Beneath Ceaseless Skies #28 Read online

  They stood appraising each other, the last fingers of the torch’s smoke fading in the wind.

  “You will not attempt the Sage’s plan,” she said.

  “No.”

  “And tomorrow’s council....”

  Imre slipped his hymn beneath the puppet head dangling from his waist, and with a single swipe he cut the strings. The ugly soulless thing, the product of his time among these folk, struck the ground with a thud. “I am finished submitting.”

  Cantiléna sighed then, and plucked his grasp from her wrist. “Then you will die,” she said, and walked off beneath the pale starlight. Trailing a scent of lilies. Leaving him alone among the bones.

  * * *

  Chorus

  They attacked together—Bellico driving forward, stabbing with the frenzied speed of white lightning, Ariosa’s curved blade flitting here and there like a ribbon on the winds of the same storm. They were a single beast, single-minded, many-limbed. Imre could only raise his hymn in defense as the blades bit home and a dozen narrow fires blazed across the flesh of his arms. He backpedaled for space but the pair devoured the void, besetting him once more with their tempest of stone. He lost his footing once, twice, his backpedal melting into a flustered retreat clear across the amphitheater floor, parrying for all he was worth and suffering cuts just the same, until he left a spattered trail of his own blood darkening in the sun-warmed turf. And still they came.

  The cheers were deafening, cries and applause and shouts for every flick and slash. Bellico and Ariosa were masters, true, but Imre half expected to see gods incarnate after such delirium. He turned aside a thrust with his hymn but caught another on his shoulder and felt a new wash of blood. “Beauty! Beauty! Beauty!” cried the crowd. Damn them.

  Not until Ariosa traced a line of hot pain above Imre’s navel did he see an opening. Her slash took her too far round, exposing her center, and Imre drove for it savagely—hip, shoulder, arm, and blade—his cracked hymn whistling as it broke the air. The lunge was brutal, would have opened Ariosa cleanly across the middle, if she was still there.

  A heavy pressure struck Imre about the head—the air itself drumming his ears—even as his blade impossibly passed through Ariosa’s shape without slowing. No impact. No blood. Instead she blurred and before his eyes faded into the air, a ghostly mist. “Blind me,” he swore as he caught his footing, just an instant before Ariosa reappeared with a hammer-fisted blow that jarred Imre to the spleen. Vesti met hymn with a crack and Imre’s battle-scarred blade exploded in a cloud of black and copper pieces.

  Even as the shards pelted his arms and chest, stabbing like needles, Imre’s mind fumbled with Ariosa’s speed. Here one moment, there the next, with a ghost-step in between. He knew of magicians in the Jinan deserts, of snakewives and tattooed ancients and man-scarabs that held entire tribes in thrall with their command over the sands. He’d seen unearthly feats in Silici duels. But he’d never seen the like of Ariosa.

  Jeers came down from the gallery: “Beauty, Theca! A prickled coat for the peregrin!” called a woman as Imre struggled, doubled over and hemorrhaging. “Nearly a blade for the near-man!” cried another. And many laughed.

  A sudden cold spasm seized Imre and drove the shame from his mind. He fumbled at the shards in his flesh but availed nothing: they were too stubborn and too deep.

  It’s happening again, he realized, even as the cold slid inch by inch beneath his skin. The same agony from the Verzi. Imre thought of the scar on his chest, imagined dozens. He shuddered. The surgeons were on hand, he need only call them.

  But then Bellico was there, blade propped across his shoulders, grinning. “You thought yourself are a man of prowess in the dark with my daughter. Yet here you are. Continue?” he asked, lightly. Imre lifted his gaze and saw the flesh beside the Maestro’s single working eye crinkled in mirth. And Imre thought of Cantiléna. Thought of that pitying little smile. And he heard himself shout, “Aye!”

  A wind stirred across Imre’s ears; he heard what sounded like distant wolves howling. He frowned: the isle had no dogs or their wilder cousins. But his wonder shattered as the chieftain’s blade came slashing for his face. Imre, hunched in cold pain, scrambled out of Bellico’s range just as to the left rustled another windy sound—a flutter like the beating of wings—and Ariosa was darting there, her body blurred and dark. The winds gusted from this side and that as Imre frantically knocked aside Bellico’s thrusts before whirling to slash savagely at the streak that was Ariosa. She stopped short, and Imre was jarred to the teeth when she caught his broken blade on the edge of her hymn.

  But the wolf-sound was there again, raising his hackles, and instinct told him to turn just a moment before Bellico’s hymn came stabbing. The pale blade ripped through Imre’s trousers and missed his groin by a finger’s breadth. He kicked at the Maestro with a raw cry and caught him on the hip, and they stumbled apart, the three of them.

  Imre fell to his knees, shivering, his body numb from jaw to palm, but he flung his arms into a cross of defense and flinched from the blows he knew were coming.

  Instead, nothing.

  Instead, when he looked he found Bellico and Ariosa staring. Brows furrowed. Flesh knuckles pale on their hilts. They were gaping in a way Imre had not seen on a Silici since he and Naldo won their battle on the harbor road. He’d only begun to work out his puzzlement when a single keening birdcry echoed overhead, and Imre felt a shudder that had naught to do with his wounds. In a flash he realized why. The amphitheater was quiet. A cough, a scrape of sandal on stone, whispered linen and whispered voices, all tiny ripples in a yawning silence. Imre’s breath came haggard—for the dread fell upon him thick as a quilt. Until he bent to see what awed the assembly so, for then his breath promptly died in his throat.

  Follow the firstblood. Those were the words Naldo had written. When wit and thew won’t suffice, follow the firstblood. The blood of the devouring Djinn. The blood of change.

  Even as Imre watched, his body devoured the living stone of the Baremescre. All but one of the shards had melted wholly into his flesh, leaving chitinous blotches speckling his arm, his chest. The last and thickest was merging with him now, sinking into the meat of his shoulder down to the bone and spreading cold as it went.

  Imre’s heart beat like a hammer; his stomach churned; yet deep in his mind a truth fell into place. He’d never won a single duel against a Baremescre until he sailed to war, until after Naldo stabbed him with the hymn splinter and gave Imre his hard, black scar. And hadn’t he, just moments ago, parried Bellico, easily, with hardly a thought? And the thrust, hadn’t he dodged the Maestro’s thrust without seeing? Hadn’t he checked Ariosa’s ghost-step, even with a broken hymn?

  He felt giddy. Naldo hadn’t wanted him to eat their flesh. Imre’s stone sword had come to learn him, and he it. And it was the stone that had the power.

  The winds built again with their beastly songs—Bellico’s song, he realized, and Ariosa’s. Footsteps rustled in the grass, proving that the Maestro and his Theca had finished their gaping, were coming to sort this mystery the Baremescre way, with sharp edges. Imre lifted his gaze and for the first time understood the Silici strength: Bellico was practically cloaked in his wolfish wind, its beating gusts giving power to his every stride.

  Imre grasped his shorn stub of a hymn with a cold, clumsy hand, and for the first time since crossing blades with her parents he looked to Cantiléna. She lounged by the dais, regal and poised even with her brow arched in confusion. In a way you were right about the Sage’s plan, you beauteous harpy. But still, we will cross blades, you and I. Imre scanned the gallery and the Baremescre peers who studied him implacably—quiet, yes, but disdainful to a one. He sniffed at the air and caught the smells of the sea, heard the waves crashing off beyond the amphitheater walls, and thought of those ships in the harbor waiting to claim him as a token of war. And he decided.

  Bellico and Ariosa had chosen to flank him, but Imre ignored them as he worked his hymn into the ground
hilt first, jagged edge up. This blade would sing for him, Ariosa had said, if he allowed it.

  The doom Imre felt was crushing, but his thoughts had never been so pure, so clean. There would be suffering from this, of that he was certain. But Bapa had told it true. To succeed in this world, learn to embrace pain. And Imre agreed, even as he impaled himself upon the blade.

  * * *

  Middle Eight

  He dreamed he was beside a river of silver threads. They quivered each with a thrum, a note that swelled with its neighbor into music that mellowed the air. He brushed his fingers across the threads and they sang for him. He thrust his hand between them and heard a wild music. He stroked the silver threads until he’d played a song of savagery, of might. And when his melody was honed into a pure and elegant weapon, he dove into the river, letting the threads entwine him whole. For a weapon was what he wanted. And a weapon he meant to be.

  * * *

  Verse

  Imre opened his eyes. He was standing upon the Baremescre’s grassy amphitheater floor. The turf stank of his blood and others’ blood, of starch and ancient death. The sunset scorched the horizon with a riot of colors he’d never seen in the same sky. But it was the wind that overwhelmed: in blasts and whorls it struck him, cut him, rushed beneath his skin. Its cadence was the beat of his heart. Its melody a roar with the menace of a dozen lions.

  “What’s happening?” he tried to ask. But his mouth was frozen shut. He made to reach for it with his hands but his hands were frozen too. Frantically he squinted against the light to see what substance restrained him; his neck would not turn. A panic began pawing beneath the floor of his mind.

  It was then that Bellico sprang into view, snarling, swinging that white and platinum hymn in a cut for Imre’s neck.

  Imre made to scramble backward. To duck. To dodge. To flee. Not a muscle gave heed, not an inch. Instead his body tilted forward into Bellico’s swing, shorting the distance by half. Imre braced for the blow. But of a sudden, a Silici off to Imre’s right swung a black vesti ferre and caught Bellico’s hymn on the back of its fist. In that instant Imre’s senses jarred with a clash of sound, as from snarling beasts in a deadly toothed clinch, then Bellico was stumbling away, hymn recoiling wildly, and the moment passed.

  Strike me blind, Imre swore to himself. That was a near thing. He tried to see who it was that saved him, only to again have his muscles refuse. He stood helplessly planted in the roaring tumult, facing Bellico, watching him recover his footing. Move, damn you! Imre screamed in his mind, but even as he struggled, a sharp breeze struck him from behind. This one was different, a flap and flutter almost pacific. He was deciding if it was familiar when a force spun him round by the hip just in time to watch Ariosa slash at him, and to watch that mysterious ebon fist swat away her blade to another bloom of violent music. Ariosa’s face showed surprise. But the greater shock was Imre’s: she was dripping sweat.

  She recovered quickly and danced away out of reach, jabbed her hymn into the earth and leaned on it. Her hair was matted to her face, exhaustion and excitement rolling off her body like heat. “A marvel,” she said, and her words smote Imre to the quick.

  He looked about.

  The amphitheater had not changed in form, the same impossibly delicate masonry, the same stalwart gazes from the gallery. The world, though, felt upended. The amphitheater’s pale stonework was over bright, the Baremescre’s linens in colors too sharp; dust motes in the distance lazed upon breezes that floated smells of impossible things, dead things and living, beneath the earth and above. And this wind that cloaked him, though fierce, never bent a single blade of grass.

  What had he done? He’d been hurt, he remembered. Someone had stabbed him. No, that was wrong. He focused as Naldo taught him, and the winds around him settled. What had he done? He’d been on his knees after fighting, cold and bleeding, his hymn broken down to a jagged stump... and he’d fallen on it. He’d thrust his stone sword into his own heart. He’d done it for power, for a Silici song.

  The wind was half a whisper when the truth of his action struck home, but like a thrown door, his awareness opened. And he knew the roaring wind was his. He became aware of its strength seeping through is body. He felt it even in his breath, the roar surging with every exhale, his chest swollen with might. And all through the amphitheater whorled the Baremescre singing winds. I’ve been ignorant of this? he thought, astonished. For though Bellico’s howl and Ariosa’s flutter were greatest and loudest, beneath them rose a vast chorus—drones, booms, trumps, and squeals, clicks and keens, bells and growls—together only a sword’s edge short of cacophony. A musical noise to reach even the stars. And still he found no match for his roaring wind.

  I’ve done it, he thought. But what’s wrong with me? Imre bent to examine his wounds.

  He screamed.

  The right arm across his breast looked like his arm, could almost be his arm, but when sunlight danced across the back of this hand, the color ran from black to copper to black again. Stone. A vesti ferre, he thought giddily. Naldo was right! But when he scanned the left arm he saw it matched the right, and that was wrong. And the chest and belly, they were stone too, and that was worse. His trousers were torn, exposing a dark stone thigh with the scars from his duels outlined in copper. Black stone feet and matching toes gripped the sod through broken sandals. Imre touched his lips and nose and found stone, clapped his hands to shoulder and back and found the same; he beat his chest with closed fists and over and over felt nothing but distant shocks. And the voice that screamed from his throat was the rattling of gravel echoed between sepulcher walls.

  He screamed with impossible breath, on and on past human enduring. But his voice was abruptly muzzled when Bellico’s howling song rose more fiercely, when Imre’s mouth snapped shut with a painless crack. The Maestro was coming. And Imre’s new stone body stepped forth all on its own to meet him.

  The battle was automatic. One of Bellico’s gusts hit Imre in the stomach just an instant before the Maestro, in full stride, thrust his hymn there. The stab was a white blur, but Imre’s body pivoted neatly and the great pale blade spitted naught but air. Two more stabs and two more effortless escapes. Bellico stumbled, out maneuvered. But Imre’s body wasn’t finished. The fingers on one hand bulged, snapped, and in their place bloomed dark stone claws. They raked down in a blinding slash and bit with a thump, four wells of blood exploding across Bellico’s flesh arm. Another slash. Four peels ripped from his vesti. And the Maestro tumbled like a grunting rag doll to the turf.

  Imre felt giddy but had no time to reflect, for Ariosa was there in a heartbeat. Where her husband’s song was a rage, she came with a restrained wind of sharp twittering flits. She slashed high then low, then low and low again, all with her ghostly blur. But everywhere she went, his body was there first, maneuvering with the slightest of motions, until finally it caught Ariosa’s hymn in an iron grip, heedless of its bite, and yanked it from her hand. Imre’s left hand shoved her backward. His right slashed her across the chest with her own hymn. A red mist exploded in a line as Ariosa staggered back several steps. She did not fall. In response, Imre’s body flipped her hymn to seize it by the hilt and brought it down, without a pause or stay, whistling for her exposed neck.

  And Imre watched, awed. Bellico and Ariosa had been toying with him before. Their latest attacks, he could barely assemble them into anything that made sense: an image of a face in rigor, a clash of stone on stone, a waft of sweat and musk. They were quick, freakishly quick, and monstrous in their strength. His heart ought to be pounding. But, no—his body had dismantled those fantastic assaults coldly, patiently, like a machine at work.

  All of this flashed through his mind in less than half an instant, and still he was slow to realize what was coming.

  Bellico was not.

  “A song and two kisses!” came his strained cry. But too late.

  Far too late.

  For to Imre’s horror, his stone war body drove Ariosa’s blade clear
through her neck with demonic fury—the sound a horrendous wet tear—until with a jarring halt it caught, lodged in her hip. The fluttering winds hushed. All sound fled. His world was Ariosa’s face, timeless, without wrinkle or spot, her dark eyes knowing even as their light faded. She smiled bloodily. And smiling, she died.

  Imre was trapped there inside a body of stone that held this stately woman’s corpse like a haunch of meat on a spit. Her viscera spilled across his arm. He tried to look away and failed.

  After a time, Bellico limped into view to stand silently beside the remains of his wife. Cantiléna and Eroico joined him, followed by Glissando and Dolenta. Appoggia came with the other three Granos, and soon every Baremescre of peerage had gathered in a rough circle, children and all. As they came, Imre’s body released Ariosa’s hymn and dropped into a defensive crouch, allowing her nerveless remains to at last topple to the earth. Here were faces awed, there intrigued; many wore the bruises and cuts Imre had delivered in earlier duels, and from these the wariness radiated thickly. But everywhere, the singing winds danced. Not a strand of grass swayed, not a speck of dust stirred, but gusts touched Imre in a thousand places.

  Ariosa’s body had fallen nearly in twain, spilling her life in an obscene display. But Bellico gathered her carefully into his arms and spoke two words in a clear untrembling voice: “Beautiful song.”

  The Baremescre echoed him, high voices and low giving the only Silici eulogy as the chieftain came cradling his wife’s corpse and stood before Imre. Their gazes met, Imre’s dread threatening to overwhelm his senses, until with a horrible blow he realized there was no sorrow here. Bellico had on his face a wistful smile beneath faraway eyes, the countenance of a man enraptured in remembered joy. He bent carefully to retrieve Ariosa’s hymn while Eroico and Cantiléna watched, each nearly bursting with pride. Maestro Bellico walked alone across the amphitheater floor, the crowd parting before him, and he delivered Ariosa to the surgeons near the dais. Without a word they gathered her upon a litter and carried her through a stone ivy archway, headed for the tombs, Imre remembered, where the bones would be prepared for their place upon the Verzi. The assembly applauded, but Imre thought only of the words Ariosa had spoken to him so long ago: The dead have no names.