Beneath Ceaseless Skies #140 Read online

  “Can you protect us from them?”

  The eunuch glanced at my company and licked his lips. “A handful of you. Half a dozen, maybe. I will need to prepare charm strips, and coat your blades in salt.”

  “And you, fire-keeper?” I asked. “Can you aid us here?”

  “Only by cleansing you with fire and water,” the blind priest replied.

  I turned from him to look at Dahar. In memory, its towers blazed like torches and my comrades rode through its streets, their blades and clothing black with gore.

  “Chesha,” I said. “Gather the Old Guard. We and the exorcist will go after General Turghar.”

  “I thank you for your offer,” I told the blind priest as Chesha turned her mount. “Perhaps the men we leave behind will take you up on it.”

  “But you will not?”

  “Even so,” I said, watching shadows slide through the ruins of Dahar.

  None of us would ever be clean again.

  * * *

  Seven of us marched into Dahar that night: myself, Chesha, and Irkan; Zymt, Ayva, and Ishifan; and the Xiong exorcist, who called himself Chao Zhen. We were the Queen’s Own now, with the war five years past, but all of us save the eunuch had been General Turghar’s dogs.

  They’d called us the Hellhounds of Surnam, the Butchers of Bursa, and a hundred other epithets to make children wail and heroes grow faint. We’d fought Prince Zhar’s finest to a draw at Second Aktar and ended the line of the old kings at Kurqand. Depending on who you asked, we were the best soldiers in the world, or beasts in human form.

  And General Turghar had made us what we were.

  “I saw the Old Man,” Zymt said as we passed the dry heaped bones of the rebels who’d fallen defending the gate. “After he took his vows, I mean. I was in Kurqand for my father’s funeral and thought to visit his monastery.”

  “And the abbot let you in?” Irkan said, scanning the ruins for movement. “I thought Buddhists didn’t hold with murderers.”

  Zymt snorted. “Let the General become a monk, didn’t he?”

  “Make your point or shut your lips,” I said as we reached the first plaza. Its stones were dusted with sand and splotched with a hundred stains, but there weren’t any bones. General Turghar had ordered the square cleared of bodies so it could be used as a mustering point.

  “He wasn’t the same,” Zymt muttered as I stopped short of the shattered basin at the plaza’s center. The ruins around us seemed amplified somehow, as if the moonlight and the stones of the fallen city were whiter and the shadows deeper and blacker than they should be. The moon and stars overhead had swollen until the moon looked like a silvery, pockmarked melon.

  “Exorcist,” I said gesturing at a wall that seemed faded, its stones dusty and its shadows dimmed, like ink diluted with water. “Where are the ghosts? Are they the faded spots?”

  “No, Captain Zrana,” Chao Zhen quavered, prayer beads clicking between his fingers. “Those patches are where the ghosts are not.”

  Zymt, Avya, and Irkan swore, while Chesha sucked air through her teeth and brandished her torch like a weapon. Ishifan, whose tongue had been cut out by Prince Zhar’s men, touched the prayer strip tucked inside her plate coat.

  The moon seemed to swell further, its glow curdling to the yellow of old bone as the shadows on the wall deepened and the ghosts of Dahar attacked.

  They formed themselves out of dust and sand and shadow, out of wind and breath and moonlight. At twenty paces they were vague distortions, but at sword-point they became silhouettes: shadow-puppets wrought by a clumsy child. Their eyes were frozen stars, their hands grasped like claws, and their mouths gaped like chasms, sucking light and heat from the air.

  Chao Zhen chanted sutras as the ghosts approached, brandishing his prayer beads. Chesha thrust her torch in one ghost’s face and slashed another with her sword, parting its fabric like a curtain. As Avya and Ishifan moved to back her, ripping into the ghost she’d set alight, I formed a series of mudras with my left hand and thrust my sword into a ghost that loomed over me like a giant.

  There was a heartbeat’s resistance, and then the ghost dissolved, severed from the world by the salt on my blade and the powers I’d invoked. I repeated the mudras and cleft the shadow pushing Irkan to the ground in two.

  Avya snarled curses as she fought, shredding one ghost to ribbons before taking a claw to the shoulder. “Ahriman’s legions!” she swore as I spitted the ghost that had wounded her. “Why couldn’t these fucks stay dead?”

  “Zymt! Staunch that wound,” I barked. “Exorcist! How many more phantoms are there?”

  “Hundreds,” Chao Zhen said, lowering his prayer beads as the tide of ghosts seemed to ebb, the eerie moonlight fading as they retreated. “But they’ve fled. Strange. I’ve never seen ghosts withdraw once blood has been shed.”

  As Zymt cleaned Avya’s shoulder with a wine-soaked rag, Chesha sidled up to me. “What was that you did?” she asked, imitating the mudras I’d used.

  “Something the General taught me before Fourth Aktar,” I said. “In case we ran into ghosts.”

  Chesha glanced at Chao Zhen, who’d seated himself on the lip of the fountain. It took decades to master ghost-eating sutras, he’d said. Decades the General may well have had.

  The hardest thing about having power is resisting the urge to use it. Another of the General’s sayings.

  It was all too easy to imagine the General, burdened by age and old wounds, succumbing to the desire to be whole again— whatever the cost.

  * * *

  As Zymt bandaged Avya’s wound, Irkan, Chesha, and I drew maps in the dust and argued about which path to take through the city.

  “We don’t even know where he’s going,” Irkan said.

  “Like hell we don’t,” said Chesha. “He’s headed for the White Spire.” She gestured at the minaret from which we’d flung Princess Nawyata to her death.

  “It would be the natural focus of any exorcism rite,” Chao Zhen allowed.

  “Assume it’s the White Spire,” I said, forestalling Irkan. “How do we get there? We can’t go through the Scholar’s Quarter. The astrologers’ tower blocked the ring road when it fell.”

  “Can’t use the Street of Poppies either,” Chesha said.

  I nodded. Chesha and I had sealed the alleys and side roads so Irkan and his men could use the Street of Poppies as a killing ground. The street had been carpeted with corpses before we were done—it would be choked with vengeful specters.

  “How about the Street of Lilies?” Irkan said.

  Chesha and I stared at him. “Rokhshan had that sector,” I said. Rokhshan, who’d spent ten days flaying one of Prince Zhar’s companions before he allowed the man to die.

  Irkan paled. “Not the Street of Lilies, then.”

  We glanced up as Ishifan crouched beside us. She took the bone I was using as a stylus and drew a snaking track from the square we occupied to one near the White Spire.

  “The Beggar’s Track and the Street of Exile?” Chesha asked, prompting a grunt of confirmation.

  “That takes us to the Yard of Sighs,” Irkan said, licking his lips. “Close quarters. Less ghosts, though.”

  “Best chance we’ve got,” I said, nodding to Ishifan as I rose. “Avya. How’s the shoulder?”

  “Fine,” Avya said, flexing her arm. “No worse than a fleabite.”

  I glanced at Zymt, who turned his palms upward. She wasn’t bleeding enough to risk her life or ours, at least. Good.

  “Chao Zhen,” I said. “You and Irkan lead. Chesha and I have the rear. Move.”

  “You really want Irkan in front?” Chesha asked me as we headed for the back street Ishifan had suggested.

  “Why not?”

  Chesha rolled her eyes. “‘Even fanatics have their uses,’“ she quoted. “Or have you forgotten who the General was referring to, that first time?”

  I hadn’t. “Irkan was just a boy,” I said, recalling the mad zeal that had driven him to reclaim the Q
ueen’s banner at Second Aktar. “Besides. We have our orders.” I touched the sandalwood baton tucked into my belt. It was one of the six standard battle orders, its dire command carved into its lacquered wood: No quarter. Slay all who oppose you.

  “We do,” Chesha agreed as we picked our way between ruined buildings. The Beggar’s Track was just barely wide enough for us to draw our swords, and I felt hedged in as I pondered my reply. Chesha was implying that it might not be wise to kill the General out of hand.

  “You think we should talk?” I asked.

  “We owe him a chance to explain himself.”

  “Captain,” Irkan called from up ahead. “Problem.”

  “Well, fuck,” Avya said, as our column ground to a halt and we all stared at the scorched and splintered wreckage that clogged the Street of Exile. The buildings here had been timber and paper, built in the Xiong style. Now they were an impassable tangle of charcoal and jutting beams. “Guess we’re not going that way.”

  “When did—?” Chesha began, then cut herself short. Those parts of Dahar that could burn, had. Ishifan spread her hands in apology, but I waved it aside. I hadn’t thought about what the fires would have done to this part of the city. None of us had.

  “Which way, Captain?” Irkan asked, glancing down the paths leading to the Streets of Poppies and Lilies.

  I hesitated. Just a heartbeat, but long enough for Zymt to croak a warning. The moon seemed to swell as the ash and charcoal from the Street of Exile swirled into motion, coalescing into a half-dozen inky forms, and then our swords were out and we were fighting for our lives.

  The ash-wraiths were worse than the ghosts of the plaza, dissolving before our blades touched them and reforming instants later. Chao Zhen struck one with his prayer beads, dispersing it to the winds, and the General’s mudras seemed to slow them down, allowing my blade and Chesha’s to carve rents in what passed for their flesh. But those rents closed, and as the fight progressed, Chesha and I found the wraiths had cut us off from our companions and were driving us towards the Street of Poppies.

  “Irkan!” I shouted. “Get to the Yard of Sighs! We’ll regroup there.”

  Irkan raised his sword in what I hoped was acknowledgment, then the ash-wraiths drove me and Chesha around a bend. Their substance grew steadily more diffuse as they herded us, and two intersections later, they dissolved into shadows and a thin haze of soot.

  “Great,” Chesha said, her chest heaving as she slumped against the alley wall. “You think we can make it to the Yard through the back streets?”

  “Most of the way,” I said. “But there’s no way around the Gate of Curling Smoke.” We’d barricaded the gate and held it against a tide of men and women fleeing Irkan’s advance. It wasn’t my fondest memory.

  “You don’t believe in karma, do you?”

  “No,” I said flatly, wrapping the charm strip Chao Zhen had given me around the hilt of my sword. “There’s no justice, Sergeant—just consequences. You drop something, it’ll fall. You kill people, you get ghosts. This isn’t a judgment or a punishment for our crimes. Anyone fool enough to chase the General into Dahar would get the same.”

  “Maybe they would,” Chesha said, the moonlight making her look wan and half-dead. “But they wouldn’t be reminded of what they did to make Dahar like this.”

  “It’s done, Chesha,” I said, more gently than before. “We can’t change it now.”

  “Funny what sticks with you,” Chesha said, gazing down the alley. “I spitted children with my spear and shoved them off the barricade without even blinking. Greybeards, grandmothers, babes in arms—it was all the same. But after we finished Nawyata, I stepped on a wooden doll. Broke it in half and almost fell. It took me an age to see the dead boy who’d been holding it.” She shot me a sidelong glance. “I had a doll just like that, back home.”

  “I remember,” I said. “You wanted to go back to get it.” The dusty terraces of our village were fresh in my mind, seen from the mouth of the cave we’d hidden in. My hand had covered Chesha’s mouth as we waited for Prince Zhar’s men to go; I’d smelled rotting blood and tasted my gorge as flies buzzed around us.

  After so many years, the bodies of my parents and neighbors were just a blur.

  “You don’t feel guilty?” Chesha asked, gesturing at the Street of Poppies, whose shadows were unnaturally dark. “We killed an entire city, for the crime of harboring a woman and her unborn child.”

  “She would have claimed it was Zhar’s. And the war would have started back up again.”

  “I don’t care why we killed Nawyata,” Chesha said, her voice rising. “I want to know why we marched through the streets butchering everyone we found. You’re not Irkan, Zrana. You don’t do things just because! Why in hell did we do that?”

  “As an example,” I said, but Chesha was already laughing.

  “Horseshit,” she said. “We made a hundred examples, and it never did a damn bit of good. Dahar was defiant. We were tired and angry, and the Queen wanted to consolidate her power. But none of that was why. Not really.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them to find Chesha giving me an expectant look. “We did it,” I said at last, “because the General thought it best.”

  “And we trusted him,” Chesha said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you trust him now? Enough to ask why he’s come back?”

  “It’s not a question of trust,” I said. “He’s going to cleanse the city and open us up to invasion.”

  “Think, Zrana,” Chesha snapped. “You heard the Zoroastrian. Whether or not the General is trying to make himself a daeva, do you think no one else will try? Dahar isn’t a shield against the Xiong. It’s a dagger aimed at the country’s heart.”

  I swallowed as Chesha’s argument sank in. She was right. And the General—whatever his motives—had seen it too.

  “All right,” I said, drawing the sandalwood baton the Queen had given me from my belt. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “What about that?” Chesha said, gesturing at it.

  Wordlessly, I broke it over my knee.

  * * *

  We salted our blades again before setting out for the Gate of Curling Smoke, and I drilled Chesha in the General’s mudras until she could repeat them without thinking. The alleys danced with shadows cast by the torch Chesha carried, but the chiaroscuro was reassuring—a sign they weren’t packed with vengeful spirits.

  “Ready?” I asked Chesha as we stared down an alley at the moonlit gate.

  “My mother bore no cowards,” Chesha said, shooting me a rueful grimace, and for a heartbeat, I was standing in the ruins of my home, glaring defiantly at the General as he studied the two of us from horseback.

  “‘Our mothers,’“ I murmured. Our mothers bore no cowards. We can fight and hate and kill as well as any man.

  The latter half hadn’t been true yet when I said it, but the General had enlisted us anyway.

  Steeling myself, I took a step towards the unbearable brightness of the Gate’s white stones, leaned forward, and broke into a run, hearing Chesha’s footfalls behind me. The moonlight turned a bilious yellow as we ran, soiling everything it touched, and ink-black shadows spilled across the ground, not flinching from the torchlight. Specters rose from them in ghostly ranks, each spirit blurring into the next, joined by linked arms, unbound hair, and ropes of midnight gore.

  I howled as I fell upon them, carving a path with my blade and the mudras that I shaped with my free hand. The prayer strip Chao Zhen had given me blazed with heatless flame as my pommel struck a ghost and dissolved it, and though spectral fingers clawed at my sleeve, Chesha’s blade and torch reduced them to threads of mist, leaving numb patches on my skin.

  With the gate a spear’s throw away, the sea of phantoms drew back and screamed without sound. A frigid wind snuffed Chesha’s torch and made my teeth and bones vibrate, and the pressure of raw hatred drove me to my knees. I fought my way upright and stood over Chesha, sword and hands tremb
ling, as faces I’d last seen clawing their way up a barricade leered at me with vacant eyes and yawning mouths. Each breath tore at my throat and lungs.

  “Do your worst,” I said through gritted teeth, and braced myself for an onslaught that never came.

  The sound of metal rings striking one another came from beyond the Gate of Curling Smoke, and as one, the ghosts turned to face the sound. A figure rounded a corner, leaning on a four-ringed Khakkara—a monk’s staff, meant to warn animals and insects of the bearer’s approach.

  The General had changed. His head was shaven, and he wore the dusty yellow robes of the Kurqand monastery—but more than that, the utter confidence that his posture had once conveyed was gone. The mix of exhaustion and determination which had taken its place was something I’d only seen on forced marches.

  A susurration seemed to run through the spirits surrounding me. Then, as one, they rushed towards General Turghar like a wave. His staff blurred into motion as they bore down on him, and his voice rose, chanting a sutra in Xiong.

  At first, only the ghosts he touched with his staff dissolved, but as the General waded through the Gate of Curling Smoke, a bubble of empty air grew around him. Any specter that crossed its boundary came undone, leaving only threads of mist and shadow behind. This drove the ghosts to new heights of frenzy, and as the General approached, Chesha and I fought our way to his side, falling at his feet in our haste to reach safety.

  “Begone, foul spirits!” the General commanded, and struck the end of his staff against the ground. A clap of thunder—more felt than heard—shook the earth, and when I looked up, only a handful of ghosts remained, dissolution spreading from one to the next through the limbs, hair, and gore that joined them.

  The General grunted in satisfaction as the last ghost dispersed and helped Chesha to her feet. “Zrana,” he said as I levered myself upright. “The Captain’s cloak suits you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, sheathing my sword.

  “You have orders to kill me?”

  I inclined my head. “Had. Yes.”

  General Turghar turned to face me. “Had?” he said, his voice drier than the desert wind. “You lost the Queen’s baton?”