Beneath Ceaseless Skies #98 Read online

  E. Catherine Tobler was born on the other side of the International Dateline, which either gives her an extra day in her life or an extraordinary affinity when it comes to interdimensional gateways. Her fiction can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, Fantasy Magazine, and several times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She is the senior editor of Shimmer Magazine and calls Colorado home. For more, visit www.ecatherine.com.

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  DEATH AND THE THUNDERBIRD, PT. II

  by Michael J. DeLuca

  (Concluded from Pt. I, in BCS #97)

  * * *

  VII.

  Shoving the steward boy ahead into the brightness and roaring wind of the platform, Five Legs slammed the aft door to the passenger car, cutting off the sounds of rioting, the growl of flame and the skin-crawlingly appetizing scent of cooked flesh. The handle began to turn; he threw his weight against it. The snarled breath of a bay centaur fogged the window. Thin lips, creased by a ghastly scar, brushed the glass—he noted with relief it was reinforced with wire. The other pursuers turned back. They’d be looking for a ram.

  The platform was narrow, with barely enough room to turn. Five Legs’s pulse beat high in his throat, matching the rhythm of the wheels, drumming thunderbird, thunderbird, thunderbird, thunderbird. The things he’d done to make it here—killed without thinking, without asking indulgence of the soul within the body, without giving thanks or caring for the blood or the meat—they hadn’t felt wrong. He didn’t regret them. If he thought it would make any difference, he would turn around, open the door, and go on slaughtering centaurs until someone awarded him a death of his own.

  She had sent the thunderbird to spy on him. To ensure he didn’t stray so far from the humanity she’d never believed he possessed as to place himself beyond redemption. Had he? If he ever saw the elder again, would she destroy him?

  He didn’t fear centaurs. Not anymore. But humans....

  A hand groped inside Five Legs’s coat, and he jerked around to find the steward boy pointing the conductor’s revolver at his chest, one eye screwed closed, arms shaking with the effort.

  “It’s empty!” shouted Five Legs over the wind, with a twinge of regret.

  The boy pulled the trigger, kept pulling it until the cylinder had spun twice around and he could no longer hold the gun level. He let it fall, clattering. It struck the iron coupling that bound the cars, two fists clenched together, then disappeared in a flicker of blue sparks under the train. The boy scrambled across the gap and flattened himself against the rough wood of the slave car.

  They stared at each other, smoke and wind rushing past, the door behind Five Legs thudding with blows.

  He didn’t know what to say to this boy, the inverse of himself. But he was almost there, almost to the slaves. He’d done what Bienor wanted of him. Now there was a chance to thwart him, thwart Nessus, give them the train but not its cargo.

  “We—we have to separate the cars.”

  “What makes you think I’d help you?” the boy shouted back.

  “There are people in those cars. Your people! Thousands of them. Look.” The Echidna curved along a hillcrest, climbing gently. Cattle cars filled the track as far back as they could see, coarse wood jaundiced in the sun, still more emerging from the gully as they watched. In the shadowed gaps between slats, Five Legs could imagine movement—bodies, faces. On the platform, there had been a waving hand.... “Where they’re going, they won’t get to dress in white linen and serve cocktails. They’ll be worked to death. If they’re lucky, they’ll be eaten.”

  “They’re not my people—they belong to the centaurs. Like I do. They’re yours.” The boy began pounding on the slave car door.

  “No... don’t you understand? I want to free them. You saw what I did back there—”

  “What—kill centaurs?” the boy shouted. “That’s what centaurs do. I’m supposed to think that makes you different?”

  The pressure on the door handle suddenly released; Five Legs ducked in time to avoid the bay centaur’s rear hooves as they smashed through the window. He caught hold of one shank before it was withdrawn and forced it downward through broken glass and torn wire, sawing. The bay screamed as glass cut past bone; tendons gave way with a sinewy pop and flesh tore free. He found himself laughing, holding a severed hoof.

  The boy’s smooth flesh, undarkened by a life of mountain sun, blanched whiter.

  Five Legs let the ghastly thing fall after the gun. “Just tell me how to separate the cars.”

  The boy’s eyes flicked to a row of flywheels and levers blazoned with sorcerous symbols. He went on pounding on the cattle car door, shouting for help.

  Frantically, Five Legs studied the levers. One of them must work the coupling. He wrenched one at random. Brakes squealed; the car lurched violently. He threw the lever hastily back the other way.

  When he looked around, the steward boy was gone.

  The slave car door slid open, unleashing a stench of sweat and stale breath, eloquently human; Five Legs’s belly clenched with shame. He couldn’t see them in the shadows, but they were there in his mind, faces pressed between the wires of their cages towards the light: human faces, wrinkled by laughter and sun, stoic, afraid or despairing. He didn’t want to see. He couldn’t save them. The wouldn’t know him. Not with the spiral brand naked on his hide, his hair cropped so close, his tailored clothes stained with hot blood not his own.

  From within came the crackle of a prod, a moan. A hulking shape lurched out of the darkness, all upper body, horns and grasping hands, the breath from its snout an open furnace. A minotaur. Behind it in the shadows, the slave-driver brandished a smile.

  The screaming, maimed bay was dragged from the passenger car window. Others took his place, wielding a service cart like a ram. The minotaur charged over the gap, swinging its horns low at Five Legs’s belly; Five Legs gripped them and was lifted off his fore-hooves by the power of its charge. A blow from the cart bent the door out of its frame. Another blow and the door flew into the gap between the cars. Centaurs spilled out onto the platform, screaming for blood.

  Then, overhead, the thunderbird. Its vast wings beat ponderously, an eternity between each downstroke, climbing, the wind of its passage driving back smoke such that the sun fell full and blinding on its plumes. It wheeled, tucking in its wings to dive. Talons like threshing blades. The hooked beak, parted.

  Five Legs understood. He had failed; his time had come.

  He let go the minotaur’s horns, stepped into the open, and inclined his chin, exposing his throat to the sky.

  A shot, its source indiscernible. An instant’s haze of vaporized blood before the sun, a screech torn from the spirit world’s throat. Then a great weight struck him, accompanied by shadow and a sharp, lung-crushing pressure over his shoulders and chest. The mass of his body was lifted from his hooves, and—for a moment—he was flying.

  * * *

  Bienor lowered the rifle. He tried to reload; dropped a shell through the catwalk, then another. He finally got the third to stick. He thought he’d hit it, though he didn’t know how, shaking like that. Now it was gone: no burst of feathers, no body. He’d gotten lucky. With his string already cut, the Fates had handed him a parting gift—a reprieve. The rooftop was empty, cleared by talons and a beak, not his own wild bullets. Corpses hung from the windows and lay scattered along the tracks for miles among indifferent dust and thorn.

  The Echidna’s wheels keened as it crested the ridge, going too fast, and the curve hardened westward. Bienor was thrown against the railing. His grasp on the Pyretus rifle slipped, and he hugged it clumsily to his chest as he clutched his way forward, heading for the brake. Deimos was making a sound halfway between screaming and laughter, and Bienor glanced back to see him mash the broken bottle into his latest foe’s fingers grasping the rail; the grizzled centaur’s grip came loose, one of his fingers flying free, and the acceleration of the curve sent him sliding, screaming, past
the sheared-off edge of the catwalk into empty space. Blood bathed Deimos’s fore-hooves to the fetlock. His nose bent crazily in a different direction from his face, blood streamed from one nostril, and a shank of twisted metal protruded from his side. He panted, cheeks flush with absent, vicious joy. Catching Bienor’s gaze, he shouted over the wind, “Where you going?”

  “Rooftop’s clear—coming up on the end of the line—have to slow her down or she’ll derail!”

  “Let her derail. Kill us all—save yourself some time.”

  Bienor edged along the steepening downward slant to the engine. Red rock surged up on either side, throwing the train into shadow. They were entering the canyons.

  He vented the boiler and eased on the brake. The tracks swerved back in the other direction, hugging the canyon wall, supported by timbers that shuddered and creaked beneath the Echidna’s weight, meant for one carload of ore at a time, not an overloaded slave train. No time left for fighting. The remainder of the ride, everyone onboard—soldiers, thieves and slaves—would be more than occupied hanging on for dear life.

  Bienor groped for the whistle-pull, leaned into it until the shrill note drowned the roar of the engine and all he could hear was the staggered pounding of his hearts. Nessus might as well know they were coming.

  * * *

  Five Legs picked himself up, wincing at bits of gravel embedded in his lacerations. Buzzards dove in the distance. Of the thunderbird, there was no sign—no mythic shape fading into sun, no monstrous body broken in the dirt. Had he imagined it?

  In the flesh of his shoulders, underneath his torn, tailored coat, he found the marks of talons.

  The Echidna took the curve too fast, wheels screeching, descending into the canyon car after car, an ouroboros’s endless tail still writhing long after the head has been severed. From one of the slave cars, a thin arm—Thin Crow’s—waved with incongruous grace.

  Five Legs fought down sick laughter. The last car roared past, wheels clicking on the ties, and he was alone.

  Not alone.

  A bent pine clung to the dry slope, roots bare to the wind like skinless knuckles burrowing for something solid to keep from being blown away. Leaning heavily against the trunk, her strength or her sorcery drained, perched the elder. The mask showed no age, no fatigue, no humanity.

  He was somehow unsurprised to see her here, at this lonely tree in the waste on the canyon’s rim. He was tired, and she’d warned him. Perhaps she waited at every such tree.

  “It went as you said, elder. I became a centaur. I lusted for their deaths, achieved many. But when I needed to prove my humanity, to demonstrate compassion, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even look our people in the eye. The only one I could have saved—a boy—I let him die.”

  She released her death-grasp on the tree and reached for him, faltering, brittle as the fragile old woman she ought to have been. “Come here to me.”

  He remembered too vividly the hate in her eyes as she’d raked those claws across him. Her touch had driven him from the ruin of his tribe with no thought but those she’d planted in his head: guilt and revenge.

  “Are you a centaur?” she said, impatient, her voice unsteady as the wind. “Where, then, is your endurance? Eurytus is unstoppable. Our enemies live. Come. Lend me your strength.”

  He found himself supporting her, astonished at her lightness. Past the edge of the mask, tight hair, bone-white, curled behind a sagging ear. Blood matted the feathers of her cloak and trickled from her upper arm pressed tight against her side. A wound—not some sign of decay, of age, but a wound of battle, like his own. A sign of fallibility. She, the survivor; she who had evaded Eurytus’s attack when all her tribe had not, older than this gnarled tree, older than these stones, was mortal. “Elder,” said Five Legs, “Elder, let me see your face.”

  The mask disdained him, laughing, looking down its long hooked nose as though at a cowed bit of prey.

  He closed his hands around her waist, the cloak’s feathers coarse and broken, shifting against flesh loosened by years. He lifted her, placed her astride him. Then she was clutching him, sharp nails pushing through rips in his tailored coat, softening as they reached the tender marks of talons.

  “I watched you,” came the elder’s voice soft at his ear. “I never believed you’d do as you said. I thought you’d run back to them—I thought you a traitor. I meant to hunt you—” She patted him, twice, at the nape of the neck. “—rip out your throat. It would not have brought them back. They’re not the first tribe I’ve lost. I watched you fight. Now I begin to see....”

  Apology, forgiveness? No. She forgave him only insofar as she needed him to go on, needed his strength to fool herself she still could find the will to fight.

  How could he argue? He needed to be fooled.

  The mask’s sharp edges dug into his back. He flinched, glancing behind. Its glare was unceasing—but behind it, the elder had fallen asleep.

  Now—what? The Echidna was gone, out of hearing and sight, though its passage still shivered the rails. Past the curve, the canyons dropped steeply away, stone writhing in the shapes of rivers long dead, colored in the ochre shades of Thin Crow’s body paint. From what he could recall of Bienor’s map, with its crusted brown ink, Epimethea must be close. What could they achieve there?

  More than by wallowing here.

  He took a few careful steps along the track. She clung painfully tight, even in sleep. He could barely feel her weight; only the slightest drag of the feathered cloak against the wind. But the mask burned its rage into him, hot and searing as a branding iron.

  He broke into a gallop.

  VIII.

  Bienor leaned back on the brake, slowing the train to an easy canter. The Echidna passed through a neck in the canyon, between yawning iron gates wrenched off their hinges, and entered a stretch where the absent river must once have pooled. Where human slaves by thousands had toiled, died, rebelled.

  Deep gouges marred the red stone on both sides of the track, the tunnel-work of slaves long dead, interconnected by zigzagging scaffolds ascending level after level towards the light. Skeletons of blackened timber thrust out of scorched sand—slave barracks, torched to deprive striking miners of a place to conspire. Blood had spilled here, casks of it, barrels—enough to make this dead river flow again, if only for a moment. The sheltering canyon had preserved it so well it might have happened yesterday.

  It was dark inside the canyon’s belly, cold. No movement anywhere, no glint of steel nor clack of hoof. But they were here. Nessus, and enough centaurs to accomplish whatever was coming. Bienor swept his gaze over gauges and dials, trying to guess.

  Nessus’s eyes; irisless, obsidian-black. Dried flowers, sticking to the spittle on his lips and spilling down his beard. His head filled with what psychotic sorceries those tools of human prophecy could wreak. Even if Nessus had become the thunderbird, learned the secrets of the human gods, of the future, of fate, he remained himself. A liar. Nowhere did apotheosis rule out killing off his co-conspirators. Unless he needed them—and what good was a drunken sharpshooter who couldn’t shoot and knew more than was healthy?

  Explosives, drilled into the walls in the right locations, could bury the Echidna, crush or suffocate its crew and cargo. That would make a fine insult to Eurytus—a colossal, brutal, petty annoyance of the kind at which Nessus had always excelled. But a threat to his power?

  Round the next curve, a heap of broken stone came into view in the distance, piled as tall as the Echidna’s eye, blocking the track. Bienor pulled hard on both brakes, raising sparks. Still, he knew he couldn’t stop in time. He shoved his head out through the eye, looking back. The rush of air yanked off his hat and sent it spinning past Deimos, who was laid out on the tinder’s catwalk taking potshots as passengers leapt from the windows.

  “You’ll get your crash,” Bienor shouted at him over the wind. “Get ready to jump—pray you’re luckier at it than your lover!”

  He felt a chill as the words left his lips
. Couldn’t keep from rubbing his own pain in the vicious runt’s face. Maybe Deimos deserved to suffer for his lover’s death, as Bienor had. That didn’t stop it sawing open his own wounds.

  Straining at the brake, he let himself think what Gryneus would say about all this. Helping Nessus make a bid against Eurytus was killing the wolf to raise the coyote in his place. Expecting to get paid at the end of it was madness, pure and simple.

  Kill ‘em both, Gryneus would say with a laugh, and pass the wine. No illusions. They had chosen to desert, to live as outlaws, because anything else amounted to a martyr’s death.

  But Gryneus had never been old.

  Like Phaeton had said: might as well die trying to accomplish something. Gryneus would have seen that in the end. But he’d never have just sat back and let death come. He’d have done whatever he could to hold Nessus to his word—and failing that, to make him pay for breaking it.

  “Deimos!” roared Bienor, coming to a decision. “Quit wasting bullets—they’ll be dead anyway in a minute—and get up here, help me stoke.” If the stupid colt was too wrapped in his grief to listen, so be it. Call it fate.

  But Deimos appeared in the doorway, shaking the ache of recoil from his palms. “What in Hades for? It’s the end of the line.”

  “Starting to think you’re right—that we’ll be getting paid in lead.”

  Deimos’s long look said he knew it and didn’t care.

  “End of the line,” Bienor agreed, “for us and them. We need a way to load the dice.”

  They packed the flagging boiler as full of coal as they could manage. Then the heap of rock loomed up, and Bienor threw down the ramp. It bounced and scraped against the canyon floor, kicked up a flying wake of sand and was ripped away. “Jump,” he told Deimos, who needed no prompting.

  Rearing, Bienor kicked at emergency pressure release until the flywheel bent back against the threads. He closed the vents, released the pressure brake but left the manual engaged. Then he followed Deimos out.