Beneath Ceaseless Skies #140 Read online

  Milgi seemed torn. He looked the way they were going, then back the way they had come. “No,” he said firmly. “There is no shame in hiding from a Privileged. We can’t fight them.”

  Taniel began heading back. “I’m going.”

  “Then you go alone. You’ll never find your way.”

  Taniel attempted to get his bearings, but Milgi was right. It was easy to get turned around in this swamp. He didn’t know the terrain, and he didn’t know how to spot swamp dragons and snappers hiding in the water.

  “Ka-poel!” he shouted, startled to find the girl already at his side. “Ka-poel. Can you lead me back to Gladeside?”

  She gave Milgi a mocking smile and nodded.

  “She has no fear,” Milgi said. “She will get you killed.”

  Ka-poel narrowed her eyes at Milgi, and the man took half a step back.

  “I don’t have time for fear right now,” Taniel said. “I have to kill someone.”

  He could have sworn that Ka-poel’s green eyes twinkled at that.

  “I need to come out of the swamp either north or south of Gladeside. Two miles away would be best—somewhere I have a clear shot at Gladeside, and an easy path back into the swamp.”

  Ka-poel listened, her brow furrowed, then gave a short nod.

  * * *

  She led them back the way they had come, leaving Milgi behind. The water was still, the day windless, and Taniel spoke to try and forget the pain in his side.

  “It all looks alike,” he said. “How do you know where you’re going?”

  Ka-poel pointed to her eyes with two fingers, then to the forest. She indicated a nearby hummock of gumbo and inkwood trees, then pointed to a uniquely twisted cypress rising out of the swamp to their left. She jabbed a finger behind her, toward a boulder that lay on its side in the water.

  “Landmarks?” Taniel asked.

  She nodded.

  That’s how he’d been taught to track and survive in unfamiliar land, but the landmarks in this swamp seemed few and far between. He’d have to try harder, it seemed.

  She stopped him as dusk fell, halting him with the flat of her hand. She pointed toward the sky, then traced the path of the sun until she pointed at the ground.

  “It’ll be dark soon?”

  A nod. She made the walking motion with her fingers and indicated the forest around them, then drew a finger across her throat.

  “Very dangerous after dark.”

  Another nod. She gave him a small smile, then spread her hands. What did he want to do?

  “Can you see well in the dark?” He remembered her guiding him through the swamp last night, away from the Kez searchers.

  She wobbled her hand uncertainly. Somewhat.

  “The powder,” Taniel said, drawing a line of black powder on the back of his hand and taking a snort. “It lets me see in the dark almost as well as I can see during the day. Let’s keep going. We’ll make camp outside the basin. I’m not completely comfortable sleeping here with snakes, swamp dragons, and Kez patrols.”

  Ka-poel nodded.

  The sun had set before they managed to clear the swamp. Climbing the hillside that marked the edge of the Tristan Basin, they made their way to a hilltop some quarter of a mile away from the swamp edge and set up camp as best they could with no fire and no bedding.

  Taniel took first watch.

  He didn’t bother waking Ka-poel for a second watch. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  Shooting a Privileged, his father had once said. It seems like the easiest thing in the world. Just like shooting a target.

  You’ll do well to remember, though, that the most deadly thing in the world is an angry Privileged.

  Don’t miss.

  Because if you do, he’s going to decorate the landscape with bits of your corpse.

  * * *

  Taniel sat with his back to an oak tree, watching the distant town of Gladeside. It was a little over two miles away in the darkness. With a strong enough hit of powder, he could see the Kez sentries at their posts, just outside the town.

  The remains of the common house had been cleaned up. A few houses had been burned down, and a pair of corpses had been strung up on a scaffold in the center of the town.

  Rebel sympathizers, most likely. Probably the mayor—he had given Taniel’s company succor, after all.

  The Kez were anything but subtle.

  White tents were pitched throughout and around the town. Taniel counted them, just to be sure. With two to a tent, Taniel pegged their number at almost a thousand. Five companies and a Privileged, just like he’d been told.

  A force to be reckoned with.

  He let his eyes wander around the outskirts of the camp, singling out their sentries. One was picking his nose. Another’s lips were slightly parted, and though Taniel couldn’t hear it, he knew the sentry was whistling to himself.

  Taniel had been on sentry duty before. Anything to keep yourself awake.

  He rolled his eyes back in his head and let out a slow breath, then opened his third eye to see the Else.

  The world became awash in pastel colors. Throughout the town and in the swamp immediately next to Gladeside, swatches of faded color stood testament to where the Privileged had used sorcery the night before. One of those swatches marked where Dina had died.

  In the town itself, Taniel could see several dull, lesser spots of color. Knacked—men with minor sorcerous power. There was usually at least one in every company. Their skills always proved useful in any army.

  His eyes stopped on one bright dot in the Else.

  The Privileged. She was inside one of the houses, probably sound asleep in a feather bed.

  He could try a shot right now, while she was asleep and unmoving. It would be the easiest thing.

  But even if he managed to float the bullet through a window and around the corner—almost impossible at this range—he’d still afterwards have to flee into the swamp at night. He’d already tried running into the swamp in the dark once this week. He didn’t relish a second attempt.

  He glanced at the girl.

  Of course, he’d get her killed, too. He should have sent her back into the swamp hours ago. This was something he had to do alone.

  “Ka-poel,” he whispered, some time later.

  It was now near dawn. He could see the slight brightening on the eastern horizon, the moon dipping to the west. The Kez soldiers in the camp were beginning to stir.

  He shook the girl awake. She was on her feet moments later, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, her red hair bedraggled.

  “It’s time,” Taniel said. He listened to his stomach growl. It had been thirty hours or more since his last meal. The numbing vine Ka-poel had pressed into his wound had long ago lost its potency, and now his whole body hurt. His side felt tight, the arm stiff.

  This wasn’t going to be an easy shot.

  He settled himself on the hilltop beside a maple tree and pointed the musket’s barrel toward Gladeside, resting it on one thick, gnarled root.

  “I have one shot,” Taniel told her. “If I miss, the Privileged will be alarmed and raise a shield around herself. I’ll try again regardless, just in case she’s sloppy, but that first shot is the only good one I’ll have.”

  He glanced at Ka-poel to see if she was listening. She’d laid down on her belly beside him, watching the town.

  She nodded to him.

  “Two shots at most,” Taniel said. “And then we run for it.” He pointed down the hillside toward the basin. “She’ll send her soldiers after us. We have to move quickly. With a little luck we’ll be gone by the time they reach us. They won’t be able to track us in the swamp.”

  Taniel checked the musket for the fifth time—the pan was primed, the barrel loaded, and the powder dry. Not all of that was necessary for a powder mage, but each bit of preparation made the shot a little bit easier.

  He settled the butt of the musket against his shoulder and sighted down the barrel toward the house where he
’d seen the Privileged.

  Taniel opened his third eye.

  The smudge of color that represented the Privileged was still in the house.

  Taniel could hear his heart drumming in his ears. This wasn’t melee—there wasn’t a surge of black powder and adrenaline pushing him through the fight, years of training taking over to help him through the kill.

  This was a calm, meditative shot.

  The smudge of color was moving. Taniel closed his third eye and watched the house from the outside, focusing on the front door and the window facing him. Through the open window, with his powder-enhanced vision, he could see a washbasin and a tall mirror and one post of a bed.

  Taniel lowered the musket and tapped out a line of powder and snorted it; felt it calm his nerves.

  Back to his vigil. There was some movement through the window, and the Privileged came into view.

  She was not at all what he had expected.

  She was thirty at the oldest, younger than Major Bertreau. Her face hadn’t been marred by years of sorcery and cruelty, like most Privileged Taniel had met. Her nose was small and pinched. She wore a night shift, sagging to bare one shoulder, her blond hair curled and wild around her head. She splashed water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror for a moment.

  Taniel regretted his sorcerous sight; cursed the black powder that gave him the power to see his target with such clarity.

  She looked like a girl Taniel knew from university. Soulin. In fact, she could have been Soulin’s older sister. She had the same color hair, the same slight features, and even looked to be a similar height.

  The barrel of his musket wavered. His hands were shaking.

  He let his head fall away from the stock and closed his eyes a moment.

  Ka-poel was staring at him. She scowled and made a pistol with her fingers, pointing at Gladeside.

  Shoot.

  Taniel took a deep breath and slowly let it out, setting his cheek against the rifle stock.

  The Privileged was still in her room. She had finished washing her face and stepped away from the window, only to reappear a moment later wearing a clean shirt.

  She stepped to the window, fluffing her long hair with both hands.

  Taniel remembered the Privileged’s dry, matter-of-fact voice as she had spoken of corpses. He thought of Dina, and the look of surprise on her face as Privileged fire cut her in half.

  He thought of Dina’s husband and children, who would never even see her body.

  And he could never forget that it had been a Kez Privileged who, long ago, had presented his family with his mother’s head in a box.

  The crack of the musket startled him, as he had barely felt his finger pull the trigger. An expanding cloud of black smoke rose overhead, filling his nostrils with sulfur.

  He counted silently, burning the extra powder in his powder horn to keep the bullet floating far longer than any regular musket ball. A slight pain began in the back of his head as the effort of keeping the bullet up taxed his sorcery.

  Powder mages normally used small caliber bullets and rifles with a high muzzle velocity, to be sure that the bullet hit their target before their target could hear the shot.

  But with a standard Kez infantry musket, the bullet would hit the target about the same time as the sound.

  As long as she didn’t see the puff of black smoke rising above him, giving away his position.

  She didn’t.

  She was still standing at the window, enjoying the morning air, when the bullet entered her left eye and blew the back of her head across the mirror behind her.

  Taniel didn’t wait for the sentries to figure out what had happened. The extra few minutes could mean the difference between getting away and being captured. He was on his feet in a moment, running half-crouched down the hillside in a straight beeline toward the Tristan Basin, with Ka-poel on his heels.

  He heard his father’s voice in the back of his mind as Ka-poel led him into the swamp, the sound of Kez trumpets blaring the alarm behind them.

  You’ll feel guilty about that first cold, calculating kill. After all, they never even saw the bullet coming.

  Taniel was chilled, and it had nothing to do with the cold of the morning.

  You’ll feel guilty on the second one, too, said his father’s voice. And the next. I lost that guilt around my twentieth, and I think part of my humanity died with it. Hopefully, my boy, you’ll keep it longer than I did.

  “I didn’t,” Taniel whispered.

  Ka-poel cast a questioning glance over her shoulder.

  “Let’s get to your village,” Taniel said. “And get it prepared. They’ll send another Privileged eventually. I’m going to be here to kill that one, too.”

  Copyright © 2014 Brian McClellan

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Brian McClellan majored in English with an emphasis on creative writing at Brigham Young University. It was there he met Brandon Sanderson, who encouraged Brian’s feeble attempts at plotting and characters more than he should have. Brian’s debut, The Powder Mage Trilogy, set in the same world and featuring some of the same characters as “The Face in the Window,” sold at auction to Orbit Books. Book one, Promise of Blood, was released in 2013, and book two, The Crimson Campaign, is due out in May of 2014. Brian lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife, two dogs, a cat, and between 6,000 and 60,000 honey bees (depending on the time of year). Visit him online at brianmcclellan.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ATONEMENT

  by Alec Austin

  We came to Dahar by moonlight, tracking General Turghar across the waste. The bones of the haunted city—spills of rubble, broken walls, and hollow towers—gleamed pale as the salt pans we’d crossed to reach it, as bleak and white as death.

  “Why’d the Old Man come back here?” Sergeant Chesha muttered as I halted our company a stone’s throw from the western gate. Nothing lived or grew in Dahar—not since the sack, five years before. Not since we’d breached its defenses and painted its streets and walls arterial crimson.

  “Captain Zrana,” Sergeant Irkan said, reining his mount in beside Chesha’s. “Your orders?”

  “Water the men and horses,” I told him. “And bring me the priests.” I needed to know what we were dealing with; what the General might try to do.

  Chesha snorted as Irkan turned his mount, barking orders. “The blind Zoroastrian and the Xiong eunuch? Zymt had to tie them to the saddle to keep them from falling off.”

  “Peace, Chesha,” I said, gazing at the ruins of the western gate. The ram we’d used to shatter it lay rotted and abandoned, not far from the gates themselves. “Even eunuchs and fanatics have their uses.”

  “True,” Chesha agreed. “And even vultures need to eat.”

  We traded sour smiles. That had been one of the General’s jokes, before a decade of civil war had drained all humor from him. Before Surnam, and Kurqand, and Aktar; before Second Surnam, and Bursa, and Fourth Aktar, and all the horrid, vicious skirmishes fought in wadis and canyons that only the hill tribes had names for.

  After a decade of that, it was no wonder we’d treated Dahar the way we did.

  I pushed my memories aside as Irkan returned, bringing the priests with him. The sun-blind Zoroastrian wore dusty white, while the Xiong eunuch was clad in sorcerer’s black.

  “This city is accursed,” the eunuch exorcist said, glancing between me and the moonlit ruins of Dahar. “Countless ghosts wait behind those walls, thirsting for blood and vengeance.”

  “A child could tell me that much,” I replied. “Have you aught else to offer?”

  The blind priest spoke into the silence that followed. “Your General carries a spark of the Sacred Flame, gentle Captain. He has walked in dark places, and stolen Ahura Mazda’s greatest gift to man. No good can come of it.”

  “This is no time for riddles,” Chesha snapped. “Why did the Queen send you with us? What is she afraid the General will d
o?”

  The eunuch frowned at his companion. “From what he said at the caravanserai, he’s come to cleanse the city of its ghosts.”

  “No,” the blind priest declared. “He seeks to consume them, and become a daeva.”

  The two began bickering, lapsing into Pashto and Xiong as they berated each other. “Enough!” I shouted. “There are daevas and then there are daevas. Are you saying the General will rival Ahriman’s greatest servants, or that he will be little more than the ghosts he consumes?”

  “The least of the dêw are whispers of malice on the wind,” the blind Zoroastrian said. “They throng the night, souring milk and spreading disease. But with a city to gorge on, your General would not join their number. He would be a captain of the host of evil; a monster clad in human flesh, second only to the arch-demons and those daevas who tear stars from the sky.”

  I weighed those words as the wind stirred the sand at the blind priest’s feet. “You, exorcist. Is the fire-worshipper’s suggestion possible?”

  “Possible?” the eunuch replied. “Perhaps. But it takes decades to master ghost-eating sutras, and your General had but a few years among ignorant monks in Kurqand.” He sniffed, as if that settled the matter.

  “Nothing is beyond those who heed the call of malign spirits,” the blind Zoroastrian retorted. “Wickedness calls to wickedness. Your Queen is right to fear.”

  “Put aside sutras and daevas and ghost-eating,” I said. “The General seeks to purge the city of its ghosts?”

  “Aye,” both priests chorused.

  Chesha, Irkan, and I exchanged glances. Dahar lay at the mouth of a pass to Xiong—a pass used for raids and invasions going back centuries. Since the sack, all commerce with Xiong had followed other routes, inconveniencing travelers but freeing the Queen from fear of a Xiong invasion.

  Exorcising the ghosts of Dahar would open our homeland to attack.

  “He’s entered the city?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the eunuch said. “And roused its spirits. Even at this distance, I can feel their hunger.”