An Ill-Fated Sky

by Darrell Drake

  “Shkarag,” he called. “Come back why don’t you? I’ll open a wound, and let you wallow in my blood until you’re satisfied. Whatever you like.” He waited, but the silence remained woefully untended. Heaving a sigh, frustrated above all else, he closed his eyes. Surely, she had a reason for doing that out of nowhere; the trouble lay in unearthing the reason. There was no way he was going to fall asleep in his condition.

  “Fuck,” he breathed and lowered his trousers.

  • • • • •

  They were out early the following morning to stock up on essentials. The city was a lazy one, acting mainly as a hub for farmers from the many neighboring villages or a rest stop for travellers on their way to the capital. On a normal day, the residents might have gone on with their routine as if Tirdad were just another stranger passing through. Shkarag had other plans. She’d fashioned them a spectacle.

  She wore her cloak and scarf, but brazenly: hood down and silk scarf—which he’d given her before setting out—loose around her neck. For his part, Tirdad had only objected once and respected her silent refusal to conceal her identity. Whispers arose as they passed, which came as a surprise to Tirdad because they carried more than the well-deserved fear of a daughter of Eshm. More than once he heard mention of the star-reckoner who saved Ray, and of his div companion who had died for the city. He knew she had died for him at best, but plausibly only as a result of her reckless bloodlust. They didn’t have to know that. Besides, she’d come to the aid of the legendary archer Erash and saw none of the prestige she was owed. Who knows how many other feats had gone unappreciated.

  Thinking on that injustice left Tirdad rankled, which distracted him enough that he nearly bumped into her. He drew up short, beetle-browed and matching her stare where she leaned into her spear and craned up at him. “What?” he asked.

  “. . .” She directed her attention somewhere over his shoulder.

  “Out with it, Shkarag.” He glanced past her. “Oh, looks like we found the bazaar.”

  At that, she hissed. “Said you need to lift, to steal, to abduct, to—”

  “Buy?”

  Another hiss. “—to buy apricots. Forty apricots, all shriveled and sun-dried, to count the days.”

  “Huh?” Tirdad turned his attention back to her. “That seems mighty unnecessary. Why count with dried apricots when I can just count, well . . . most any other way seems better.”

  Shkarag sharply angled her head, throwing one arm wide, which rolled her spear on its butt to jab at the bazaar behind her, nearly impaling a passerby in doing so. “Are you going to, going to count the šo-damned stars like some planet-reckoner slipping into the trousers of a star-reckoner, shoving one leg in and losing your balance, all making a fuss about how you’re a true bona fide star-reckoner and don’t want to fuck a planet until it’s—”

  Tirdad clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shkarag!” he breathed. She just stared. “You win. I’ll get the apricots. Just drop the whole roving explanation.”

  “Maybe,” she said when he removed his hand, retracting her spear as if she were a royal guard permitting him entry. “I think.”

  He offered her a smile and headed into the same square they’d visited the night before, though it was markedly busier. Rather than being separated according to an artisan’s craft, stalls were arranged in two concentric circles, where sundries were on display beneath canvases beaming with primary colors. Lively as it was, the bazaar was small and had a subdued atmosphere that always seemed to gloss these small cities, whose residents took pride in their work. The bustle of the capital and other sprawling urban areas drained everyone involved. Leisure. That was the key, he figured. A person could find leisure here.

  Shkarag’s spear thumped as she approached a stall. He joined her, where she glared at a pile of sun-dried apricots. Every few seconds, her gaze would flick up at the vendor. She sucked in several heavy breaths before pulling herself straight by her spear. She donned her hood. “Forty apricots,” she said, now darting between the wares and anything but the vendor. “Dried in the, in the šo-wretched sun.”

  “Come to think of it,” mused Tirdad, “we used to eat these often on the road. Between all the dried fruit, I’m surprised I’m not sick of them by now. Actually, been having something of a craving for them lately.” He reached out to pluck one from the pile, and when his fingers came into contact with its leathery skin, he was abruptly shunted into a memory.

  “Date,” he said in Ashtadukht’s voice, palm extended and watching himself expectantly. His bones ached terribly; it burned just to breathe. Worse than his stubborn body was the weight of the past. He wanted to die. More than that, he yearned for it. All that kept him afloat was the promise of the festival—his annual rites. So he stared from that precipice daily as if to say, “Soon.”

  There was more to it than that, an undercurrent focused on himself: chiefly resentment at being escorted, but somewhere in there the leanings of gratitude. With the date placed in his palm, the memory dispersed, and Tirdad was back in the bazaar, sun-dried apricot in hand, sun hot on his neck. He bore into it, blurry and unfocused. In passing, the memory hadn’t been so complaisant as to take its emotions.

  “Why’re you crying?” asked a voice accented and somehow managing to hiss words that could not be hissed. That broke the spell of the past, and he looked up to see a hood aimed his way, off-kilter as it was wont to be. Shkarag reached up to smear his cheek with an uncommon tenderness. The same hand disappeared beneath her hood. “Salty,” she confirmed. “Why?”

  Embarrassed, Tirdad used his sleeve to finish what she started. “I . . .” He trailed off. By Ohrmazd, Ashtadukht had been so much stronger than him. He almost felt as if she deserved to finish what she’d started. He respected her tenacity when faced with such suffocating baggage. Tirdad couldn’t tell Shkarag as much; he wagered she’d take it the wrong way. “It was only a memory,” he replied at length. “Only that.”

  “Memories are . . . memories smart,” Shkarag agreed, turning back to face the stall, and angling her hood away from the vendor. “Forty sun-dried apricots,” she said. “Not more, not less, and I want, I want them yesterday.”

  The vendor, a jowled man with his better years behind him, had not spoken a word. He hadn’t even moved, and were the bazaar not in swing, the sound of swallowing would have filled the silence. Tirdad gathered as much from his salt-white complexion and the beads that pooled on his forehead despite sitting in the shade on a cool day. He extended a hand, chiselling onto his face the same smile he’d wear when forced to take a pillow near the door in court—farthest from the King of Kings, thus furthest from his favour. Not that his lowly House would ever again be invited to sit on the fringes.

  “I’m Tirdad,” he said. “Your new star-reckoner.”

  The vendor gave him a look that was plainly dumbfounded—as if he’d appeared out of thin air.

  “Rakhsh hired us,” Tirdad added.

  “Rakhsh . . .” the man muttered. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. “Rakhsh . . . right,” he got out at length, finally managing to grasp Tirdad’s forearm. “That is a . . .”

  “This is my partner,” Tirdad explained. He couldn’t fault the man for his reaction, especially after the recent invasion. “She won’t hurt you as long as you don’t give her a reason to. Haven’t you heard what we did for Ray? We’re here to do the same for your city, so you’d do well to get used to us. Now—” He held out the apricot. “I need forty of these. Sometime today if you would.”

  Now more afraid he’d lose his throat if he didn’t oblige, the vendor hurried to fulfill their request. “Forty,” he said, looking a little less pale.

  “Thirty-nine,” countered Shkarag. “Don’t like merchants. Always trying to swindle you into more trousers or fewer apricots.” Her spear creaked in her grip. “Forty,” she hissed, “or I’ll fucking—” She snatched them away once he’d added another, fury having overcome anxiety. “Forty,” she said, spear thumping to her departure. />
  Tirdad gave him an apologetic smile-turned-grimace and left the vendor to remember how to breathe. The remainder of their trip was decidedly less confrontational, now that Shkarag had accomplished what she set out to and subsequently retreated into her cloak and scarf. Loaded with supplies, they headed back. With Ashtadukht’s memory fresh in his mind, he was eager to run the star-reckoner’s residence through a sieve. Or run through a star-reckoner. He had to find something incriminating.

  Upon returning, he immediately set to the search. Rakhsh hadn’t exaggerated the state of the place: with all the dirt and strewn belongings, it looked as if a sandstorm had swept through, with an army galloping behind. Tirdad took the time to explore the building, and as far as he could tell, every room served as haphazard storage. So, without a clear direction, he began his search on the second floor, aiming to go from the top down.

  Shkarag joined him in rummaging through the mess, which was about as multifarious as a mess could be excluding outright garbage, and piled high enough to curtain the faded hunt murals that decorated the walls.

  At a glance, sheafs of old scrolls were bunched beneath jars replete with contents too warped to make out, above which barsom twigs shared space with vulture feathers and rolls of leather—all of it littered with astrolabes, armillary spheres, and various apparatuses only of use to star-reckoners, mariners, and select other professions. From the rise of the nearest heap, an elaborate bronze astrarium emerged, its mechanisms green with patina and representative of the luminaries, which it could predict more accurately than any star-reckoner.

  In searching, Tirdad rifled through manifests, recipes, star charts, missives, everyday bookkeeping—he scoured it all. Having found the thread’s beginning in trade manifests, he refused to part with even the most mundane entries. This made the search painstakingly slow. Eventually, he struck up conversation to pass the time.

  “That was . . . different, what you did last night,” he said. “It’s unlike you to carry me around, or run off in the middle of it—neither of which I appreciated by the way. What were you on about?”

  Shkarag was picking through her pile as if plucking choice eggs from the clutch of a lifetime. She cocked her head, still facing her charge but casting at him from the corner of her eye. She went on searching, and the silence that followed was unsettling in its emptiness.

  “You can talk to me, you know.” Tirdad reunited the latest in a series of aged astrolabes with the others he’d found. He tinkered with its plates, which were uncannily familiar. “I don’t know how challenging it is for you to share, only that it is. Not your driftwood tales—to really share. How you vacillate between being a thrall to one thing or another. But I can’t help but worry.”

  “Can’t,” Shkarag blurted.

  “Huh? Can’t what?”

  “Can’t—” She hissed, and flung a jar across the room. Rather than her usual claw or raking, she clutched her skull. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but all that emerged was a drawn out croak.

  Tirdad ceased his tinkering to come over, meaning to rub her back, but she flinched away. “Don’t answer,” he said. “Not if it’s causing you this much grief.” He’d seen her all sorts of distressed, but never like this.

  In labouring to look at him, her movements were stilted. What’s more, her eyes bulged, and a prominent vein crossed her temple to join the furrows of her forehead. Again, she croaked, and it went on until at last it formed a broken, “—ay—be.”

  Tirdad didn’t know what to make of it. Only that she was straining to get something out—straining like he’d only ever seen in mortally wounded warriors clinging to the last vestiges of life. She trembled, and so too did her voice.

  “Swor—d, can’t . . . str—ron—“ Briefly, it seemed her eyes would roll into her head, but she steeled herself. “Stro—n . . . ves—sail—sailor . . . you’re can’t.” A claw jerked from her head, stilted in finding the ram’s head pommel, and missing it four times before taking ahold of it. “Plea—se don’t,” she croaked as if it took everything she had just to get the words out. A line of blood trickled from one nostril, and her pupils went from slits to saucers, unwavering and trained on him. She lurched forward, baring her fangs and shoving the pommel of his sword as she did.

  Tirdad was more than a little nonplused. “Stop,” he bade her. “I’m telling you to stop. Whatever you’re doing, just stop.”

  “D—on’t.” She gave the ram’s head another shove, his weapon belt creaking at her strength, which nearly brought him to his knees. “Don—‘t an—y any an—y a—ny—” A second trickle joined the first, and a convulsion had her doubled over, wheezing and hissing and clutching her head.

  Tirdad grimaced, wanting to console her but uncertain if he should. Just what was she doing to herself, and why in the seven climes would she go to such lengths to speak? Or need to for that matter?

  Suddenly, she collapsed, hitting the floor with a hiss. He reached out to help her, but thought the better of it when her hiss went on until she’d sidled up against the nearest heap. “Smarts,” she said, licking the blood from her lips, and staring ahead as if in a daze. “Something fierce. Not enough blood to, to . . .” She brought a claw up by her ear, then let it fall to her side. “Smarts.”

  Tirdad joined her, feeling awkward and unsure of himself. “You look like you’re in a bad way.”

  “Maybe.” She rolled her head toward him. “Need to rest. I think.”

  He raised his hand so she could see his intention before reaching down to hold hers. He squeezed, which she returned weakly. “Want to tell me what happened there?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is that a ‘yes’ maybe or a ‘no’ maybe?”

  “Want to, but . . . I tried. Really need to—” When next she parted her lips, she emitted a croak that became a hiss. “Need to,” she said, patently furious but too drained to do anything about it.

  “Want to, but you can’t?” Tirdad ventured. “Can you not say it? Can you write it? Can I help at all?” She only stared. He made to press further, and would have liked to, but that would be both unkind and futile. Whatever she needed to tell him, she’d fought tooth and nail to get out sputtered gibberish. “Promise me you’re hale?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she said in the affirmative, reassuring him with another weak squeeze before closing her eyes and going limp against the heap. That unnerved him for a moment, because as much as she killed herself, even in the odd times it’d happen during sex, he never could stomach it. So it was comforting that her chest still rose and fell.

  To avoid stirring her, he moved his search downstairs for the time being, trying to make sense of what she’d said as he did. Sword, don’t, sailor: those were the only whole words he could recall. And they made even less sense than she was prone to. When, after hours of trawling, dusk rolled around, he remembered the dried apricots, and figured he may as well use them if only to please Shkarag.

  Tirdad took one from the lot, and in doing so said, “Well, that’s one down the hatch.”

  As he swallowed, he was alerted to a thud followed by the sounds of scuffling just outside the house. He had his sword out in a flash, heart beating in his throat, chest heaving, and adrenaline honing his senses to a keen edge. He stood fastened in place for a moment, debating whether he should go out or let it come to him. Ultimately, adrenaline and a dash of pomegranate-red had him flinging the door open so hard it clapped against plaster. Chin held high, sword brandished, Tirdad stepped out, feeling every bit the redoubtable planet-reckoner she had been—and he was not.

  He swept his sight over the cisterns, the stretch of dirt between them, the autumn-coloured sky, and when that turned up nothing, spun on the adobe, checking first above, then taking the time to skulk around back to the nook between it and the wall. All he found were the leaves and debris that’d accumulated over years of neglect. Surely, nothing could have—something tickled his neck. He spun around, ready to strike.

  He saw nothing. “Just
the wind,” he said, scowling at the thought that had wormed into his mind. Whatever happened to those terrible divs that’d—no, never mind that. Tirdad tried not to think about it. The last thing he wanted to do right then was yawn.

  “Fuck,” he mouthed as he did just that. He swung his sword wildly, slashing at the air around him like a madman until he felt confident he’d dispatched any invisible divs, which would not have been comforting if he’d stopped to think about it. “Footprints,” he said and set to inspecting the surrounding area, which turned up only his own. Empty-handed, he paced a circuit out and around the cisterns, if only to calm his nerves before retreating back inside.

  Once in, he started stringing up noisemakers throughout the place, thinking himself clever for those he hid with tripwires. With that done, Tirdad was too unsettled to do more rummaging. Besides, the sun had set, and that meant making himself a beacon by lighting an oil lamp. He kept telling himself he was overreacting, but something in him had responded to the noise—like a conjunction, or an animal catching wind of another in its territory. Heaving a sigh, Tirdad headed up to join Shkarag. He had thirty-nine more days to pick through the place. May as well enjoy the luxury of sleeping under a solid roof while it lasted.

  Shkarag hadn’t moved an inch since he left her. He laid beside her, resting his head on her good thigh, and repeating the same three words in his mind. Sailor, sword, don’t. Don’t, sword, sailor. Sailor, don’t, sword. Sword, sailor, don’t.

  XIII

  The days that followed were occupied from dawn til dusk with investigating the hoard strewn throughout the house. Within five days, Tirdad had amassed an archive’s worth of documents to pore over and was beginning to come to terms with the fact that he’d need months, maybe years, to study it all—and that was only about half the hoard sorted.