Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (13 page)

       
He saluted her then started across the Piazza, his mood bleak. He knew the Baremescre only warred within their archipelago. They would sail from isle to isle, raiding the neighboring populations for slaves and wealth. But never did they invade other lands. Never did their eyes turn to expansion of any sort. It all seemed profitless.

       
“Peregrin!” Ariosa called, startling him. She’d not moved from her bench, but even from a distance Imre could see her smile.

       
“Yes, Theca....” he called back.

       
“The Voce will one day teach you this lesson, but I offer it to you now, as a gift. We are born to sing, peregrin.
And we do not sail where we cannot sing
.”

       
Imre felt no more enlightened, but he nodded like a boy learning his letters, then left the Piazza with the firm conviction to never again think a thought in Ariosa’s presence.

       
He followed the Falcis road along the crescent cliff side overlooking the sea. At its northernmost point rested a plateau known as the
Verzi na Spina
, or “great garden of bones.” At her crown was the resting place of the Baremescre clan chieftains. Their stone remains were laid in rows, faces to the sky, feet to the east, their hymns planted deep in the earth through the hard cages that once protected their hearts.

       
It was here that Naldo spent his days going mad. Daily, down the paths between the dead, the old man trod a tireless rhythm, bent and stooped under the sun, his eyes ever downward. He searched the bones for riddles he’d learned. Always the riddles, always the bones, always the black shard Ariosa had given him for enlightenment. He tucked it against his withered arm in its sling, close to his breast, and spoke to it from time to time.

       
The Baremescre had no music that wasn’t battle, but they claimed to hear the dead sing. A boneyard such as that upon the
Verzi na Spina
was the closest they had to theater. So this evening when Imre found Naldo among the bones, he and the Arbiter were not at all alone. Silici visitors strolled the open graves as other men might amble among street musicians, inclining an ear, swaying now and again, and wandering on.

       
Naldo’s cobbled babbling rattled sharply over the quiet. “
Kirei desu, ne
...
Warum
? A mineral, young master, from the beginning.
Il contenu la peau
, the bones, the stone, the blood, the beginning...
begyndelse
...
kezdem sejteni
...
alku, no
!”

       
Naldo’s muttering rose and fell with the wind as Imre sat cross-legged upon a worn alley between two ancient Baremescre corpses. He laid his stone sword at his side and set to work carving his new puppet’s face, “uncovering a mystery” as Tayuya called the process, for no two were ever the same. This mystery was a brutish, ugly, and awkward buffoonery, with all the elegance of a child’s clay sculpture. There was a soul inside this hunk of wood, but he was becoming frustrated as all hells trying to find it. Baremescre shadows stretched around him, occasionally falling across his hands and ruining his light. But the shadows passed and Imre worked on, carving at the wood, looking for its true gaze.

       
He of course noticed Cantiléna. She’d long ago set aside her stealth when approaching him in what Eroico claimed was an effort at truce. She came and crouched near him, the slanted sun rays making copper fire of her hair, arm, and blade.

       
“The evening finds you hale,” he said to her in Silici.

       
“It does.”

       
For a time they sat quietly while the dull scrape-nick of his work beat a tattered rhythm, until, “You have not been here in some time.”

       
Imre halted.

       
“It has been nearly a month,” Cantiléna said. “The Sage asks for you often.”

       
“The life of a slave is demanding,” Imre replied. He blew the shavings from the puppet’s face before refastening the wooden head to his trousers. It was wasteful to work with distractions.

       
“The first-duty slaves have their evenings, the second-duty their mornings. Your wooden trinket work must then be what keeps you.”

       
Imre shifted uncomfortably, watching Cantiléna watch Naldo as he ambled amidst the generations of hymns that bristled like a naked forest. The Baremescre held a special reverence for the mad. There was respect to be had for someone living in both this world and the next, or so they felt. Imre’s regard of the insane differed somewhat, and for that Cantiléna was all but accusing him of cowardice.

       
“I am sailing to war tomorrow,” Imre told her in a tone of conscious courage.

       
“So is the talk.” Cantiléna yawned and stretched broadly, her fingers, stone and flesh, spreading into a pair of shuddering fans before curling back into her lap.

       
“Tell me of your way of warring,” she said, accepting his change of subject, “in the peregrin cities of your League.”

       
Imre tugged at his lip for a time, the sea-misted wind dancing coolly across his bare scalp, until he decided that there was no harm in telling her a bit of truth. “Jinan men will still settle affairs with the blade,” he said. “But my home lies within the Zuben al’Akrab. This desert has many ores, stars that fell long ago, and these ores give off powers that can be harnessed into... into many things.

       
“So when the League turned against my city, it was a war of ships clashing while levitated over leichstone canals, of flame belched from machine-wrought jewels, of emerald energy spat by muskets in the hands of men clad from head to toe in suits of ironsilk.”

       
“
Muskets
,” she said, trying the word out. “Like your weapon of iron and wood.”

       
Imre nodded. “There’s no blood, only ash feathering across the grease of burnt flesh. My... a man I knew lived for an hour with a hole in his skull the size of a fig. He couldn’t speak, but he wept. He wept and he grinned and he wept still more, shivering, until he died.” Something on the wind was tickling Imre’s throat. He coughed and turned away to look out over the sea before continuing.

       
“The Djinn taught our people industry, if you can believe that. They came with dark arts and the strength of lions. They cut down the desert tribes—man, woman, and babe—and put the survivors to work, and worse, made them food.
Living
meals, damn their twisted souls. For the demons liked their meat hot. Until Fahd the Balgas King and his firstblood rebellion. Fahd ground their hell-spawned hides into—”

       
“
Peregrin
,” Cantiléna said harshly.

       
Imre started. He’d let his language slip, drifted from Silici to Adala and back again. He reached for his sword. She was Third Blade of her clan; her lesson would be hard.

       
But when he noticed Cantiléna’s gaze, he froze. Imre had been too deep in his own thoughts to notice Naldo shuffling near.

       
With the sun beating red gold from the half-purple sky and the breezes dying softly with the light, Naldo sidled close, as he’d done so many times. “The honorable thing,” he whispered with sour breath. His clothes stank. The whiskers clinging to his jaw made his expression wild. But ruined and dirty, he was still the Arbiter. He was still Naldo.

       
Imre leapt to his feet, overwhelmed with his shame, and for the first time since their landing he embraced his old tutor. “I’m sorry,” he said into the old man’s neck. “I should have come.” He’d been afraid, disgusted, angry. How dare Naldo become this horrible babbling thing, now when Imre needed him most? But Imre was sailing to war. And like a coward he’d only now come to see his friend.

       
“I’m sorry,” Imre said, meaning it in every sense. He wiped his face on the old man’s dirty shirt and let him go.

       
Naldo stabbed him.

       
He had always been quick. Imre caught only a small movement in the dusk, a coral flash of reflected light before Naldo plunged the shard of the dead man’s hymn deep into his chest.

       
Imre staggered clutching himself, the sudden pain raging across his nerves. Cantiléna was there in a blur with a deft crack across Naldo’s jaw that sent him sprawling.

       
“No!” Imre said. Tried to say. His fingers had all on their own found the shard, grasped and yanked, and availed nothing. The wave of agony twisted his “no” into a growl. Again he yanked, and again nothing. The disciplined corner of his mind was working furiously to make sense of this—the wound should have been healing already, his body pushing out the offending shard—even as noises of struggle in the grass told him Cantiléna was having trouble subduing Naldo. Imre lifted his sticky hand, but as he did a twisting jerk ripped his chest and flooded him with another surge of pain. Then another twist and Imre fell to his knees, moaning aloud. His wound had grown cold, hard fingers spreading now, stretching for his shoulder, his throat. He’d lost too much blood, he thought. Too much firstblood. The idea seemed absurdly silly to him—too much firstblood—and he had the greatest urge to laugh at his own inanity. Instead he let out a shuddering breath and fainted.

       
They would tell him later how Cantiléna had managed to stun Naldo without braining him, how she found Imre lying facedown and with her stone fist had ripped the hymn shard free. The surgeons were summoned to minister to Naldo while Cantiléna hefted Imre and carried him down the gentle face of the
Verzi na Spina
. But when Imre came to, his only thoughts were of the scar.

       
He awoke in the gray of predawn, alone in his runty one-room cottage that almost made the Baremescre cliffside cell seem grand.

       
The flesh of his breast had mostly knit, but as he ran his fingers across the stretch of skin they brushed a scabrous pucker, like a knot in a tree. He sat up, stared at the black spot. He scraped at it with his fingernails. He rubbed it with his palm. He tried to wash it away in his basin of tepid water. The spot remained. He shut his eyes and forced himself calm, and when he opened them he knew he would see he’d made a mistake. But, no. There it was. A black chitinous thing beside his heart.

       
Imre collapsed back onto his pallet, shoulders propped against the cool stone wall, and tried to make sense of things. Beside him on the floor lay his hymn, his puppet, and Naldo’s ebon splinter. Imre grasped the shard and examined it. He’d been cut thousands of times, even by this very substance when Dewberry’s blade bit his side on the harbor road, and he’d always healed with no ill effect. So why now? Why a scar from this little stab? What was different? He spun the shard round and round in his hand, watching it flash dully in the half-light. It danced through his fingers with barely any effort.

       
The dawn broke and forced orange light through his half-rotted shutters before he at last admitted that there was only one person who could help him. Imre yanked on fresh trousers and a cotton drape, gathered up sword and puppet and shard, and sprinted from the tiny cottage. He arrived at the main villa just as Bellico and the war party were forming up.

       
The Baremescre who would be left behind waved colored streamers from windows and doorways, many calling with words of envy. Cantiléna was there upon a balcony next to Eroico and their mother. Her gaze followed Imre as he passed through the festive gathering, but he went immediately to the chieftain. He requested a reprieve from his duties. He needed more time with Naldo.

       
But Bellico would have none of it. “The surgeons say you are healed, peregrin. Your oath still stands, so take your place.” When Imre protested Bellico cut him short with a raised hand. “The Sage will be confined to his quarters under guard at all times. He will be treated gently. Now, take your place, or suffer.”

       
Imre cursed quietly and obeyed.