Beneath Ceaseless Skies #227

by Wren Wallis

  When the youth and his mule have gone back up the street, Almas drags the crates into the hall of the house and pries them open. Packed in the sweetly musty rice straw within, she finds honey and beeswax and wool fat, willow bark and vinegar and strong clear liquor, peony root and licorice and salvia. There are also, unasked-for, a sack of clean, carded lambswool, another of millet, a sticky, paper-wrapped brick of dried apricots, and a little jar of poppy tears.

  Lidat comes from the front room, Sonam trotting at her heels. She looks worn-through, faded at the edges. Almas can hear a child weeping in the room she’s just left.

  She halts when she sees the bounty at Almas’s feet and slips a flyaway strand of hair behind her ear. “Already?”

  “Ai. Sonam, can you help put away?”

  The girl nods and slips out from behind Lidat’s skirts. She, too, looks drained, a dull-eyed wisp, and Almas’s heart of sand threatens to choke her breath again. Ten years ago, when Sonam’s mother had died in childbed and her father had turned his back on her—an ill-luck child, a red-cord child—Almas and Lidat had agreed it would be kindness to keep her. But what kindness raises a child in a place like this? Gives a child this work?

  She almost corrects herself and sends the girl to play in the garden instead; then she recalls there is no more garden, and the words turn to ash in her mouth. As Sonam passes, Almas stops her to crouch and hug her fiercely. Sonam leans against her with a soundless sigh. The child is skinny as a hare. “There are apricots, Sonashka,” Almas tells her softly. “He sent apricots. Have some, after you put away.”

  When she rises again, Lidat’s eyes are gleaming. To divert the moment, Almas says lamely, “The Father advises to keep well away from the wall tonight.”

  “Oh, well, my evening’s plan ruined,” Lidat scoffs gently. Then she does the same arithmetic Almas had and puts fingertips to the taut line of her mouth. “He’s sending the soulless out in the dark?”

  It seems a mad gamble on the Wolf’s part to commit the Watch’s remaining dead to a night sortie against devils and raiders both, stripping Kharsh of their protection, but Almas supposes he’s tallied his risks. The wastelanders will never expect a night attack, and if any of the Watch’s dead do somehow make it across the devils’ carrion grounds without their huntsmen to keep them leashed, ward-lines won’t protect the wastelanders tonight. The wards will hold devils at bay, but they won’t keep out the dead.

  It feels breathtakingly unfair to break such a primal custom as that of shelter against the night. But fair is a child’s word, and Almas suspects anyway that the Wolf reads from a different book of rules than other people.

  “Well,” she says. “At least it might be over soon.”

  What a cold and weary thought.

  * * *

  What strikes Almas first that night isn’t the noise, it’s the stillness: the held breath. If the devils prowl close, they do it in silence. If the Sons’ tame dead advance on the enemy lines, they do it unremarked.

  It isn’t until the noise begins that she realizes exactly what the Wolf has done.

  Even then, she doesn’t understand right away. The first devil’s wavering hunting-cry seems nearer than she’d expected, lifting the hairs on her neck, but the ones that answer it are farther. She hears a sudden distant clatter of weapons, the shouts of disordered men. But above these rises a snatch of hymn, a Marethi war-song—the angel with his fiery sword— a swift drumbeat of hooves racing toward the wall, and then all is drowned beneath the ragged and terrified screams of men, the triumphant shrieking of devils.

  The living Sons rode with their dead. They’ve shattered the wastelanders’ wards and left them open to the night.

  It’s hard to bear the whole weight of comprehending such cruelty. It settles like a final, suffocating stone on the fallow sand of her heart.

  She and Lidat move the injured who can be moved into the same room as the ones who can’t, and pull their own and Sonam’s pallets in as well. They take turns holding Sonam and singing over the sounds from outside until both their voices are rusted through.

  * * *

  She can’t read the night’s verdict in the empty morning streets. A few molting hens scratch and bluster. The Watchtower wears the sunrise across its shoulders like a victor’s banner, but Almas doesn’t believe in omens. Both the tower and the ruins and fields beyond the wall are quiet. The chilly air smells sour.

  After they’ve fed their charges, Almas puts on her boots and her old sheepskin jacket, and ties a kerchief over her hair. “I won’t be long.”

  Lidat nods, her mouth pressed pale.

  The Watch gate stands open and no guard waits to bar her entry, so Almas stalks through it unchecked. She’s never been within the Watch itself before and might have been curious at one point. Now she notes without surprise how shabbily ordinary a place it is. Not even dawn’s kind light flatters the dusty yard and ramshackle outbuildings slumped around the bleak tower’s foot. It smells like horseshit and rust and men’s sweat.

  The Wolf is there, standing in the yard at the center of a knot of men. His arms are folded, head bent to listen to two of the others arguing. He glances up at Almas’ approach.

  His iron braid is fraying, his black surcoat dusty and mottled with blacker stains, the lines on his face drawn deeper by weariness. The colorless eyes assess Almas impassively. “Sister,” he says, and the men around him fall silent and turn to stare. The one at his right shoulder is dead and regards Almas with a strangely identical blandness. She lets her gaze skip away from that one.

  “Father. A word?”

  His stare bores through her. At last he nods, and gestures courteously to one side. “This way.”

  She waits until they’ve walked out of earshot of the living before she speaks. “You rode on them at night. Broke their ward-lines, to lead devils down on them.”

  He nods politely, hands clasped behind his back.

  “They were people.” Her voice is still rusty, and outrage makes it shrill.

  He glances sidelong at her. “So are you and yours.”

  “You didn’t do this for me and mine,” Almas tells him, biting the words off hard-edged. “None of us would ever have asked such a thing.”

  “No,” he agrees. “But I was charged to provide what Kharsh needed, not what it asked. The wastelanders are broken; the fight here is done.”

  “At what cost? Their souls?”

  “As God wills. Their souls aren’t my concern or yours.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me my concerns.” The God Almas wants to believe in would never have willed such a thing, so many souls tainted and lost; would never have allowed the use of the damned against any of His creations.

  He actually laughs at her: a dry and tired sound. He stops walking, so Almas stops with him. “Sister, I do my duty so that others can do theirs. Perhaps theirs is nobler and cleaner work—I don’t begrudge them that. But someone has to burn the field before it can be planted, ai?” He spreads his hands. “As I said—God leaves the mending to others. I have faith that He chooses His instruments well, each to her proper task, and I thank God for those who feel their duty as keenly as I do mine.”

  She squares her shoulders, half-smothered with rage. “Are you trying to flatter me?”

  He laughs again. “You overestimate both my courtesy and my courage, Almas Shah. Your principles are admirable, I’m sure. I pray the work I do allows you to keep them.”

  She lets her gaze slide away. The brethren he left gathered behind them await his return. They’re wan and worn-looking, somber boys in battered armor; one lean, dark youth appears half-asleep on his feet and is supported against the shoulder of another. In a nearby corral, a limping man tends to a mare with an ugly, seeping gash in her shoulder. The yard seems unnaturally empty otherwise.

  “How many did you lose?” she asks.

  “Enough.”

  She resists the pull of sympathy. “And I suppose you don’t begrudge the cost, either?”

&
nbsp; He’s silent for a long time. Almas hears a hoarse voice raised in prayer somewhere nearby. “I’m not sure what you take me for,” he says eventually. “I grieve them, every one. But our souls are secured to Maret for just such a purpose. My brothers knew their duty, too, and what use is sentiment to them now?”

  Almas resists a venomous urge to spit. He’s still watching her in that level fashion.

  “If that’s all you came for, sister,” he tells her with cool courtesy, “I have work yet to do.”

  Almas doesn’t realize until he turns away from her that at least one of the stains he wears is his own blood; she hadn’t noted the wrapping of bandages around his side at first because they’ve soaked so dark as to blend with his black clothing and armor in the ruddy early light.

  “Father,” she calls after him. He turns back.

  You have injured men here, Almas meant to say. You’re injured. Do you need a physician’s help? Once it would have been instinctual, unhesitating—but now in the sand of her chest, the words wither. She won’t lend her skill to this. At last she only shakes her head.

  His smile is a curved blade. He turns away again.

  * * *

  As Almas approaches the gate, a black-armored brother on horseback clatters through it. His mare is blown and lathered. The animal halts, head hanging and legs planted square, and the Son half-tumbles from her back. “Father!” he calls; unnecessarily, for the men at the yard’s center are fixed on him already. “Tsomo Bess begs to treat!”

  Almas pauses.

  The Wolf steps out again from the group. “Treat? On what grounds? His host is shattered—what more will talk profit us?”

  The rider stoops, hands on knees, to catch his breath. “Ai. But he says—’all border hostilities.’ He, his survivors—” The rider shakes his head and points. “Waiting,” he manages.

  The Wolf folds his arms. “I am not authorized,” he observes to the yard in general, “to negotiate a general peace with the clans on the Citadel’s behalf.” But the colorless gaze finds Almas and lingers on her for a long moment. She lifts her chin and holds his look steadily.

  He steps back. “Matei,” he says, and the dead man comes diffidently forward. The Wolf turns his back on Almas, bends his head to the dead man’s, and begins to confer with him low-voiced.

  Almas stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jacket and turns away. There’s a catch in her throat like the promise of rain.

  The huddled town has begun to stir. Almas meets Irinat and her grown son Hamash in the street standing dazed like people just woken from a long, unexpected sleep. “The fighting’s done,” she tells them. “He’s broken them.” Irinat’s expression melts, the bound-up grief and fear of the last months flooded out by sick relief. She turns and presses her face into her son’s shoulder, shivering in her threadbare shawl, and he wraps his arms around her and nods at Almas.

  More people have emerged into the dusty hollow among the houses that used to hold the afternoon market. The sun hasn’t risen high enough above the tiled roofs to illuminate them, and they mill and mutter in the gray half-light. “Doctor!” calls Vikhis, the smith, and folds her broad forearms across her leather apron. “Were you at the Watch?”

  “I was,” Almas says. “The Father says the fighting’s over.”

  Vikhis nods uneasily and makes a warding sign; the whole town heard the night’s horror. “Well. We’re blessed in that, at least.”

  She’s nearly at her own porch—she can see Lidat waiting ahead, hands knotted pale-knuckled in the worn embroidery of her skirts—when she hears horses behind her and turns back. A group of Sons is riding out: a few of the tired youths from the yard, and the dead man. The Wolf is there too, though he lingers a moment at the gate to have a word with someone within before urging his horse after the others. A white cloth is tied conspicuously around the hilt of his sword.

  Lidat comes down into the street and takes her hand. “Where are they going?”

  Almas shrugs wearily. “Tsomo himself and a handful of his men remain. They want to talk a general peace.”

  Lidat stares. “With him?”

  “I suppose.” Almas feels hollowed to lightness, as if all the exhaustion of the last weeks has lifted and left her empty. She thinks she ought to feel glad right now, but all she contains is dust and airy space, like the husk of a burned-out house. “They destroyed his host. Now he wants to bargain on behalf of the rest of the border.”

  Lidat laughs humorlessly. “After what they did to him and his last night, he trusts they’ll ride out there to treat and not to assassinate him? That they’ll abide by any custom?”

  Almas remembers the pale eyes fixed on her. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I think they will, though. I think they mean to.”

  Lidat searches her face and then squeezes her hand. Her tone turns brisk. “I’ve changed Elam’s dressings; his fever’s broken and he seems to be healing clean. Let me make you tea.”

  “Thank you.” Almas allows her wife to lead her onto the porch and into the house.

  They’re still standing at the kitchen hearth when they hear the blast.

  * * *

  The Watch is an antlike swarm when Almas again reaches the gate. Her side aches from running and she puts out a hand to brace herself on cold stone. Lidat is breathless at her heels.

  “What happened?” Almas demands of the first brother to cross her path. He shakes his head roughly at her and pushes past. “What happened?” Almas asks the next, and then recognizes him: it’s the one that had leaned half-asleep on his fellow this morning. He isn’t one she’s seen in the settlement before, so likely one of the Wolf’s own host. His arm is bound in a sling now and he wears an unwholesome greenish pallor beneath his dark skin.

  “The field was mined,” he tells her hoarsely. “They mined the field. God—” He bites off whatever bitter oath was on his breath and turns away, but Almas won’t let him go. She steps in and seizes his good arm.

  “Is there fresh fighting?”

  “No,” he says. “That was—they stayed to see the trap sprung, and rode off. Some of ours are going in pursuit, but—”

  Lidat exhales behind her and murmurs something.

  “And the men in the Watch party?”

  “I don’t know yet,” the brother says. He starts shaking his head and then seems unable to stop. “My Father—our Father, that is—they’ve gone out to see, but—”

  Almas has already shrugged out of her jacket and is rolling her sleeves. “Sit,” she directs him. “You’re bleeding, you shouldn’t be afoot.”

  * * *

  There are few enough of the morning’s wounded to tend. She and Lidat are already done with their brisk, sure work by the time two grim-faced huntsmen lead a pair of horses back through the gate. The animals bear a kind of makeshift sling between them. It contains the ruins of two men.

  Almas rises from her exhaustion on the tower steps and goes to meet the brothers. They are tired enough or shocked enough not to seem startled by her.

  “All that was worth collecting,” the one on the right tells her. He’s a big youth, broad as a bear, and his beardless face is streaked with blood and rage or grief. “Rest were just mess.”

  The two in the sling are little better than mess. The one on the right has died in transport, or he was already dead when they collected him; either way, it was a mercy. The body on the left nearly defies identification: his face is half-flayed, the jaw dislocated, and his right hip and leg are twisted at a cruel angle, splintered bone jutting through torn flesh in the incongruous midmorning sunshine. But Almas knows the long, stained braid of his hair.

  When she bends over him, she can hear that he still breathes, in a thin unpleasant rasp. His pulse is a faint and listless flutter under her thumb.

  I don’t make the peace, he’d said to her. God leaves the mending to others.

  An author of brutality: the Choyi massacre, the nighttime descent of devils. For all she knows, he might have meant to assas
sinate the steppe raiders’ captain under the guise of peace-talk.

  But she recalls also a light hand on a child’s forehead, a packet of apricots. The way the colorless gaze had considered her in the early light.

  She thinks of words she could have spoken then but hadn’t, of a dark stain over his ribs, the wounded men waiting behind him. She had thought then that to offer help would make her complicit, but now she thinks it could have been a kind of repudiation. She thinks of burning fields, of smoke on the horizon, of the ones who walk away from such places and the ones who stay to tend them. A little green shoot like shame, like fury, like something else takes root in her fallow heart.

  Almas straightens. “I need a clean room, a clean bed. Good light. If you haven’t got those here, we’ll take him to our clinic; we’re equipped there anyway.”

  “Sister,” the bearlike boy says. “We ought to lay him out for rites.”

  “No,” Almas says. Her physician’s mind sees already what can be done, what has to be done: joints carefully re-fit, the leg wound opened and debrided.

  “He goes to God’s host,” the boy holding the other horse tells her.

  “No,” Almas says. “Some of us have hope yet of this world.” The Prophet Maret may raise her Sons for martyrdom, but Almas doesn’t have to abide the waste.

  Lidat moves wordlessly to her side, and they stand shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “Sister,” the boy says. “Your kind concern is—”

  Almas draws herself up to her full height and scrubs at her brow with the heel of one hand. Blood is caked in brown crescents beneath her nails. She takes a deep breath, and finds it comes easily despite the smell in the air. “It isn’t kind concern. It’s what we do. Your Father claimed to understand duty. This is ours: we help the hurt, regardless. What they need, not what they ask.”

  Not because of, but in spite of. The rain will fall on every burned field; every seed will bloom again.

  “If God wants your Father now,” she says, “then let Him take him from my hands. But God chooses His instruments well, and He put us here, did He not?” She stands her ground. “Trust that I know my duty at least as well as your Father knows his.”