Beneath Ceaseless Skies #97

by Tina Connolly

The skies were empty by the time he looked again. But he’d seen it. He’d seen it. Hadn’t he?

  V.

  Five Legs circled through the desert to be seen coming into town from the south. A white plume hung like a thunderhead on the west horizon, heralding Echidna.

  Yesterday, the Grecian facades lining the main street had awed him; today, they were slapped together out of plywood, whitewashed, and propped against hovels they barely concealed. Aside from the station house, the only structures of any permanence in Prometheus Gulch were the empty slave kennels. The barber let off stropping a razor on his porch to bow greeting. The dust-faced dial on the station house roof gave Five Legs ten minutes.

  Teeth clenched, he shouldered his way into the bar. As before, he didn’t have to speak: the bartender slapped down a sloshing cylinder of liquor the color of straw, then retreated behind a pillar. Five Legs gazed into it, working up the effort.

  The last time he’d drunk whiskey—the only time—had been with Amycus, an old soldier shattered by a grief he wouldn’t share, relegated to herding minotaurs and spinning yarns on the Labyrinth Ranch. Amycus prescribed liquor for every affliction, a cure-all: proof against the fear of death, the hazard of long life, and the waiting in between. Drinking, he said, was a mistake, and mistakes were the only way to learn anything.

  He was killed not long after that, brawling in the stands at the Circus: a meaningless, arbitrary death, a purposeless sacrifice, achieving nothing. And Five Legs had abandoned Amycus’s monstrous flock and headed west until the humans found him.

  He drained the glass. His eyes watered, but he kept himself from coughing.

  Announcing its presence with a tortured whistle-scream, the Echidna arrived at the platform. Billows of white steam, vented from her straining brakes, beckoned Five Legs out the bar’s swinging doors.

  The locomotive was a hulk of dead-black iron, artfully sculpted to evoke a monstrous leering head, both serpentine and simian: a brooding, heavy brow, and fanged jaws parted to swallow the track, sorcery crackling in its throat. The cars drawn behind it stretched west out of sight, scuffed catwalks glinting. Curtains were drawn in the passenger windows. Between gaps in the slats of the slave cars, sallow human faces shone, then faded, like the faces of the dead.

  The thin crowd on the platform wrung each other’s hands and tittered; they were here not to board but to gawk, like the barber and his slaves. The Circus crowds were the same, Five Legs remembered—in a culture of submission, the greatest thrill came from vicarious fear. Only one centaur stood at the ramp: a giant muscled black, coat groomed to a viscous sheen, surrendering a pristine carbine into the conductor’s waiting hands. Bolstered by the flimsy confidence of drink, Five Legs took a place behind him.

  “Where you bound?” asked the conductor, a centaur in a long, brass-buttoned coat and matching cap.

  “The Labyrinth Ranch,” Five Legs said, not even looking at the ticket.

  Murmurs spread across the platform. He felt eyes upon his back and on the brand. The black flashed him a voracious grin, then stepped aboard.

  The carbine went into a heavy safe just aft of the door, the key into the conductor’s coat. So he wouldn’t need to worry about guns—except the conductor’s, a snub revolver peeking from the shoulder-holster under his arm.

  As Five Legs climbed the tarred ramp, his shadow fell over the platform’s edge and beyond onto gravel and dust. Far down the track, a hand reached out between the slats of a slave car, gestured defiance, then was withdrawn.

  His false arrogance broke. There were people he cared about in those cars, people he loved, crammed in suffocating darkness like fine cigars; valuables to be preserved. They were hurt and terrified, and he was betraying them. He wasn’t a centaur. He slipped a hand beneath his shirt-tails, down his stomach to the place where skin gave way to hide.

  The conductor glanced at his pocketwatch, cleared his throat. The trains of the New Ilium and Acheron line—driven by sorcery—were always on time.

  Letting his hat-brim shield his panic, Five Legs ducked onto the train.

  The steward was a human boy, impeccably dressed in servant’s livery but naked from the waist. Five Legs itched to slap his downy cheek and drag him by those starched lapels down the corridor to the end of the car, to show him what his people were suffering while he serviced the elite. Instead, he rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder and let himself be led.

  The compartment was spacious, the paneling dark wood the color of human skin, leering sileni carved at the corners. No brake cables to be seen. Eurytus’s trains were on time, on pain—and hazard—of death. A divan styled after a sella curulis was fixed to the wall beneath the window; another by the door. The low table between them had been set for a sumptuous breakfast.

  A snatch of throaty song from the corridor preceded the black Five Legs had met on the platform, his supple bulk filling the doorway frame to frame. “You,” he said, licking his lips. “What luck—there are things I would enjoy... discussing with you.” He threw himself down on the couch by the window, kicking his hooves playfully like a foal in fresh grass. Stiffly, Five Legs took the seat across from him.

  Satisfied with his display of virility, the black sat up and leaned across the table, nodding to the spiral brand. “Eurytus. You must know him—tell me about him.”

  Out the window were the hills and the sandstone spire where Bienor lay in wait. That spire had stood before the first centaur’s hoof had broken the sand of the Abyssine’s shores; it would stand when the spilled blood of humans and centaurs had turned this desert green.

  The train rocked gently, rattling the silver—were they loading the baggage? Something tapped at the roof—a monstrous beak, he imagined, probing the Echidna’s iron skin for a place it might get at the meat. The compartment darkened as an immense wing, impossibly large, brushed across the window: burnt-golden, textured like the forests of the sacred mountain, gapped with the scars of millennia. Five Legs flinched away, fearing, knowing it had come for him.

  The black waited, rapt, for Five Legs’s answer. If he had noticed any of this, he didn’t acknowledge it. What answer could he expect? He was huge, imposing, barely older than Five Legs himself.

  Five Legs studied his scarred knuckles, his palms, reminding himself what they’d been capable of when he was twelve; a scrawny, underage ranch hand still burning with pain from the brand, and with hate, struggling to hold his own against centaurs twice his age. He knew how to fight dirty. To talk dirty. Seven years among humans hadn’t erased that, much as he wished it. Just buried it deep.

  He closed his eyes and dug it up again. “He’s... passionate. Insatiable. A brilliant judge of character and a better liar. An incorrigible, discriminating aesthete, in everything from violence to cuisine. A killer, remorseless. His ambition to power brooks no obstacle, yet he’s incapable of turning down a challenge, and he demands the same of all in his circle. And his cunning... but you’ve heard of that. You look like him, a little.”

  The black flushed with unwarranted pleasure. He stretched a smoothly-muscled arm across the silverware and linen cloth, a beckoning hand, the insinuation clear.

  Five Legs picked a cocktail fork from his place setting. He toyed with it, rolling it between his fingers, wondering if Eurytus might have sired this fool. The New World was peppered with bastards in the path of his conquests—no doubt more of his issue were already gestating aboard the slave cars of the Echidna. Five Legs himself had been lucky; acknowledged, at least insofar as it got him a place on the Labyrinth Ranch. “Whose is that?” he asked, feigning innocence, indicating the theta inscribed in the black’s sculpted bicep, so new as to still be red with scabs.

  “Nessus,” said the black, his chest swelling. “I go now to meet with Eurytus on his behalf. A place is reserved for me in Eurytus’s own box at the Circus of King Minos’s Masque.”

  Amycus had been slaughtered at just such a place. Five Legs shoved down the pity that welled up for this black’s absurd innocence
, which must have been what prompted Nessus to

  put him on this train to die. The whole situation warranted shame, not pity: on behalf of his race and for what he was about to do. Instead, Five Legs felt the sickening urge to laugh.

  The conductor appeared in the doorway, ticket-punch in hand. Once he’d returned their tickets, he moved on down the corridor, his iron tread muffled but distinct. From outside came a clang and a rattle as the ramp was raised; the brakes disengaged with a hiss. They were getting underway.

  Five Legs rose with a suggestive flick of his trimmed tail, the cocktail fork concealed against his wrist. He leaned out into the aisle and shouted for drink, trying not to smile at the thought of the havoc he would wreak with such a tiny implement of decadence. Nessus might appreciate the humor; the black would not. It was easy, thinking like a centaur. That was the danger of it.

  The steward boy came from the forward compartment, pushing a cart laden with tobacco, candy, and liquor. Five Legs thrust aside the offered wine list; reaching past the boy, he lifted a pearl-green gallon of apsinth, then slid the compartment door closed.

  He saluted the black with the jug, pulled the cork free, and raised it to his lips.

  The anise-bitterness of wormwood constricted his throat; tears blurred his vision. He slammed down the jug and leaned over the table, gasping. The black stood and came around to thump him on the back. Five Legs took the offered hand, gripping tight, drawing the black close across the divan. “Let me give you some advice,” he said, when the burning subsided enough to let him speak. His lips were hot and buzzing with the alcohol, too near the black’s own. “When you meet Eurytus, don’t believe a word he says.”

  With a backhanded stab of the cocktail fork, he punctured the black’s throat at the base of the jaw—the wound would gout blood but not deprive him of the breath required to scream—then yanked the fork out again and plunged it through the wrist, severing the vein, down between the bones of the arm and into the divan. Smirking, he gave it a twist.

  The black screamed and writhed, knocking the jug awry, spilling apsinth everywhere. Five Legs contorted out from under him and helped it along, soaking the walls, the linen tablecloth, the carpet. Fumes filled the compartment. Coughing, he cracked open the compartment door.

  “Help!” shouted Five Legs. “There’s been an accident!” The steward boy stood in the corridor, transfixed. The car lurched as the Echidna’s piston limbs began to pump in earnest; the boy pitched into Five Legs’s chest.

  “Matches,” breathed Five Legs, catching him by his pristine lapels, staining them with red. He pawed a box of phosphors from the boy’s breast pocket, then thrust him up the aisle into the arms of the conductor, who approached with revolver in hand.

  A sharp kick to the liquor cart smashed open half a dozen bottles. The conductor gripped his arm.

  Five Legs drove a whiskey bottle’s jagged heel into the bridge of the conductor’s nose. With the wet crunch of cartilage, his upper body went limp, depositing the revolver into Five Legs’s waiting hand. He struck a match to life on the conductor’s brass badge, shoved it inside the box, then dropped the resulting flare of blinding-white into the fuming puddle on the floor. Cobalt and orange flames singed the hairs off his fetlocks and crawled up the walls to lick at the ceiling. The varnish on the carven sileni began to peel. As he groped in the conductor’s coat for the key to the safe, he hoped insanely that the thunderbird on the roof had found a different perch.

  The door to the forward car slammed open just as his fingers found the key.

  He didn’t wait to see how many hoplites poured through or whose symbol they wore branded on their hides. He’d never make it to the engine that way. Not that he meant to—the slaves were in the other direction. Let Bienor and his dupes fend for themselves.

  Five Legs flung the key out an open window, swept the shrieking steward boy from his feet, tucked him under one arm and went aft.

  Through the windows, Prometheus Gulch slid away into the desert.

  VI.

  Stretched atop the red ledge cold with morning, Bienor settled the barrel of the Pyretus rifle atop the piled folds of his coat and spent a moment marshaling his shaking hands to adjust the sights for the range and drop. Then he tipped his hat high on his brow and pressed his cheek to the stock’s worn-smooth mesquite.

  Bright plumes from the Hyperion’s stacks hung low over the hills beneath a sky blissfully empty of wings. Freight cars crawled past the switch house with a river’s ceaseless rhythm. The switchmaster, a satyr in striped coveralls, stood on the embankment working an enormous wrench in the gearbox below the signal Bienor had gently sabotaged on his way out of town.

  Leaving the rifle’s chamber empty, he laid his sights on the center of the switchmaster’s spine, slid his finger through the trigger-well, and let out a long breath. When the hammer clicked home, the sight pin jerked up and to the left, out from between the satyr’s shoulder-blades and past his neck. Useless buggering drunk.

  Deimos and Phaeton waited in the gully’s shadow, collars turned up, handkerchiefs knotted loose about their throats, huddled together against the chill so that the two of them appeared a single centaur, two-headed. They passed a hand-roll back and forth, blowing smoke over their shoulders up the gully in an echo of the train. Their closeness dragged Bienor dangerously along the warm curving grain of the rifle’s stock, towards the memory of Gryneus’s touch.

  Gryneus the satirist, the hedonist, the pragmatist. The legendary outlaw; hands so steady he could feed a kestrel from his palm, such a hothead he’d killed centaurs for so much as letting slip his name. The Pyretus rifle had been his: taken from a mass grave in the badlands below Acoma in the aftermath of the siege. When the time came for him to go into the ground, when the Pyretus rifle was all that remained of him, Bienor couldn’t bear to let him keep it.

  The half-pint of Labyrinth bourbon called to him from the bottom of his poke. A belt of it would go down smooth, take the edge off the chill, the jitters, the double-edged fasces knife of memory.

  But he was sober now, dead sober, for the first time since he’d put his symbol next to Nessus’s in blood. If he hadn’t been so desperate to dull his wits, afraid to wallow in memory, he might not have been so ready to assign Deimos and Phaeton the future he and Gryneus had desired. He might not have accepted so easily an exiled plaything of Eurytus stumbling out of the desert just in time to contribute to his plans. If he’d been sober, maybe he’d have been doing this alone, going to his death. A glue factory waiting to happen.

  Maybe that would be better.

  The Hyperion’s last car coasted away along the southward track to New Tyre. The satyr reset the signal, wiped hands on his coveralls, and climbed the embankment towards the switch house, looking over his shoulder to the Echidna with a frown. Phaeton passed the cigarette to Deimos, pulling the scattergun off his shoulder. Deimos dragged, then flicked it away, snorting smoke like a minotaur. Raising their handkerchiefs to mask their faces, they stepped out from the gully’s shadow.

  The switch house was a fortress, carved from the same stone as the hills. The caryatid columns flanking its stone portico depicted a Pallas not warlike or wise but downtrodden, shoulders bowed beneath her burden, chained to the pedestal on which she stood. A bust of Eurytus was carved below the cornice. Phaeton shot off its face.

  Laughter shook their shoulders as they stepped between the switchmaster and the door. His head barely reached Deimos’s withers. All he had was the wrench. Beneath the grease stains and the grizzled beard, his face was passive. Resigned. The poor old billy-goat. No doubt he’d toiled for the railroad all his life. He hadn’t asked for this. But he was ready to defend what was his.

  The satyr cocked the wrench over one shoulder, revealing a row of symbols burned into the underside. The clear sky seemed to darken. The rails of the Epimethea spur, long-disused, crackled with traces of power.

  Deimos and Phaeton kept coming. Why should they stop? They wouldn’t know sorcery fr
om the shakes.

  Bienor threw open the bolt of the Pyretus rifle. No use shouting—they’d never hear him from up here. His shaking fingers knocked awry the row of shells he’d arranged across the ledge; he snatched one up, shoved it into the chamber, snapped it home. He centered his sight on the satyr’s profile, just behind the ear. Merciful. Quick. Better than he meant to offer most of those he killed today.

  He breathed, squeezed the trigger. The rifle jerked, low and to the left this time. Stupid, piss-sipping old swayback. The bullet still ought to have ripped through the switchmaster’s spine; instead it deflected off the wrench as though it were a pebble.

  Bending low upon his goatish hocks, the switchmaster launched himself at Phaeton.

  Time slowed. The satyr’s teeth were yellowed, worn.

  Phaeton—the idiot—let loose with just one barrel. He hadn’t reloaded, had no idea what was coming at him. For all his show of wisdom, he’d no better respect for age than Deimos. Guilt stabbed at Bienor, numbing, as he saw what would come. He should have prepared them. There hadn’t been time.

  Blood burst from a dozen holes in the satyr’s face and chest, staining his beard with red—but he didn’t stop coming. The wrench shivered, pulsed and doubled in size; its enormous, toothed head whipped around, crashing into Phaeton’s flank and through his ribs, knocking him sideways off his hooves into the dust.

  The switchmaster, flecks of skull exposed beneath his cheeks, turned to Deimos, swinging the wrench on the backhand.

  Howling, Deimos opened fire with both his guns. The satyr rocked back against the switch house door as the hammer-blows of bullets struck—but the damage was done. Deimos’s face was flushed, his eyes contorted. Bienor knew what he was feeling, much as he wished he could forget. Deimos flung himself upon the satyr, striking viciously with hooves and the butts of empty guns. Phaeton lay unmoving.

  The Echidna roared into view around the side of a hill, snorting steam, its body streaked in orange ribbons of firelit smoke spilling from the passenger car windows. Deimos didn’t even look around.