An Ill-Fated Sky

by Darrell Drake

  The townspeople were equally befuddled. None had actually seen the divs, though each was full of wild ideas as to what horrid sensibilities the beasts must surely possess. Having seen an army of divs, and having shared the road with Ashtadukht, Tirdad knew the truth had the potential to give their imagination a run for its coin.

  Every day the same thing. Search, apricot, scout. Search, apricot, scout. Search, apricot, scout. When there were but a few left in the jar, Tirdad had begun to consider running. Shkarag had squashed that the instant he brought it up—had brooked no argument. So when the final day arrived, Tirdad stood before the jar’s sole apricot no more prepared than if he’d fought those forty divs upon arrival. He had his sword, his planet-reckoning, and Shkarag. He prayed that would be enough.

  Tirdad downed the apricot and said, “That’s forty down the hatch.”

  The mysterious shuffling answered as it always did. Only this time, it was different. It went on as if it had found its confidence; it grew in volume and intensity. Tirdad’s palm came to tremble on the ram’s head pommel. Shkarag retrieved her spear from where it leaned by the door, and leaned instead into it.

  “Forty down the hatch,” she confirmed.

  Tirdad approached the door, through which he could sense the presence of divs, and caught wind of their reek besides. The bone-penetrating fear that had Tirdad in its grip until then was flushed out by adrenaline. He brandished his starling-black blade and shoved the door open. It complained on its hinges, then rapped against stone.

  The shuffling ceased.

  “Šo-wretched broom sweepers,” Shkarag observed from his side.

  Tirdad figured that was an accurate enough description. If he were going for something less pithy, he would have described each div as an assortment of animals and men run through ass-to-mouth by a broom and stacked one on top of the other. They were kebabs. Broom kebabs. The nearest spoke, and when it did, all its mouths moved in unison, some yapping or hissing, with the humans somehow getting words through long-rotted vocal cords. It did so in a foreign tongue like dragging an old broom over stone, but one he understood.

  “Please spare us!” it swept. “We repent! We repent each and every one of us to He Who Devours Brooms!”

  Shkarag emitted a giggle.

  “The One Most Slithered!” it swept again, and the brooms all fell forward to prostrate before him.

  “Please don’t eat us,” they swept as one. “We heard you were a redoubtable star-reckoner, so we visited you nightly to see what we were up against. One, then two, then three, each group coming back with the same story. That you could somehow see through our sorcery, and meant to eat us! Oh, how we repent!”

  Tirdad skimmed confusion over the divs, all so much brooms and gore, and ended on Shkarag, whose face was drawn into a grimace that battled to hold back laughter. She grinned at him, broad and lopsided as ever, and he knew he’d been played for a fool.

  “Shkarag.”

  “. . .”

  “Shkarag.”

  “After,” she blurted, canting toward the brooms and shaking her spear at them. “After.”

  “All right,” said Tirdad, shaking his head at her and addressing the crowd with the same authoritative voice Ashtadukht had so often employed. “As much as I’d anticipated devouring you all like—” He sighed, and threw an exasperated glance at Shkarag, “—like kebabs, I’m not above letting you free. But you must indenture yourselves to me, and leave humans to their peaceful lives.”

  “We’ll do as you say!” swept the brooms. “We’ll use our sorcery to hide! To keep alleys free of leaves! We’ll never trouble another soul if you but sweep the terrible fate you had planned for us under the carpet!”

  “Off with you then!” Tirdad roared. “Don’t show your face—your bristles ever again!”

  Without another sweep, the divs all winked out of sight.

  “Wait,” said Shkarag, having anticipated his question. Head askew and leaning into her spear, she pivoted around it, trained on empty space. Tirdad figured she could see the brooms, which meant she could see them all along. “Swept away,” she said after following their departure for minutes. “Can rant now.”

  “I won’t rant,” he said and hadn’t intended to. Whatever her prank, it had achieved the desired result. Curiosity drove him now. “Did you know this would happen all along? Is that why you insisted on the dried apricots?”

  She pivoted back around to face him, leaning into her spear and making no attempt to hide just how pleased she was with herself. “. . .”

  “Shkarag. What in the seven fucking climes were those divs? How much of this was a prank?”

  The more he asked, the more buoyant her toenail-swallowing grin. Unable to suppress it any longer she laughed, unrestrained and full of a rare mirth, to the thump of her spear as she retreated into their home.

  “Shkarag!” he shouted, following her in. “Come on!”

  XIV

  Rakhsh, the merchant with whom Tirdad and Shkarag had signed a contract, had been practically jumping for joy when they went to collect their due the next morning. Evidently, a few curious souls had seen fit to spectate, which meant the whole of the city had heard tell of the forty terrifying broom-divs and how Tirdad had sent them sweeping once and for all. That earned him a hefty reward and an invitation to settle in for the winter, which Tirdad declined. He had his sights on his next quarry.

  The Gulf, too dense with brine and oppressed by heat to remind him of home, was almost nostalgic—almost. It misted him where he stood at the prow of a small single-mast merchant vessel, its lateen rig billowing just overhead, a crew of three idling by the steering apparatus at the aft.

  A steady flow of boats passed in the other direction, all headed for one port or another to offload goods from the empire’s booming maritime trade. The monsoon winds would be coming up from the southwest this time of year, which meant a return trip for the merchants who had set out with the favourable northeasterly winds months earlier. Why this particular merchant challenged the schedule was beyond him. But Tirdad was neither a sailor nor a merchant. Leave the experts to their trade, he figured.

  The Gulf was nostalgic, he decided. The mist, the whiff of brine overpowering his nostrils, the distant coastlines, each with the childhood promise of adventure to be had: none of that brought him back. Shkarag retched over the starboard side. That did.

  “I’ll—urk,” she spat at the water, convulsing and wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “Dourboat’s swimming with the fishes and yet—hck.”

  It was so far removed that he had all but forgotten their first travels together. “You all right?” he asked, grinning. It reminded him of her pranks, too. “I can’t believe you convinced me to eat an apricot a day just to trick those broom divs into thinking I’d seen through their invisibility and planned on eating them one by one.”

  Shkarag threw herself to the deck and leaned against the curtain, looking as if she were ready to vomit again any time now. “Land,” she muttered. “Want to eat dirt.”

  “You got yourself into this,” said Tirdad. He glanced back at the crew. They were giving her a wide berth, trying to act uninterested, and had only allowed Tirdad to join the voyage after he’d handed over the sack Rakhsh had given him.

  “So how’d you know about this island?” he asked her. “Wait, no. Don’t answer that. How’d you know one of the star-reckoners we seek would be here? This better not be another trick. It’s too elaborate, if so. Sometimes brevity is best. And look what it’s doing to you, why don’t you?”

  “Don’t you—” Shkarag started, seeming offended, only to be cut off by a dry heave. “—urk. We’re family. Told you we’re family. If you want to, want to do a thing, family should be there, not run off like some—hrk—like some ترسو.”

  “What?”

  “. . .” Shkarag stared past him, racked by a convulsion.

  Tirdad had his hand on the ram’s head pommel, keenly aware of the pull of the blade. “What’d you jus
t say?”

  “I . . . wrung it out of the star-fucker,” she said. “Before you returned from—” She made a gesture as if she were twisting a wet rag between her hands. “I wrung it out of him something fierce. Kept carrying on about how he’d never talk, and that made me think what in the seven climates are you, your mouth parts are doing the thing. But I thought that’s just as the crow flies and went to task.”

  “Seven climes,” Tirdad corrected with a sigh. “If you’re going to mock me at least get it right.”

  “Mocking?”

  “Never mind. So you wrung it out of him. That simple?”

  “. . .” She canted.

  “Well, that was thoughtful of you at any rate.”

  “Need to know where not to go.”

  “Oh, smart then. Not thoughtful.”

  Shkarag opened her mouth to speak when a dribble of bile seized the opportunity to gurgle out. She’d already emptied her stomach many times over, so it could hardly have been called a puddle. A hiss of a groan petered out after, and she summarily fell to one side to hide beneath her cloak.

  “I suppose that’s just as well,” said Tirdad. “Get some rest.” The words had hardly left his mouth when the sky lit up with lightning bright enough to force him to shield his eyes, and to cause Shkarag to cry out. It spread throughout clouds like ominous fissures over the core of a yazata. It singed the sky.

  The clap of thunder it heralded was deafening. So awful was the sound Tirdad almost expected the world-ending dragon Gochihr to part the heavens. It was enough for him to check. That thunderclap stirred the Gulf into a frenzy. It threw a shadow so sudden and so dark that Tirdad saw fit to check the heavens again for Gochihr, drawing relief in the soot-coloured billows of stormclouds. Better them than the dragon.

  That was all he managed to take in before the boat lurched, tossed on an especially vehement swell, and threw him to the deck. Tirdad hit it with a shout, the world all a blur beneath a sudden and torrential downpour. Before he could react, the boat canted to a sharp, slippery incline that slid him into the mast. He groaned, already soaked to the bone, and hugged the mast with everything he had. Somewhere in the back of his mind, between the unsettling complaints of wood and an ear-piercing scream, Tirdad sensed the telltale signs of star-reckoning—whatever they were. He just felt them.

  Thunder swept over the measly vessel again, cruel and tyrannical, pinning him in place as much as the lurch of the ship. It had power, personality; he could have mistaken it for a roar. Over and over it broke his spirit, more blood-curdling than the rain-tended lulls left by a departing roar, and the agonized screams that occupied them.

  Around him, the deckhands were doing their part in keeping the vessel afloat. Tirdad didn’t know boats. He didn’t know seafaring. He’d never been farther out than dinghies would take him on the Mazandaran Sea. He’d rushed into this voyage because it would get them there well before an approach by land. Now, he wished he’d followed the coast until a dinghy could ferry them across the strait occupied by the island.

  He clutched the mast, lurching this way and that to an unabated scream, the steady hum of rain, and the piercing thunder that arrived with less and less frequency. Tirdad had no way of knowing just how long he toiled at the mercy of the storm. As far as he was concerned, it’d been hours.

  When at last the thunder ceased and the sea calmed, it did not take the screaming with it. Tirdad put his feet beneath him, feeling utterly drained from struggling against the storm, clothes heavy with rain, and squinted across the deck to the stern where the merchant and his help had gathered.

  “Shkarag?” he asked, turning a circle to scan for her. Had she fallen overboard? Could she even swim? “Shkarag,” he shouted. “Where in the seven climes are you?”

  “Over here,” called one of the crewman. “Don’tcha hear her?”

  “Oh,” said Tirdad, hurrying over. Going on as long as it had, he’d assumed it was part of the storm. “Move,” he snapped, shouldering between them and shoving one aside. “Get the fuck away!”

  She was on her hands and knees, fingernails cracked and digging into the deck, muscles taut with what could only have been agony. He shivered. What he had mistaken for a scream was so much more. To call it a scream would have come up dismally short. It had substance; it smothered the air around him as if the aura of her bloodlust had turned against him. She went on without stopping for breath: shrill, grating, and constantly at the point of breaking. The deck began to splinter under the strength of her grasp. A plank exploded behind her.

  “Shkarag?” he asked. “Shkarag, what’s wrong?” He got to his knees beside her, and that’s when he noticed the thin trail of blood that ran from her ear, which directed him to other such trails from her nose and mouth. “Shkarag?” he asked, anxiety tightening his throat. He took her by the head and raised it so she could see him and—

  “Fuck!” he cried, falling on his back but scrambling to get his bearings immediately after. “What the fuck is happening?”

  She gazed at him, still screaming, without the faintest flicker to a glare that was not her own. Her eyes were human now, one blind and the other an aged brown. Whoever it was, it saw him. It looked back.

  Horror held him in its grip, a combination of the eyes, her unending scream, and an aura unlike anything he’d ever experienced. For a moment, it seemed as if everyone and everything were out to get him, as if the stars themselves conspired to cut him down. His thoughts came all at once, demanding he sort through the clutter. The world tilted without him. He angled his head to compensate, but that only gave the things that did not belong free rein to do as they pleased. He couldn’t place what exactly—maybe it was everything. Maybe. His surroundings were off. So, too, was his place in them. He angled again. There were thoughts like faces in the dark reaches of the world into which his mind saw fit to leak. Everything was related, connected. Briefly, in that torrent there prevailed a view of reality unencumbered by perception—one distorted instead by patches of long-sown thoughts where there should have been clouds or sea or boat. They appeared to him as unnatural and unknown as a twilight mirage. And in those mirages, two scenes were locked in combat, flickering between one and the other as if the world could not decide what it wanted to be.

  Directly ahead, there was Shkarag. Only she wore the trappings of a div twice her size, flesh and scale charred and bubbling, a starling black mantle thrown against her in a wind he could not feel. She screeched. Tirdad knew then that she had plotted his demise from the very beginning. That she was his sworn enemy. Without another thought, he unsheathed his dagger, and without giving his actions due consideration, plunged it into her skull.

  The screeching stopped. The aura disappeared. The world sloughed its indecision. Everything returned to normal. Shkarag collapsed to the deck. Tirdad fell to his knees beside her.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered as he tugged his dagger free. Whatever had come over him was beyond explanation, and he was too drained to give it much thought. The deckhands were edging closer as if they were Nasu trying to get at a corpse.

  “You . . . the div is dead,” said the merchant. “You killed it.”

  “Give us some space,” said Tirdad, an edge to his delivery. When they didn’t oblige, he brandished his dagger at the nearest. “Now. Or you’re next.” That did the trick.

  He eased her head into his lap and stared, waiting blank and silent to the slosh of water against hull. The boat rocked lazily, uncanny in how far-removed it was from the tempest they had endured. The sun cast a pleasant warmth over his back. He stroked the ruts of her scalp, where another would soon take shape after the wound had healed.

  Hardly a minute had passed before she woke up. Tirdad took solace in the way her pupils contracted to slits, blood-red advancing on and driving out the abyss, to flutter over his shoulder.

  “That smarted,” she said, inscrutable as ever. “That smarted something fierce.”

  “Forgive me?” asked Tirdad. “Something came ove
r me and I just lashed out. I really don’t know—”

  “Not that. Not the, not that.” She flexed a claw by her head. “The star-fucker.”

  “I stabbed you in the head.”

  Shkarag canted. “Asked you to.”

  “Asked?”

  “. . .” She looked away. “Thank you.”

  Tirdad screwed up his face at that. Shkarag did not typically show gratitude—not in the conventional manner. And he had buried a knife in her brain.

  “Star-fucker wanted me to rip this šo-damned boat to splinters and scatter your organs across kingdoms. I would—” She convulsed, and brine streaked with leftover blood bubbled up. Shkarag spat it to the side and sat up. “Urk. I would’ve. Couldn’t hold out much longer. Dagger did me in.”

  “This star-reckoner, he was controlling you?”

  “Maybe,” she said. Shkarag seemed as if she had more to say, but she left it at that.

  “Well, fuck me with a fishing rod.” Tirdad turned a frown on the island, and scratched the side of his head, only to find the itch was on the inside. The island’s rocky outcroppings watched the strait that defended the only access to the Gulf. From those far off cliffs a star-reckoner had made the first move. Had ruled out the possibility of negotiation. Until now, Tirdad had wanted answers. Now he wanted answers and violence.

  “She’s strong,” said Shkarag. “Others have tried, but . . . she’s strong.”

  Tirdad’s frown deepened at that, but the thought of a challenge had a certain allure. “How do we stop her from controlling you?”

  “Not controlling.” Shkarag flexed a claw by her head. “Divs are, divs are, she wasn’t controlling. Star-fucker was . . .” Shkarag took a moment to find the word, and finished with, “Liberating.”

  “Liberating?”

  Shkarag angled her head away, but kept her eyes on and around him. “Casting off shackles and chains. You don’t want that.”