The Forgotten Sky

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The Forgotten Sky Page 30

by R. M. Schultz


  “Why are you here, love?” Her voice is airy, creaky, full of dust. “Sit.”

  Elion remains standing. “A friend of yours sent me here to learn about a spider.”

  The old woman chuckles. “All my friends are long dead. I do, however, know a lot about spiders. Now sit.”

  Elion flashes his light about and slinks down onto an antigravity chair. No spiders could hide in supported air, but he scans the floor in a two-meter vicinity to make sure it’s clear.

  “Spiders,” she says, “so misunderstood because they killed a few humans and initiated an evolutionary phobia back when we were ape-men. Much less dangerous than hover racers, shuttles, and ships flying around space. Come to think of it, far less dangerous than the Pearl itself.”

  “I’m only here for information.” Elion wants to know where the spiders that infested the king of Staggenmoire’s body came from and if it was possible that they could have killed him. Or if they were planted in his dead corpse to mimic a poisoning.

  “Did you know that without spiders, the human race would’ve never survived their early farming days? All the crops that sustained our species would’ve been consumed by locusts, and all our ancient ancestors would’ve starved to death. A much more unpleasant way to go than a spider bite … Unless it’s one of the enormous types in low gravity, big enough to paralyze you and feast on your innards while you’re still alive.” Uh uh uh floats past her lined lips like a long-forgotten chuckle. “That might be more painful.”

  Elion briefly wonders if there had been more spiders on his birth planet, if his people would not have been as hungry, not suffered as much. The thought becomes lost as it drifts amidst the fog of fear in his mind. “Can you tell me about—”

  “First we must commune, then you’ll learn everything I know about whatever particular spider it is you have in that pack of yours.” The woman’s drool strings as the corner of her lips twitch with the hint of a smile. “The others can feel its presence.”

  Elion crosses his legs as he sits, something he’s never done in his life, unsure exactly why he’s doing it now.

  A small wooden table rests atop the larger one between them. On top of it are scattered squares and a pile of white sticks. The woman blows at the sticks. “Can’t move them myself no more. Do you mind? Pick them up and toss them on the small table.”

  Elion grabs the sticks, which are small bones stripped of muscle, fat, tendon, and ligament.

  “This is all that remains of my colony of cats and my Pomprollian dog,” the old woman says. “Too curious for their own good. Liked to chase and bat at spiders sometimes. They all did.”

  Elion drops the bones while dismissing images of cats and yappy dogs strung up in webs, spiders feeding on their livers. “Please, make this quick. I can just pay you for information about the spider.”

  “First, we must consult with and listen to the Arachnid Mother. She feeds on fear.” The woman starts rocking in her chair, the tips of her withered fingers twitching as she hums some scale of perfect fifth notes. “My mother, we all need to feed, we’re all your offspring, all of mankind should owe you his allegiance for the deeds of your kind, sparing him in his upbringing. I seek repentance for every one of your offspring that we humans stomp, squash, and shriek at.”

  The woman studies the board before her.

  She spells out letters as she takes in the symbols the bones came to rest on. “A-S-S-A-S-S-I-N, S-P-I-D-E-R.” She laughs. “Now throw the bones again and mean it, put your mind into it.”

  Elion tosses them again, quickly, grimacing.

  The woman leans over and narrows her dark wells of eyes. She grunts. “You must go have a lie down in the next room. It’s part of the process, and I need time to interpret this.”

  “I’m not going into any bed in this house.” Elion stands, glancing around.

  “Then you may leave.”

  Elion considers running away versus why he’s here. He sees the ghost girl floating in the doorway the woman indicated and inches for that room. He glances inside.

  A pale light on a table, a chair. A dusty old-fashioned mattress with sheets.

  Elion throws back the sheets and runs a hand over everything, shining his light under the bed, the table, into the corners. No spiders that he can see.

  “Lie down,” the woman calls from the other room. “The mother calls for your rest.”

  I don’t want a fucking rest. I’m here about a spider.

  Elion sets his pack beside the bed and lies down as if sinking into a vat of iceberged water. Even if he had three bottles of rum in his system, he’d never be able to sleep here.

  He wonders if those words she spelled were prophetic, to scare him, or if it was a telling of his innermost fears rising up from his psyche like some sea monster before sinking back into the deep.

  A door bangs outside and flaps as if unlatched in a breeze, a door closer than any Elion remembers seeing. Footsteps scuttle on the floor in the foyer, on the walls, the ceilings. Elion’s hand tightens on his pulser, his light flashing to a corner, back to the entryway.

  There are footprints in the dust beside his, not boots or even human, but not much smaller.

  Elion bolts upright, scanning the room, his trigger finger shaking. He almost believes that he sees black spiders crouched in the shadows, dangling over his head by thin threads or in suffocating webs, under the sheets crawling up at him, smells them in the air. Spiders in his brain.

  The hostess floats in through the entryway on her antigravity chair.

  Elion jerks and almost shoots her, then forcibly removes his finger from the trigger.

  A crooked smile rests on her face, her teeth seeming long and yellow. “Now, let me see that spider, love.”

  Elion digs out the container with the glass-like black spider.

  The woman studies it for five seconds. “This one comes from only one known planet in the galaxy, a drifter. Their slow method of killing is induced by crawling into a sleeping host’s mouth, descending through the esophagus and laying eggs in the stomach wall. The eggs hatch, and the young chew their way out, feeding on organs until the host slowly dies. Then the spiders exit the corpse via the rectum or mouth to begin their life cycle anew. Humans are a new preferred host, as most species native to their planet have developed several evolutionary defenses in the gastrointestinal tract.”

  King Goldhammer was poisoned. Poisoned with a spider. Only one of the king’s recent Uden visitors is still alive. Now I have to find her: Nyranna of Uden.

  “That’s all I need.” Elion wedges the container into his pack, resisting the urge to shoot the spider right there, slips past the woman, and picks his way out of the hall, glancing back with every step.

  “Starvation,” the ghost girl says, following behind him now.

  “Where’d you go?” Elion asks as he steps around the aquariums. “Starvation?”

  “I’m always with you, just unnoticed at times. Starvation is basically what the spiders do to the hosts, only when someone’s dying of hunger, the body instead of the spider starts to devour its own organs. It’s quite a sensation.”

  Suddenly, the girl’s face, once of sculpted beauty, appears more emaciated. Hollowing, sinking. Her eye sockets and cheeks become craters.

  ***

  Where’s the bounty hunting and smuggling of illegal substances, small shipments of enormous value? I’m good at that, what my ship’s designed for.

  Months have now passed since Elion’s investigation of King Goldhammer’s assassination began. The rogue detective work is draining. He needs a drink.

  He virtually steers his stealth cruiser, with subtle finger movements, out of the gravity well of the artificial planet of the Majestic Space Pearl. The Pearl will never be the same. The Supreme Emperor is dead.

  Would his clandestine career die with the Emperor?

  Elion received a black-side comm before departure, a comm announcing the Supreme Emperor’s sudden death. The hacked coroner’s report stat
ed that some ravaging disease rotted through his intestines and liver, turning every organ in its path the black of necrosis. The coroner had only seen one similar case in three decades and had never isolated a pathogen from the previous victim. Both male victims were affected shortly after intercourse, and the necrosis appeared to originate from the groin. No female victims had been found.

  At least there were no spiders. That detail would have made it into the comm, even if the coroner somehow believed the arachnid, or many of them, crawled inside postmortem.

  The black-side report mentioned that a single lowly attendant of the Northrite council died of an abdominal spider infestation, but the councilmembers were unharmed and healthy. Then the report discussed the meaning of some Shadow Whisper and questioned who would have sent such an inflammatory message to the galaxy.

  “You’re moving up in the galaxy.” The ghost girl sits in the seat next to him, her face again beautiful and full, but her dead eyes remain, watching their surroundings.

  The stars outside shine cold and distant, the blackness around them alive and threatening, hungry.

  “You’re some kind of seedy detective now,” she says. “You could keep climbing and make something of yourself.”

  “Why? When it’s all over, no matter what happens, we’re all dead men. Men made of legends or shit all end up the same. We disappear, turn into worm food. I won’t waste energy to be remembered when I’m ash and dust.”

  The girl is silent for a moment, but only for a moment. “Whoever murdered the Supreme Emperor of the Pearl isn’t the same person who murdered Goldhammer.”

  “At least they didn’t use the same method.”

  The ghost rises and floats in front of him, her green cloak still. “The Northrite seem to suspect that Uden sent a Paladin assassin after them in their own governing chamber, and that Uden destroyed the Staggenmoire castle. Would Uden do that with its own diplomat inside?”

  “By mistake maybe. This Strider-Whisperer, Nyranna, left on a summons from the Northrite without bringing the diplomat and Beguiler with her as her Royal Father may have hoped.”

  “The Beguiler then made it out alive as well. Was that just luck?”

  “Maybe Uden blew the castle to pieces to hide the fact that they’d poisoned the king of Staggenmoire after realizing that someone might find out. So they used Moonrider ships to stage the attack as a diversion.” Elion can’t look at the dead girl any longer. He stands and paces back to his holding chamber.

  “Why would Uden second-guess their poisoning strategy so late in the game?” The ghost is following him again, inescapable, part of him, like his arm.

  Elion heads to the steel toilet and urinates a splattering stream. “There’s too much easy evidence against Uden. I’m not sure Uden would be so sloppy as to use such a rare spider as a poison in the first place before deciding to try to cover it up. That supposed Shadow Whisperer accusing the Northrite of crimes against humanity, was that Uden’s way of fighting back?”

  “Please finish before we continue.”

  The girl waits outside until Elion zips up, burps an echoing belch of smoldering garlic breath, and steps out.

  She says, “Maybe Uden hoped the spider’s offspring would all crawl away and blend into the environment. Those spiders could wipe out an entire civilization before being detected by a people who know nothing of modern medicine and disease. Maybe there was some threat of more outsiders showing up and Uden worried someone else’s diplomats would find out.”

  Elion’s black-side report rolls absently in his head and across his vision as he walks to the galley, a cramped room with a chiller and food and drink port. Not much bigger than his shower or toilet. He pours a jolted coffee, rips open a bag of raw egg whites, mixes them, and drinks the slurry between gasps for air.

  “I’ve been chasing spiders when an entire planet’s been destroyed without reason, destroyed by some force called the Ruin.” Elion wipes stringy strands of egg from his lips. “Someone besides me must see this as madness.”

  “No one should openly work for the Pearl and secretly for the Northrite at the same time.” The girl averts her eyes, unable to watch him eat.

  “What do you know of either? You died young.”

  The black-side report mentions a female prostitute of the Pearl found in a bed alone, killed in ritual fashion with a black sun on her forehead and dead people and glacial roses painted on her chest and stomach. Another dead body was found outside, the woman’s pimp, his organs liquid, blood oozing from his orifices. No alarms in the area for radiation and no other people are developing symptoms.

  Elion’s body locks up, becoming a statue holding a stubbly chin. He can’t recall anything about a prostitute.

  Why would I draw images on some dead woman’s body … unless they have to do with that recurring dream with the dark figure?

  “You killed me, didn’t you?” the ghost girl says. “So why couldn’t you have killed these other women?”

  The girl was right. But he can’t remember any woman this time.

  The black-side report rolls on, mentioning that a lock on the window in the dead woman’s room had been broken, as if someone recently snuck in and out of there.

  If I was inebriated and with a prostitute, wouldn’t I just go in and out the obvious way, the way I always do when I can’t pick up a girl at the bar?

  Thoughts race against each other in the tight turns of Elion’s mind like cats pulling chariots through poisonous hedges. Is someone setting him up, to make others believe he’s the monster only the ghost girl knows he truly is?

  A new thought occurs: maybe Uden or this Nyranna poisoned King Goldhammer to take that pearl of his, the one of enormous value. Then they hid its disappearance by destroying a castle, an attempt to make others believe the pearl was smashed and broken. Maybe all this spider business is a distraction.

  It’s time to put caution aside amidst the Northrite accusations hovering over Uden.

  Elion has a black-side contact on Uden that he has at times paid for information, similar to how he pays for black-side reports. Except this relationship was more intimate. He has to find this Nyranna of Uden somehow.

  Elion sees the hovel of his childhood home in his mind, transected light of the morning sun spilling between an alleyway, dust swimming in twinkling plumes of particles. He awakes from a sleepwalking episode wondering where he is and how he got there. He sees the girl’s gaunt face, once a face of sculpted beauty. He was just a boy then. Her oily-black eyes press into him. He sees the faces of all those men he has irradiated. Sees himself shoot them all over again.

  Tonight, it will take all the alcohol Elion has to find sleep.

  Cirx

  Their Uden warship sits on a moon outpost, mantled in reflections of flame: the evenfall light of a red sun. A blazing fire roars before Cirx against the backdrop of a fjord so still it seems red glass turning black, dwindling flame becoming oil. Kallstrom roams its surface, drinking from its depths.

  Another month may have passed after their attack on Silvergarden, after Cirx obliterated the barracks of those responsible for the assault on his castle, after their ship whisked them away to safety.

  Cirx can no longer tell days or time.

  He rams the point of his longsword into the soft dirt of the bank, burying its cold steel an arm’s length. He kneels and presses his head against the warm pommel, his hands on either side of the crosspiece. The crackling flames heat his face and fingers, drawing out beads of sweat and tears.

  The ghost aboard their Uden ship hasn’t been sighted since the destruction of the Silvergarde’s barracks. It was probably appeased, had moved on to the next world. There was no farewell, no look of peace, no sign of relief for finding its eternal rest. No appearing and then fading into mist. It was just gone.

  At least Cirx’s family should have moved on as well.

  A biting nostalgia floods Cirx’s heart like an ocean wave: riding the Eventide Sea at sunrise with Erin, attempting to
answer insightful questions he never considered, her eyes burning fires of awareness and curiosity; the clap of wooden swords and vibrations in his forearms as he spars with Enix, Enix boldly claiming he’s the mightiest of Fiend Slayers. Watching evenfall—the twin suns veiled by the Sky Sea—with Kitasha as they dine alone on salted crab, relaxing upon some uncharted speck of rock amidst endless water. The only sounds the anthem of waves sloshing upon stone and the soft patter of their mounts’ hooves. Kitasha’s kisses, her supple skin … She loved sea lilies, or was it roses?

  An irritation, a guilt sinks its claws into Cirx. He worries that if he thinks of them too much, he will wear out his memories, that they will dissolve forever.

  Cirx speaks to the flames. “My loves: my beloved wife, Kitasha, my courageous Enix, and independent Erin. May your souls find eternal rest now that vengeance is yours. I slayed the fiends that took you from me … I’ll carry on, although I don’t know how to continue without you. When my time comes, I’ll see you again, and I pray that time is short, as all my years on Staggenmoire now seem as long as a single day without you.”

  Cirx settles onto his heels, his face stained with the wet tracks of tears.

  None of this feels right, and nightmares of flying ships and flying projectiles wake him every time he sleeps, his clothes as wet as if he’d been riding across the Eventide Sea. He imagines the men he killed, sees them running for their lives, igniting. Flailing candles of human flesh.

  Cirx has taken his revenge, but the future looms as dark as the space they flew through. A drive to continue fighting evil lingers inside, but little else, and now he’s not sure what to fight against. If he stops for too long, he fears he will suffocate in a sea of pain and remorse, curl up and die.

  Did his father, the mightiest of Fiend Slayers, feel the same emptiness after he achieved a victory? Or was his father contented, satisfied, even euphoric?

  “My Mir.” Garrabrandt approaches. “This outpost the ship recommended is more than sufficient.” A cool hand settles onto Cirx’s feverish neck.

 

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