Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  The groves they ran through smelled of rotting flesh. She pulled tight the wet fabric wrapping her face and peered forward into the gloom. They did not stumble. As it had on their way down the mountain, Mira’s seer whispered: Move left. Duck. Jump now!

  A fallen branch lay just before them, hidden in the ash. Mira yanked Ismene to the side. “Up!” They landed, their feet crunching into the dullness.

  Ismene skidded but stopped, the ash piling like dirt in front of her sandals. Not puffs, not curls—it rolled heavy and thick like sludge and slopped over with a whining thud.

  “Is the Dracos here?” Ismene grasped the hilt of her dagger but she did not draw it from its scabbard.

  Again, questions: “Where is he, sister? What does he do? Does he sleep? I will cut his throat. Tell me!”

  Mira told. The words filled in some of the hole in her soul. “His beast sleeps, Ismene.” Unlike you, they are done churning, she thought. But her sister asked nothing of the tribunus, so she spoke nothing of the man.

  Like her, he was a half-godling, a child of a god, but he’d swaddled his gifts to keep them from harming the world. Mira’s gift, though, unraveled and left her flesh naked and cold, its threads pulled first forward, then back, as it lifted from her skin.

  She’d met the Dracos’s tribunus once, in Rome, when he stood protecting his commander and Faustus while they’d argued over supply routes and political intrigue and the future of the Empire. Andreas Sisto was his name, a huge man, big like all the males of his kind, with deep, richly-colored skin and ocean-tinted eyes and scents capable of enthralling the world as much as his broad physical presence.

  He’d looked down at her, his face showing nothing more than the stone façade she saw on all of the Dracos’s warriors, and said nothing when she caressed his present with her seer.

  She’d seen only herself reflected back, so she’d paid no heed.

  But the menace of the Dracos had crawled her skin and squirmed on her lips and left a taste of terror-spiced awe on her tongue. His beast whipped his big tail and she’d gasped. The man, dressed in a void of black, had looked upon her with the same distaste he held for her brother.

  Then, she had not called her seer. One did not poke an irritated godling. Now, pulled by her sister, her seer screamed: There, under an olive tree. That way. They will not move.

  Ismene huffed again. “Tell me, sister. Tell me he’s here.”

  Ismene’s seer vibrated across Mira’s mind. The truth of what-was laid itself bare for her sister, a flat path to all her sister’s ragings. All that the world was built upon, all which had come before, blossomed somewhere inside Ismene’s mind.

  Yet she still hounded Mira.

  “Mira, is he here?” Ismene pulled her wrap higher over her nose and her dark eyes receded farther into the fold’s shadows. They were sisters, but not of the same mother, as was the same with their brother. Born on the same day, at the same moment, and bound forever as tightly as if they had come from the same womb, they were a Prime triad. Escape was not Mira’s fate. It was none of their fates.

  Yes, he is here. Mira’s seer dropped as if a ghost whispered into her ear. She nodded.

  Ismene drew her blade. “Where?”

  The trees sank under the same colorlessness as the other groves. What had been green now withered. The fruit remaining on the branches had turned the same consistency as the ash. The land no longer smelled of olives and the salt of the sea, but of hot mud and rotting death.

  A grand olive with a twisted trunk dwarfed the other trees at the center of this grove, its branches spread as wide as it reached tall. Once, its leaves swayed in the breeze, murmuring like a brook rushing over rounded rocks. The sky above it had glowed brighter than the other trees. The sun smiled upon it more than any other living thing in the world.

  No longer.

  “We should not be here, Ismene.” They should have gone to the children. Caring for their bodies would have given both Mira and her sister closure. A cupful of relief to begin filling the new hole in their lives. Much more relief than Ismene sought now. She only gouged at the the side of the crevasse, widening the burden they’d all carry for the rest of their lives.

  Ismene’s eyes blazed, and for a moment Mira wondered if her sister would slap her unbruised cheek.

  “Under the tree.” Mira made no motion to indicate which tree. Her sister knew.

  Ismene’s seer pulsed. “We haven’t much time. His beast has slept a full day.”

  Another reason to leave. If they were anywhere near his human when the dragon woke, he’d gut them. He’d stretch his long neck and extend his talons and she and Ismene would become nothing more than crimson released into this sea of gray.

  Though maybe death was their fate. Maybe this, too, was to be the end of the Jani Prime. The Dracos would be gentle, if they asked. The man would end this phantom her sister had become, a shade who reflected into the real world only the moment of her sons’ deaths. Then he’d end Mira, dropping her into the hole once and for all.

  Ismene pointed. The man knelt, his back to them, hidden in shadows. Ash coated his armor with the same even layer of flatness as it coated the grove; he must have dropped to his knees before the eruption.

  He’d been here, under the tree, since he’d left their villa.

  Ismene crept forward.

  “Leave us alone.” His words rolled from his throat at the same time a rumble pulsed from the mountain. The sounds mixed, Vesuvius filling the man’s already resonant voice with an edge so deep both Mira and Ismene halted, frozen in the presence of a human as much a child of the gods as their own father.

  Mira watched him now, the debris of the mountain mixing heavy and flat into what remained of his black hair. The ash pushed him down, as it pushed down Mira, but his body did not bow under the pressure.

  What were they doing? Mira’s seer screamed Run! Go! Ismene’s hate cannot stand against this godling.

  Mira felt pushed. Pulled. Yanked on as if someone had tied the rope of a stone anchor around her leg and dropped the rock into the hole. The ash obscured the stone’s descent, but she heard it smashing against the walls.

  And the rope went taut.

  On the mountain, she’d watched her brother walk away after accepting a fate he should have had the spine to fight. Watched her sister balance on her heels as she tempted a fate threatening to rupture her bones. But now, here under this olive tree, the hole ceased to be something her imagination fabricated to give her mind understanding of what she felt. The hole became a real part of what-is.

  Her sister lifted her dagger.

  The mound under the trunk cracked.

  Mira’s seer erupted: The hiss of the ash took on tonal variations—a little more here, a little less there, and it curved with the trajectory of lunging talons and breathed fire.

  Mira understood what woke under the ash. She’d seen both dragons vanish and reappear, both moving with such speed neither man nor animal could counter. Each time, she’d stared, awed, even though she knew she shouldn’t. She was a Prime Fate, a woman of good breeding and great power. But the beasts never missed.

  She and Ismene were about to bleed out, like the children. They had to run. Mira’s seer forced her to move, made her turn her sister away from the threat lunging from the ash under the dying tree.

  But Ismene countered. She would not leave. She punched Mira hard in the belly, the hilt of the dagger she held angled to cause as much pain as possible. “You will not take this from me!” Ismene screamed. “You won’t—”

  Mira had been focused on the dragon, not on her sister’s rage. She thought her sister still had some sense in her head. But now agony poured up into Mira’s throat. They were going to die. She saw no other fate.

  The ash on the dragon’s back broke into dried, hexagonal plates. Some dropped to the ground, hitting like boulders and splashing the gray at the beast’s feet. Some clung to his ridges, a great coat of thick stone armor. But none of it slowed him down.
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br />   A great, six-taloned claw-hand swept between Mira and Ismene. It cupped away from Mira just before it vanished, mimicking Ismene’s ash-encrusted clothes.

  Mira’s sister skidded through the mud. The gray billowed around her as the air frothed, and the ash on the ground piled high like grabbing fingers. Ismene twirled her arms, but it did no good. She dropped to the ground.

  The great beast growled, his warm-scented breath washing across Mira’s face, though she saw nothing puff out the air. She looked into the visually hollow space under the cracked ash-armor, the place where a dragon tensed, but did so without being seen. He mimicked the inside of his shell of Vesuvius’s ashes, living, breathing, but beyond her comprehension.

  “He wants you to leave.” By the tree the man straightened slightly, his head rising. The ash coating his back popped with a dull crack and slid off his armor. The metal of his back and chest plates no longer gleamed. And the blackness of his legatus’s tunic had faded to the same final gloom as the air and trees surrounding them.

  Next to Mira, Ismene shrieked. “Murderer!”

  5

  The past-seer of the Jani Prime shook like an adder and spit murder at Ladon. He didn’t move, nor did he respond. Ladon only returned his gaze to the gladius lying across his knees. He wasn’t surprised. In war, the losers always thought of death as murder.

  Time for Ladon to admit that he and the beast slept on a pile of corpses.

  For a moment, nothing changed. Nothing moved, but the hot air pushed down on his lungs. The blood in his veins imitated the indistinct roar of the ash pressing into the night. He smelled it, knew it, heard it whisper. The end sat on the back of his tongue like poisoned fruit.

  Murder.

  He’d expected political retaliation. The Jani worked the machinations of empire. Manipulated from back rooms. They sent others to do their killing. Yet two-thirds of their Prime triad now pointed daggers at his head.

  They did not understand what they did. People who knew what-will-be should consider their actions. They should not have cut down his niece, unprovoked. They started this war. And they suffered a severe retaliation because if it.

  He did not understand the behavior of Fates.

  Ismene, the dark-haired past-seer, shrieked again. Mira, the fair-haired present-seer, stared at Dragon with eyes as flat and mindless as the dead girl, even though she held her gut and retched from the pain of her sister’s hit.

  “Ismene…” Mira’s voice flitted through the noise of the ashfall. The chiming sweetness of her seer lifted its quality above simple panting. “The dragon…”

  The past-seer’s arm rose. She’d fling her dagger around Dragon, at Ladon’s head.

  Maybe he should allow it to hit. When Dragon awoke, the edges of Ladon’s awareness brightened. The sulfur in the air glistened as it stung. Lightning flashed across the mountain’s face in blazing, blinding streaks, and the noises of the overheated earth—the crackling mud, the breathing of the two women—filled Ladon’s ears.

  The beast’s vision made Ladon’s own more than it should be, but Dragon did not work Ladon’s muscles. He didn’t move his bones or lift his gladius. And sometimes Ladon needed a sharp point to remind him where he ended and the beast started.

  The blade cut through the ash floating down around them. A maelstrom formed behind it, a trail of void where once had been smooth death.

  Ladon’s body moved slightly, twisting just enough to save itself. The dagger nicked his cheek anyway.

  The sting hit hard—he moved, but a dishonored woman still found a way to slap his face from two dragon-lengths away.

  He chuckled as he touched the cut.

  I do not see humor in this situation, Human. The beast growled at the present-seer once more.

  Nor did Andreas see the humor. Ladon had signaled his Second to stay back, on the other side of the grove, with the horses. Not to mesh himself into the fury of Jani Fates—there’d be no justice. But warriors were not ones to ignore threats to their commanding officers.

  Andreas lifted the past-seer out of the ash by her neck. She croaked, her shrieks silenced. He held her at arm’s length, her feet dangling over the death coating the grove and her fists pounding the muscles of his arms. Small smacking sounds pumped off his flesh, but he did not flinch or move.

  “Quiet, harpy,” Ladon’s tribunus growled.

  ***

  His orders had been to stay back. To tend the horses, to let what was to unfold, unfold. Ladon had spent the night and the full day under the tree, his head bowed, in reverence. Andreas followed his example, praying to rid his mind of his challenges.

  The entire time, they did not speak to each other.

  When the ground growled like the beast and the world shook and Ladon did not move, Andreas suspected the truth: Ladon did not rid himself of his challenges. He took them as his purpose.

  Long ago, Andreas had leashed his fear. But now it rose in his core, toward his chest, at the same time it rolled down, into his bowels. It flavored the air as much as the stinging stench falling with the ash.

  He knew what the fear was. He recognized it.

  Fear opened gates best left closed. Doors disrupting the world when they swung open and threw eddies into the currents created by the gods.

  The beast breathed out small flames, awake enough they could leave, yet they did not. They’d been trapped on another path into the future shaped by a pair of screeching Fates who should have known better than to follow them into this place.

  Fates claimed visions of the past, present, and future, but they knew nothing. They took no responsibility for the ripples caused by their abilities. They believed in nothing more than their own cycles of hate and greed, like a snake eating its own tail.

  They balanced nothing and caused their own ill fate, and now they smeared it across his legatus like shit from a cow.

  The past-seer panted under her scarf, hate crunching her eyes into black stones. For a moment, Andreas wondered if she’d lost what little mind she had.

  But her seer danced across his consciousness—semi-discordant jangles that felt the way how cymbals in the wind sounded. Andreas sniffed, his fear responding by squirming in his gut. His face tightened in response, but he did not let go.

  “You could have stopped his blade!” Disbelief whistled out her nostrils in high, shrill puffs. “You let him murder. My boys died!” Words dripped from her lips with as much heat and vileness as the detritus spewing from the mountain.

  Boys? “What are you speaking of, witch?” There’d been one. A girl.

  “Her sons were to become our niece’s triad mates this coming Saturnalia.” The present-seer stood stunned in front of Dragon. “They found the dagger.”

  So they’d killed themselves. Andreas would have felt sympathy for their mother, if she’d been worth the effort.

  Next to the tree, Ladon’s fingers twitched. But his face did not show change, nor did he move his body.

  The past-seer sneered. “Murderer,” she hissed.

  “Let her go, Andreas. This is done.” Ladon pointed at the present-seer. “Take your sister. Go to the coast before the mountain kills us all.”

  Andreas’s fingers tightened. He could as easily snap the past-seer’s neck as he could whisper scents saying ‘die now’ and watch her breath halt in her throat, enthralled by his gift and willing only to do as he commanded. She’d turn as gray as the ash and as cold as her soul.

  If he let loose what sat at the back of his throat, he’d end the Jani Prime. Their brother would drop dead where he stood in whatever hollow he haunted. And his legatus’s family would be avenged to the fullest order.

  He’d uphold his goddess mother’s orders to protect the Dracae, but not his commander’s order to allow what-will-be to be.

  One trust granted him with little effort, confirmed. One he’d only earned with centuries of effort, broken.

  The present-seer stepped back from Dragon’s snout, a slow measured movement. She trembled as if fi
ghting her body’s need to run took more strength than she had. But she pushed her leg back anyway, determined to survive.

  “All I see is death,” she whispered. “I see an open void. I see no choice.”

  Andreas turned his attention back to the wild past-seer. Of course only death filled the present. The past had brought them here, to this grove under the mountain. Brought them all into a moment where Ladon, the godling whose soul and body Andreas had sworn to protect, asked one more time for an action which whipped Andreas’s gut into his throat:

  “Put her down, Andreas. Let them be.”

  ***

  Both men flooded Mira’s seer: The giant gripping her sister danced in precise steps with his own fate. The other wrestled with his decisions, ones he had not questioned since he’d walked from his god-world into the world of humans.

  Mira stood between them now, watching, pulled and pushed and held over the gaping maw that was her life—the hole in her soul through which all that mattered, all that sang or sweetened or lived—fell into Hades.

  The godling with his scraped-off black hair and brilliant eyes glanced from her to her sister and back. His body reflected his truth: He’d commanded Ismene’s release not because he cared, but because he didn’t. What was to happen was what would happen. He would not fight it. There was no need or cause to care.

  The giant behind her, holding her sister, breathed the ash—his own and what swirled in the air—because he’d weighed his choices and chose his options.

  Neither man cared about her.

  Mira glanced at Ismene. Her sister writhed in the big tribunus’s grip, venomous but just as enthralling as the man. Mira had followed her into the ashfall, after all.

  Her sister did not care about Mira, either. Mira had known this her entire life. Felt it in the constrained hugs. In every moment Ismene’s glances dismissed a fear or a moment of caring. Tied as tightly together as they were, her triad could not hide their individual narrowness from each other.