Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (9 page)

       
“This morning finds you hale,” he said in a loud voice. The assembly saluted with a clap and answered, “It does.” Bellico flipped his hymn so the spine of it rested across his shoulders, then stepped forward to the edge of the dais to tower over Imre. This was the second time the council had been called to order. Imre glanced at the bloodstain in the grass and wondered if there would be any more interruptions.

       
“For matters of war,” Bellico said, gesturing with his stone hand, “matters that affect our lives and our traditions, we come together as a family, and as a family we enforce our will. This is the law of the Voce. It serves us as we serve it.” He waved toward Imre. “This peregrin came to our shores a fugitive and a meddler, and as payment for his transgression was bound by an honor debt. He has given us his song, for what it is worth, but he has also given us disrespect, disorder. And now he invites war to our doorstep, peregrin navies threatening our isle, even as he besmirches the purity of certain of our clan.”

       
At this last Imre felt a chill from his scalp to his nethers. So they knew. Eroico had told. The ships were waiting. And his life was soon to be worth naught but a few buckets of jackal dung. Now was the time, this moment or never.

       
Before Bellico said another word Imre gathered his breath and his courage and shouted, “Maestro Bellico! A moment!”

       
The indecency sent an angry buzz rippling the gallery until Imre had the sense of many eyes measuring his neck for the edge of a blade. Upon the dais, Ariosa appeared somewhat bemused, as did Eroico. Cantiléna’s face was a mask. The Maestro, though, fixed Imre with a look fit to darken a room. “You speak out of turn, peregrin.”

       
“Forgive my insolence, I—”

       
“Your insolence will see you spitted!”

       
Imre bowed, reminding himself to be careful. “That may be so, Maestro, and though your wrath is kindled, I beg an indulgence before you pass my fate to this noble assembly. I pray my service to your clan these many months affords me a measure of mercy.”

       
“Your service is payment, and our mercy is short. But you have fought for us. And though you sing like a mule, your talents have seen their use. Ask your favor.”

       
Imre kept his head bowed, blinked against the sweat in his eyes. “You mention singing, Maestro, and that is well, for I request a song.” This moment or never. “I request
thalamos pugna
.”

       
The gallery erupted with the roar of a thousand voices—laughter, questions, taunts pouring down in a torrent of Silici that would have put any market auction to shame. Hymns were shaken. The ground beneath Imre’s feet shook from the force of stone fists and sandaled feet pounding throughout the amphitheater. His head remained bowed.

       
Over the din, Imre heard Bellico’s voice thunder from the dais. “Stand straight, peregrin!” When Imre obeyed, he saw the Maestro glowering, that hard white hand raised for calm. Gradually the assembly quieted. And when the sea could be heard over the old stone walls, when Imre’s own heartbeat rushed in his ears, Bellico spoke the words. “Challenge who you will.”

       
Imre was astounded when both his voice and hand held steady as he raised his dark hymn and pointed it toward the dais. “I would sing with the Third Blade of the Baremescre clan, with your eldest child. I challenge Cantiléna.”

       
This time there was no buzz, no roar, only one collective intaken breath as if all sound had been swallowed in a tempest.

       
Cantiléna, though, never hesitated. She drew her copper-brown tortoise-shell blade then stepped next to her father. “I accept,” she said. And with her arms taut and her trousers rippling slyly in the wind, she looked just as dangerous as that day on the harbor road.

       
“I call on my clan to sing beside me!” she cried. “Come, all you willing! Come cross hymns with the peregrin!”

       
Imre’s sword point dropped to the ground as his jaw dropped to his chest. Her clan?
Her entire yanking clan?
 
Damn him to a frozen hell, he hoped he’d misheard. But there it was, plain. The rows above were aswarm, the Baremescre leaving their seats to throng the stairways, flexing their hard stone arms and freeing their hymns from their slings.

       
Less than ten hours ago, surrounded by smoke and bones, Cantiléna had told Imre he would lose his life today. As he watched the army of half-stone warriors descend upon him, Imre prayed to the stars she was wrong.

* * *

Verse

       
Aside from the clothes on his back and a sackful of trinkets, Imre Balgas had made landing at Craggerman’s Maw with scant few necessities: two pattern-welded dueling blades, as any gentleman would wear, his father’s grimwade musket, and a spool of puppet strings hand-woven by Tayuya the Harmonist. Together they represented all that remained of the beauty in his life, which was why it made him sick to the belly to bring them to shore in a place like the Maw.

       
Imre carried his musket and spool rolled together in a bundle of oilcloth. This he swung over his shoulder as he stepped from the gangplank into the flow of the great unwashed, old Naldo Randal following close behind. With the Jinan marauders hunting the waters for their trail, Imre and Naldo had need of passage on some new vessel heading further into the tropics, hopefully as far south as Tahan. Imre scanned the ships at berth and sighed. They would be a long time searching.

       
Trader cogs flying the Jinan flag were jammed into the quay, each no doubt bearing a dozen greedy hearts willing to trade for marauder coin any rumor of the last son of Balgas. But in the distance were stranger sights that brought no comfort: eight-legged floaters sitting on the water like pond striders; lanky transports with dozens of masts and a thousand woven cords in the stead of sails; gnarled floating fortresses made entirely of black iron, vomiting smoke; hulls of bone, hulls of glass, hulls of a wood bristling with stiff pearly whiskers. The docks of the Maw crawled away to the east and west with one monstrosity after the other.

       
“Ugliness for the ugly,” Imre said. For in the hills rising to the south, above the confused jumble of shipyards, taverns, and fish markets, rested two estates of red marble, each with tiered garden pavilions overlooking the bustling waterfront. There, haughty and bronze-skinned figures idled in the sun, each with that stone-limb deformity, each with a covey of slaves.

       
“Do the Silici disgust you so?” Naldo asked.

       
“They’re mongrels, aye, dirty blood, no doubt. But worse, they trade
flesh
, Naldo. They keep men at their heels like curs.” Imre eyed a craggerman swaggering through the crowd, and spat. “My father would have had them all stretched across a hot dune for the buzzards to pluck.”

       
“True,” said Naldo. “Any other lord of the League would do the same. But we are fleeing the League, Adalheid has been sacked, and your father, may he bathe forever in light, is gone. You are deep within the Silici Archipelago. There is no memory of the Djinn here, no history of captivity, no code of liberty. You must accept that.”

       
Naldo was an arbiter—scholar, tutor, and agent of the will of House Balgas. He’d begun his service with Imre’s great-uncle Gideon, for whom he’d lost two fingers and most of the use of his left arm. The limb was a cracked and withered mess wrapped under gauzes of cotton and bound to his body in a sling. Even so, he fancied himself a warrior poet, the tough old man, and with quick feet and sinewy strength in his good arm he swung a wicked knock with the saber. Brains by the bucket, oak in the spine, and a love for lecture—that was Naldo.

       
“As for mongrels,” he was saying, “know that your own House Balgas is noble for its history of courage, not purity. The firstblood is in your veins, true, but that is simply controlled breeding, young master. Don’t confuse it with virtue.”

       
Imre hefted the oilcloth and chastened himself. Naldo was right. Imre
was
House Balgas. It wouldn’t do to place his own prejudices above the needs of his House.

       
They were wandering past a battle-scarred galleon, Naldo lecturing and Imre doing his best to listen, when a commotion rang out. Imre knew crowds, knew their different voices, and this one screamed
fight
. He craned his neck to spy masses of folk gathering near one of the paved roads winding down from the hills. He veered off to investigate, Naldo zealously oblivious.

       
The crowd thickened quickly, a press of elbows and human odor sharp and cloying, but with the now unmistakable sounds of argument rising over the din, his curiosity drove him on. When at last Imre gained a vantage, the crowd, buzzing like an angry hive, was in array about two figures struggling in the road, one male and the other female. Both craggers.

       
The sandy-blonde man, lean but well muscled, was clutching with his hard stone fist the flesh arm of a young woman, no older than Imre and done up in linen trousers under a bolt of blue wrapped from hip to breast. The man was possessed of an ugly black limb, knobbed all over as if covered with dewberries. Hers was smooth and copper, but no less unsightly. It was a case of jilted love, Imre saw at once. Dewberry entreated the woman over and again for some favor, which she flatly refused. Imre understood the words
weak
and
fool
from her stream of Silici, but the rest was lilting gibberish. Instead of listening, he took advantage to examine the far-famed cragger blades.

       
There was rumor in the League that the craggers used sorcery—Djinni spells, blood sacrifices, all manner of wicked devices—to grow evil-minded swords from the flesh of their young. These babes had hideous bony spurs jabbing from the inside of the left arm, the sinister arm. As the babe grew so did the blade, until it fell from the body and became a fell weapon. There
was
a large dimple in the woman’s flesh arm, catching pools of shadow as she strove with her petitioner. Her sword, darkly rippled like a polished tortoise shell, was straight and double edged and hung from her right hip. It was forged of no metal. Nor was Dewberry’s, very long and slung across his back; it was thick as a steak and looked to be ungodly heavy. Imre’s own swords were slender reeds in comparison. But in the tales the blades supposedly spoke and saw the souls of men and turned piss into liquid gold. It was folk foolishness, Imre was sure.

       
No cragger had ever been seen outside of their archipelago domain, not in their long history with the jungle island lords, not in their years of trade with Jinan cities. They never traveled, never showed interest in expansion. But Arbiter Naldo had made landing at the Maw many times before. He likely knew more of these ugly folk than any in all the Jinan League, and it might be he had some bit of truth about their swords.

       
Imre began to look for an escape from the throng, muscling and jabbing where necessary, but his efforts were spoilt when the cragger man spat something harsh that sent a fresh buzz through the crowd. The collective energy shot in an instant from pleasantly entertained through to full-on bloodlust. They wanted a fight.

       
They would not be disappointed.

       
The young woman responded softly, though her words were surely barbed, for her fretted suitor cuffed her across the jaw with his stone fist. The blow snapped her head round, but she righted herself imperiously, spoke, and was struck once more, this time with an open hand that cracked like a whip. The woman spat blood, yet she faced him. She laid a hand on the hilt of her blade. “
Denuo
,” she said. Imre knew the word. “Again.”

       
All around him sailors and beggars and fishwives and urchin girls were shouting curses and praises and words of shock. But Dewberry had gone far past caring. As the woman stood unprotected, he clenched his stone fist and slammed it full in her face. The woman went tumbling backward like a batted doll, first her shoulder then her head cracking loudly against the hard road.

       
Dewberry yanked his monster sword free. He raised it above his head.