“Do you think you killed those men as well?” the girl asks.
Shots from Elion’s unassuming case—which held a specialty-made linear accelerator—are targeted high doses of radiation. General radiation leaks are dispersed. “Radiation alarms are not set off when I fire my gun, as long as I don’t hit a detector directly. So, I guess I probably did.”
Elion’s intestines writhe like a nest of disturbed snakes.
The comm continues, “Many of the nayaks and skoalers have begun a mass migration to the system with the beating red sun, as if being summoned home. An unconfirmed source claims a few skoalers flew into the sun itself and ignited into wings of flame.”
What’s happening to everything? Maybe all of those fucking space monsters will actually fly into the sun and go as extinct as the hermadores soon.
Voices carry in the distance, just over the murmur of splashing rain. The cold wet has drenched Elion’s hair, even soaked through his stealth suit. Nothing is dry here, not the soles of his feet or even the skin between his glutes.
Elion sneaks closer to two soldiers with spears twice as long as a man, who stand under a tent at the edge of a sphere of sputtering torchlight. Raindrops sizzle on its flame.
“Can’t stand this reek of death much longer,” one guard says. He has a domed forehead and recessed eyes, reminding Elion of a crab in its shell. All Elion can smell is the wet slop of rain. The man takes a swig off some gourd.
“A couple more days still before they’re properly prepared for the goddess,” the other soldier answers. “We’ll see an armada of burning boats riding out on the Eventide. Can’t meet the gods like this. You can deal with it.”
This place is like the fucking dark ages.
“Are the outsiders taking their dead, or are we going to burn them as well?” The crab spits as he wipes his dripping eyebrows and takes another drink.
“I heard they’re coming down from the station for their one.”
Only one? Wasn’t there supposed to be a Strider, a Beguiler, and a diplomat of Uden at the castle? There are several caskets lying inside the tent.
Elion adjusts several dials on the case he carries, a case that is as tall as he is. Eight gray this time. He needs these men unconscious for a bit, or dead, so he can have a look in the caskets without someone seeing him and raising an alarm.
“You can’t just irradiate these two men,” the girl says.
“Sounds like I’ve been doing it all over the galaxy already.” Then he whispers, “Why do the ghosts of haunted men feed on brain tissue?”
Elion clicks the trigger. One man falls in a heap. The other jerks to attention only to join him a moment later.
“What’s two more?” Elion sets his case down. “Plus, they won’t know what hit them and will have just enough time to say goodbye to whatever loved ones haven’t already been slaughtered on this planet.”
The girl shudders and sobs. “You can’t just do this kind of thing.”
Every time … she either throws some kind of tantrum or chastises me.
Elion creeps into the tent and searches the bodies of the more prestigious dead. Lots of flowing dresses and tailored suits. The ambassador of Uden, the one called Hagair, is there. No body of the Strider or the Beguiler that accompanied him. They must have escaped, but how? Did they know what was coming?
Elion stops.
In the very center is the immaculately decorated casket of the king. A great warhammer of gold rests at his side, but there’s no giant black pearl.
The body is smashed, bones and joints twisted like a broken puppet.
The stench beside the corpse is overpowering: fetid, rotten decay. Elion shoves two orange plugs up his nose, releasing pleasant scents of mint and juniper. The more invasive odors persist but have decreased in nauseating severity. He removes a small sonic scalpel, activates an autopsy program on his v-rim, something Breman gave him, and cuts along the king’s sternum, opening his chest.
Elion searches for a sign of indolent poisoning that would have killed this king, something subtle that others unfamiliar with death might miss. His v-rim scans the exposed organs. He examines the heart and lungs, the airways, then moves to the mouth and opens the head like a container, studying the gray mass of the brain. Nothing other than smashed organs and premortem hematomas consistent with crushing injuries, the program tells him.
Elion slices into the abdomen, holding his breath in anticipation of the worst of the gases.
Insects boil out of the incision like roaches from a crack in the wall.
Elion jerks back and falls, scooting away, his hands and feet flailing.
Glistening black bodies of arachnids scuttle around the king’s belly, up and over the casket. They fade into the night.
Elion steadies his shaking limbs and creeps forward. More spiders wait inside an abdomen that appears partially scraped of organs.
He grabs a clear flask from his pack and slams it down over one of the arachnids. The thing hurls itself against the transparent walls with alarming velocity, creating muted pings.
Elion eyes the creature as he smashes on the lid, screwing it down as hard as he can manage, blue veins popping in deltas along the backs of his hands. He sees the spider’s network of faceted eyes staring back at him.
They think radiation poisoning is horrific.
Cirx
The metal floor of the ship lifts beneath Cirx’s feet, then he feels as if the foundation of a castle rests beneath him: gravity, walls, stability. And so very dry.
The black of space and a sea and river of stars fills what appears like an open window in the main cabin. But there’s definitely something more solid than glass between the ship and the outside.
And there are moons. Everywhere moons. The thousand moons of Staggenmoire are uncovered, the binary suns on the far side of the planet. The lunar masses float in an empty abyss, sadly suspended in the proximity of a planet whose occupants will most likely never gaze upon them directly, never appreciate their haunting beauty. Will only know them for their faint thousand lights distorted by the Sky Sea. They are dead beauties, however, all of them nothing more than congealed rock and dust. Nothing is pulsing red, the dark omen Cirx overheard King Goldhammer and that diplomat speak of, as to why Staggenmoire supposedly needed allies right now.
“Look at Staggenmoire,” Tegard says, shaking Garrabrandt’s shoulder in a meaty hand as he points into the window.
The Sky Sea appears as a turquoise sphere of swirling wonder.
“Focus on the quest,” Cirx says harshly and admonishes his men with a stern eye. Riesbold stands proud, quiet, his belly hanging over his hauberk.
Cirx and his score of knights loaded up three steeds, including Kallstrom, and their feed—dried seaweed—in the lower holds of the sky train. The outsiders working the train down below attached the castle’s one surviving ship to a train car and shipped it with them.
Cirx and his knights rode inside the contraption in its passenger’s padded saddles, through a clear tube. The Sky Sea was a blur of refracted light and sloshing water. Tegard wanted Cirx to realize the beauty of it then as well, but Cirx admonished him. Revenge on these outsiders is all that drives him. The rest is just distraction.
Cirx and his knights arrived on the outskirts of the space station, a city of metal with strange people in strange suits and a clear dome that kept the darkness of space at bay, similar to his castle on Staggenmoire, only much different. They loaded up the destriers in their ship and flew away as soon as they were given clearance and talked to a machine, something on their ship called a “computer,” that performed the takeoff and navigation itself.
Tegard explained that the outsiders placed minds inside their ships, that they only had to command the ship to a destination. These computers did everything else.
Cirx wishes to fly this ship, this steed, maneuver it, and launch weapons of technology from it. He will fly about the area and practice and then return to the station and destroy it. He wil
l become the Fiend Slayer in this new world of space and slay the evil, will release his family’s souls from the lonely purgatory of the Sky Sea.
Cirx will obliterate that station, their castle.
Hours pass as the ship sails around several moons with craters as numerous as the seas of Staggenmoire. Cirx’s men talk to the computer and offer commands as if this inn of metal is a person. They speak to it more comfortably now, as if they better understand each other.
Cirx’s life would have been so different if he hadn’t gone looking for that fiend again. He would be with his family, at the very least have comforted them in their final moments of terror. He would be dead along with them.
“At least we made it off the station with all our limbs.” Tegard chuckles. “No one’s riding slung over a horse. Remember the battle of the southern huntsmen?”
“When I rode in to save Riesbold from five barbarians?” Garrabrandt’s tone is dour. “You never let me forget.”
“When Garrabrandt took a sword under the hauberk, on the back side?” Eusair, another knight seated near the exit says, his tone growing lighter. “Split his right cheek in half.”
“Riesbold was surrounded and had taken several serious wounds.” Garrabrandt’s posture and tone stiffen. “I slayed three of them. Helped drive the other two off.”
“And had to ride back slung over your horse since your arse was split open!” Eusair bellows, slaps his knee, and guffaws.
Tegard and Riesbold laugh.
A smirk threatens Cirx’s lips. He grunts in forced anger, rises, and clomps away to the sleeping quarters. He won’t find rest; his guilt and memories will haunt him there, compounded by the stillness of night. He hasn’t slept well in over two weeks, and his eyelids feel like dead weights. They feel pressurized.
The space steed they now fly in is spacious enough for all of his knights, their destriers in stall-like holds below, but there’s not enough room for anyone to roam.
Cirx enters a room and looks in a mirror clearer than a crystal pond on a still night. Scruff as well as dirt ravages his face, hiding the purple aprons under his eyes.
He searches for a bed but only finds lettering similar to the word bed and an image of a man lying down. No mattress. He fumbles around, and an inward lever of some kind gives way. Support materializes in the nothingness of air as if a mattress of straw floats before him. His eyes tell him it’s a trick.
After several minutes of poking and prodding, Cirx strips off his armor and lies on air, supported as if a bird who can sleep in the wind.
What treacherous magic is this?
Cirx’s eyes close before he knows it. He sees red sickle moons hanging in the sky. They seem to join, to fuse and fly about, wailing like haunting wraiths.
Something bangs.
Cirx’s eyes try to gape open, but they are sticky and tired. A man stands before him, not one of his knights.
Cirx bolts up.
The man wears metal piercings in his nose, his ears, his eyebrows, his lips, and stumbles about the room. Cirx blinks, realizing the man isn’t solid but a flutter of light or smoke. A spirit.
“A ghost.” The words and a gust of air slip past Cirx’s lips.
The apparition turns as if to eye Cirx curiously for a moment, thinking, then wanders out of the room.
Cirx follows as it continues on into the darkness, down a long hall to the aft deck. His skin tingles, and sweat forms on his back and palms. He’s heard as many ghost stories as tales of Fiend Slayers but has never seen a ghost.
Is this a dream?
Cirx glances around, searching for intricate detail in his surroundings, something an old man once said is lacking in dreams. Steel walls, grooves, notches. Glowing lights that do not flicker. This seems real.
The apparition arrives at the aft deck under a faint green light buried into the ceiling. Cirx’s hand squeezes the hilt of his longsword.
“Cursed for what the silver ones did.” The apparition fades into the aft wall, as if floating out into space.
Cirx creeps to the wall where the spirit disappeared, his eyes darting about, prepared for an ambush.
What madness happens beyond Staggenmoire?
Hesitantly, Cirx touches the wall with a fingertip, as if the metal may freeze him solid. It’s not cold nor hot. No indication of a ghost passing through.
He should tell his knights of this sighting. Perhaps one of them will know something he doesn’t. He shoves against the wall and turns to leave.
The wall behind him clicks.
A thin compartment as tall as a man has opened. A hidden storage closet. Something lurks inside, stuffed into the cramped area amidst shadows and faint green lighting.
A desiccated body. Its face shrunken and withered like an old log. It has many piercings, like the vanished ghost.
***
Garrabrandt paces the aft deck before Cirx, everyone pondering Cirx’s story of the ghost sighting and of the corpse standing in the closet watching them with empty eyes. In its death grip, the corpse holds a torn strip of some silver clothing that appears as protective as armor, only much more pliable.
“Mayhaps purgatory for the outsiders is this empty darkness of space.” Garrabrandt rubs at his thin black beard shaped like a chinstrap for a helm as he guzzles water.
They all need so much water here. The air is drained of moisture and makes the lands of Staggenmoire seem like seas. Or is it nerves? Garrabrandt’s hand shakes. Although his Mir will not admit it, the occult terrifies him.
Cirx nods. “They have a cruel god.”
“Then, once we destroy the space station, we’ll grant those bastards the same fate.” Riesbold leans against a wall, the rolls of his stomach overhanging his thighs.
Tegard clears his throat and paces opposite Garrabrandt, his head and shoulders filling the entry to the aft deck. “Similar to the story of the ghosts of Ragoon.”
“Is that a moon?” Riesbold asks.
Tegard shakes his head, running a hand over short brown hair. “Nay, my friends. The Ragoon was a corsair ship that ran the Eventide Sea a few hundred years ago. They say the captain, ole Three-Fingered Ayk, was searching for the great fiend, the one who held the power of regeneration, like trolls in the old tales. The Ragoon went missing before a battalion of sea knights could find and sink her. But the sea knight captain persisted in his search for the corsairs, making it his and his men’s life quest. Only one knight ever returned, mad as a pickled sea cow. The old seers put him under a hypnotic incantation to learn what’d happened. He told a tale of finding a corsair ship and boarding it. The knights stormed the decks, the galley, and the holds. They found no one, not a single living person, only a bolted chest they couldn’t in any way force open or break apart. So, the knights commandeered the ship and sailed back for Staggenmoire castle.
“The first night, some of the men saw corsair ghosts wandering the holds, walking through walls and muttering of the great fiend. They spoke of acquiring the power of regeneration from this fiend, and of controlling dreams and that the secret was in the treasure chest, but they said the chest was cursed or magical and would only open at midnight on the sixth night of a crew’s voyage. Even back then, our saying of, ‘the dead do not lie’ was common knowledge. So the knights stayed on. Each morning they woke, they recalled strange nightmares. Although each man’s nightmare was a bit different, twisted in some notion of time or place, some madman in everyone’s dream was the same being, a being who controlled the spirits. Death, they said it was, a figure of shadow, not bone, that no longer wore the horns of writhing flame. Only the smoke and ash spewing from its face gave it away, as this figure of Death had no discernable mouth or eyes.
“Finally, on the sixth night, all the knights gathered in the hold and waited until midnight fell. At that moment, the chest’s lid cracked open, and water started to seep through the hull, flooding the holds. The knights scrambled for the decks, but ghosts of corsairs and Three-Fingered Ayk blocked their paths and barred th
e exits with crates and beams. Once the knights fought their way out, the ship was already under water. Ghosts and skeletons manned the oars and sails, the helm, steering its three masts through the depths of the Eventide Sea on a journey to find Death. And a ghost woman held a baby up in her arms, as if trying to push it above the surface to breathe. The knight who eventually returned said under his incantation that he wasn’t wearing his armor and only escaped by cutting a skiff loose and riding the air bubble trapped beneath its hull to the surface.”
The silence left by Sir Tegard swells and rolls through the ship. Minutes pass, each knight’s fear virulent in this unknown environment. They are probably afraid that if they move, others will sense their weakness.
Cirx clears his throat, and everyone gives some twitch: a finger, an arm, a bounce of the ankles, a straightening of the spine. Garrabrandt’s face goes white.
“Ghost stories meant to frighten children,” Cirx says, “and we’re all on edge given that none of us have ever been in space. I’ll confront the ghost tonight but won’t require anyone to find a treasure chest and wait for its opening.”
Cirx breathes against a coiling fear in his stomach. He already followed the ghost. Now he only has to speak to it.
“I’ll come with you.” Riesbold stands, pivots, and pushes past Tegard for the sleeping chambers.
“As will I,” Tegard says.
Cirx follows Tegard to the sleeping chambers and lies beside his two willing companions. He cannot close his eyes, although a fog of exhaustion fills his head.
The men lie still. Ten minutes, thirty, an hour. The loss of Cirx’s family engulfs him like frost, its icy bite harder and harder to ignore.
A faint glow appears in the corner.
The Forgotten Sky Page 18
