by R A Fisher
The top deck was quiet compared to when she’d first found herself aboard the Heaven’s Compass. She supposed that most of the crew were below, looking for her. Still, she needed to avoid a handful of groups bustling about as she made her way to a lifeboat. There were only four—two on the fore and two on the aft, attached with a series of pullies that would swing them out and drop them into the water with the pull of a lever. They were large, but with a ship that size, most of the crew was left without a way off. The idea saddened her. She thought of the boy again and forced the image away.
Almost out of time. She sprinted across the deck, to the port lifeboat, and dove in, pulling the lever as she did so. Shouts erupted across the deck, footfalls charging toward her, but she was beyond caring as the pullies lifted the little boat up and out over the rail.
A blast of heat slammed into her, so intense she felt her eyelashes burn away as the force of the explosion tossed the raft away from the Heaven’s Compass like a discarded toy. Blue and white flame, a low sky made of fire, rolled above her and she and the little boat were falling, falling, toward the sea below. Searing pain, infinitely more intense than that in her chest, roiled up from her hand.
“My hand is burning,” she said to the voice in her head, her own voice distant and calm as she stared at the skeleton of light and heat her left hand had become.
A tremendous impact threw her from the boat. Fire rained down all around her. The water slowed the flames engulfing her hand but didn’t extinguish them.
She swam back to the lifeboat and pulled herself half-aboard with her right arm when there was another explosion, and something heavy and dull struck her on the back of her head, and the fire and pain and water fell away.
21
The Beach
Syrina woke to heat and light and gentle bobbing that made her temples and hand pound in time with it. Her mouth was dry. She turned her head and squinted into the sky, looking for the sun. There it was, blazing high in the east. It was a few hours before noon. Her stomach lurched when she remembered, and she forced her gaze down to her hand. The flesh whirled and warped under the tattoos, which seemed to be trying to tie themselves back together again. Her middle and index finger were gone. The naphtha had reduced them to a charred lump of skin and bone. The knot in her stomach tightened and she dry-heaved, which shot new darts of agony through her chest.
Beneath the sun spread the shore—a strip of white sand, maybe a span away, burning just as bright. She must’ve rowed for hours to get to the coast, but she could remember none of it. She felt around the puncture wound in her chest. It was healing, but she was thinking about rowing for hours and not remembering, and the mangled stump that had been her left hand. Over all of it, lingered the frightened face of a boy with a knife in his chest.
We did what needed to be done. Just like always.
We.
She wondered whether it was her rowing, and what else the voice could do.
Whatever she was, she wasn’t a Kalis anymore. She was fine with that. Or at least, she’d come to terms with it. What scared her now was the thought that the thing inside her head still was.
The sea ebbed low enough to wade, even as far out as she was, and she could feel the current tugging against her thighs as the tide followed the Eye west. She let it take the lifeboat away, and by the time she collapsed onto the beach, the raft had disappeared in the expanse of cobalt water and pale blue sky.
After a few minutes of lying in the sand, she dragged herself up the wide, steep, beach to the bushes lining the high tideline another span in. Then she slept again.
It was night, but other than that her surroundings were the same. However the voice had managed to row for countless spans while she’d been unconscious, it hadn’t done anything like it again. Over the scrubby hills to the east, the waning Eye loomed.
She headed south, following the coast. She guessed she was somewhere near the middle of the barren northern half of the Ristro Peninsula, which meant she was about a year from the city of Chamælivishi if she needed to walk the whole way.
For nine days, she hiked south through the hills along the tideline, without another soul in sight. She devoured a few unfortunate rodents and birds along the way, which she caught with her hands and ate raw. There was no fresh water, even with all the humidity, so all she had to drink was their blood. It was feral and stomach churning. Nine days shouldn’t be a big deal for her without resorting to raw squirrels, but after all the healing, she was ravenous, and as it was, small animals weren’t enough. More than a week after the Heaven’s Compass and she still couldn’t catch her breath. She needed to stop and rest every few hours, and her ribs ached. The tattoos had knitted over her gnarled hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it. Absent fingers throbbed.
The tenth day was an Eye Night. The sun was only three hands above the eastern hills, which could almost be considered mountains this far south, when the black mound of the Eye caught up to it, a sharp circle of gloom twenty times its size. Everything went dark and the stars flared, but they, too, were devoured.
She thought about stopping, not so much because it was dark, but because Eye Night was a time for festivals or introspection or whatever, and she had no idea what sort of customs revolved around an eclipse in Ristro. Every culture on Eris had an Eye Night tradition except for Fom, where they were just civic holidays and barely even noticed through the perpetual clouds. If Syrina came across anyone today, she wouldn’t know how to act, whatever disguise she might scrape up.
On the other hand, how much was she going to blend in on a normal day? She didn’t even speak Ristroan beyond a few words and phrases she’d picked up on the Corsair ships.
There’s no food out here. If you stop now, we’re not getting up again. Every day you’re weaker.
Part of Syrina wanted to just die and get it over with so she wouldn’t give the voice the satisfaction. But instead, she dragged herself along in the dark and tried to think about something else.
As she trudged on, a gigantic fire flared somewhere to the southeast, just over the ridgeline. With it came the scent of roasted vegetables. Yellow light twinkled through the scrub and cast long wriggling shadows across the sea, which had chased the Eye up to lap at the rocky tideline.
With the tiniest modicum of caution left in her, Syrina scrambled up the hill. It was higher than it had looked from the beach, and it took an hour to get to the top since she needed to stop and catch her breath every few minutes. As she clambered through prickly, leafy bushes, she imagined what sort of rite to the Eye might be taking place. She wasn’t naive enough to picture burning virgins, but anything with a fire that big was bound to be interesting.
It wasn’t interesting. At least not in the sense she’d thought it would be. It was a shipyard, and a military one at that. The fire wasn’t a bonfire, but an enormous open smelter they were using to forge the copper plates that covered Corsair airships.
The skeleton of a sleek dirigible a little bigger than the one she’d gotten halfway there on, sat at the end of worn bronze rails that glinted in the firelight. Her mind touched on the question of slavery or indentured servitude. The Corsairs had captured enough N’naradin and Skald crews to build a nation of slaves, but she discarded the idea. She couldn’t understand much Ristroan, but the relationships she saw below weren’t those of masters and serfs. They worked together, liked each other, probably went out drinking together. They were like everyone else on Eris, except they needed to work on Eye Night.
To be fair, so did she.
She scrabbled down the hill, using the thorny shrubs to slow her descent, wincing as they tore at her maimed hand. She hoped the rain of dirt and pebbles wouldn’t draw undue attention, but she needn’t have worried. The shipyard was well lit, but it was dark where she landed, and too noisy for anyone to hear her.
After finding the food stores and gorging herself on sweet dried fruit and some sort of pickled fish that tasted a lot better than it smelled, she dec
ided there was no point in rushing into things, so she settled down to watch.
For three weeks, she observed and listened and healed, picking up a little of the language and culture so she wouldn’t look like an idiot. Or if an idiot, at least a believable one. Her chest and hip mended, and the tattoos finished re-growing over the flesh of her hand, but they stopped at the charred roots of her two missing fingers, which still ached in their absence.
As usual, there was nothing to be done about it. She pilfered some wax and other supplies she could use to cover her face and what was left of her hands, wondering what she could do about hair.
The whole time, she hoped the voice would try to goad her into doing something rash so she could argue and resist whatever it suggested, but it let her do her job without saying a word.
22
Ristro
Tævarnavasi brought his pair of speckled camels to a halt alongside the tiny frantic woman standing in the dust between the road and the scrub, but she continued to wave her arms at him like she thought he wasn’t going to stop. She was tanned and sturdy-looking. Her baldness, which he’d first attributed to an inscrutable fashion choice, upon closer inspection looked like her hair had been burned off. Her scalp was red and tender, and her left hand was scorched deformed.
“You need help?” He looked down at her from the lopsided cart as she squinted up at him.
Her eyes were a penetrating green under the slits of the lids. A foreigner, he realized with a start. She stopped flapping her arms, but she still held them above her head. One shielded her eyes against the glare of the mid-morning sun, while the mangled one hovered off to the side as if she’d forgotten it was there.
“Fire shipyard at.” Her Ristroan was almost unintelligible, and Tævarnavasi needed to think a second before he could sort out what she was saying.
“Where are you from?” He felt an itch of suspicion.
It wasn’t unusual to hire foreigners in the domestic shipyards, but there were only airship yards this far north.
“Valez’Mui.”
“Well, come on up here. You can tell me what happened, on the way to Vormisæn.”
She took his hand with her good one and let him help her clamber into the empty seat beside him. Her hand was small and clammy, but her grip was iron. The grip of a laborer. He’d never met anyone from the desert before, but he’d heard they were strong. He supposed they’d have to be.
“Need go Chamælivishi.” She settled beside him,
The camels lurched forward, grunting.
That gave him pause. “You’d better have some extra time on your hands, then. It’s three months by land, at least. Depending on the weather and if you can find someone to give you a ride. I can get you as far as Vormisæn, anyway. From there, you can attach yourself to a caravan going south, or maybe find an airship to take you if you’re lucky, rich, and in a hurry. What’s your business down there, if I can ask?”
“Need Astrologer see about fire. Someone set.”
Tævarnavasi frowned and lit a stick of yellow magarisi petals rolled in thin paper with a flint he pulled from the breast of his worn shirt.
“How long you been in Ristro?” he asked.
“Not long. Three weeks. Then fire set.”
“Well.” Tævarnavasi stifled a cough around the magarisi stick. “An Astrologer isn’t going to see you, whichever prefecture you’re in. As I said, I can get you to Vormisæn. From there, you can see for yourself.” He paused. “The fire was set?”
“Astrologer in Vor-me-seyyn?”
“Aye, it’s the seat of the northern prefectures.”
She seemed to think about that for a while. “I know who burned it. Astrologer sees me.”
Tævarnavasi shrugged, scratched his bulging belly, and took a long drag from the smoking herbs. He held it a moment and exhaled tangy gray smoke through his nose.
“Well,” he said, “there are a lot of other people you need to tell first. He’s got twenty people whose job it is to tell him things. He probably already knows about the fire, anyway. Someone tells someone else, who tells someone else, who tells him if they think he needs to know about it. Doesn’t it work like that in Valez’Mui?”
It was her turn to shrug, and the only sound for a while was the wheezing of the camels and the crunch of their hooves on the gravel road, and the creaking of the cartwheels on their wooden axle. The sun grew higher, and the air was heavy and still. Sweat poured off Tævarnavasi’s forehead and pooled in the small of his back. The woman didn’t seem bothered by the denseness of the air or the growing heat. But then, she was from the desert.
He waited for her to offer more information or even her name, but she didn’t seem to have the slimmest of manners. Foreigners weren’t unpleasant. Just inscrutable.
“What’s your name?” he finally asked, as he nodded a greeting to a passing camel driver heading north.
“Ser’ai. Mends. Father was ambassador from Fom,” she added when Tævarnavasi arched his eyebrows at the name.
“I see. So you’re well-traveled?”
She shrugged again. “Not much. My father left. I was young. Trained as shipwright, after mother. Tired of desert. Petitioned to come here.”
“You got the job young.”
She chuckled. “Young to you. Years. Waiting in Valez’Mui.”
They lapsed into another silence, not as uncomfortable as the first one. He wondered and tsk’d the camels and looked at her out of the corner of his eye, but she was looking off toward the hills on the horizon, cradling her injured hand, lost in thought.
They progressed from the scrubby humid hills into forested humid hills, alive with broad-leaved trees and small skittering creatures. Mountains loomed further to the east, where they could be glimpsed through breaks in the flora. Tævarnavasi was blind to his surroundings, like anyone who’s seen the same thing for most of their lives. But Ser’ai gaped around, wide-eyed, then closed her mouth and tried to appear stoic every time she noticed him looking her way. Her awe made sense, he decided, if she’d come from the desert.
As they approached the first checkpoint, still an hour from any real view of the city, Ser’ai started to look nervous. Tævarnavasi tsk’d his spitting, grumbling camels up to the queue of other wagons in front of the stone and wicker guardhouse. When it was their turn, two guards, huge and swarthy, approached. Each carried an obsidian and brass scalpel and small jars of alcohol.
Ser’ai shifted. “What going on?” She almost edged out the tremor in her voice.
“Nothing. Just a skin check. It hurts a little the first time, but if you travel around Ristro a lot, you get used to it.”
He watched the approaching bordermen out of one corner of his eye, and her out of the other. She would’ve been subjected to more than one of these to work in an airship yard. Random checks were mandatory.
“Skin check?” She swallowed.
“Of course.” He turned to her. “Just a little scraping. You must’ve had one before.”
“What for?”
“To keep jungle-fly larvae away from the population centers. A little scrape from the back of the hand will tell them if you have parasites. If they find any, they’ll keep you in quarantine until you’re either disinfected or you die. Almost never happens, but better to be safe, I guess. No one wants an epidemic. Nothing to worry about. I’m sure you’ve been checked at least a couple times since you got here.”
Ser’ai swallowed again and didn’t answer him. She watched the bordermen approach. Her demeanor remained nervous, but her green eyes were calculating.
The guards smiled cordially, approaching on either side of the wagon. “Left hand, please,” they said, at the same time in the bored monotone of people who’ve said the same words so many times they’ve lost all meaning.
Tævarnavasi caught a blur out of the corner of his eye and the guard standing next to Ser’ai staggered backward, holding his face, blood squirting through his fingers. The scalpel clattered on the gravel somewhere o
ut of sight beneath the wagon.
Before Tævarnavasi could soak in what was happening, there was a flurry of motion and Ser’ai was standing on the opposite side from where she’d been a moment ago, next to him, holding the other borderman by the throat. She was short enough that she’d needed to force the man to his knees to get a hold on his neck, all so fast that Tævarnavasi didn’t see it happen. Her green eyes were still calm. Too calm.
She whispered a few irate words that sounded like Skald, to no one in particular, frowning, looking at nothing.
Then she addressed Tævarnavasi. “I don’t want to kill anyone, but it’s very important I see an Astrologer.” She paused a second, and her expression grew angry. She muttered again in Skald, harsher this time.
The borderman with the broken nose stared at her a moment, then staggered back a few steps before turning and breaking into a run toward Vormisæn, but Tævarnavasi was only vaguely aware of his departure. He was staring at Ser’ai’s left arm, wrapped around the borderman’s neck. Her hostage’s desperate fingers had clawed away long swaths of skin, revealing a swirl of tattoos he couldn’t quite focus on, like oil rolling across water.
The girl muttered to herself in Skald again.
The tense moments of inaction that followed poured weight into the already heavy air. Tævarnavasi was aware of the ring of twenty crossbowmen that had emerged from their hiding places around the post, most of them probably not aware of what was going on beyond there being some sort of incident. He raised his hands in front of him, hoping they would see he wasn’t a threat so he could explain what he was doing with this woman when they asked. He hoped they would bother asking.
“You have nowhere to go,” a voice called, from somewhere behind him.
But he didn’t turn around to see who it was. He kept his eyes on Ser’ai, who still looked much too calm. She shifted so she could get a better look at whoever was speaking, putting her back against the camel cart, still holding the squirming borderman close to her.
