An Ill-Fated Sky

by Darrell Drake

  “So, is there a nest or not?” called Chobin from below. The silhouettes canted toward his voice.

  Figuring it as good a time as any, Tirdad threw caution to the wind and lunged for the eggs, unintentionally punching one of the birds as he did. Having caught them off-guard, Tirdad had time to snatch half the clutch and slip it into a pouch before one of the two birds was on him, flapping, pecking, and squawking. He swatted at it, cursing as he did and trying to make his way back down. After a few branches and more than a few pecks, one such swat batted it into the cliff face, after which it tumbled to the ground below.

  When he reached the bottom, Chobin was waiting, hands on hips. “Didn’t have to kill it,” he said.

  Tirdad turned a frown on the bird. “I only meant to—” Movement in the distance interrupted him, where high atop a faraway cliff there stood a figure cast in the diffuse glow of the moon. Chobin had caught on, and now shared in the spectacle.

  “What the everliving fuck?” he asked. The figure spread its arms. “Why’s there a—” It jumped.

  That marzban and planet-reckoner were stunned was evinced by their still silence. It lasted only a few short breaths before Tirdad was off to help, though he knew the odds of surviving such a fall were slim. Cold rain biting at his face, he ran out of the grove, charged across the wildflower-laden field that measured most of the distance, splashed through the swollen creek that fed it, and stumbled into another grove. Branches whipped his face, roots wrenched his ankles, once throwing him into a mud puddle. Ragged from his mad dash, he made it to the clearing where the body lay.

  To say the sound that greeted him made him wince would have been accurate if woefully understated. It creaked like wood in winter, cracked as if splintering; it grated like stone dragged over unpolished stone. The figure lay at the opposite end of the clearing, but faint as the sounds were, their repulsiveness carried clear.

  Tirdad squinted against the night. The clouds had once again renewed their downpour, and smothered the moon as a result. He plodded over, sobered by the dreadful sound, which only got worse the better he could hear it—the individual splinters, the mortar digging into pestle. As he drew near, he could make out the silhouette of a person in the darkness, contorting in ways no silhouette should. Not only did it grow louder, but somehow more intense, as if rising to a peak, and begging the question of what sort of peak broken bone could hope to achieve.

  “Are you alive?” he asked, stopping a few steps away. More of the terrible sound answered.

  Chobin burst out of the forest, winded and stumbling. “You—” He doubled over, hands on knees, and waved a hand in Tirdad’s direction. “Really—” He couldn’t get it out.

  Meanwhile, Tirdad kept an eye on the figure, which was rapidly beginning to take on a less disgusting silhouette. He furrowed his brow at its slender frame, at the faintest hint of glossy colour that would surface now and then.

  “Training really—” Another heaved breath. “Training did a number on your stamina,” Chobin half-breathed, half-laughed. “Either the threshing or the training.”

  “Shkarag?” asked Tirdad.

  “Who the fuck else?” blurted Chobin.

  Tirdad kneeled, and as the bones quieted to crinkling, trusted his instinct: he reached out to stroke the figure’s head. Scales, smooth and semi-keeled, scored with what could only be scars. “Shkarag?” he asked again.

  “. . .“

  He recognized that measured quiet. Now that he’d learned what she was up to during her nightly romps, he felt sorely unprepared to so much as entertain it. What in the seven climes was she doing? Jumping off cliffs the entire time? More importantly, why?

  Her head canted beneath his touch, and though he could hardly make her out, he knew she hadn’t the same trouble when looking up at him.

  “Are you injured?” he asked.

  “. . .”

  “Sorry. I never meant to intrude on your privacy. I was out searching for, well, here.” He retrieved one of the eggs and offered it to her. “I’ll leave if you want.”

  “. . .” She transitioned to a sitting position, one leg out as usual. Only then, as the dim reflection roved her scales, did he realize she wasn’t wearing anything.

  “I’ll go,” he said, moving to do just that when she caught him by the forearm. Gingerly, she accepted the egg. A crunch followed, underscored by a low hum, to be replaced by the measured quiet. Tirdad waited for her to release him, but her grip didn’t relent. He took that as a firm enough sign to stay, so he sat in front of her, drenched and now sitting in a puddle of mud.

  Whatever ritual he had interrupted, he gathered she must’ve been made to feel awkward or at least uncomfortable if she’d gone out of her way to do it in secret. Anxiety burned like bile in his throat and chin. The last time he interrupted a ritual, it had been Ashtadukht’s, and he had mishandled that to catastrophic effect.

  The dread of making the same mistake kept him from speaking, from asking the many questions begged by the scenario. Perhaps, he thought, it’d be better if he did. Shkarag wasn’t the greatest at expressing herself. Then again, maybe no communication was best.

  For a time, the chorus of a downpour spoke for them, and removed the need to fill an uncomfortable silence. Thunder soon stormed in to liven the steady conversation of rain. Lightning preceded the rumble, a stark flash that caught a still of her hugging one knee, eyes fierce and trained on him, as if preserved in rock relief.

  That’s right, he thought, she must be freezing—her viper blood all the more vulnerable to the chill. He unclasped his cloak and swung it around her, lifting the hood to cover her head and securing it as best he could to fend off the rain. “Where are your clothes?” he asked. “You’re going to die again if you aren’t careful.”

  He took her hand, which trembled in his grasp, and leveled concern where the flash had last illuminated her face.

  „،ترسو”

  “Fuck,” he cursed under his breath.

  „،ترسو ،ترسو ،ترسو”

  “SHE WAS YOUR SISTER.”

  “she’strembling.”

  “you ran!”

  The next lightning strike did so with prejudice, such that its spoiled-yogurt glow only spilled over a distant figure. Another strike followed immediately after, bringing the figure considerably closer, canted and every bit as horrific as Tirdad remembered from their forest nightmare. “Shkarag?” he asked, the yazata’s warning fresh in his mind. This sorcery belonged to her. For all its hatred of divs, the yazata would not have lied to him. That would have strode counter to its nature.

  The lightning picked up pace, flickering and giving the disfigured face leave to advance in a series of unholy cants.

  “What the everliving fuck is that?” yelled Chobin. “Tirdad! Look out! It’s coming right at you!”

  Tirdad fought to tear his gaze away from its starling-black sockets and the terror they promised. In doing so, he discovered that he could move his head, but his eyes refused to budge; he couldn’t look away. He reached out, finding Shkarag and feeling his way up to her face, where her hastened breaths soothed his rain-chilled fingers. He cradled her cheeks, using them as a guide to find and caress the scales of her scalp, paying special attention to the furrows disfigured by bit and blade.

  “Shkarag,” he said, calm as he could manage with his heart in the grip of the oncoming nightmare. “Relax. Let it go, Shkarag.” He kept up his ministrations. “Relax.”

  At his words, the flashes of lightning rapidly lost their tempo, which brought the terrible, stuttering advance to a crawl. The face twisted as if in recognition of its defeat, becoming more repulsive as its broken fangs sagged, as its soul-empty sockets bent into a scowl. Like a mirage meeting its end, the image warped and ran. It vanished. So too did the storm, flushed away and replaced by a starry sky.

  Now that the celestial theatre had reclaimed the night, it cast them in a lustrous sheen. With the constant reminder of its true nature warring at the fringes
of his soul, Tirdad knew better. Lustrous was too gentle a term; it implied beauty, grace.

  “Would someone tell me what in Ahriman’s unwashed scrotum just happened?” Chobin shouted from behind. “I’m not even wet!”

  “Now you have something in common with your women,” Tirdad called over his shoulder. Then, to her, “How’re you feeling?”

  “. . .”

  “Better?”

  She cocked her head. Veiled as she was by the hood of his cloak, she came off as more distant than usual. Shkarag reached into the hood, making a claw over his hand.

  “I won’t judge you,” he said. “And I won’t bring this up again if that’s your will.”

  She cocked further.

  A shadow fell over them. “What’s she—oh, fuck, where are your clothes?”

  “Chobin,” Tirdad growled, thinking it was impossible to be this dense.

  “Sorry. I’ll, uh, I’ll, yeah.” The shadow retreated.

  Shkarag let her claw fall by her side, and Tirdad withdrew his touch, surprised by the slickness of her cheeks as he did.

  “Father forbids us,” she started, “forbids . . . phylacteries. Vouchsafing blunts our, what makes us, dilutes the pomegranate-red and—” Shkarag bunched her fingers into fists. “She didn’t have one. She just, like some . . . I should’ve, too. Should be dead. They say, they say a coward dies a thousand deaths. I’m due a dune’s ransom in sand.” A sob shook her, and it took all his self-control not to embrace the half-div. If this was her penance, the last thing she wanted was to be consoled.

  “You do this every night?” he asked.

  “. . .” Her cant intensified.

  Tirdad contemplated her fists, the signs coming to him with the benefit of hindsight: the night he’d thought he dreamt of her standing naked before a cliff, the div’s comment on how many deaths she must’ve endured to have such an impressive rate of regeneration. He’d been waking up to omelettes, oblivious to the truth behind her apparent sleep deprivation. He’d written it off as her div half trying to adapt to a more human sleep schedule. During their earlier travels, before they split up, she would rarely if ever go an entire day without an extended nap, even if it was on the back of a horse. Not now.

  “Can I help you do this from now on?” he asked, astounded at himself for offering, and uncertain whether or not he should be ashamed.

  She lifted her head enough for him to see beneath the rim of the hood. There, her expression was patently perplexed. She parted her lips, canted forward, and screwed up her face.

  “I’ll do the deed for you,” he said with conviction. “However you like, as much as you like.” Much as he hated that she spent her nights ending her life, it wasn’t his place to lecture her on it. Better she didn’t do it by her lonesome.

  Shkarag offered him one of her uneven smiles. “No,” she replied, flat and direct.

  “Maybe?” he asked.

  “No.” Her gaze darted over his shoulder, and her lips formed an unspoken ‘maybe’.

  Tirdad sighed but left it at that. He retrieved the other egg and held it out. “For you,” he said. “Where are your clothes?”

  She plucked the egg as if choosing it from an assortment and reached back to stow it in her pouch, trying several times to find its flap before coming to the realization that it wasn’t there. Shkarag brought the egg back around and turned it end over end between index and thumb, tacitly contemplating its texture.

  “I don’t have your eye for eggs, or even know where to begin,” Tirdad said, wondering whether he’d foraged a worthy one. “But I’m willing to learn.”

  Shkarag set her hood further askew. Still occupying her hands by turning his gift end over end, she tucked her outstretched leg under so that she could lean in and express her gratitude with a kiss—fleeting, with a whiff of egg, but heartfelt.

  “You try,” she began, sitting back and briefly heedful to some faraway distraction. Shkarag bundled in her cloak to stave off the chill, shivering underneath but pressing on. “No one has ever tried. You’re a . . . a trailblazer. You hack and hack, like some, like some quack of an explorer in uncharted territory, and you don’t have a map because that’s the, that’s uncharted territory, but you don’t care. You try. You keep your head down in blizzards and sandstorms, and when you stumble upon, when there’s a ruin, you ponder it. You see an antiquity site, and you’re no historian—historians turn up their noses at you, their šo-wretched collective noses. But while they’re off curating or snorting potsherds, you try. You . . .”

  She trailed off, shivering and made drowsy by the cold. Slowly, she brought a claw up by her head. “You try to get ahold of, try to capture, try to grasp my . . . you try even if you never can understand. Never. I think.”

  “You’re the first to try, to . . .” She transitioned from the faraway distraction to dedicating her stare to him. “Šo-damned everyday things smart something fierce, but you just, you just explore and don’t leer down that kestrel’s nose.”

  Her stare darted to the egg she still tumbled just outside a gap in the cloak. “You try, and take care not to disturb those antiquity sites. So . . .”

  She deliberately placed the egg in the palm of one hand, and held it out for him to take. Her eyes, already dedicated, didn’t so much as waver. “We share. Like . . .” An inward turn sloughed the focus from her pupils such that she looked through him, and left as abruptly as it’d come. “Time for you to go,” she stated.

  Tirdad accepted the egg, but only after clasping her hands in what he hoped was a comforting gesture. “I’ll keep the bed warm,” he said. Tirdad held the egg between thumb and forefinger, blemished like the spotted flycatcher it belonged to, and allowed a smile to ease his worry-strained features. “But this doesn’t mean I won’t be expecting an omelette tomorrow morning.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Tirdad agreed, and her eyes, having rekindled their habitual darting, did so with what he took to be mirth. Without so much as a goodbye, she wandered off into the trees. The night embraced her such that even her limping came off as effortless.

  Tirdad knotted his brow at the egg, turning it over as she had and replaying the conversation in his mind. She’d shown genuine appreciation. So why couldn’t he get over the sinking feeling of knowing she was off to commit suicide—who knows how many times and in who knows how many ways?

  “Skink-slicker told you it was time for you to go then went and left herself,” said Chobin. “That’s a div for you.”

  Tirdad glanced up at the marzban, who was watching the spot where Shkarag had disappeared into the darkness. “I appreciate your backing off,” he said.

  Chobin shook his head, scratching it as he did. “Sometimes I speak without thinking. All the discipline father beat into me, and I can’t break the habit.”

  Tirdad returned the egg to its pouch on his belt, and groaned as he stood, knees none too happy about how long he was kneeling. “This is worse than expected,” he said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You heard her.”

  Chobin nodded. “Won’t claim to know her better than you do, so I’m not equipped to weigh in. Especially not after all she said.” He drew his face into a grimace and rubbed the back of his neck. “Admit I might’ve been too caught up in my perception of her based on what she is and what she’s done.”

  “Yeah.” Having achieved what he set out to, though not nearly as he’d expected, Tirdad made for the encampment. The weight of what he’d learned exhausted him. He just wanted to sleep.

  “Something is seriously off with her,” Chobin said, falling into step by his side.

  Tirdad shot him a glare, which the marzban either didn’t see or didn’t acknowledge.

  “I don’t mean that as a joke,” Chobin went on. “There is. It’s fucking obvious to anyone who spends a bit of time in her presence. But that’s easy to come by. What she . . . expressed back there? As your friend, I need to be certain you got the meaning.”

  �
�I believe I did,” said Tirdad. “But I welcome your perspective so long as it isn’t an insult.”

  Chobin grunted, still rubbing the back of his neck. “You don’t just see that she’s fucking off. You don’t even see that—not like the rest of us. You see her as someone who struggles with something beyond her control, do your utmost to come to understand her without judging, and she knows it.”

  The marzban slung an arm over Tirdad’s shoulder, which did nothing to help his exhaustion. “Way I see it, she isn’t used to that.”

  “That’s about what I took away from it,” said Tirdad. “Although I worry I don’t try nearly as much as she thinks.”

  “Only makes it all the more sincere.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, no matter.” Chobin slapped his back, grin brightening effortlessly. “Soon we’ll be too busy claiming our glory for you to worry! If you’re half as improved your sessions let on, I’m eager to see the two of you in battle. And that isn’t even considering the training you do beforehand!”

  Tirdad’s sigh was drowned out by a boisterous laugh.

  XI

  Tirdad wanted to scream. From his saddle, where he lay in wait in the shadow of a trough between hills, he could see the enemy. And they were tantalizing. Their lanterns, bobbing on their way across the river, were beacons that signalled a checked thrill, inspired the steady pooling of adrenaline. The reins creaked in his fist. Soon.

  Second to that, Shkarag had his abdomen in a vice that bunched the mail he now wore beneath his plum-coloured tunic, and for which the mail did nothing. Her sawing breaths vibrated against his back, as clear a sign as any that she was drunk with bloodlust. However infuriating his anticipation, it no doubt paled in comparison. She wasn’t holding on to avoid falling; she held on to avoid letting go.

  It poured into him, amplified his own eagerness. Their sessions had made sure of it. Those warriors nearest fed on it same as they would the minstrels during hunts. The bloodlust that vibrated and heaved her cuirass threaded its way into their adrenaline. When unleashed, her lineage had an almost visible battlefield presence; it spoke to those around her in certain terms. It emboldened her allies; it struck fear into her foes.