Beneath Ceaseless Skies #23 Read online

  Issue #23 - Aug. 13, 2009

  “Between Two Treasons,” by Michael J. DeLuca

  “Oil Fire,” by Kate MacLeod

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  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  BETWEEN TWO TREASONS

  by Michael J. DeLuca

  A calloused hand in the small of Periphas’ back awoke him.

  The desert dawn beat against his eyelids. The naked flesh of his hip and shoulder had reshaped itself to fit the cracks in the parched earth where he lay. The stone on which he’d laid his head was cold, but soothing: his skull throbbed with the fading effects of the poison. He forced his eyes unseamed.

  The face that met his gaze—that grotesque wooden mask, its hooked beak, the black hollows with human eyes behind them—had woken him every dawn for weeks. He knew he shouldn’t fear it. Its features belonged to a god, a monster, but the eyes behind it were not a god’s, nor even a centaur’s. They were fallible, weak, uncertain—human—but untrusting, and thus as terrifying as ever.

  The elder flung back the wings of her feathered cloak, shook the snakes’ rattles bound about her wrists, and pounded her feet upon the ground in rhythm with the pounding in his head. Periphas recoiled from her, scrabbling backwards on his hands. Did she know what he was? Did she suspect?

  Young men and women his own age lay sprawled around him, like the lotus-eaters of the myth, in various stages of the struggle to emerge from dreams. Each body, like his own, was naked, painted with sorcerous symbols, skin sunburned, frail human feet mutilated, fleshy human legs trembling with exhaustion from weeks of walking over parched and stony ground. They had come across a continent at the elder’s summons—the scions of a hundred different savage tribes—seeking the means to defend their people from the onslaught of the centaurs.

  You’re not like them, his mind recited. You are here as a ringer and spy.

  Above, buzzards wheeled against a cloudless sky, bewildered, perhaps, by this madness of their human neighbors, but interested no less—to them it all must smack of death. Their wings traced iridescent trails across Periphas’ poison-twisted vision, leaving spirals burned there, shifting between gold and black.

  He thought of his master, the centaur Eurytus, standing somewhere far away atop a butte, this same breeze lifting his pitch-dark mane, this same sun glinting from his stolen rings and torques of gold, the brim of his hat pulled low to shade his face, his fingers tracing the sorcerous spirals carved in the stocks of his revolvers.

  The elder’s eyes were hard behind the mask. If she guessed what Periphas was, he would be required to choose between a human hand like a bird’s talon ripping out his throat and a centaur’s iron-shod hoof smashing open his skull. The east horizon dragged his vision.

  Somewhere behind the dazzle of the sun, beyond the red buttes and pale sage, burned the remains of the signal-fire Periphas had set the night before—the fire by which Eurytus could track him. Periphas searched the line between land and heaven for the smoke that would betray him, for the dust cast up by an army of centaurs. There was nothing.

  How long would Eurytus wait?

  The elder, wordless, thrust towards Periphas a cupped hand brimming with the poison hearts of flowers.

  She had not guessed. Periphas sagged. For the moment, he was safe.

  He crawled to her like a child, took hold of her wrist and pressed his open lips against her palm. The skin was like old vellum stretched too thin over bone. He gagged at the medicine’s sick-sweet scent, but slid his tongue across her palm, filling his mouth with the buds. The monumental bitterness sent spasms through his jaw. Tears leaked from his eyes, but he forced himself to swallow.

  The elder wrenched her hand away. She stalked past Periphas, rattles shaking, towards the next prone form.

  Someone set the giant earthen jug before him. The jug—carved with birds and snakes and things that were both birds and snakes—was always waiting there at dawn, always full, though he could not fathom how. Some trick of the elder’s power. Some sorcery the centaurs did not know. But what did it matter? What purpose would such a secret serve once the centaurs had enslaved her?

  Periphas drank, hunched at the lip of the jug like a mosquito at a pregnant belly, not stopping to breathe until it was taken away. Then he sat back on his haunches, gasping, clutching his knees to his chest and blinking in the sun.

  The young sorceress beside him swallowed her medicine in turn. She drank of the jug, then climbed to her feet, eyes glazed, tired muscles shaking, whispering to herself in some human dialect he had forgotten. He watched the power progressing through her, quelling her trembling, driving back exhaustion, replacing it with strength.

  She caught his gaze, offered a hand to help him up. The skin beneath her high, small breasts was blazoned with a symbol like a jawbone trailing strings of desiccated flesh. She stood a head taller than the men surrounding them, as tall as Periphas himself. She couldn’t be older than sixteen.

  He tried to rise without the jawbone-blazoned sorceress’ aid. His left knee buckled. He flung out his arms to compensate, but pitched forward, flailing. She caught him, a hard hand on his collarbone, her dark eyes too much like his own.

  She came from the tribes of the Abyssine Sea. He knew it by her height, by the angle of her nose, the sharpness of her chin, by those familiar whispers he had not quite managed to decipher. She was a fragment of his childhood, before the centaurs had come: the cannibal tribes endlessly warring across the same mile of beach, wearing each other down almost to nothing, then sitting back, panting, waiting only long enough to stop spitting blood before setting out to prune each other’s ranks again.

  If not for Eurytus, he told himself, you would have been no different. For all your learned sophistication, your subtle aesthetics of wine and domination, there is more alike between you than this disguise of nakedness and paint. You are like her. You are human.

  Of course, if it weren’t for Eurytus, he would have been dead.

  Periphas took his place in line with the rest.

  * * *

  The elder led the way across the desert. A hundred sorcerers struggled behind her, so weak that save for their power they would topple in the dust. Each stepped in the next one’s path, so the track they left seemed that of only one. The buzzards followed, undeceived. Crooked cacti appeared like giants on the rims of distant ridges, grew and loomed, then shrank away behind them. A coral snake coiled in the sun did not stir at their passage, though it hissed and slithered into hiding when a buzzard’s shadow brushed its skin. Periphas walked with his head down, watching the feet of the jawbone-blazoned sorceress lift free from her footprints, settling his own feet in their place. He fought the temptation to turn, to search behind him for the telltale cloud of dust. His thoughts dwelt upon the inexorability of hooves.

  It was six weeks since he had left New Ilium, six weeks since he had held a gun or dressed in the supple skin of minotaur. He had never come so far from the River Acheron’s shores. He was lost. For weeks he had been forced to trust in the elder, to follow her lead. He told himself it didn’t matter. Eurytus was behind him.

  The elder lectured as they walked. “We are stalking death,” she said. Her voice, unsteady with age, raw with the harshness of dry desert air, belied the terror of the mask. “Death—the one certainty, the only end no diviner need predict, no vision is required to foresee. Be aware of death’s presence. Let it walk at your shoulder. Follow its lead. That is the root of sorcery, the key to vision.”

  Another day, when Periphas was not so tired, he might have had to fight off laughter. Death, he knew, was stalking her.

  “But this is not a quest f
or vision,” the elder emphasized—as if any of them could possibly still believe that it was so. “Since the days when humans came to Upper World, when Old Woman showed our ancestors the path to climb from below, young sorcerers have met here in the desert, seeking wisdom, truth. But traditions, like sorceries, like truths, are fluid things. Only death is fixed. And where meanings shift, so must ritual. We are become a hunted people—a race of insects infesting a house that is no longer ours. We can’t afford anymore to seek wisdom for its own sake. Should vision come, accept it. Learn. But that isn’t why I called you here, so far, from so many different tribes.

  “This tradition has become a quest for power.”

  Periphas dug dust-caked fingernails into his palms; he knew the elder’s polemics by now as intimately as though they were his own. If she had nothing more to teach, why were they still walking? What was Eurytus waiting for?

  A memory arose to Periphas’ eyes, made vivid by the poison: of sitting at his master’s hooves before a fire, of Eurytus lifting the haunch of a slaughtered foe from a platter offered by a slave. Of the dead stare that glazed the living slave’s eyes as the juices dripped, gleaming, down Eurytus’ chin.

  Eurytus had nodded, following his student’s eye. “Do you wonder how our servant can so skillfully conceal his rage? How he can come so close to the enemy he serves, yet keep from rising up to throttle me? He believes himself aloof from pain. He believes he has transcended, that this world and you and I within it can no longer touch him. And he’s right! That is half the nature of sorcery: delusion. Within the boundaries of the lie, the slave is free.”

  There had been laughter then from the fire-edged dark, where other centaurs slaked themselves upon the fruits of conquest, indulging their own illusions. Eurytus’ stained lips drew back into a white-toothed leer—but his voice remained intent. “Understand me, Periphas. All that separates us from the slave is this: he lacks the will, the control, to impose his lie upon us.”

  Eurytus ate the meat, and Periphas shared it. When the slave returned to clear the platter, Eurytus took the bone and clubbed the wretched man to his knees among the ashes. The slave wiped a lump of gristle from the hollow of his eye. He grimaced briefly. Then his face relaxed. He crawled away.

  “Do you see?” asked Eurytus.

  Then he’d flung the bone into the fire.

  * * *

  The jawbone-blazoned sorceress cursed in that half-familiar tongue, startling Periphas from his daydreams.

  At the front of the line, the elder had halted. The sorcerers, lulled by the rhythm of the march, spilled from her track across the dust, marring it with missteps. Periphas stood with one foot in the air, no place to set it down. The elder turned to face them; the cloak of feathers lifted from her shoulders, then settled to stillness. The mask was blank.

  She had stopped at the mouth of a gorge. Sandstone cliffs, jagged with desert growth, sheared the sky into planes. Shadows divided the ground. And between the gorge’s walls, an ancient, wind-worn ruin waited. Two vast semicircular earthworks, set with row on row of sloping tiers, faced off across an open court: an arena, like the one the centaurs were constructing on the Oxbow Island north of New Ilium. This one was simpler, its lines more austere—but surely its purpose had once been the same: a place where battles could be staged, grudges played out, hatreds spent. Periphas wondered at this parallel—wondered if it meant there was a time in distant past when his ancestors had not been savages, not been fools.

  “What is this place?” one sorcerer shouted. “Elder, what does it mean?”

  No sound emerged from behind the elder’s mask. Even her rattles were silent. Yet he found he understood why they had come.

  A quest for power. They had answered the elder’s summons not only to learn, but to be tested. She intended them to find out which was strongest—who among them would lead. There was no other way to interpret it: they’d been brought here to fight.

  Unified by poison—by the power of the elder’s will—the ragged line of sorcerers dissolved, passing through a ring of tall stone stelae carved with human shapes, spreading silently like ancestor spirits to occupy the ruined court. Nods and mumbled words shaped tenuous alliances along demarcations of homeland and creed. Every one of them came from a different tribe; of course there would be grudges. The buzzards found perches among the empty seats. Periphas put one of the stelae at his back.

  The elder herself took three running steps, and in a motion that belied the distances behind them, belied her birdlike thinness and the mask’s monolithic weight, leapt to the top of a stele taller than she. Then she sat back to observe.

  This, Periphas realized, is why Eurytus waited. The humans would fight, exhaust themselves to within inches of death; then the centaurs would gallop in, laughing.

  Periphas opened his hands. He turned them, studying the calloused palms, the scarred knuckles, the sorcerous symbols trailing from between his fingers and down his arms. The lines were thin, sometimes jagged, sometimes smooth, like the ragged ranks of weeds and jetsam tossed onto the shores of the Abyssine Sea. Those symbols signified his choice, his sacrifice. He had given up a history he might have shared with those around him, traded it for the love and the cruelty of centaurs. Eurytus meant him to test that choice.

  The jawbone-blazoned sorceress shot Periphas a smile and a two-fingered gesture he had come to interpret as obscene. Her irises were poison-swollen, encroached upon by black. As she had that morning, she offered him a hand. Periphas reached for it, knowing her intent.

  She gripped his wrist, dust-caked nails digging deep. She pulled him close. Her breath was bitter. One of her ankles snaked around his.

  Periphas flung himself backwards to the stony ground, just in time to avoid the blow that would have split his temple. He broke her grasp with a twist and a wrench, reversed it, planted a foot against her chest and heaved her away from him. Somehow she caught herself upon her hands. Periphas rolled to his feet.

  The jawbone-blazoned sorceress sprang upright, steadied herself, reasserting her balance. A bruise blossomed subtly where his heel had struck her, marring the symbol below her breasts. Her eyes flicked left and right.

  Four forms closed around them.

  Tingling with the rush of fear, Periphas found himself wishing for a knife in his fist, or a gun. He drove the thought away. What would Eurytus say if he showed himself weaker than these? Skin sunburned dark as leather, eyes darker yet with ignorance and self-delusion: they were nothing more than human, indistinguishable save for the symbols on their skin.

  Indistinguishable, but for one. The eyes of the jawbone-blazoned sorceress offered him kinship, respect—offered him an ally. He thought of Eurytus.

  He gave no signal; she must have seen the conflict in his eyes.

  The jawbone-blazoned sorceress struck, a vicious kick that left the man beside her gasping, clutching at his shattered knee. Periphas, driven by Death’s whisper in his ear, took full advantage. A momentary foe spun through the air, slammed into another, and knocked him sprawling. A skull cracked hard against the stele where the elder perched. The last attacker fled. Periphas and the jawbone-blazoned sorceress adjusted to defend each other’s flanks against new foes.

  The shadows of the stelae stretched and turned. A thin cloud rolled past overhead, never crossing the sun. The day wore into afternoon. Alliances changed as sorcerers fell, but Periphas and the jawbone-blazoned sorceress held firm. He watched her carefully, betrayal in his thoughts. She was a sturdy warrior, decisive, if vicious—she resorted too quickly to a crippling blow. But what choice did she have? The numbers assailing them steadily grew.

  Do they know my treachery? he wondered. Is the mark of centaurs so apparent in me?

  He had taken such care to seem savage—to keep his hands from straying to the seams of the long coat he no longer wore, to walk as though his feet weren’t accustomed to shoes. He’d barely spoken for fear he would stumble on the subtle consonants of the human tongue. Had they seen, by some gift
of the poison medicine’s vision, the ghost of the massive, powerful body that ought to begin at his waist, the sable coat shifting over piston muscles, the flash of the steel-shod hooves he had so often possessed in dreams?

  A burst of red out of the corner of his vision dragged him from detachment. A shriek of pain echoed off the heights. The jawbone-blazoned sorceress gripped a skull-sized chunk of a ruined stela in her hands; one of nine attackers staggered, blood coursing from a deep gash in his brow. She swung the stone back, ready for a second blow. The buzzards beat their wings.

  The jawbone-blazoned sorceress flicked her eyes towards Periphas, as though seeking his permission. His mind reeled. Why should she care?

  She was ready to kill a fellow human, an ally. Periphas saw what would happen. How many of them had even seen centaurs? The threat of conquest by a monstrous race—how could they accept such a thing on another’s word, even the elder’s? They would forget why they were here. Even if she didn’t kill him, the young man with the bloodied face would find some weapon of his own. Then his allies would follow, and then his foes. They would batter each other to death with the rubble of their own history—Eurytus would say it was only fair.

  Periphas looked to the spike of the stele atop which the elder perched like a bird. If she couldn’t unify them, against the centaurs they would never stand a chance.

  If she reacted at all, the mask concealed it.

  With the heel of his hand, he knocked the weapon from the jawbone-blazoned sorceress’ grasp. The chunk of rubble spun across the court, hit the wall with a crack like a rifle shot and fell to the ground. The dust cast up by its impact trailed west on the breeze. For a moment, all eyes followed it. Then they shifted to Periphas himself.

  He fought to regain the illusion of distance. What does it matter if these humans kill each other—save that it deprives Eurytus of the pleasure? The patterns the poison traced across his eyelids evoked the symbols burned into his wrists.