Beneath Ceaseless Skies #23 Read online

  You’re not like them, he told himself, using Eurytus’ voice.

  He alone, of all those here, had seen the centaurs. He alone understood them. Who in the world knew the mind of Eurytus better than he? Of course he could see these people’s death coming. He knew exactly what would happen. It had happened to him.

  He made a gesture, dismissive. Go on, then. This isn’t finished. Fight.

  The wounded man wiped blood from his eyes. The stillness was broken by the blur of bodies moving as though in a dance.

  Anger throbbed with the poisoned pulse in Periphas’ temples. He’d deluded himself. He didn’t need help. What threat, what challenge, could mere humans make against one who had wrestled centaurs?

  He left the safety of the elder’s stela, left the jawbone-blazoned sorceress’ flank. He found himself intervening in uneven fights, hurling people apart, twisting weapons from their hands. He found himself wanting to do more: to snap wrists, dislocate jaws, shove his fists up through the flesh of stomachs and rip out hearts. Why was he helping them? He was here to destroy them. He ought to be laughing.

  The sigils on his skin grew hot, began to sear. He spun and rolled and snaked away from blows, untouchable, more than human—like Achilles, like the god Eurytus had trained him to be. Every detail stood out in his perception, every contour of the wrinkles on a stone-faced stela’s brow, every catch in the breeze, every gap in a buzzard’s feathers where an old wound had not healed. Those around him seemed to flail and founder, as though the muck-choked marshes of the Acheron had caught their limbs while he alone danced free. He felt their intent trained upon him: surprise, respect, envy, despair. The elder’s gaze he felt keenest of all. He returned it with a seething glare and went on destroying their illusions.

  No words passed, no sounds but grunts and thudding blows and labored breathing and the screeches of carrion birds, but something changed. The chaos of the battle slowed. His enemies fell back from him, then from each other.

  He emerged from the trance that had taken him and found himself alone, but for the stelae, in the center of the court. Ninety-eight sorcerers formed a ring around its edge.

  He searched their eyes, their symbols and bruises. They wanted a leader, he realized. They too resented the elder and her mask. They were as weak, as uncertain as he.

  He chose a face he hadn’t fought. He beckoned.

  When he had struck that one down, he found another.

  Still the elder crouched atop the stele, silent as though she were part of the stone, patient as the buzzards.

  The sun yellowed, descended. Sunlight broke and fled; the shadows grew until they swallowed everything. The moon crossed, drawing clouds behind it like a feathered cloak. Like dust-billows, cast by an army too distant to be heard.

  At a lull in the fighting, the clouds finally broke. Periphas stood catching his breath, staring at the ground, thinking of nothing. Starlight struck his stinging face, and he looked up.

  The jawbone-blazoned sorceress stepped forward. Her hands were empty, dangling at her sides. She was mumbling to herself, unintelligible words half-formed around swollen lips. The bruise his heel had left below her breast was hidden now by darkness.

  His muscles were rubbery; his consciousness waned; exhaustion gave the poison reign, laying fog and ghosts across his vision.

  He shook his head at her. There was nothing she could show him.

  She flung back her shoulders.

  He took a long breath and dropped into a defensive stance, so familiar by now it was like falling into dreams.

  She fell to one knee.

  The sorcerers were scattered, nursing their own hurts, tending to each other’s wounds or hovering at the edge of sleep. A murmur made its way among them. Heads turned; the whites of eyes glowed. She was yielding to him.

  Periphas brushed blood from the hollow of his eye. His gaze crossed the circle, disbelieving, but found no challenge. The centaur in him laughed harshly.

  He held out a hand to the jawbone-blazoned sorceress and pulled her to her feet.

  He looked to the elder. Was this what she’d intended by her distance? Was this why she had interposed that monstrous mask, cheated her students of her trust? To make a leader of the spy who’d been sent to destroy her. He beckoned, though his body was jelly and the flower-heart poison was whispering the fates of traitors in his ears in Greek. Prove to me I belong here, he said with his gaze. Prove you have something to teach me Eurytus cannot. Only give me some excuse to respect you, and perhaps....

  In the myths it was never armies who won or lost wars, but individuals.

  The elder descended from her monolithic human pillar to challenge Periphas herself.

  She seemed suddenly tiny beneath the massive wooden mask. Her legs, protruding from the feathered mantle, were knob-kneed, stick-thin. She looked as though she might be blown down by the wind. How old was she, he wondered? Eighty years? A hundred? A hale enough age for a centaur, but for a human savage, she might as well be dead.

  Periphas bled from split lip and swollen eye, his body leopard-spotted with bruises in the starlight. It was sorcery alone that kept him standing, the tenuous command of a mind besieged by poison, torn between two treasons. He drooped forward, shoulders sloping, leaning on his power, like a man impaled through the chest on a post.

  She nodded readiness; Periphas sucked in a breath and closed in. For an instant, he allowed himself to fantasize. In his mind, he pitted himself against Eurytus.

  The elder flicked a wrist, sending one of her rattlesnake’s rattles hurtling at his chest. It made no sound as it flew through the air, but struck with the roar of a rainstorm. Buzzards departed the earthwork’s rim like startled swallows. It knocked him sprawling. He tumbled a dozen feet, rolled to a stop and lay still, looking up at the sky.

  The elder leaned over him. A sigil on her palm, like a talon or a peak, took on the glow of the brand that had inscribed it, throwing a red light between them. The mask was wooden and immense, slit-eyed, bird-beaked, as much for terror as religion. She pulled it off, revealing for the first time the face beneath. It was wrinkled deeply at the lips and eyes and showed no optimism. “Your name,” she said, “and your tribe.”

  Periphas gave her a name that meant Sandpiper, and a tribe whose people had been killed or enslaved a dozen years before. The words tasted foreign. Eurytus had named him.

  * * *

  He slept where he had fallen. He dreamed of riding half-awake on a centaur’s back, as he had so often as a child: arms wrapped tight around a torso streaming sweat, his face flicked by a long mane streaming in the wind. He felt the hooves pounding beneath him slow to a halt. A set of hands lifted him down and laid him beside a fire. A dead human, anonymous, had been spitted and laid across the flames to sear. Eurytus basted the roast with blood, his sable, richly-muscled horse’s body glistening. He hacked off a leg with a toothed knife and offered to share it. Periphas, for once, refused.

  He woke to the deep blue of predawn. The earthwork was silent. He climbed to his feet, unsteady. The hulking shapes of the ruins and the gorge’s mouth were limned in his vision by pulsing trails of white. His sore muscles throbbed in the cold.

  Atop the east arena wall, a giant bird perched, a silhouette against the fading stars. The elder, keeping watch.

  He drew in a breath, smelled a stain on the air. Something was burning.

  The signal fire. He had lit it six times in the past six weeks. Every time, he’d been terrified of being caught. Every time, he had woken the next day in fear for his life. Had he lit it tonight? He couldn’t remember.

  He sat up. The uncertain forms of sleeping sorcerers lay all around him. The smell of smoke faded until he thought it just a trick of the medicine. Then it returned, sage-scented and strong.

  A snake’s rattle came from impossibly close. He felt a feather brush his spine. He choked back a cry.

  The elder crouched behind him. “Fires,” she said, “on the east horizon.”

  She l
ed him winding among the sleeping bodies. Out of habit, his eyes followed her feet: stealthy but frail, like his own, like any human’s. A single step from a centaur would shatter every bone. He walked where she walked: climbing steeply up the terraced rows of the earthwork to the rim, where she had perched.

  Periphas remembered: he had set no signal-fire tonight. Nine pinpricks of light lined the horizon. Eurytus had revealed his presence.

  Why would he give himself away?

  A lure. Another test. Eurytus the aesthete, the connoisseur of hatred and deception. Why would he choose the easy win, when opportunity offered a chance for finesse?

  “You have to run,” said Periphas. “If you ever hope to rally the tribes, to have the chance to stand against the centaurs, run. Take the others into the gorge. Find somewhere steep to climb it, where speed can’t help them. When you reach the top, go west.”

  The heavy mask was slung across the elder’s back. The contoured wrinkles of her face made her harder to dismiss as distant and oblivious. Made her easier to fear for in what was to come.

  “Are you not coming with us, Sandpiper of the Karankawa? You who have shown yourself strongest, wisest among us?” Her smile was wry, but not sarcastic; it accepted that had Periphas not been half-dead, more than half asleep and nearly starved, she would have had no chance to beat him. He saw that she had little hope, and no illusions. “What will you do instead? Go off and hide? Stay here and face them down alone?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not the leader you’ve been seeking. I can fight. I have more capacity to kill than any ten of the others. But against centaurs, that isn’t enough. You need a warrior who can change people’s minds, unite them. No one knows me. I can rally no tribes to your cause. I am the only Karankawa left. My people were enslaved or killed a dozen years ago.”

  “Then stand with us, Sandpiper, to free those who survive.”

  “Have you ever fought a centaur? They have two hearts—did you know that? Spear a centaur through the chest and he will not die, but only go drunk with pain and rage and loss of blood and go on killing.”

  Emotions fleeted across her lips like flash floods across a droughted wilderness, changing the land forever as they passed. She was awed. She was afraid. “You have fought them,” she said.

  The elder was no warrior. He imagined her in another time, leading her students among white peaks, looking down upon the backs of eagles. A healer. A philosopher. A seeker of visions, drawn by desperation far beyond her league. And yet she’d called Periphas wiser than she. He wondered—could she see the future?

  Surely not, or else she would have seen his treachery.

  He watched the horizon, the smoke and dust rising against the rose-gray approach of the sun.

  She clutched his shoulder with a talon hand and drew him around to face her. “Then we’d have no chance at all without you.”

  He saw it in her face. She knew. How she had divined it, or when, he couldn’t guess. There was no such thing as prophecy. Even Eurytus lacked such power. Yet somehow she knew how he had learned to fight, who had taught him.

  And still she wanted him to lead.

  He understood at last why she had worn the mask: her face was too expressive, too human, to hide what she knew. What he could not comprehend was why she had removed it.

  She gestured behind her, at the bodies of the sorcerers scattered prone. “Do you think I called them here to follow me to war? For generations I have led the scions of the tribes in quest for vision. I am acquainted with the minds of thunderbirds, the acts of ancestors a thousand generations dead. I am the only one among you who will ever see the shape of wind. I know myself, Sandpiper, as you and they do not.”

  She padded barefoot, rattles shaking, down the earthwork’s bank.

  Periphas touched the red marks she had left in his flesh. Then he followed her.

  At last, he would defy Eurytus.

  * * *

  The sun reached its first beams along the heights of the gorge, and one of those sorcerers born among the western peaks waved his arms and cried out. He had found the route that Periphas sought: a steep defile in the western cliff, carved by runoff falls in wetter seasons, marked now by rich and jagged growth. It reached a thousand feet from floor to rim; at times the ascent was almost sheer. Sorcerers could climb it, if they must. Centaurs wouldn’t have a chance.

  The elder began to climb, her students following in single-file, as though this were no different from any other path they’d taken since they met. Battle-cries and the thunder of hooves echoed around them, multiplied, distorted by the gorge’s labyrinthine curves.

  Periphas waited, last in line, massaging the swelling from his fists, watching the bend in the gorge from which Eurytus and the centaurs must emerge. Every second, deceived by the echoes, he expected that black-maned head, those golden-mantled shoulders to appear behind the muzzle of a rifle.

  Treachery. He’d seen it before among the centaurs. Given time and leisure, any centaur’s ambition would swell to the point that it eclipsed self-preservation. Eurytus himself had committed it, when he made himself the centaurs’ lord. Did that mean he would forgive it in another? Perhaps. Amycus had sided with savages once, and Eurytus had shown pity—even mercy. Enough, at least, to merely smash Amycus’ pride and sanity apart instead of destroying him completely.

  Would he do the same for me?

  The numbers waiting at the canyon bottom dwindled; the pairs of apprehensive eyes that fixed, not on the bend, but on Periphas’ own face, went from ninety to fifty to ten. He wondered at the lies they must have had to tell themselves to come so easily to trust him.

  At last he found himself alone, the time for doubt behind him, all the others climbing steadily above. Then he was selecting a toehold in the sandstone, gripping a juniper root or a tuft of desert grass, pulling himself upward hand over hand. All that remained to be feared were the guns.

  He found himself believing they would make it.

  When he had climbed perhaps a third of the way, he spared a moment for rest, letting those above him get farther ahead, making himself the easiest mark. At this range, the centaurs wouldn’t recognize him. He was just another savage.

  He craned his neck over his shoulder, eyes on the bend in the gorge. He swallowed. He slipped an inch before he caught himself.

  The first ranks of the pursuing army emerged: stumbling over each other, shoulders hunched and crisscrossed with red, heads bowed low. Humans. Human slaves, their feet bound up in irons so their footsteps rang like hooves. The white spiral brand of Eurytus stood out clear against their skin. Minotaurs ran among them, lowing and shaking their horns, on the verge of stampede. A handful of centaurs stalked behind them with scourges and prods, rifles slung across their backs. The cries of war he thought he’d heard were cries of pain.

  Eurytus had divided his forces.

  A tall bay centaur with a close-cropped mane unslung the rifle from his shoulders, lifted it, and laid his cheek against the stock.

  Periphas threw himself laterally across the defile and upward, scrabbling for purchase against the loose earth and stone. The rifle cracked, and a clod of dirt burst from the cliff face where he had been. “Faster!” he shouted at those above.

  The fires on the horizon—a ruse. A cover, while Eurytus led the bulk of the centaurs elsewhere. Periphas guessed it was three hours since dawn. How far could they have gone?

  He looked up in time to glimpse the elder’s feathered mantle disappear over the top of the cliff.

  He gave no warning, just went on climbing, hand over hand. If the centaurs were waiting, then every one of the humans above him was dead. They would find out soon enough.

  The rifle cracked again. One of the sorcerers screamed and fell past Periphas into the gorge. He couldn’t tell who it was. Black hair dancing like a gorgon’s, dark eyes already blank. Enemies or allies, he still couldn’t tell them apart.

  Dislodged dust and pebbles clattered past Periphas, striking his shoulders a
nd face. Silt lodged in the cut above his brow. It stung; his eyes watered. His bruised muscles ached as they loosed and contracted, pulling him closer to the place where he would learn his end. A hundred feet remained, and only a dozen still climbing ahead of him.

  He passed a colony of swallows, houses built from dust and spit against the cliff-face, crowds of chirping nestlings begging to be fed. In the sky, the buzzards were silent, certain this time of their feast.

  A shotgun bellowed. The roar resounded from the far side of the gorge, its after-echoes mingling with panicked shouts. The swallows burst from the cliff wall in a terrified cloud. Periphas knotted his fingers in a clump of grass and pressed his body against the rough sandstone as another form tumbled past in a rush of air and dust. He blinked sand from his lashes. The body was a centaur’s. It slammed against an outcrop, snapping bone. Ribs punctured skin; the humanoid part of the centaur went limp, the equine limbs still kicking.

  He kept climbing, engulfed by the tiny, beating wings and fevered wails of swallows. He thought of what he could say to the elder. He would tell her it wasn’t her fault.

  Then he was pulling himself up over the lip of the gorge.

  Human sorcerers knelt or lay prone—most, it seemed, unharmed. A few had been dismembered, the pieces scattered—not cut apart, he saw from the wounds, nor blasted into bits by lead, but ripped. Torn limb from limb. The elder alone stood erect, untouched. She wore the mask. Her back was to him. He couldn’t see her eyes—and for that, he was glad.

  Centaurs surrounded them, bristling with guns.

  “Periphas! Welcome—well done.” Eurytus stepped forward, nearly pranced. He holstered a massive revolver, pushed back the brim of his hat from his sun-bronzed brow. Every contour of him, every muscle, exuded almost childish glee. Grotesque faces, like stolen souls, grimaced from his golden torques—royal emblems of the conquered nations to the south. Eurytus’ own ivory grin was predatory and immense. “We’ve waited for you. So you could help us celebrate your great success.” His voice leaked irony like sweat. “Shall we begin?”

  Eurytus cast his gaze over the cowed human sorcerers. He chose one carelessly. He closed a hand around her throat and lifted her to arm’s length, forcing her to balance on her toes. There was a symbol painted below her breasts, like a jawbone trailing strings of desiccated flesh.