Beneath Ceaseless Skies #97

by Tina Connolly

  “The switch!” Bienor shouted, uselessly. “The switch, you worthless crowbait, look!” He reloaded, swung the rifle towards the oncoming train. It was still out of range.

  The satyr was dead by now, had to be dead, but Deimos went on tenderizing his corpse, oblivious. Bienor aimed at the crown of his hat—but the shakes weren’t getting any better; he couldn’t risk a shot. He was watching a death-bout from the Circus stands, heavy money on the wrong side of the fight.

  Whiskey. Whiskey would steady him.

  He scrabbled for another shell.

  Then Deimos jerked round of his own accord. Phaeton had raised himself on an elbow, was struggling to stand. The satyr’s corpse slumped as Deimos rushed to help him. Phaeton waved him away, pointing at the switch house door.

  Bienor sat back from the sights, brushing dust and perspiration from his wrinkles. Enough of this. Enough. He yanked open the drawstring of his poke and dug inside. The rolled-up map. A twist of tobacco, another of pemmican. A deadwood carving of a face he’d done in sleepless hours before dawn.

  The bottle, smooth and temperate to the touch—he drew it out by the neck, held it up to the still-wingless sky. Three good gulps left, four if he conserved. He pried out the cork, releasing pent aroma in a low hummed note barely audible above the wind. He breathed. He took two greedy swallows. The endless complexity, the memories it evoked, the transformation that ensued in his body and mind—sometimes he wondered if Eurytus laid a personal sorcery on every bottle his cellars produced. He carefully replaced the cork, his thumb lingering over the raised shape of the spiral.

  Deimos drove a shoulder into the stone door at speed, without effect. He wheeled away, scowling up at the cowed face of Pallas. If the door was sealed by sorcery, they were finished.

  He got up to a canter and went at it again. This time, the door pivoted slightly, opening a lightless crack. Deimos took the wrench from the dead satyr’s fingers and used it to pry open the darkness enough to let it swallow him. A grayed old donkey emerged, braying; it snuffled at its master’s body. Bienor blinked back ridiculous sympathy. The signal-arrow spun ninety degrees, east to north, as inside, Deimos threw the switch. He emerged onto the switch house porch and rushed into Phaeton’s arms.

  Bienor resisted the urge to cut them both down where they stood.

  An arm, shoulder, and head emerged from an eye-shaped window in the Echidna’s cab: the engineer, gripping his striped cap against the wind, looking from the prone form of the satyr to the two masked centaurs, then aft to the fire and smoke pouring from the passenger car. Bienor understood his hesitation. Interrupting the schedule would mean his job—perhaps his life.

  Bienor put a bullet through his skull, saving him the trouble. His aim was perfect. The conductor’s upper body slumped over the window frame, the top of his head spilling off with his cap, gore fluttering away in the wind. Inside, his equine half didn’t accept the end so peacefully; writhing and kicking in its death throes, one of its hooves caught the human fireman square in the chest, and he crumpled.

  Bienor swore an oath of thanks to the long-defiled ghost of Artemis and, running his tongue around the inside of his mouth, to the neglected, nameless deity of distillation. Maybe Eurtyus could occupy that gap in the pantheon once he was dead.

  He stuffed the remaining shells into his bandolier, firmed his hat upon his pate, and rolled onto his hooves, joints creaking. He fired once into the air to make his point, shoved the near-empty bottle of bourbon into his poke, and ran for the rendezvous.

  * * *

  When he looked, they were thirty strides ahead of the train, Phaeton hunched over his injured side, Deimos half-turned at the waist, goading him on. The Echidna was gaining.

  He reached the jump point, the ledge that paralleled the tracks, the rails vibrating only a yard or two below along the gully slope. Easy.

  Something moved on the roof of the train, an angular shape obscured among mingling smoke and steam. A brakeman, most likely. Five Legs, making his way to the engine. Only it hadn’t looked like a centaur. Bienor raised the rifle, tracking. The equilibrium the drink had imparted wouldn’t last; two swallows were barely enough to wake him in the morning. Might as well take advantage.

  A twitch in the wind lifted the smoke for a span of heartbeats, and he glimpsed it again: something long, curved, and slashing, there and gone again before he could adjust his aim. The headless body of a centaur toppled out of the smoke and slammed into the catwalk railing, tearing it free from the side of the car with the screech of metal.

  A hooked beak, long and sharp enough to shear a head from a spine.

  He’d seen the last thunderbird die; he’d been there in the stands to watch its broken, golden body dragged away into the bowels of the Circus to be minced into slop for hogs and minotaurs. It hadn’t frightened him then—but that had been the point. The centaurs’ gods were dead. How could they permit those of the humans a different fate?

  He strained his eyes, sweeping the clouded roof and the sky above the gully walls.

  Then Deimos crested the lip of the gully, hooves eroding the dry earth in clods, dragging Phaeton behind him. “Let’s go, old horse, come on!”

  They galloped, raising red dust in their wake, as the snarling iron snout, curled lip, and scornful eye of the Echidna drew up beside them. Bienor recognized those features—they were stretched, distorted, but there was no mistaking that jaw, the arrogant sweep of the brow. The engine rolled past, its mask wearing a smooth disdain that promised the New World’s last and only god, Eurytus, knew their plan too well, knew Nessus’s mutinous intent, and couldn’t be bothered to care.

  “Go on,” gasped Phaeton, faltering. “Jump—I’ll follow.” A purple-black, blood-blistered wound covered his side where the switchmaster’s wrench had crushed his ribs, perhaps a lung. He was a centaur; he could survive it, given rest and time. He wouldn’t get either.

  The coal-car platform came level with the ledge. Bienor put on a burst of speed, twisted, and leapt. He cleared the railing. His shoulder and hip collided with the coal-car and he slid to the platform’s latticed floor, cradling the rifle and the precious bourbon in his poke.

  Deimos performed with the grace of youth, landing easily on his hooves. Gripping the rail, he reached across the gap to Phaeton, who galloped doggedly, barely keeping pace, a grimace of pain ill-concealed by the slipping handkerchief.

  A hundred strides ahead, the ledge veered away from the track. Bienor shouted warning over the apocalypse-drumbeat of pistons.

  As Phaeton angled his body, gathering his weight for the leap, an eroded chunk of sandstone disintegrated beneath him. His foreleg twisted at an unnatural angle. His stride broke, and what color remained in his face drained away. In the instant before he plunged into the gap between iron and rock, Bienor saw in his eyes what he’d seen in Nessus’s before the poison flower pulled them closed. He’d seen it on his own face too often to forget, looking up at oblivion out of the bottom of a glass.

  Phaeton fell, dragged down by inevitability. The Echidna plowed on.

  Again the lingering detachment of drink allowed him to act, to move past consequences to what must be done. Bienor pushed past Deimos to the edge of the platform. He leaned out over the rushing ground, watching as the rolling earth whisked Phaeton away. He raised the rifle, steadied it, and fired.

  At the strangled shriek of rage and disbelief, Bienor twisted smoothly and caught Deimos by the throat coming at him with closed fists. “A broken pastern-bone. The way he collapsed—you know it as well as I. He would have died regardless, alone. I lessened his pain.”

  Deimos struck at him, but listlessly, without strength. Hot tears seeped over Bienor’s hand, searing. Deimos pulled away, gripped the railing, averting his face. “You should have let me do it.”

  Bienor resisted the urge to clutch the poor idiot’s head to his chest.

  His longing for Gryneus had mellowed, like the rotgut from his old shotgun distillery rig would have mellowed if onl
y he could’ve made it last. But he remembered well what grief had been like while it was young: helplessness, all-devouring, enervating as a slave-car’s worth of chain. Bienor wanted him here even now: to lean on, to trust, to take the place of this stupid colt, to wield the Pyretus rifle that had once been his and fight off the army, the grief, and the ending that were coming.

  But there wasn’t time for wanting or for grief.

  He drew out the bottle of Labyrinth Bourbon, flung away the cork into the rushing air and smoke. “Drink this,” he said. “It’s good.”

  * * *

  He found the coal-cart overturned in the engine-house doorway. He righted it, salvaging what coal he could, and shoved past the bodies of the fireman and engineer to feed the furnace. The Echidna had climbed free of the gully. On either side of the cab, desert hills fell away into twisted juniper and scrub. He leaned out into the wind. In the distance ahead, blood-red canyonlands opened like the convolutions of a maze. Epimethea lay somewhere within.

  Bienor cleaned splattered blood from the gauges, wiping his hands on the engineer’s shirt. He slung the dead fireman across his back, surprised as always by the airy lightness of human flesh, and carried him out to the rear of the engine where he tossed him into the gap between the locomotive and the coal-car. Then he spat in his palms, hardened the muscles of his spine, gripped the engineer’s corpse by the hocks and wrestled it too across the floor and into the gap. The iron wheels of the Echidna crunched the bones of slave and centaur without so much as a stutter.

  Buzzards gathered in the train’s wake, summoned by their god, the thunderbird, or else merely scenting a feast.

  He found Deimos where he’d left him, swallowing, blinking red eyes clear of blur. The bottle was empty. “It still hurts,” he said.

  A few swallows were never enough.

  The door to the forward passenger car clattered open, emitting a billow of smoke and a centaur, stooped and coughing, in the short, leather-braced tunic of a hoplite. He was young, soot-stained, parts of his auburn mane singed away. His eyes widened, and he reached for an empty holster at his withers. Smoothly, Bienor reloaded the Pyretus rifle and shot him in the face. No shakes. Not yet. But they were coming. He found a craftsman’s quiet pleasure in ejecting the spent, smoking shell.

  There was comfort to be had in killing: the ageless catharsis of violence. Revenge could be misdirected with ease against the pawns of Eurytus, when the real guilt lay within.

  He took the empty bottle from Deimos’s dangling grasp, downed the trickle that remained. He slammed the heel against the railing, handed back the jagged crown. He pulled Deimos to him, the coarse hairs of his hide pricking as their flanks brushed together. “Fight dirty. The eyes or the throat. A centaur’s not as easy to kill as a satyr—or a human. You hold the door to the passenger car, I’ll cover the roof.”

  Deimos’s knuckles tightened on the bottle’s neck. He nodded, muscle standing out against his jaw, then drew a pistol and advanced along the coal-car.

  No sign of Five Legs. Likely he was dead.

  A shattering scream from the rooftops; another body tumbling hooves over head. A baleful eye glaring out of the smoke, and Bienor could no longer deny it: something was there, neither centaur nor human. As he hunkered down against the corner of the coal-car, he struggled to accept it. Whether a ghost, a god, or the malevolent sorcerous eye of Eurytus, it was there. Real. The thunderbird.

  An hour to Epimethea.

  * * *

  (Concluded in Pt. II, in BCS #98)

  Copyright © 2012 Michael J. DeLuca

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Michael J. DeLuca brews beer, bakes bread, hugs trees, and curates a precolombian thought broadcast out of the back of his head. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005, belongs to the Homeless Moon writers’ cabal, volunteers at Small Beer Press, and operates Weightless Books, an indie ebook store. Look for more of his short fiction upcoming in Jabberwocky, Bibliotheca Fantastica, and Live Free or Never Die. Read his blog at www.michaeljdeluca.com/.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  COVER ART

  “Knight’s Journey,” by Raphael Lacoste

  Raphael Lacoste is a Senior Art Director on videogames and cinematics. He was the Art Director at Ubisoft on such titles as Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed. Raphael stepped away from the game industry to work as a Matte Painter and Senior Concept Artist on such feature films as: Terminator: Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Repo Men. Raphael now works as a Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts and now Ubisoft. His artwork “Chinese Steampunk Village” was the cover art for BCS in winter 2010. View his gallery at www.raphael-lacoste.com..

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

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