Beneath Ceaseless Skies #19 Read online

  “The Emperor sent you, alone, to destroy those bandits?!”

  I smiled. “Hardly. I was sent to retrieve this item just as I told you. Nor did the Emperor send me here. I was, however, acting in his name. Not the same thing. You weren’t supposed to know that, by the way. If you tell anyone, I will kill you. I mean that.”

  Kenji looked serious. “I know you do, so if it’s my death to speak, then I will know the full story of what I am not speaking about,” Kenji said. “Who sent you?”

  “Princess Fujiwara no Ai.”

  For a moment Kenji just stared at me. “The Empress?!”

  I shrugged. “Yes, but more to the point: a direct descendent of Governor Fujiwara no En.”

  “Lord Yamada, everyone knows that Princess Ai is proud, vain, and of most disagreeable temper. Are you telling me that she sent you out of the charity of her soul to lift the curse on this place?”

  “Of course not. She knew of the statue’s existence, doubtless from a family tradition, and she engaged me to try and fetch it. I fear it was my idea that the statue’s removal could be the means to break the curse. Princess Ai could not have cared less. For my part, the plight of those two wretched spirits perhaps clouded my better judgment.”

  “Then what you showed the two ghosts...?”

  “...was the Imperial mon, the symbol of the Emperor. Against such authority, even their original master would bow. As attendants still in faithful service, they did the same.”

  I removed the golden image from the box and casually tossed it to Kenji, who let go of his staff as he struggled to catch it.

  “Lord Yamada, are you really insane—” He stopped. He held up the statue, feeling its weight, or rather lack of, in disbelief. “This isn’t gold!”

  I smiled. “No, it’s gilded wood. A fine carving well-protected by the stone shrine, but a simple devotional image and no more.”

  “And the rumors of treasure?”

  “Rumors only, probably fed by the presence of the ghosts, who were obviously guarding something. No one knew of the statue, save a few members of the Fujiwara family, the two unfortunate ghosts, and that pitiful youkai. But, thanks to Master Rencho, soon everyone will know of it. They will tell stories of the marvelous golden statue plucked from the ruins of this place. They’ll know it’s no longer here and thus not seek it. And even if rumors of treasure persist those who come here will find nothing, suffer nothing save wasted time. I have completed my mission. And the curse on the Mansion of Bones is lifted. In all respects.”

  “And the bandits?”

  “At first I felt guilty for tricking the ghosts into dealing with them for us, but that was foolish of me. I was forgetting that the bandits of Uji were the physical and spiritual descendants of the people responsible for the ghosts’ suffering in the first place. What I did was no trick.”

  Kenji scowled at the carnage around us. “No? What would you call this then?”

  “A reward for devotion beyond the grave?” I smiled a grim smile. “No, Kenji-san. I call it justice.”

  Copyright © 2009 Richard Parks

  Comment on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies including Year’s Best Fantasy and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. His third story collection, On the Banks of the River of Heaven, is due out from Prime Books in 2010.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  HAVOC

  by A.C. Smart & Quinn Braver

  He was everything the stories claimed, only smaller.

  I met him among the turbid shadows outside of camp, the golden watch fires seeming but a dim reflection of the laughter in his soot-smeared face. He hardly seemed to notice the mountain pony pirouetting beneath him, nor the swirling chaos of horses and men around. My heart tripped, then its pace quickened.

  “The great bard, Marcoen!” Havoc grinned, his raven’s-wing hair tossing on the evening breeze and teeth gleaming in twilight. “We are in the presence of legend, brothers! Get him a horse!”

  I could tell that this was to be one of his infamous raids, but I had no time to ask questions. His men obeyed without hesitation, saddling a horse for me and making sure I didn’t fall off, because Havoc had made clear I was to join them on their venture. But they knew I’d come across the lines from Cumbera, and Commander D’Strigides had been correct in his assessment of my welcome. Havoc himself might accept me at my word, but his followers were wolves. Were I to give them any cause to doubt, make any gesture scenting of betrayal, Havoc would find himself apologizing to D’Strigides for my ‘fatal accident.’

  In no more time than it took me to blink, it seemed, I found myself included in an avalanche of horses thundering south along the military road through Roenish Mirze-side. Horses, and a few men…a dozen, I estimated, despite the dark and the constant movement, but more than twice that many horses. Everyone but myself led at least one spare on a line. I noticed quickly enough that the mounts carrying riders were the sturdy mountain stock Havoc favored, while all the spares were full-sized. But it wasn’t until we were passing yet a third encampment, in the dark evidenced as the previous two times only by the bugling of officers’ stallions, that I realized: the mountain stock were geldings, but all the spares were mares. And all the mares, including the one I bestrode, were in estrus.

  Half a watch into the ride, our party left the road and angled east toward the Mirze River that separates Roen from her Cumberan adversaries. We dropped down a defile that led to a swift but shallow section of river between looming banks. The riverbed was paved with fist-sized stones, but the run had taken the edge off the horses’ nervous energy and they were tired enough to be careful. So preoccupied were they that I might have been the only one of our party to feel terrified when we headed back north, downstream now, into deeper water that picked us up and swept us away down a gorge at speeds rivaling a gallop.

  Perhaps I wasn’t as alone in my terror as I felt. The horses seemed pathetically grateful to stagger out onto the little beach we found just before the water downstream churned white against submerged boulders.

  A stream had cut the gully that led us east. The horses struggled, fetlock-deep, up its course. By the time we found ourselves once more on level ground, among a scattered grove of buckeye, the horses were more than ready to stand quiet and blow.

  We went slowly from there. The night was so dark, I found my way solely by dint of staying with the herd. Havoc must have been part cat to find his path. But, invisible in the darkness, the horses passed downwind on the southern edge of a Cumberan encampment—though it was only later events that proved this the case. I believe that was where I saw one of our party dismount and slip away north. At the time, I half convinced myself it was a trick of the shadows; a sliver of moon had just peeped over the Cumberan peaks to the east.

  Still at a walk, our herd swung around to the north again and hooked back to the west. The moon rode thrice its span above looming crags by the time we once more approached the encampment, this time from the southeast. Without any signal that I could detect, the herd increased its pace. Rested by the long walk, the mares were willing and able when pushed to a flat gallop.

  We found ourselves among Cumberan tents, plowing through Cumberan watch fires…and sweeping up their picket lines, which had inexplicably become detached from their posts. The stallions of the officers were more than willing to join our remuda, while the mares and geldings in their company followed out of habit.

  One of the newcomers swung into stride along beside my own mount, and a dark form clinging to its otherwise bare back flashed me a jubilant grin.

  Havoc.

  I loved him, then, as well as ever I’d loved The General. Well I understood the free rein his Roenish commander allowed him. I understood, too, the prevailing sense of frustrated good humor with whi
ch the Cumberan army viewed him, despite the ‘havoc’ he wrought upon them.

  Once the Cumberan encampment had fallen behind, the men on the southern flank of the herd whistled and the horses angled north.

  We reached the vicinity of the river with the thin moon high above us. Ahead I could see watch fires again, and the flame-lit façade of the twinned towers guarding either bank of a ford. Their path cluttered by another Cumberan force, the horses thought to slow. But Havoc’s men, with cries and whistles, drove them forward.

  In panic, the horses lunged through the camp. Tents collapsed, and men and fires scattered. Then the spray flew as the herd hit the ford and plunged across.

  “Roen!” shouted the raiders as the lead horses approached the guards posted on the western shore. “Roen!”

  I feared the men on duty there would be run down. They held their post as their Cumberan counterparts had not. But the water had cooled the herd’s vigor and they were willing to be shunted around the camp, to settle among the picketed steeds in the pasture beyond.

  The thunder of hooves drummed on in my ears, in the stream of my blood. My lungs were a bellows and the air carried the bite of mint, of cool water in the face on a sere afternoon. The raiders whooped and called, and cursed each other with rough affection. Havoc’s laughter rained on my soul like spring showers on the dry Mydicean lowlands.

  We were still drunk on adrenaline, though the horses settled as if they belonged. A contingent of Roenish officers made an appearance. I recognized the banner of Duke Strigides, and realized we were back where we’d started at the beginning of the evening.

  “We return the mares we borrowed!” Havoc hailed the duke. “These others we present to your brother, Commander D’Strigides, with our regards. He brought us a gift earlier this evening, the Bard Marcoen, and it is our honor to return the favor!”

  Well. Travan D’Strigides merely guided me to prevent my wandering at will through Roenish territory. He trusts me no more than Havoc’s men do. But it made a great story, and who am I to interfere with another’s telling?

  I collected my kit and rejoined Havoc’s party, in the dark before dawn, atop a low bluff overlooking the river. All were gathered about a small fire, where chunks of meat roasted on stripped willow twigs and tins of water heated on the rocks of the periphery.

  “You don’t sleep?” I inquired, worn by my long day and the excitement of our adventure.

  “Oh, certainly!” Havoc smiled, his back to the river and his comrades around him. The budding legend stretched booted feet to the fire and mended a stocking.

  “When?”

  “Sometime after dawn,” he allowed. “Whenever we get tired.”

  He’s young, I reminded myself, feeling all of my two-score- and-five years.

  “Great Bard,” he said, “will you share with us the news from Mydicea?”

  Did he have memories of that far land? His speech bore the rhythms of its tongue, but he must have been very young when Daphed was recalled to accept the throne of Roen.

  So I sang to them of the Adamantine Empire’s last days, news five years stale but something of which these men could’ve heard nothing more than rumors. Songs of the past these were, of the dead, and therefore harmless. I sang of Solanum Adamanté, Emperor Divale’s third son, raised as an assassin in the service of the nether god Datura; of how he crossed the lines to visit General Hanbel one night, promising victory. I drew pictures with my words of Solanum’s signal for the final assault: the fiery destruction of Datura’s temple on the heights above the walls, how it looked to us in the waiting army watching from without the city. And I sang, my voice roughened with grief, of the great General falling even as the gates to the city were thrown wide.

  As I spoke, the laughter stilled in those eyes so like the trailing edge of dusk. Havoc gazed southeast, beyond the impassable Tonoman Mountains where a gilding of the year-round snow on the peaks gave first hint of the rising sun. I knew his thoughts weren’t on the war he now fought, but on the one he’d missed. The needle in his hands moved unerringly, reweaving a worn heel, and the firelight glinted off a tarnished silver ring on the smallest finger of his left hand, his only adornment.

  What a tragedy, I thought. The preeminent scout of the century missed the greatest campaign of the age by but a handful of years!

  I told of the populace rising up, pulling down Lord Marshal Hellebore, and storming the palace. By the time the throne was taken, the entire royal family, down to Queen Aelania and her infant son, lay dead.

  “They killed her?” While his comrades looked solemn, even grim, Havoc’s naturally pale face now looked almost translucent. The needle stilled. I recalled his reputation for unfailing chivalry toward the weak.

  “Divale did it, or had it done. Not even applying a statue as a battering ram got us in the throne room fast enough. We could hear the queen screaming for the life of her child, but were too late.”

  The violence shocked him. Or perhaps it was my tone, hardened by guilt and five years of retelling. He couldn’t know the tender wound it concealed.

  “In the four centuries of their rule, the Adamantés fed thousands of innocents to their pet demon,” I reminded, fighting to keep my voice the gentle polished tones of a storyteller. “Two more tallied are hardly worth mentioning. The queen was mourned, right along with General Hanbel. But it’s as well her child died.”

  He just looked at me, innocent despite his reputation at war, a lad who hadn’t been born when I joined Hanbel’s campaign over two decades before. He might have been thinking of a beloved mother, a baby brother, and I had to explain.

  “You cannot know, who weren’t on the campaign, the horror of Datura’s assassin priests. You’ve never wakened at dawn to find your shield-mate beside you, cold and dead, his heart gone to feed that dark god’s altar. You’ve never seen your commanders falling in swathes, your comrades turning against you mindless as ravening wolves.

  “You have heard the song and know the debt owed to Solanum Adamanté. Without his efforts, the campaign would have failed. The Adamantés would yet rule, or at the least threaten, a quarter of the known world. But had he survived, our army would have seen the city razed. No man who participated in that campaign could have rested while even a drop of that bloodline survived.”

  Silence.

  A log broke, and newly minted sparks sizzled into the sky to hang among the hard diamond stars. The early morning breeze blew from the south, cooling the land. The men waited, and I spared them my attention now because after my last statement, I couldn’t look at him.

  I found myself truly in the company of wolves, lean predators with nothing to lose, who watched me with eyes that glowed in the firelight. Such lawless men might as easily have become bandits, but had joined a mercenary company for money...and perchance to shed blood. I’d survived a full score years of the mud, fevers, disasters, and assassins that plagued the Adamantine Campaign. The entire world knew my songs and my name. Yet a word from this stripling youth and I’d have died.

  Though he held only the rank of scout, Havoc claimed a loyalty as absolute as it was unquestioned. He held his band to a standard of conduct the Royal Guard of any country could envy. And the chaos he wrought upon his enemies was ingenious, devastating, and only in rare and truly deserving cases fatal.

  The needle again nosed through the stocking’s fabric, tugging the yarn after.

  “You said ‘we’. You saw the throne room? You were there?” he asked.

  “My apologies. I have the tale from Dirk Alzarin’s men. Three of them were with him in that final assault.”

  Silence.

  A horse stamped.

  “So Dirk Alzarin led the assault on the throne room,” Havoc said, his voice cool and calm as the river he’d dammed that spring to impede cross-border raiding.

  I thought that would get attention. That same Dirk Alzarin, not a moon past, was assigned command of this border dispute by his older brother, Cumbera’s new king.

 
“He did. And by then not an officer survived who ranked him. He commanded the army, and through it the city and empire.”

  “Why’s he here?” inquired a man to Havoc’s left, a Tonoman busily engaged in mending tack. “Why isn’t he Emperor of Mydicea?”

  “That, I cannot tell.” Even having known Alzarin a score of years, I didn’t understand. “He established a ruling council of the guild masters and city officials, then took most of the army on a tour of the provinces. I go where the stories are, and the city was at peace. We ranged farther and farther afield, until nothing remained of that once vast army but the Cumberans and a few who owed Alzarin their loyalty. And eventually I realized we weren’t going back.

  “You know what Dirk Alzarin found in Cumbera: a usurper on the throne, and most of his relatives dead by assassination. King Glaive sent Dirk to command the front, dissatisfied with Duke Cudgel’s waiting game.”

  “Or hoping some accident might befall the returning hero?” offered a swordsman to Havoc’s right, sighting down the blade of a gleaming rapier and applying a strop yet again.

  I smiled, as was my habit. I am but a chronicler, after all. The fate of nations and kings touches me not. I remind myself of this often.

  “Dirk Alzarin could’ve been absolute ruler of the greatest nation in the known world, and he walked away,” mused Havoc, the needle quiet in his hands. “It’s a dangerous enemy you have brought us, great Bard.”

  ”I have brought you nothing but tales, O Havoc,” I replied serenely.

  “Why then have you come?” He met my eyes across the cook-fire, and in the shadows of the mountains in the earliest dawn the dark blue of his gaze appeared pools of gleaming shadow.

  I smiled.

  “I go where the stories are.”

  * * *

  I stayed.

  Never, other than the days immediately following the fall of Mydicea, have I felt so alive as I did that summer. Everything fascinated Havoc. He might lie on his stomach a watch or more observing a wasp burying a spider four times its size, or wade waist-deep in a meadow gazing rapt at leaves and flowers. We’d saddle up and travel all day down the valley, just so he could gaze on the trees or an outcrop of rock. Often these trips were on Cumberan soil...and came to nothing.