Beneath Ceaseless Skies #97

by Tina Connolly

  It was the colt who looked away.

  Scowling, Bienor stepped between them. The woman snatched her pails and fled into the alley.

  The colt stared at the ticket. “Why are you helping me? Who are you?”

  “Bienor.” Clearly the colt had never heard of him. “Just an old outlaw looking to change my luck. You want to help humans, you’ll do as I say.” He unslung the Pyretus rifle, angled it at a spire of wind-worn sandstone jutting up out of the hills. “When you’re rested, meet me there. Tomorrow before daybreak—that’s when we move.”

  “How can I....” The colt looked himself over; his naked chest, the dust caked on his skin, the thorns lodged in his coat. “How can I do what you ask—pay for clothes, a room? I don’t have money. I don’t have... anything.”

  Bienor smiled. He’d blown his brief wealth on the ticket. And the wine, which was filling his vision with the faintest of phantom black-powder detonations and a heady sense of the foreordained. “Doesn’t matter. With that spiral on your hide, they won’t even ask for credit.”

  IV.

  The barber, a satyr whose elaborate moustaches concealed his reaction as efficiently as a cameo, took one look at Five Legs’s spiral brand, unfolded a razor from his robe, and went to work.

  Slaves watched from the corners of the shop, barely breathing, as the satyr slid blade and fingers intimately over Five Legs’s cheeks and chest, even venturing past his navel almost to the bristles where his hide began. Dimly, through the haze of terror, Five Legs perceived that a liberty was being taken: in the slaves’ eyes, it amounted to a violation. They were waiting to see the barber taught a lesson of the kind only a favorite of Eurytus could provide.

  That he was capable of grasping such subtlety made his flesh crawl to the point that it required an effort not to twitch and open his own throat on the blade. He was still a centaur. The red-and-white barber pole—blood and bone—spiraled hypnotically between Corinthian plinths made of crumbling plaster.

  Murmuring smooth nothings about marauders in the hills and the inflated price of rendered fats, the barber executed shave and hoplite-cut so thoroughly and so close that Five Legs thought he could have made a second copy of himself out of the slough—of his upper body, his human part, at least. When it became clear no retribution was forthcoming, the slaves herded him out into the street to scrub him down with pails of suds and bristled brushes—which, along with the subsequent towels, oils and creams, they plied with still more brazen intimacy. He let them stroke and prick and maul him as they wished. This was what he’d come for: to be punished for the crimes of his race.

  “Only the finest,” said the barber, “and to Hades with the shortage. We don’t skimp on what’s important.”

  After the barber came the smith, with hammers, hot nails, shoeing irons, and throaty anecdotes about long-past campaigns of conquest. A seamstress, fumble-fingered with terror and free with her pins, fitted Five Legs with a coat and collar, a thin tie of black cord, a shallow, flat-brimmed hat made from an unrecognizable skin. At the tavern he was served a globe of black wine and a leg of minotaur artfully charred at the surface and raw at the bone. He forced himself to swallow everything. Finally, a young slave led him to a sleeping berth, then waited, expectant and shaking, until he slammed the door.

  He sicked most of his supper into the basin, slept fitfully, and woke long before dawn.

  * * *

  Native constellations crowded in around Andromeda, who dangled from the Pegasus in chains. A cold wind crept up at the first insinuation of daybreak, and Five Legs clutched his new coat close. The starched fabric of his collar prickled his freshly-shaved throat; he missed the weight of his matted mane, the familiar thickness of sweat caked in dust. His whole self felt shorn away, leaving only newness and pain.

  The sandstone spire towered black against the paling heavens. He circled its base, his shod hooves ringing in the darkness, and stepped into a shaking cone of lamplight.

  “Now you look like someone deserving of that brand.” Pleasure crinkled Bienor’s features, lascivious, but without malice. He wrapped a forearm around Five Legs’s withers, drew him in close to the light.

  A railroad surveyor’s map lay unrolled across the slab, weighted down against the wind by a battered signal lantern. The terms dried on it in blood were predictable, save for the symbols beneath: a theta, quartered, beside a hunter’s bow.

  There was an answer to the question he’d asked and Bienor had ignored. Why would you help me? Not for any human’s sake.

  Nessus.

  “Deimos and Phaeton,” said Bienor, beckoning two others from the shadows, “meet our inside man.”

  Their clothes weren’t as fine as his own, their shaves nothing like as close. They wore no brands; he envied them that. “Five Legs,” he muttered, the Greek words thick and heavy on his tongue.

  Deimos, the jumpy chestnut, was turning a little silvered repeater over and over in his hands. “That supposed to be a nom de guerre?”

  It wasn’t a centaur’s name. Stupid—he’d opened himself to attack. He’d already thrown away everything else Thin Crow had given him.

  Bienor’s reaction was subtler, silent. He studied the spiral brand.

  “Let’s go over it again.” This from Phaeton, the dapple-gray.

  Bienor pointed out the town on the map, the rail line heading east, the abandoned spur running north through the gully. “Our prey is the Echidna: the most powerful locomotive in service on any line between here and the Abyssine, pulling the richest payload there is, as thinly guarded as you’ll ever find.”

  Money. Slaves to be sold. The scent of alcohol lingered on all of them. Five Legs’s face burned hot. The first centaur he’d met had deceived him, first thing from the gate.

  “Details,” said Phaeton. “What payload? What guard?”

  It was all there on the map in blood. But Five Legs saw they hadn’t had his education.

  “A luxury sleeper for the brass, one coach full of heavies, another for private passengers. Then near fifty freight cars loaded with the fruits of conquest: fresh slaves, gold, and who knows what, enough to sate even the appetites of New Ilium for a while. All arriving at the Gulch come nine by the dial. She’ll refill her boiler reserve, take on a passenger or two.” Bienor’s gaze hadn’t left Five Legs. “You’ll board the passenger car, posing as an envoy to Eurytus. Meantime, over at the gully mouth, another train is passing the switch—the Hyperion, bound for the Lethe Valley. Rest of us wait at the first bend out of sight. Six after nine, the Echidna gets underway. At the switch, there’s a three-minute gap between when the Hyperion goes by and the Echidna closes. That’s when you boys bust up the switch house. Change the eastbound track to send the Echidna north along the spur. Then meet me at the top of the gully, fast as your little legs can get up here.”

  “How come we get saddled with the wet work?” said Deimos.

  Bienor scowled. “Because I’m old and decrepit—I’d slow you down. Because I’m the one with the plan. And because I have this.” Out of the spire’s shadow he drew the long-rifle he’d been carrying in town: a thing of beauty, elegant, its lines so austere they might have been carved over millennia by wind and rain, like the buttes. He threw back the bolt, held the chamber to the rising light, blew away an invisible speck. “A Pyretus rifle. Made, so goes the lie, from the melted cannon and split timbers of the Scylla.”

  Five Legs had heard that lie over the range fire on the Labyrinth Ranch. The Scylla was the ship that had brought centaurs to these shores in exile, more than a century ago. Another rifle just like this one had been mounted in Eurytus’s study.

  “With this I can bring down a swallow at a mile. I can kill the fireman and the engineer before they sound the alarm. If we’re lucky, they won’t even see us coming.”

  “What if we’re not lucky?” said Phaeton.

  Bienor slid the bolt into place. “That’s why we got an inside man.”

  Five Legs took a breath. “I don’t even
have a weapon.” His bow and skinning knife he’d left behind; among centaurs they’d have been useless, absurd. Once or twice, long ago, he’d used a gun. It hadn’t occurred to him to try and barter for one with his scars.

  “You don’t get one,” said Bienor. “Any conductor on the New Ilium and Acheron won’t be as easy to cow as a country barber. Show him a gun, he’ll want a reason not to take it. Try to hide one, you risk fouling up the whole job. Of course, a true envoy to Eurytus—someone worthy of that brand—wouldn’t need a weapon.” He flashed again that easy grin, suggestive, forced. In his mouth, the glint of silver. “Just start some kind of ruckus, distract them a minute. Until the rest of us can get aboard. Then you leave behind whatever mess you made and come forward to the engine. You’ll do fine.”

  Alone on a train full of centaurs. It was suicide. But wasn’t that what he’d expected, what the elder had promised? He’d come chasing a conquering army. Even if he managed to survive, the elder said she’d hunt him to death. The sudden weakness in his knees was telling him to turn tail, go back to the mountains, find some other human tribe to hide in until the centaurs had enslaved them too, then another, until there was nothing left.

  A hard, dry crack made everyone start, and Five Legs saw Phaeton’s for the first time: a shotgun, sawed-off, shoulder-slung. Deimos had let the hammer of his silvered revolver snap home on an empty chamber.

  “Do that again,” growled Bienor, “I’ll break it over your head. Give it here.”

  Phaeton beat him to it—a gentle hand over the pistol, and Deimos let it go. It pained Five Legs to watch, their vocabulary of subtle touches, looks. He thought of Thin Crow, packed with a thousand others into a cattle car stinking of fear. The artistry in those delicate hands, wearing raw against a miner’s pick. His body flung atop an incinerator heap. His wisdom lost, reabsorbed into mountains, rivers, trees. Until centaurs came to take them too.

  “Where were we?” said Phaeton.

  “Old horse just killed the brakeman,” said Deimos. “So how are we supposed to stop the train?”

  “We don’t. Top of the gully, just before the grade comes level with this ledge, we’ll have a chance to leap aboard the tender. Incline will slow her up some. Easy. She’ll already be underway, crew already dead—we’ll be in control. Then we can focus on the real work. Killing.”

  Deimos snorted. “Three of us. Four, if we’re lucky. Two deserters, a pretty-boy foal, and a glue-factory waiting to happen. Against a train full of hoplites.”

  Bienor’s knuckles were white on the rifle stock. He looked ready to knock Deimos’s jaw from his face, but his voice remained coldly calm. “There’s two access points from the passenger cars: forward door from first class, and the roof. Just have to keep those covered and pick off anyone comes through.”

  “Yeah? For how long?”

  “Til the end of the line. No more than an hour.” On the map, Bienor traced the spur to its terminal point: a sheer-sided valley nested in canyons, the name stricken through in black ink. Epimethea.

  Five Legs remembered that name, too: the ruined mine where once a human uprising had come as close as any ever had to overthrowing the rule of Eurytus. “What happens then?”

  “That’s when the cavalry arrives. We stop the train, get off, get paid. In gold, no questions asked. But that’s not what we’re in this for, is it, boys? It’s not the money. It’s the chance to spit in Eurytus’s eye. To put a few who love him in the ground. He needs this train. His regime depends on slaves to keep us pacified, to keep us lazy. When he can’t provide that anymore, who knows what might happen? We pull this off, there’ll be more like us. Who knows but this won’t be the spark that sets off the revolution?”

  Sun broke from the horizon through a line of molten cloud. The shadow of the spire stretched beyond them, infinite. Bienor’s hat-brim shadowed his eyes.

  “Who knows,” repeated Deimos, his voice harsh. “Who’s this cavalry? How do we know we’re not getting paid to do the dirty work and then get shot?”

  Bienor slung the rifle behind him, slow and deliberate. “I’m afraid there’s no time for whining. You want to walk away, walk. This doesn’t work unless I have all of you. Otherwise, the opportunity passes us by.” He blew out the lantern, dropped a sheathed knife from his coat onto the map. “I’ll want all your symbols next to mine.”

  A rooster cackled, somewhere down in Prometheus Gulch.

  Phaeton took the knife.

  “I’m with you,” he said, though his eyes were on Deimos. “We can’t keep going on like we have. All we do is take risks, tempt fate, just to survive. That can’t last. Might as well get killed trying to accomplish something.”

  He gasped as the blade opened his forearm. His symbol was the adze.

  When it was done, he held out to Deimos first the revolver, then the knife. In the fraught silence that passed between them, Bienor averted his gaze. Five Legs, overwhelmed with jealousy, could not.

  Finally, Deimos’s hands met Phaeton’s. “To Hades with that,” he said. “You three can do what you want. Me—whatever I said in my cups notwithstanding—I’m in this for the money.” Tail twitching, he bent over the map.

  Then it was Five Legs’s turn. He felt empty: a suit of clothes, a skin that wasn’t his hung on a skeleton.

  A blood pact, signed with centaurs against centaurs. Stealing human beings from Eurytus on behalf of Nessus; not to set them free, but for what? To hold them hostage, ransom them for the rule of the New World—and when that didn’t work, slaughter them like cattle?

  There was some kind of flickering shadow in front of the sun, causing the world to shift in and out of darkness and glare, the indistinct edge between the two rushing across the stony landscape like a cloud. Like wings. It looked like wings.

  A gray shadow materialized on the sloping, jagged face of the gully wall below. It rode towards them, wings stretching broader, jumping and blurring as it crossed dry scrub and broken stone.

  “What in Hades is that?” said Deimos. From somewhere out of sight, he produced a second gun.

  “Buzzard,” muttered Bienor, backing away.

  It wasn’t.

  Seven years Five Legs had lived among the River Crow, as far from centaurs as anyone could reach, struggling to erase the horrible thing he had been, to make himself human. Seven years, he had looked to the rare sky beyond the peaks, waiting for a glimpse of just such a thing as this—proof that the ancestor spirits of his new clan, the gods of the New World and the human race, had forgiven him, welcomed him as something like their own.

  Now his tribe had been taken from him, his past forced like raw flesh down his gullet, and that omen had come: a reef of golden feathers streaked with rust and marred with gaps revealing ancient, pebbled skin, all surrounded by a corona of fire. A thunderbird.

  In that moment, he pitied it: removed from everything, looked upon for so much.

  There was a pair of staggered clicks as Deimos cocked his pistols.

  “Don’t, you idiot—” warned Bienor.

  Deimos opened fire into the heavens, the shrill bark of the repeaters echoing back from the spire, the gully walls, the hills. The thunderbird’s shadow slid up the stone face of the spire and was gone, leaving behind an echoing cry like the blast of a locomotive whistle. Five Legs closed the space between himself and Deimos in a stride, driving a shoulder into his chestnut flank. They fell together, grappling for the pistols. Five Legs spat curses, without thinking, in the human tongue. The corners of his eyes pricked hot; his vision blurred.

  “A spy,” said Deimos, his voice high and terrified. “A spy for Eurytus. It might have seen the map. It might have read our very symbols from the page.”

  Then Bienor was between them, knocking them apart with a swipe of the Pyretus rifle, clubbing Five Legs in his stomach with the stock. Five Legs rolled away, gasping. Phaeton gripped Deimos around the chest, helping him to get his hooves beneath him.

  Bienor leaned on the stock of the magnificent rifle
, hands shaking. “No such thing as thunderbirds. It can’t be. We wiped them out. The last one withered years ago in a cage at the Circus menagerie.”

  Five Legs might have believed that when he was twelve. If he’d taken the elder’s advice, become fully a centaur again, he might believe it now.

  The elder already wanted him dead. So would these three before long, if they didn’t already. Let Nessus and Eurytus get in line.

  He staggered back to the slab, slid the tip of the blade across his palm and traced a broken spiral on the map in blood. Only as he let the blade fall clattering onto the bloodied map did he recognize the fasces. His bitter laughter rose and was absorbed into the desert silence like the beat of wings.

  “Good.” Bienor brought the Pyretus rifle to his shoulder and swung it round. “Now get out of here, all of you. Whoever—whatever that monster was, it might come back. Anybody heard those shots, they might come looking. Go on. Got a hour to get in position.”

  The barrel fixed on Deimos. He wavered under its focus, turned, and fled north towards the top of the gully. Phaeton touched his hat, gave Five Legs a lingering, uncertain look, and followed his lover.

  The muzzle shook—barely, but enough that Five Legs dragged his eyes from the sky to grant it his full attention.

  “You listen to me,” Bienor growled. “I don’t know what you are—some kind of sorcerer—raised by mustangs—I don’t care. I see that bird again, I’ll kill it. Got your own reasons for putting your symbol next to mine? Know more than you’re telling? Fine. You do anything else to put me or my allies at risk, I’ll put lead in your eye. Spiral brand or no.”