confront what’d been dogging him since he’d given chase the day before. “I killed Shkarag.”
“She insists you call her Waray. That was you out there?”
“Waray then. I only meant to disarm her. It was an accident. She was drunk, and had convinced herself she was doing something heroic. I did my best to . . . I made it quick.”
Ashtadukht shook her head, still working uneasiness into her cuff. “Don’t blame yourself. If anything, I drove her to it. Waray was a better friend than I deserved. I’ll miss her.” She chuckled dryly, and it caught on the arrow lodged in her lung, which interrupted her for a few agonizing moments. “Well, not for long anyway. Imagine that. I just might catch the deranged viper before she departs. Find her fighting off Nasu tooth and nail.”
“I never thought I would find myself grieving over the loss of a daughter of Eshm,” Tirdad mused. “If someone had suggested as much to me when we first met, I might have been obligated to run them through. Life takes you places, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Another length of silence swept in, during which Ashtadukht closed her eyes and let her hands fall to her sides. She felt utterly drained. Even the pain, intense as it was, seemed part of a slow-moving river she’d been interred in.
“Are you still with me?” Tirdad asked, his voice heavy with worry.
“Yes,” she thinly replied.
“Our House has been dissolved,” he said. “We are to be wiped from the annals of history. There will only ever have been seven.”
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 34
