Beneath Ceaseless Skies #28 Read online

  Seven times he pored over the letter, for the first time in his life doubting his own memory, and seven times he twisted it in his hands until the parchment was a moistened wad and the words became unreadable. Hours passed before Cantiléna found him this way, huddled in the sullen light of a dying and neglected fire. She was moving quietly this time, but he heard her coming down the lane. He’d learned his lessons well.

  He’d learned a great many things. In his first battle on the warpath he put two lesser-isle Silici to the sword and on his own defended the body of a Baremescre peer. He’d never before won a Silici duel, so perhaps, he thought, these lesser islanders were of weaker stock. But when he was later challenged to a fight by one of Bellico’s nephews, he fought the man to a bloody draw. How he was doing it, he didn’t know, but his esteem with the Baremescre grew—infinitesimally, but still it grew. Until word had come to them by messenger of Naldo’s passing. Imre had neither the time nor the freedom to mourn. Instead, to his shame, he became a bitter and reckless companion, refusing to speak, rushing headlong into enemy positions, and suffering more wounds than ever in all his days. But he always healed, was always ready to fight.

  When they returned to Silici Tarraneh he declined a seat at the celebration feast—he would not have been good company, nor did he think he would be missed. But Cantiléna had sought him out; she always did.

  She entered the home—doubtless aware of him as he was aware of her, but saying nothing. Instead she walked softly from one corner to the next, brushing her hand across Naldo’s designs and carvings, hovering for a moment over the papers written in languages strange to her, pausing to caress his Jinan clothes with her copper-colored fingers. This was the first time she’d been here, Imre realized, and he envied her virginal eyes. He tried to observe this room from her perspective, to experience this place without seeing Naldo and his blithesome smiles, without hearing his lectures, without having every possible sensation bound and fettered to House Balgas and its legacy... its lies.

  Imre flung the wadded letter onto the embers in the hearth. Cantiléna, smelling strongly of lilies with her soft trousers whispering, came and sat next to him on the thick quilted rug. Together they watched the letter writhe and curl, a worm caught in the sun after the rain.

  “Your hymn has shaped well, Imre the Balgas.” He was startled by his name on her lips. Her tone was different than he remembered, canorous and more sorrowful. The music she found in those three words—”Imre the Balgas”—his dark blade, propped next to him, did much the same for the tired firelight, made it dancing and beautiful.

  Cantiléna reached with her stone arm and tossed more fuel on the fire.

  “Tell me what it is like,” he said, “to use such an arm.”

  She laughed. “Tell me what it is like to speak with a tongue, or to walk with feet. I never give it thought, Imre the Balgas.” She held her hands up for him to study. “They each tell me different stories, but the voice is the same.”

  Imre very carefully ran a finger across the palm of her stone hand, tracing a line to the tip of her thumb. It was cold and unyielding, but alive. Cantiléna flinched just slightly at his touch. “How did that feel?” he asked in Adala.

  She swallowed and lowered her hands. “My family tells me you returned home in grief and anger, yet now you.... You have never touched me, or even looked upon me with a pleasing eye. I wonder now what the Sage has written to change you so.”

  Imre steepled his fingers under his chin. What had Naldo written? A work of nonsense? The ramblings of a dead mind? Shamefully, Imre wanted the letter to be these things, but he could not lie to himself. Naldo’s words had been written with care and planning. Their terrible truth was just that, truth:

  Imre was Djinn. Djinn. Enemy of mankind. A child of beasts. The last son of a House secretly descended from the demon race of man-eaters. Naldo had known. Bapa had known. Do the honorable thing, the letter had urged, but Balgas honor these countless centuries had been but a romance built on ashes.

  Imre had always gone to his father with his secret worries, and Bapa would in a few hard words grind them to bits. Or he would turn to Naldo, who with his easy grin and lunatic bravado would use logic and reason to settle his fears. Now he had no one. Even their memories were sullied. He was finally and completely alone.

  Imre was appalled when the tears spilled down his face. He brushed them away quickly, but more followed; he swept these with both hands and blinked and told his mind to compose itself, but a wildness crept from his breast and took hold of his throat. Soon Cantiléna was there with her hands on his, and he was raging, roaring like a beast, screaming curses at his dead father between hard shuddering sobs.

  She spoke not a word, and he allowed her to pull him down to the rug and into her arms. She held him while he grieved.

  There were instances, moments before his old Adalheid duels generally, that Imre often examined and wondered what word or gesture had complicated his life so quickly. Who hurled the first insult? Who crossed that deep bold line? What had he done, or not done, to find himself on the road to bloodshed? After that night, in the home of his departed Arbiter and friend, Imre could never decide who first kissed whom, who whispered the first sweet word, who made the first awkward touch. Later moments blazed with detail—the feel of her mouth on his neck, his ear, the astonishing strength in her arm and the cool touch of her stony fingers passing across his chest.

  The need was on him like a hunger as he held her down with one arm and buried his face in her hair. Her body arched and she lifted him as easily as if he were a babe, then rolled him beneath her with a weight to make him gasp. When she pressed her mouth to his, her urgency, a rival to his own, crushed his lip. His blood mixed with the taste of her. Imre pushed his hands through her linens along the curve of her waist and found her unyielding, her steely but fevered body taut to match the passionate pleading in her eyes. Be strong, they seemed to beg. Imre pulled her close to lift his hips against hers, to oblige her want, his muscles straining with the effort, but Cantiléna held him down easily, her breath hot and sweet on his face. He strained until his teeth creaked, until his shoulders knotted, but Cantiléna slammed him down, and to Imre’s deep and fervent humiliation he cried out in pain.

  They stopped then, lying atop each other panting, she refusing to meet his eyes, he cursing his own frailty as the passion swiftly fled his manhood. Time stretched on, Imre’s limbs numbing beneath her weight, until finally she rose, grasped her hymn and made for the door without a thought to her appearance. At the threshold, she stopped and glanced back over her shoulder, meeting his gaze for the first time with a small and pitying grin. “I want to want you,” she said, and left.

  He lay there on Naldo’s floor, his soul battered, his ribs likely broken, thinking only of Naldo’s letter and Cantiléna’s parting grin, each of them flaying his mind with a different agony.

  Then he rose to follow her. He stepped out beneath the dawn. “Wait!” he called, but stopped before finishing. For Eroico stood on the lane, mouth agape as he watched his sister pass, stared at her tousled hair, her half-torn clothes.

  Cantiléna kept her head held high and looked neither left nor right as she rounded the bend. When she was gone, Eroico next regarded Imre, began to ask a question then thought better of it. Instead he delivered the news: “Your wildness on the warpath spread fame of the peregrin with the marvel hymn. The traders took with them the stories, and less than one month ago ships from your League arrived on our shores. They have blockaded our harbor. They have fired warnings with their far-flame weapons. They are demanding Imre the Balgas be delivered to them.” Eroico relayed the message while jittering like a child with a full bladder. And when he was finished, he turned heel and sprinted up the lane after his sister.

  Imre felt a man hollowed, but with nothing else to do he dressed and reported for his duties. He spent a long day enduring stares, avoiding questions, and gazing out at sea, at the masts flying Jinan’s green-star flag. When h
e returned to his cottage that evening, his body was dough and his nerves were shot.

  And his blade, only that morning a deep and featureless black, suddenly had streaking down its spine a single bright splash of copper.

  * * *

  Chorus

  The songs blurred into an endless parade, one challenge after the other, and none complete until the assembly-turned-wedding-party had their two kisses. He fought Tenuto and Tenutea, aunt and uncle of Cantiléna who seemed able to make their blades cling to his, weighed him down until his arms were burning. Then followed Calando, a cousin possessed of a deceptively slow style who snuck past Imre’s every parry. Later came Spiranda with a hymn that was more kidney dagger than sword, and Dolenta, the sad-eyed pregnant woman with the blunt blade that hit like a plank.

  The day wore on, the fragrance of clean grass and sea breezes miring into an aura of spit and blood and dried sweat. They allowed him water, but Imre’s stomach began to twist with hunger pangs sometime after noon; he became with each match just a half-step slower, his mind just that more muddled; and worst of all, without food and rest his wounds were failing to heal. By the time the four Granos stepped forward, cuts from a full two duels past were just mending.

  And what could he say of that frightening quartet? Precise, patient, concerted, and entirely without mercy, they were Incalza, quick and dark; Giusto with the rapier hymn; Fuoco whose gaze smoldered with bottled passion; and powerful Appoggia, a woman who fought rhythmless and aslant, like a drunkard with a nature for war. The Granos, the hailstorms, siblings who never faced an enemy alone. For Imre they introduced a special tour of suffering. Their tactics were exquisite as they ribboned his flesh and stymied his every plan. But finally, finally he managed to cut them all.

  And when he told Bellico once again that yes he would go on, his hymn was cracked in a dozen places, and weeping blood. He squinted against the evening sun for sign of his next opponent, swatted at the midges and scanned the gallery high and low, but the movement that at last caught his eye came from the dais. For Bellico was walking near, his white vesti swinging casually with its wicked black spikes, and Ariosa strode at his side.

  It was time to sing with the parents of the bride.

  * * *

  Verse

  Imre was now taking his turn to pace the Verzi bones, to mutter and fret and seek for answers. He meandered around the open graves when the night suddenly bloomed scarlet as the Jinan fleet fired their nightly cannonade across the harbor mouth. Mute tongues of flame licked the darkness obscenely, followed long seconds later by rolling thunder. Even the waters seemed afire.

  Imre forced his gaze away. He trod down the graveyard lane, watching the hellish light dance upon the dead, and lightly brushed the hymns with his fingertips.

  Surrender to the marauders... or toss the die and wait for the will of Bellico and his Baremescre. He had a third option, he knew. He could flee, swim to a lesser isle, disguise himself like he used to and take ship with some trader, earn his bread with the strength of his back and the skill of his strings, another sort of death for Imre of the lying House of Balgas, a death he wanted desperately. But Naldo’s letter wouldn’t leave him to it. The Arbiter had wanted him, begged him, to rescue the Balgas legacy, the honorable half of it at least. And thoughts of fleeing left Imre filled with shame.

  After a time the Jinan ships quieted. The night drew down her cool blue curtain. And abruptly Imre stood once again in stingy starlight. He had to admire the marauders’ showmanship, only they hadn’t accounted for the simple fact that the Baremescre wouldn’t scare. Why should they when their stone arms tossed aside musket blasts? No, it was the stoneless slaves who would suffer if those cannon turned inland, another massacre of ash.

  Imre kicked at a skull in angry frustration, meaning to send it sailing out to sea, and cursed mightily when his toe bent back on itself. The skull stared up at him, firmly rooted and mocking.

  And crouched over, clutching his foot, he saw the torch.

  After shunning Imre these sixteen days, Bellico had at last summoned him to a council scheduled for tomorrow morning. The rumors raged: Imre was being surrendered to the dangerous peregrin shipmen, or his penance was complete and he was being sent away, or, most popularly, he was to be executed by song for dishonoring the Third Blade and his hymn’s copper stripe was the proof. So Imre had expected her to come. Though, as she crested the Verzi, wreathed in smoke and flickering orange torchlight, he could think of no one he wanted to see less.

  He worked his toes in their sandal even as the warm wash of healing flooded them down to the bone. He tied his puppet to his trousers. He stood straight, with his hand on the hilt of his blade, waiting.

  When Cantiléna stopped she sighed deeply, her torch casting skeletal shadows across the yard. “The songs here are beautiful,” she said.

  In answer, Imre stepped across the offending skull and walked away from her, for in her expression he’d seen that pitying grin, pity for the near-man both deaf and mute.

  “Our affairs are our affairs,” she called after him. “I have told them nothing.”

  “Your brother no doubt relieved you of the need.”

  “And that unmans you.”

  Imre whirled on her, fists clenched. “You dare! The entire history of my people rests on my fate, and my fate may very well be in the hands of some barbar chief jealous over his daughter’s flesh.” He drew his blade and pointed its curved length at her throat. “If I killed you here, someone else would take your place as Third Blade. Your bones would be stretched out in some yard down in the low lands, and within a dozen years no one would remember your name. Your clan would not mourn you. There would be no sons or daughters to tell your tales. You Baremescre, so proud and strong with no thought to tomorrow. You never leave your accursed island, never make a single lasting change on the world except stonework and bloodshed and the burning ire of the slaves under your feet. Your death would mean nothing, would be worth nothing. So do not speak to me of courage, Cantiléna, not until you have something to lose.”

  She was quiet against his storm of words, torchlight dancing in her eyes, beauty and strength joined in her form like some sword of legend given life. She slid her flesh hand past his blade and pressed it to his bare chest. And in her gaze were sorrow and passion and joy and longing and everything that would be lost if she left this world. She said not a word, yet Imre for the second time that night felt ashamed.

  He lowered his hymn. “You wanted to know, on that night, what the Sage wrote to make such a change in me.” Perhaps she would understand, perhaps she wouldn’t. But I don’t want to be alone with this truth, he realized.

  Cantiléna nodded.

  Imre breathed the charged air and let it out slowly. He told her of how the Djinn had come to the Zuben al’Akrab a dying race. But even at the brink of annihilation they had planned, and with patience reached for the magic hidden within their blood, the magic of change. They enslaved the desert tribes to forge for themselves a civilization amidst the starfall wealth. They consumed the living flesh of their captives to learn it, and by learning they had become year-by-year, decade-by-decade, creatures with the appearance of man. And when enough of them had completed the transformation, they posed as Fahd the Balgas King and his nomads. They feigned a liberation of the desert tribes. They became a House of firstbloods with superior stamina, great health, and sharp minds, and led the emancipated peoples into the founding a great league of cities.

  “Know now, it is not only fear that has driven us south,” Imre quoted from the letter. “It is not by accident that you are here, on this island. The League is seeking to stamp House Balgas into the dust, for by some terrible misfortune they have found our secret truth. How, I do not know. But they will hunt you, young master. They will find you and destroy the last son of House Balgas, if we let them.

  “‘When wit and thew won’t suffice, follow the firstblood.’ These are the words of your House, and I hope that you are now beginning t
o understand their true worth. You will find no greater strength than among the Silici, born warriors, immune even to the weapons of Jinan. Here is your salvation. Examine these Baremescre, find their power and make it your own. Consume it. Change as your ancestors changed. Follow the firstblood, and save your House!”

  He had signed Naldo Randal, Arbiter, Friend, and Servant of Lord Imre Usaym Balgas. That he’d written in Silici made Naldo’s desire all the more clear.

  Cantiléna’s flesh palm was still pressed against Imre’s chest. Her torch was lying in the grass, snuffed out. “So you are of the race that slaughtered babes and ate men,” she said into the darkness.

  Imre nodded.

  “And your knowledge of this somehow... turned your affections to me.”

  Imre placed his hand over hers. “The Sage’s letter brought me horror, but it also freed me from a burden. I would not continue beholden to a House of liars and fiends, and so I chose for the first time in a long while to follow my own yen, to enjoy what I pleased. You please me.”

  She cupped his face with her hands, one hot, one cold. “And of the rest, consuming our flesh, making our strength your own—you will do this.”

  At first Imre thought he misunderstood, or perhaps she had misunderstood. But the truth was there plain in her voice. Imre shook his head to free it, appalled. “I could not. Could not. Ever!”

  But Cantiléna held him fast. “You have killed. In your League and the far lands and here among us, you have slain with your muskets, with your dead-swords and your hymn. But now you flinch from killing, now when it can make you stronger.”

  Imre grabbed her flesh wrist hard. “Stronger is what you want, yes. Stronger so you need feel no shame in desiring the near-man!” Cantiléna said nothing, but Imre’s anger made him bold. “To a hell of flaying with you and your clan!” he shouted in Adala. “Tomorrow you will see how strong this ‘near-man’ can be, Third Blade Cantiléna.” He dug his fingers into her arm. Then in Silici, “I swear on the soul of my father, you will see how strong I can be.”