An Ill-Fated Sky

by Darrell Drake

  “Well—”

  “I don’t want that.”

  “Well, you’ve never been one for restraint, so these shackles and chains must not be worth much.”

  Shkarag seemed anything but amused. She put her boots beneath her and limped past the crew to the bow, convulsing twice along the way. Tirdad followed suit, drawing up behind her where she stared out at the island.

  “She’s still in there,” said Shkarag. She ran her fingers along the latest scar. “In here. You’re still in here. Like snakes in honey.”

  “Snakes in honey?”

  “. . .”

  “Not familiar with that idiom,” said Tirdad. He contemplated the island, wondering how ready this star-reckoner would be for their approach, and whether to expect another lot thrown their way before making landfall.

  “Snakes in honey,” reiterated Shkarag, trying to impress upon him the importance of the phrase with her tone.

  Meanwhile, Tirdad wondered why Abarkawan appeared to him to have changed expressions. He’d caught the island off guard, and now it didn’t know whether to maintain its ruse or do away with the pretense. What he did know, looking on as it shifted from friendly to conniving and back again, was that he had been here before. Like some, like some—

  Scenery passed in a blur, like a gale through his senses, with him oblivious to its significance, bearing, or that it was passing at all. Only a faraway feeling reached him.

  “Like some long-dormant memory,” he blurted out. “Biding its time and—”

  “. . .”

  “Oh? I see.” Having said that, Tirdad didn’t. All he realized was that he was no longer standing by the prow of the boat. A scant few scenes like plaster murals connected their disembarkation to a mangrove forest to this place. “Huh?”

  “. . .” Shkarag turned around to stare in his direction.

  He looked beyond the impatience aimed his way to the shaft of light that gleamed overhead, squinting and shielding his eyes until they adjusted. Only after he limned its edges for a moment did he see it for what it was: the height of fissure. Tirdad drew his gaze down, and found himself at the bottom of a narrow rut that ran between porous, pock-marked sandstone.

  “Where—what—how did we get here?” he sputtered, peering into the recesses that littered the rock face. It felt as if he were traversing the inside of a hive. His breathing quickened; he could hear it in his skull. “Shkarag, what just happened? We were on the boat, headed for the island, and I was thinking—”

  “Stop thinking,” she cut in, gingerly and with a knowing stare. “It’s . . . it’ll be over soon.” Her lips formed what was likely a withheld ‘maybe’.

  How could he stop thinking? Tirdad turned a circle, trying to recall how he’d gotten from the boat to wherever this was. Even now, select recesses were making themselves unknown. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked, thick with desperation.

  Shkarag snatched his wrist and pulled him farther into the fissure. “Happens,” she said. “Not to you. Shouldn’t to you. Star-fucker is, šo-wretched star-fucker is still in here.” She threw one of her inexplicable looks back at him and added, “I’m cross with you. And you’re a weakling.”

  “What?”

  Shkarag pressed on, leading him effortlessly even when he lost his footing. “Cross with you,” she repeated, punctuated by the clack of her spear against stone.

  Tirdad was growing more and more frustrated with the situation, and her obtuse answers weren’t making it any better. One minute he was standing by the rig of a merchant vessel, the next he was being dragged through the depths of a fissure. “I—”

  “—should’ve taken the direct route,” he mused aloud. “Going to sprain an ankle at this rate.” The sky was dark and busy with the din of the luminaries. He could feel the planets revolve and riposte. His bones were anchors, his muscles seaweed, his organs inhospitable islands. He leaned against the nearest recess for a breather, boring into its tenebrous depths as he did.

  “Tortoise-sodomizing woman had to hole up all the way out here,” he complained, light in its feminine carriage but heavy in spirit. Another of Ashtadukht’s memories, he half realized, to the familiar sensation of riding a dream. Like a dream, the realization was fleeting. “There’s nothing romantic about hermits. Just inconvenient. I swear, brother, if I ever become a—”

  He clammed up. Briefly, brittly, he held out. The grief, only months old, was swift and indefatigable. It conquered him. Sorrow, fury, guilt: these were the currents of bereavement that raged through him. Gushnasp was lost. Forever.

  He threw a fist at the sandstone. That hurt, but not enough. Tirdad didn’t let up. Not even to the crack of bone, or to the barbarous fire that dominated his arm. He went on until he could no longer form a fist. Until his hand fell limp by his side, and instead of sliding down the rock face, he fell into it. Half-standing, he bawled into the stone.

  “Come back . . .” he uttered, comprehensible only to himself. “Come back. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything.”

  One hand trembling and useless, he used the other to fish a small packet out of his tunic. He hadn’t the faintest idea where he’d gotten it, only that the person had told him it would make everything go away.

  “I want everything to go away,” he said, as if reaching out to try and shape the world to his desire. “Gushnasp is alive. I didn’t kill him.” He’d seen the drug time and again during a childhood spent by his father’s side in one encampment or another. Administering it was as simple as swallowing. So he did just that.

  It was bitter—magnitudes worse than wormwood. He gagged and would’ve vomited it back up if he weren’t so hopeful it would save him. “I miss father,” he said to himself, wishing he could just while away his days in the warmth and smell of leather that came with every hug shared with the man. Then the drug set in.

  His thoughts thinned, became miasma. He forgot his grief; he forgot he had reason to grieve. He just forgot. Tirdad stumbled the way he’d been headed purely by chance, not knowing why and not questioning it either. The stone was smooth under his fingers; his trousers and tunic were still soaked from the mangrove forest he’d waded through to get here. The sensations reached him, but not their significance. Tirdad could have stumbled like that for hours for all he knew. He just went.

  At some point, he fell. Rather, he found himself on the ground. How he got there was anyone’s guess, but a reasonable explanation would have been that a fall played a part in it. He made to right himself with the wrong hand. He was on the ground again. Maybe he’d fallen. Probably, the stone had dragged him down. He wasn’t frustrated. He wasn’t anything. He only existed outside his head. And he was stuck in it.

  There arrived a warbling like songbirds held underwater. With it, a figure. He squinted, but not at it. That would have required a more lucid squint. Still, he squinted. The warbling went on, those passerine fighting for air beak and wing, and eventually succumbing to a grim fate. Then he was flying—and how! He soared. He would have been exuberant if he had it in him. Instead, he looked from one thing to another, each only a thing.

  The procession of the night cannot take place unobserved. So when the miasma began to recede, Tirdad merely found himself further along the celestial equator. The planets always seemed to be the first to harangue him in the morning—well before drowsiness took purchase. Coming out of a high turned out to be no different. Their battles, their weapons tinkling like cosmic wind chimes, bid him good evening. Then a tended silence filled their egress, ushered them out hurriedly. He wasn’t alone.

  Tirdad opened his eyes, and wished he hadn’t. The headache that often assailed him come dawn redoubled its efforts. His body complained like it had never complained before. The worst part was that he remembered. He found himself wanting more.

  “You are awake,” said the caretaker of that tended silence, throwing her garden to the wayside. The voice had an unusually high pitch for how rough it sounded. “That was foolish. You are a damn fool. If I h
ad not sensed your presence like a stink come to sully my refuge you might have gotten yourself killed out there.”

  “Myrod?” he asked, blinking against the drug’s lingering daze.

  “The same. You stink. I swear, if Mehr-farr got you into fucking divs I am going to have to come out of hiding.”

  “Fucking . . . divs?” Tirdad groaned, and it finally came to him that the light at the bottom of his vision was from an oil lamp. He was staring at the ceiling. He struggled to sit up, which called for a prolonged hiss when he posted on the wrong hand.

  “I did what I could for your injury. Not much, frankly. It may hound you for the rest of your life. Try not to go around punching divs in the future. You will regret it.”

  Tirdad made a second attempt at getting up, careful for his—he looked, and that drew a grimace—mangled hand this time around. Across an empty room clammy from its environment there sat what appeared to be a woman, betrayed only by the shadows light revealed along her jaw. She was better-looking than he’d expected, especially the sheen like polished obsidian to her hair. He wished he had hair like that.

  “Beautiful,” he thought aloud.

  That inspired a tempered smile. “Well, that is a first,” said Myrod. “Cannot say anyone has ever been so desperate as to call me beautiful. But I assure you, flattery will not get you far here. Now,” she crossed both her legs and her arms, “why are you here, and how did you find me?”

  Right. He had come for a reason. Not just any reason: the only reason that mattered. He reached for his pack, only to find it wasn’t there.

  “By the door,” said Myrod. She’d uncrossed her arms as soon as she’d crossed them. Now, she nursed a wineskin.

  Tirdad stumbled over, still uneasy on his feet, and fished around with his good hand for a roll of documents. “These,” he said once he found them. “These—”

  “Actually, tell me how you found me first.”

  “The wine.”

  Myrod leered at her wineskin. “What about it?”

  “Bazrang wine. It’s your favorite.” He made to fidget with his cuff, only to remember his injury too late. A tense outbreath hissed through his teeth. The other cuff then. “You only drink Bazrang. Refuse to drink even Babylonian. When you disappeared, so too did your orders. You knew better than to have them sent directly to the island, so you had them routed along the coast. Made an arrangement with the local fishermen and pearl divers for drop locations all around the Gulf.”

  “There are many drop locations. Even on the island.”

  “I really need to talk to you. Can we just—” He held out the documents. “Can we please just talk?”

  Myrod’s stare hardened. “Have you told anyone about this?”

  “No one.” Tirdad swallowed. The quiet spoke for itself.

  “That was stupid,” Myrod said at length. “Do not be so stupid in the future. How you can manage to find me and be so fucking stupid is baffling.”

  Tirdad had been holding his breath since his reply, and only then allowed himself to breathe.

  “So,” she asked evenly, “why have you sought out a person who obviously wants to be left alone?”

  “I . . .” Tirdad kneaded anxiety into his cuff. He averted his gaze, hoping the dim light would obscure those few tears he couldn’t fight back. “You know what they did to me. They’re responsible for Gushnasp’s—” He swallowed a gasp of a sob, and had to pause to hold it back. “You know they’re to blame.”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean by that?” Tirdad growled. The anger that washed over him evaporated his gloom as swiftly as a drop of water in the Lut. “What do you mean ‘so’?”

  “Speak to me like that again,” Myrod replied in a tone as deadly as the worst of threats.

  Tirdad bit his tongue, and the chill that swept over his skin was quick to disarm his anger.

  “Good. Now, I ask again: So?”

  He held out the sheaf. “I connected the way stations, the trades and missives, the code. You disappeared right after I was taken on as an apprentice. You wanted no part of it. Everyone says you’re the most powerful star-reckoner of our time. The most accomplished. If you speak up, they’ll have to listen. You could challenge them, bring their crimes to justice.”

  “You assume much.”

  “The King of Kings would believe you,” he pressed.

  “You assume much in coming here. Principally, young Ashtadukht, that I would leave my refuge behind for your grudge. Stupid again to allow these romantic dreams of justice to guide you here. You cannot afford to continue this stupidity.”

  Tirdad opened his mouth, none too pleased with the constant berating, but Myrod’s raised palm saw to that.

  “In this, you are stupid. You need to do more than hear it; you need to listen.”

  Crestfallen, he contemplated his dirty boots. He’d staked everything on this quest. Without the support of someone like Myrod, no one would listen. She’d often run aground of one star-reckoner or another due to her unconventional nature. Still, they respected her each and every one, because she was powerful. He heard she once drew five lots in a single day. Went toe to toe with a forty-armed div and survived. Alone.

  “You are also stupid,” Myrod went on, “to think I could simply emerge from my hole and ruin the reputation of a score of influential star-reckoners. Their power is not mine. They deal in intrigue, in politics, in the prosperity of the Houses.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  “Please, just—”

  “No. Do yourself a favor and avoid being such a stupid child in the future. You cannot afford that. Neither in your quest or our profession.”

  “You’re a fucking coward,” he spat. “A toenail-swallowing coward. A fucking—” Where the room was comfortably bare a heartbeat earlier, the stars bore down on him as if their orbits had brought them in, crowding him in blinding, suffocating divinity. The pressure on his chest was such that he couldn’t suck in the slightest breath. He tried to apologize, but that emerged as a whine that cracked half-way through.

  “Leave,” said Myrod. Her tone was beyond threatening now. She was in the middle of following through. “I will not relent.”

  Determined, Tirdad matched her stare. His chest soon began to burn; his vision blurred. But he refused to back down. He had come all this way to seek her aid, and he would not be turned away so casually.

  “Leave,” she bade him. “Once through the threshold you can breathe again.”

  He didn’t so much as glance at the exit. He did, however, swell with pride at the surprise she wore. That’s right. He wasn’t about to go any—

  Tirdad woke up to the sound of a door slamming.

  “Good luck,” called Myrod. “Try to be less stupid.” A pause. “Oh, and never fucking return.”

  “I’ll fucking kill you!” he shouted. “I’ll kill each and every one of you menstrual-bathing fucks!”

  Ashtadukht’s memory didn’t evacuate as it had before. Parts of it hung around like smudges on his senses—splotches of night imposed upon day, furious faraway screams joined the celestial theatre.

  Shkarag hovered over him, leaning into her spear and looking as if she had been doing so for some time now. “. . .”

  “A memory,” he explained. “Ashta, she came here and . . .” He remembered her desperation. How she tried to hide it behind anger. How anger was not sustainable, always sputtering through the last of its fuel before capitulating to thoughts of joining her brother in death. A thirst for revenge would always keep her on the precipice, which was crueller than if she had gone through with it. By its nature, that tenuous footing maintained her yearning while never fulfilling it. Only her rites had.

  “Cry later,” Shkarag said, unusually brusque. “We’re here.”

  “Here?” Tirdad tucked his chin to his chest. Just ahead there waited an adobe house half-carved from a cliff. One he recognized. “Oh.” He wiped his face on his sleeve, feeling embarrassed and more than a
little guilty.

  “Ashta was here,” he said. “She visited a woman she called the most powerful of star-reckoners.”

  “She’s strong,” Shkarag confirmed, brusque as before.

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  “Kill her.”

  “Shkarag, look. I—”

  “Later.” She jabbed her spear in the direction of the building.

  “Right.” Tirdad made a futile attempt at wiping the brushstrokes of night from his vision, and approached the door. The starling-black blade was strident in its call to be freed. Whatever was left of Ashtadukht in her aborted phylactery, he felt it now more than ever. He wanted to bellow a heartbroken, mad-at-the-world scream same as she had been doing since the memory receded, out there alongside the planets where they orbited the furthest reaches of his hearing. He drew the sword instead.

  Shkarag inserted her spear between him and the door, leaning into it as she leaned it in front of him. “Tirdad, d—” The remainder came out as a strained croak, which threw her into a rage. She smashed through the door, hissing wildly.

  Tirdad chased her in, ready to draw a lot or put the blade to work, only to end up confused by the scene. The interior was just as he remembered it: bare but for a table and the woman across the room. Where it differed was in more than her advanced age.

  Myrod was slumped over, head balding and crooked between one shoulder and the floor.

  “I do not know what is more disconcerting,” rang a voice in his head. “Seeing myself secondhand, or what you see now.”

  “Myrod?” he asked, squinting and edging forward.

  “Only in your head. I assure you, I am harmless at present. You would not be strolling so blithely around my territory if not.” Her timbre had changed considerably since the memory, grown gravelly in its high pitch.

  Tirdad didn’t trust her. He didn’t have that luxury when dealing with a star-reckoner, especially not this one. “Why’re you in my head?” he inquired, sword leveled at her body, though he held no illusions as to how vain it would have been to try and close the distance. “Was the storm your doing?”