Beneath Ceaseless Skies #231

by Stephen Case

  In the crystal’s depths I can see our future, suddenly clear.

  I can see the two of us together, at the end.

  And I can see the blade in her heart.

  Copyright © 2017 Stephen Case

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Stephen Case holds a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame and is a professor at a liberal arts college in Illinois. His fiction and reviews have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Strange Horizons, Black Gate, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. His novel First Fleet is a science fiction horror epic in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft, published by Axiomatic Publishing. Stephen lives south of Chicago with his wife, four children, two dogs, and two chickens. Find him on the internet at www.stephenreidcase.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE BROKEN KARWANEER

  by Jeremy A. TeGrotenhuis

  Dying fires flickered red from the caved-in barn and blackened clock-tower. They cast long shadows over the corpses slumped throughout the commons. There was a mother, her shoulder torn open to the cracked bone. A child’s corpse lay beneath her, bloated and blue, smothered by the last act meant to save it.

  Orha knew violence. It was a thing she wore. Cloaked in it she stood between her karwan and danger time and again, throwing back raider bands with her armor and sword. By it she provided the karwan its livelihood. Time and again she rode out at the head of the column to hunt the twisted beasts so valued for the virtues of their blood and bone, for the power in their skin.

  There was sense in the violence she knew. Reason.

  The mundanity of the fires sickened her, their light dimmed by the lenses of her mask. She knew there would be a smell of burnt flesh, of wood smoke and rot, though it did not reach her. Abel’s mount plodded behind, a muted ringing of hooves above the muted crackle of the flames.

  Red flames, like campfires, lit by human hands.

  Her fingers groped along the metal seam of her mask. There was sacrilege in witnessing such violence through a veil. Rank air hissed in through the open seam. The galvanic thrum of her armor faded, and with it the power it vested in muscle and bone. Good. Let me feel weak. Let me feel powerless.

  “Captain!”

  Abel reined in beside her. She peeled the leathery facemask away. Her eyes, accustomed to the tint of the armor’s lenses, saw in shades of pink and red, as though all the world were a raw wound.

  Seeing clearly did nothing to salve her. The hammering of her heart did not slow. The pain in her ribs, the feeling of emptiness, of impotent rage that boiled and boiled and the steam of it filled her skull. Seeing clearly accomplished nothing.

  “Captain, some might still be lurking about.”

  She clipped the mask to her belt and dismounted. “Tracks over there.” Orha pointed to the blackened tower at the center of the village. “See what you make of them.”

  Abel hesitated for a moment. She felt his eyes, heard the halting steps of his horse.

  “Do what I say, corporal.”

  Orha knelt beside the mother. A faint odor of gun smoke lingered. The mother’s shoulder blade had been splintered by a gunshot at close range. Her child, it seemed, had survived the fall, but not the weight of her body. A gold band still wrapped her wrist. Why, then, the effort to ride her down? Orha wondered, grasping for a fragment of reason, a mote of sense to be made. Wasted effort.

  Senseless waste.

  She gritted her teeth against the mounting pressure in her skull, like steam rising from a kettle in her chest. Is that when the void breaks through? When the emptiness becomes too much? A brokenness of the soul and a wound in the body. So Brighteye had described the moment of awakening to sorcery. His voice, usually full of warmth, flattened when he spoke of it. There were people in the world who lusted for that terrible power. The same sort of people, Orha assumed, who would kill and leave the corpse its jewelry.

  She stood, and breathed, and forced reason back into the world.

  “What have you found?”

  Abel squatted beside the tangled web of tracks. “Not much of a fight. Feet running off in all directions. They scattered, and were cut down one by one. Poor bastards.”

  “Don’t be profane.”

  Abel looked up at her. She could not see his face, only the bug-eyed mask of his armor, scaled hide and silver seams. He was young, and like many of the young he wore cynicism as a shield. How else to live in a world so broken?

  “How many?” she said.

  “At least ten horse, probably more, and a wagon.” Abel stood and pointed. “Though I think they came for more than pillage.”

  There, between the ruts, a line of footprints, all different sizes, walking in the halting stutter-step of prisoners leashed to the saddle.

  “Every karwan needs new blood, I suppose.”

  His words were a bellows in her, heating the kettle in her chest, raising the steam. Orha forced herself to move, filled the emptiness with action, with purpose.

  “Search for survivors,” she said, and studied those footprints. Bare feet made muddy with gore, some too small to be older than ten years. She counted seven sets of prints, at least, following their captors with a halting gait. There, one had resisted, had been pulled to the ground and dragged for two dozen paces, where they struggled back to their feet to stumble on.

  New blood. Every karwan, even these bastard raiders, needed new blood. People died on the waste, without walls and white-armored knights to defend them. Hunts went wrong. Plague broke out. Sometimes it was as simple a thing as a few fouled wells and not enough rain to fill the cistern wagon. They were free, without a white-armored boot on their necks, but they suffered for that freedom.

  Children were born to Orha’s karwan. Brighteye made a point of that. Every young woman who was able gave three lives before she took up the gun and lance to join the column. Young men had to fight younger, but that was the way of the world, and women fought their own battles to bring new blood to the karwan.

  Orha had tried, but never quickened. Some people were only born to fight.

  New blood. Was that why? They came and killed and stole seven children, just for a drop of new blood.

  There was, at least, a glimmer of reason there.

  Not enough to quiet her anger, to fill the void.

  Nothing would be.

  * * *

  “And what will you do, when you find them?” Brighteye said.

  Orha watched three of the karwan’s children as they brushed and prepared bags of feed for her and Abel’s horses. They were orphans, rescued from a village dying the slow death of starvation so common to settlements on the waste. Brighteye made a point of welcoming such children into his karwan. Always they came willingly, with nowhere else to go. Orha had heard rumors of karwan that stole children to use as or bait for beasts, or worse. She had never believed such stories. Lives were too valuable to throw away.

  Brighteye leaned heavily on his cane. His good eye searched Orha’s face. The other was hidden beneath a strip of blue cloth. Orha had seen it uncovered only once, when Brighteye had found cause to unleash sorcery. Black crystals of cacocite grew where his eye should have been. Black crystals just like those that sprouted from the ground where the world grew thin and the beasts came through.

  “Sir,” Orha straightened, as though by standing tall and seeming resolute she might convince him. “We should know where this raiding band rides. They are not the sort we want to meet, and the karwan is weak, still recovering from the last hunt.”

  “Do not lie, Captain.” Brighteye shook his head, and the wrinkles at the corner of his eye hardened. “I know you well. What do you seek? Justice? Vengeance? An answer? Justice and vengeance are fickle things, and no answer these raiders might give could satisfy.”

  “Then are we to let them go?” She was surprised at the blade in her voice. It betrayed the black fire burning within her. It poisons me
. It makes me crueler than I am.

  “Whatever you want from these men, however you punish them, it will not be the end of evil. There will be horrors in your future. You must learn to live with them. To see them, and accept them, and weep, but to go on.”

  His focus seemed to turn inward, and Orha felt that his words were as much for himself as for her.

  “To go on.” His hands tightened around the head of his cane. “It is all we can do, and it is the greatest defiance.”

  “I am not interested in defiance.” Orha backed away from him. “You speak as though the world is theirs, as though goodness and justice have no claim. You would let brutality rule without argument or answer.”

  “Endurance is an answer.”

  “It is an empty one.”

  “To argue against violence with violence is empty.” Brighteye’s voice quavered. “I know this. What sort of wound do you think it was, that awakened me to sorcery?”

  “I feel empty already.” She grasped his hand. “Please. Let me do this. I want to punish them, but more than that, they stole children. Children who will be raised by monsters.”

  His frown deepened. Finally, with a heavy sigh, he said, “Take Abel with you. I can spare no one else.”

  “Thank you.” She covered her heart in salute. He returned the gesture, shook his head, and went to help the children with the horses.

  * * *

  The raiders’ trail had led west, so the karwan turned south. Orha and Abel would meet them at Yezel Oas, where they would make camp and wait by the fresh water. It was a dangerous place to linger, for all manner of karwan filled their cisterns there. Brighteye would wait, but not long.

  They sealed their armor, felt the galvanic rush of power, the surge of speed and strength to match the beasts that crawled out of the thinning places in the world. Orha had, in her younger days, often seen the irony in that. The karwan hunted those beasts for their skins, which went to make armor to make hunting easier.

  What if we never hunted? We could throw away these stitched hides, find a place to scrabble in the dirt. Dig wells, raise corn, live in peace.

  Such a life was harder, she knew, and the places where food still grew in abundance were scarce. Villages were shrinking everywhere as the sickness of the thinnings spread through the earth, as plows turned up as many shards of black crystal as stones. There were cities, like Capanilla where she had been born, but cities bred hardships of their own. The violence of such places had been more cleverly disguised, dressed in white armor and built on a foundation of law and tax and procedure. But violence, nonetheless.

  Violence was a thing she wore.

  I can choose its aim, she thought as she and Abel left the karwan behind. I can direct it, use it to protect and to provide.

  They rode back to the butchered village, the silence a taut wire between them. Abel followed orders. He had saddled fresh horses and readied supplies at her command, but she felt his resentment. He must think me a fool, and this a fool’s errand.

  She remembered when they found him. A boy and his grandfather, on foot, walking the waste after the thinning ruined the land beneath their village. The old man had died days later. Abel was strong, steady with a gun and dependable with a lance. In his sixteenth year Brighteye recognized that strength. Young men always saw armor as a gift, as an honor. Never as the burden it was.

  He had two children. Both girls, from different mothers, as was the way in the karwan. Diversity of blood kept away mutation. Orha felt a pang of guilt at the thought of them, at the risk she forced upon their father. That they hardly knew him did little to assuage her. Neither did the thought that he would likely die on a hunt long before they came of age.

  Perhaps they were why he had come without protest. He was a father, and by all accounts a good one, or as good a one as life in the karwan allowed. Does he feel the same burden that I do? The same emptiness? Does he ride forth in rage?

  A backward glance told her nothing. His armor was sealed, and there was no truth to be found in those green, crystal eyes.

  “What do you make of all this, Abel?”

  He cocked his head.

  “Captain?”

  “Do you think me a fool?”

  He did not answer till they caught sight of the columns of smoke, thin now, that had first led them to the butchered village.

  “No, Captain, not at all,” he said.

  “This errand may end in our deaths.”

  He shrugged.

  “Death and I made peace a long time ago, Captain.”

  “You are too young for such sentiment.”

  “Maybe,” he said. They were near the village now. The barn had collapsed completely, now nothing but smoldering rubble. Crows leapt from their meals in a flurry of wings.

  “You put a spear in my hand, and Brighteye gave me armor,” Abel said. “The gifts I have are certainty and strength of will, and those weapons kill fear.”

  “Would that I had your gifts, corporal.”

  They returned to the hobnailed hoot prints, which led west, followed by the tread of shackled children.

  * * *

  They found the beast late on the fourth day, a mound of brutalized flesh that dwarfed the hills on which it lay. Muscle drained of life and color sagged in limp ropes. Without the power vested in its hide the beast was a formless thing, dragged apart by gravity and pressure and the laws of size and volume. The longbones of its sprawled limbs glistened in the sunlight. Carrion crows had plucked its eyes and picked at the tender flesh along its ribs. They circled overhead, a furious choir, as Orha and Abel approached.

  “This was freshly done.” Abel reigned in his horse. “And by amateurs.”

  Orha imagined him studying the deep punctures in the beast’s flank, the countless tunnels bored by gunshot, the bones splintered and ruined in the ease of the kill. He would be wondering, she was sure, why its killers—the butchers—had taken only the skin and teeth. The most valuable pieces for trading, yes, but a karwan took everything of use. Longbones to reinforce the wagons or for the shafts of spears. Meat for the stewpot. Organs—the ones that were not poison—for their medicinal qualities.

  These things only flitted through Orha’s mind. She could spare no thoughts for them, no contemplation. Her mind was not her own, and shied from analysis, from anything but raw, screaming rage. For there, beside the beast, lay the body of a little girl.

  “Profiteers,” Abel said, and even through the static of their helmets Orha heard the bile in his voice. “We were wrong, Captain. Not a karwan at all.”

  Her dress was blue, beneath the mess that caked it. A length of rope around the girl’s wrists led to a shattered stake of wood, broken by the beast’s assault. The bones of her neck had twisted to snapping. A swift death, to end the dread, the panic of struggling without avail. There was a weal around her wrist to show that she had run until the rope refused her even that defiance.

  The butchers’ tracks led to a nearby stand of jagged rocks, where they had hidden with their guns while the girl wailed and pulled against her tether. While the beast came, dragging itself on oversized limbs, snapping its dog’s jaw full of needle teeth. While the girl baited their trap, and died.

  “Not for new blood, then.” Orha’s voice was soft.

  Abel’s cough crackled into her ear, and he shifted suddenly in the saddle. His hands found the seal of his mask. It came away, and he retched.

  Orha looked to the sky. The crows drew black circles against the clouds, eager for her to leave their meal.

  You wish to feast on monsters? The black flames roared within her. The kettle boiled. This creature is but a crumb beside the meal I will make for you.

  “We are not far behind.” Orha said, kicking her mount. Abel grimaced, spat, then replaced his mask. They left the carcass, and the girl. Soon the crows ceased their crying. Orha heard their wingbeats as they drifted down.

  Pray, crows, leave room for more.

  * * *

  The next mo
rning, they came upon a thinning. At first glance it looked the same as the terrain they had been crossing, an ordinary stretch of dusty earth. But to the waste-trained eye there were signs. The lingering smell of a thunderstorm and a shimmer in the air, like heat rising from sunbaked earth in the dry season. Black cacocite grew thick in the ground, cracking beneath their horses’ hooves. The crackling, static sound of it thrummed deep in their ears.

  “Must be where the beast crawled out,” Abel said.

  “They’ll try to lure another on the far side of the thinning,” Orha said. “Beasts won’t go near the corpses of their kin.”

  An image of blue fabric and frayed rope, stained in blood, came to mind. Another beast, another child used as bait. No. Not if we hurry. Not if we stop them first.

  The butcher’s trail curved southward, for even a profiteer knew better than to ride into a hole in the world. If they hurried, they might catch the butcher by end of day.

  As they rode wide around the thinning, Orha recalled her first sight of such a place, when the karwan had come upon one and routed wide around it. She had shivered in fear and wonder, recalling whispered tales told with haunted eyes of the cousin of a cousin or the friend of a friend whose uncareful footsteps had led into a thinning. Their souls, it was said, fell out of the world like water through a sieve.

  She had asked Brighteye if any of those stories told true.

  “Yes, child,” he said, “in that they reflect our fears, which are born of uncertainty.”

  “But you are a sorcerer,” she said, “and the stories all say how sorcerers broke the world and made the thinnings. That makes them evil, doesn’t it? How can you be something evil?”

  A faint smile touched his lips. “If only the world were so neatly ordered. Child, not every good man is without brokenness. In fact, for some, it is brokenness that made them good. For others, those who cannot endure, their brokenness only lashes out against the world. Sorcery is that. It is lashing out.”