Beneath Ceaseless Skies #98 Read online

  Moments after his hooves caught hard ground, the leering, distorted iron face of Eurytus plowed open-mawed into the rockpile. As the impact scattered the pieces, he recognized the broken fragments of a monumental sculpture. A chiseled hindquarter big as a centaur rolled away among old ash and blackened timber. A massive fist, clenched round a slender throat, spun and tumbled between the wheels, then was shattered. With a shriek and a shudder, the Echidna jumped its track. The cars that made its endless tail writhed like a rattler, kicking up waves of sand. The train accordioned to a halt. The overloaded boiler held, for the moment.

  Along its flanks, a scattering of centaurs—those who’d leapt free before impact—picked themselves up out of the dirt. “All right, grandsire?” said Deimos a few lengths behind. “Didn’t twist a stifle?” When Bienor didn’t dignify this bitterness, Deimos turned for the nearest of the Echidna’s crew, reloading a repeater. Bienor gave chase, caught him by the shoulder. “Don’t. Just—stand still. Wait.”

  The echoes of the crash, bouncing from the canyon walls, swelled in volume instead of diminishing. Then they turned to laughter—a voice amplified by sorcery, as at the Circus or upon the field of war. Nessus.

  “Did you see it, Bienor—the monster of his folly, devouring his desecrated corpse?”

  A rifle barrel glinted on the heights. Figures appeared on the canyon walls, emerging from dark tunnel mouths, peering over ledges.

  “There, by your left hoof,” said the voice.

  Bienor prodded a round lump of stone. It rolled: a face. The statue’s head. It, too, had been Eurytus: powerful, virile, in the full of youth. He ground that leer into the sand. “Was this your vision, Nessus? You claimed to have foreseen his defeat—was that a joke?”

  Laughter—not from Nessus this time, but hundreds of voices, boisterous and prideful, distorted by the canyon’s curves. How many had he brought? Their appreciation of his humor felt just slightly forced.

  “You know the tenor of my wit,” Nessus acknowledged, “but don’t think me so petty. I intend to bring about Eurytus’s fall. The statue had been desecrated long before we arrived—a Rape of the Sabines, I believe, featuring Eurytus as ravisher, and Ceres, Nature incarnate, as his victim. Worthy of him, don’t you agree? The rebels pulled it down, motivated by a compulsion to symbolism more simplistic than his own. And he repaid their gesture with a massacre, guaranteeing Epimethea’s abandonment for no better reason than to remedy a slight. For a symbol to command any power, it must be backed not just by strength but reverence.”

  At some unseen signal, gunfire erupted from the canyon walls, strangely quiet after the gale of his voice. The Echidna’s surviving passengers and crew went down in waves. Some tried to run, seeking cover. They died regardless. The rest simply waited. Deimos stood stock-still, wild-eyed, the ridiculous silvered repeater dangling from his open hand, one finger through the trigger-well. Bienor saw the realization in his eyes. They would have lived like nomad kings, reclining on sumptuous carpets in tents deep in the desert, far from everything, sipping bourbon, feasting on roast meat and fucking.

  A bullet cracked open Deimos’s skull, and a spear of blood skewered him into the sand.

  When the roar died away, Bienor found himself whole.

  “Now,” said the voice of doom, “at your pleasure, invite Eurytus’s prisoners to exit their cars.”

  * * *

  Five Legs galloped down the canyon with the elder on his back, the mask’s hate goading him to further speed as she who wore it drifted in and out of sleep. Sweat streamed from him, soaking through his clothes. But when he made to tear them from his back, regain at least what modicum of humanity nakedness could bring, the elder woke. “Not yet.”

  She pointed, cackling, as they passed each body lying crumpled by the tracks. One more centaur dead. “Once,” she hissed through the mask into his ear, “I thought humans the only beings capable of killing our own kind.”

  Five Legs had to struggle to muster breath. “I... thought the same of... centaurs.”

  He was pounding past the torn-down iron gate, the painted wooden frieze, bent and trampled, that had once read “Epimethea”, when the elder dug her claws into the close-shorn remnants of his mane, sending sharp pain through his temples.

  Heat rushed to his cheeks. No centaur would suffer such humiliation—he could snap her bones like kindling—but he forced the anger down. He checked his stride. She had restrained herself from tearing out his throat. He could suffer at her hands. “Elder, why do we stop?”

  “Mustn’t let them see us.” She dragged at his head, jerking his chin upward. On a high curve of the canyon wall ahead, where the stone faded sharply in color from burnt gold to bone, there was movement: centaurs, heavily armed, descending single-file along a narrow trail—a full hundred or more. “Not until we’re among them.”

  She’d known they would be there. “Elder, how—”

  “They’ll emerge on this track before long. You must be close enough to make it seem you were among them. You must appear like them—a soldier, restless, trained to shallow self-importance, inflamed with the spirit of rebellion, blind to the nature of the world.” Her hands ran over the fabric of his coat, smoothing it, straightening, brushing away dirt, folding together the edges of tears. “It won’t be hard.”

  He wasn’t forgiven, wouldn’t be until he gave his life in trade for all those she had lost. Not even then. She gripped his equine ribs between her bony knees and slapped his haunch too close to the spiral brand. “Quietly now, if you can, with those hammers of feet.”

  IX.

  Bienor took a ring of keys, heavy as butcher’s cleavers, from a centaur jailor’s corpse. But his hands shook, he couldn’t make them work the locks. So at each car, expecting every moment the bullet from above, he reared and kicked at the planks until they splintered.

  He was tired after ten cars, hurting by twenty. After that he stopped counting. As he rolled open the doors, the press of humans within shrank from the light—from him. How could so many fit inside so small a space? Bodies lay underfoot, crushed beneath each other in the crash. He moved on, letting the survivors emerge in their own time, not caring to engage what he encountered in their faces. The eyes frightened him—the glaring ones less than those that canted away. In Eurytus’s service, he’d killed humans, eaten them, sucked marrow from their bones. What use would guilt or apology serve them in the moments before their slaughter?

  The daring or stupid ventured forth, then more and more, squinting, climbing soft-footed down into the dust and gravel. Humans streamed across the canyon floor. Swarms gathered like carrion-flies around the corpses of their jailors. Maybe they’d never seen a centaur dead. Perhaps it reassured them. “Get back,” Bienor said as he passed among them, first mumbling, then louder. “Leave the poor bastards be. Keep away from the front of the train. You’ll be killed if you don’t.” When it blows.

  Stupid old horse, making a time bomb of a boiler. Who would it harm? Not the centaurs on the walls. When would it go? Outwardly, the foundered Echidna showed no change. Its armor was thick; it had been built to take abuse. But the pressure was there in his own stomach, building.

  He reached the last car, broke it open, then limped as far from the flanks of the train as the canyon would allow. Turning, looking to the walls for Nessus, he realized a stream of the humans had followed him.

  He didn’t know how to read those hollow faces, dark and milky-eyed, trembling with hunger. They were thousands, and he was alone. What else could they be thinking?

  He unslung the Pyretus rifle.

  A bullet exploded into the wall by his head. Flecks of sharp stone stung his neck. The humans shrank back. “Put that away,” Nessus’s booming voice reproached, “or I’ll be forced to take it from you. These humans were Eurytus’s slaves. They are our guests.”

  Bienor did as he was told. Not that it mattered. With his nerves in this state, he couldn’t have shot a hole in the sky. “If you didn’t bring them here to ki
ll them, why? Surely not to free them?”

  He couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t dead.

  “There is no freedom anymore,” came Nessus’s voice, a gale without source, “only death and what must be. The poison flower showed me that.”

  Hoofbeats, from the neck of the canyon. Centaurs filled the gap three ranks deep, weapons drawn, blocking the only escape. No outlaws or deserters these. Hoplites, career soldiers, not a tremor in any hand.

  In the century’s last rank, one face stood out from the rest, handsome, young, haunted as any human’s. Seeing him there, in the canyon’s shadow, whole, made Bienor fear he was already dreaming at the Stygian shore. A glance at his tremoring fists assured him he was wrong.

  * * *

  It seemed years, not hours, since Five Legs had seen Bienor last. He was shrunken, gray, his bare scalp pale, age-spotted, his bulk hanging loose from his bones. He was no longer in control. And yet the look he gave Five Legs betrayed an impossible hope. The humans behind him—a sea of them, hemmed in by stone and iron—made Five Legs wonder what there was to hope for. Thin Crow. Where was Thin Crow? He wanted to go to them, to fight his way through, show them at least one centaur was with them. But the elder’s nails burrowed into his spine and Bienor’s eyes into his head, rooting him in place.

  The hoplites were turning, staring. Bienor had given him away. “A spy—look—he wears the spiral!”

  Yes, it was still there on his hide. It still stung, faint now among the chorus of his wounds, where the elder had ripped away the paint. She clung now in the small of his back, huddled so behind the mask that it almost swallowed her. Not even Bienor seemed to see her, despite the hate that radiated from her like a furnace’s heat. Any moment she would hurl herself upon them—frail as she was, she’d rip a few of them to shreds before they killed her. Yet she resisted. The vengeance she wanted was fuller than that. And somehow she expected him to achieve it.

  The broken spiral on his hide had fooled them, the old outlaw and sorceress both, into believing he could save them. That, and desperation. Five Legs opened his weaponless hands.

  “A spy?” came the booming voice of Nessus. “Bring him here.”

  Hoplites surrounded him. A conflicted memory resurged: sweat, equine musk, rough play. The hands at the Labyrinth Ranch had taught him to wrestle. Had he hated them then, as he came to hate them? Or had he still been innocent enough to mistake their animosity for anything but earnest? Innocence, among centaurs, was as much a myth as the gods of Olympus.

  They shackled his wrists and hobbled him with chains too short for his stride, designed for humans in a simpler time. They stripped him of his tailored clothes, ripping buttons away, tearing cloth. They collared him with leather. Somewhere in the midst of it, the elder’s claws pulled free, the weight of her lifted, and a feathered shape, stooped low, slipped between the legs of the distracted soldiers. She was back among her people.

  Humans watched as he was led away, looking between him and his captors—attempting, no doubt, to distinguish between them.

  * * *

  “He’s one of mine,” shouted Bienor, finding his voice too late. “My plant aboard the train. No spy.”

  “One of yours?” Nessus demanded. “Where are the rest?”

  Five Legs was alive. For how long? Bienor’s throat was as ragged and pocked as this desert landscape, tight with sand and dread. “Dead.”

  “Why should that make this one any less a spy? Where did you find him? Did it occur to you to ask how he came by that spiral?”

  He tried to recall it: standing drunk by the tracks in Prometheus Gulch, head swollen full of his own lies—Artemis, the Old World, and Gryneus, always Gryneus—watching this strange, beautiful colt stumble down out of the hills and stoop to listen at the rails.

  There’d been no such thing as thunderbirds. Five Legs had found one. Bienor had given him the worst of tasks, sent him to be slaughtered just to buy them all a little time. Yet of the three Bienor had bulled into his service, only Five Legs had survived. Did that make him a spy for Eurytus?

  He scanned the tortured strip of sky above the canyon for the thunderbird.

  Two hoplites stepped uneasily to flank him.

  “Why don’t you climb up here to me? I owe you your reward. And you’ve wanted from the start to see my plans from on high.”

  * * *

  The hoplite led Five Legs like a leashed mule up the narrow trail along the canyonside. Naked, in chains—this was what he should have suffered when Eurytus took the River Crow. If he’d given up stalking deer, gone home empty-handed when the other hunters had—if he hadn’t still been struggling to prove himself after seven years—he might have met Nessus and Eurytus on the slopes of the sacred mountain. He knew the contours of that valley like the smooth skin between Thin Crow’s shoulder-blades. With surprise on his side, and the darkness....

  One against hundreds, his arrows against their guns. But he and his tribe would have suffered together.

  All along the cliffs, centaurs stretched prone among dry, thorny growth, the theta of Nessus gleaming in scarred skin on bicep, hock, or shoulder, the barrels of carbines reaching out into thin air. Some of them stirred as he passed, craning around to look on the spiral with contempt or dread. Were they as the elder saw them; petty, self-important, blindly following Nessus because Eurytus was the only alternative? Were they in it for the money, like Deimos? Or like Phaeton, desperate for change regardless of consequence?

  Crescents of frost lined the switchbacks like sweat dried on creased skin. Where the trail was steepest, the hobbles made him stumble, cold ground cutting into his stifles. Blasted holes and intricate natural formations divided the canyon vistas into stark contrasts. Below, the human crowd shrank into anonymity.

  Nessus stood high on a promontory ahead, his profile statuesque and dark against the sky, laying out their fate. He spoke in Greek. The humans, save an unlucky few, wouldn’t even understand.

  “Hear me, human slaves. I, Nessus, have delivered you from bondage to Eurytus—but not from responsibility. Your homelands are lost. Could you return, you’d find them changed, no longer your own. That’s the nature of conquest—a truth your brethren of the valleys and plains have been forced to accept or die denying. One choice remains: learn the ways of the New World, the ways of your conquerors.

  “You’ve lived too long in isolation, oblivious to the suffering of your race. Over the past days, you have only sampled that suffering. Had you reached New Ilium, Eurytus would have stripped you of that ignorance. There, like all the rest, you would have learned to seek oblivion in pain, to find pleasure in the only place you could: the pain of others.

  “I release you from that fate, but I can’t do the same for your brethren. The onus lies with you, who cowered in the wilderness while Eurytus ground them low. By failing to arise, you have doomed them and shamed yourselves. It’s too late to defend your way of life, your homes, your people—that train has rolled on—but you can still fight to avenge them.

  “I, Nessus, vow to make this possible. Here, where others of your race once found courage enough to rebel, I will train you, teach you to fight and to die. I will shelter and feed you. I will heal your sick. You won’t escape: I’ll kill you if you try. When the time comes, I will lead you in battle. I ask only this in return: that when Eurytus is overthrown and New Ilium in flames, you name me king.”

  Wild cheers rose from the centaurs. Hooves pounded stone. Dust spilled in plumes from the canyonsides.

  The crowd of humans rippled, their moans and murmurs like a wind.

  X.

  Atop a ledge so high it emerged from the canyon’s shadow into light, Five Legs’s captor choked him to a halt. Nessus stood among his bodyguards, squinting in the last sun fading towards the peaks, a liquor bottle glinting golden in his hand.

  “The spy.” The quiet of his voice was eerie after the roar of his sorcery. His steel-shaving beard, once coal-black, was thinning, ill-concealing heavy lines marking cheekbo
nes and jowls. His chestnut body had been a solid ton of muscle, bone and steel, unstoppable, a locomotive unto itself. Now the outlines of ribs showed through flesh, and a sagging stomach pulled at the flaccid muscles of his chest. Surrounded by the bronzed young bodies of his guards, he seemed an old stud ready for pasture. He was huge—he had always been huge—but in his age, Five Legs saw a chance.

  Bienor appeared around the last switchback, stooped and huffing with the exertion of the climb. The sharpshooters lining the trail straightened from their sights, touching hat brims as he passed. What was Bienor to them?

  “Don’t trust his reputation, my revolutionaries,” Nessus said. “He defied Eurytus, true. But his courage, his resolve, I fear died with his lover. Or else he drowned it in the bottom of a bottle. Now he fights for no cause save his own. Keep him back. If he lays hand on that precious rifle, kill him.”

  Reaching the ledge at last, Bienor leaned heavily against an outcrop, chest heaving. He wiped his lips with the back of a clenched fist and glanced over the edge at something Five Legs couldn’t see.

  Five Legs was shoved forward, his shackles clattering on the sandstone. A bodyguard reared, struck with iron-shod hooves. He went down, tangled in the chains. Dust mingled with blood in his mouth.

  “That brand... let him rise. Bienor, who is this you’ve brought me?” As Five Legs clumsily regained his hooves, Nessus stepped close, his huge bulk though diminished still dwarfing Five Legs as a sire beside his foal. With probing fingers, he reopened a clotted cut on Five Legs’s thigh, smeared crimson across the spiral. He pantomimed applying a burning poker to mimic the blur in the lines—a slow, unsteady thrust with a hitch in the middle. The recognition in his eyes was awful to behold.

  That other name, Five Legs told himself; his name they had used at the Labyrinth Ranch, in whispers, grunts, or screams—it couldn’t make him that person again. It wouldn’t change why he was here. Still, at the sound of it on Nessus’s lips, it was all he could do to keep from retching.

  “Patroclos.” Nessus’s fingertips smeared blood up Five Legs’s spine. “I remember that day—the day he made you his. You brought it on yourself. You resisted—you didn’t want to be owned. What else could you expect? It only stoked his desire to possess you.”