Shower of Stones

by Zachary Jernigan

  In this light, mankind standing up for itself made no difference. Was it not a sign of their immaturity that anyone would rail against the inevitable, fighting the unstoppable?

  No, she insisted, against all logic.

  No more bowing, she thought. No more accepting our fate calmly.

  ‡

  At the end of the world, she had begun to believe in something.

  She found herself half hoping to stop.

  ‡

  “Madam?”

  Churls jumped. She had not been asleep, but she had not been properly awake, either. “Yes?” she asked, blinking away the brightness of the sky through the open ceiling panel.

  “The big one—Berun. He is waking.”

  She rolled onto her feet and knelt near the constructed man’s head, staring into the coal-black spheres of his eyes, which gradually began to glow reassuringly blue. She laid her hand on one massive, rubbled shoulder. Cold marbles under her palm.

  “Berun,” she said. “I’m here. It’s Churls.”

  The mage cleared her throat. “I might not stand so close to him.”

  Churls grinned, and only flinched slightly when Berun shuddered and then heaved himself up from the floor, straining against the massive iron manacles bolted into the floor at his wrists and ankles, mouth opening and closing in silence. She kept her hand on his shoulder, and continued to repeat his name and tell him hers.

  Just as suddenly as he had woken, he went still, falling back to the floor with a thump Churls felt through her feet. She leaned forward and shielded his brow as the glow began to fade from his eyes.

  “No,” she said. “No, Berun. Come back, right now.”

  A low sound, barely audible, came from his open mouth—the call of a bass horn from two battlefields away. Churls bent her ear to catch it.

  “… you. Safe. Vedas. Safe?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We’re both safe, though Vedas hasn’t woken yet and we’re stuck in the middle of Fesuy’s territory.” She squinted above her head. “There’s a skylight. I have as much sun coming in as possible, but I worry it’s not enough. You have to be able to move, and soon. We don’t have all the time in the world.”

  “I feel it, Churls. Thank you.”

  For several moments he remained silent, and Churls assumed he had said all he would.

  And then:

  “Two days.”

  ‡

  At midnight, the mage called from above. Churls stopped her restless pacing along the second-floor hallway and climbed the ladder to the attic.

  “He’s waking, but slowly,” the mage said. “Don’t force it.”

  Churls turned toward Vedas, but the mage called her back. In the magelight, the woman’s reddened eyes were entirely without white. They reflected no light, as though completely dry. Blood-colored sleep granules had gathered in their corners. Her lips were cracked, around them a layer of white crust: dried spit, of course, but also a fair bit of the bonedust she had been surviving on for several days.

  “I can’t keep this up,” she said. “I need a rest.”

  It was easy to believe her, yet … “How did you cope when Fesuy was running things?”

  The mage’s smile was ugly. “You killed my replacement, Shouz. He wasn’t very good—he’d never been trained properly—but he serviced for a few hours every night.”

  “I can’t think about this right now.” Churls looked across the room to Vedas, bathed in moonlight, and her left foot stepped in his direction of its own accord. She paused just before reaching him, however, and cursed. Without the mage, they would be ruined. “No. Never mind. I do need you. I’ll arrange something after he wakes. After. One more hour, you understand? Then you can rest. I promise I’ll find a way.”

  Vedas’s chest rose under her palm. He moaned. She brushed her hand along his arm, noting its thinness with sorrow, and intertwined her fingers with his. Her heart shuddered against her ribs, caused her throat to constrict with its feverish beating. She flushed, feeling the stare of the mage at her back, and nearly let go of his hand. Instead, she gripped it tighter.

  “I’m right here, Vedas. Wake up. Let me know you’re alive.”

  The black elder-cloth peeled back from his eyelids, and he turned his head toward her. His eyes vibrated visibly in their sockets as he tried to focus on her. Slowly, as if struggling to control it, he caused the elder-cloth to retreat further, revealing the gauntness of his bearded face. She kept the worry from clouding her features, or hoped she did.

  “It looks good,” he croaked. His hand tightened around hers. “I like it.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Fuck if it does. I look like a melon.”

  He chuckled, which began him coughing. He let go of her hand and levered himself into a sitting position with obvious difficulty, protesting her assistance. For a moment, his entire body shook. She gave him water. He drank it slowly, displaying his rare and sometimes rather maddening capacity for self-control.

  No throwing up water for Vedas Tezul. Regardless of how thirsty.

  “Berun?” he asked.

  “Don’t answer,” she answered before the constructed man had an opportunity to speak for himself. “Conserve your energy.” She turned back to Vedas. “I’ll sum everything up for you: It’s the twelfth of Sectarians. That makes it almost three weeks that you’ve been kept here. It took me that much time to recover and then locate you, longer than I’d hoped. Berun tells me it’ll be two days before he’s ready to leave. We’ll need him at full capacity.”

  Her voice dropped. “I don’t know if we can rely on Fesuy’s mage to shield us from view completely.”

  Vedas looked over her right shoulder, expression unreadable. “She’s keeping people out? Impressive. What about Fesuy—the others? Everything’s cloudy in my mind, but I seem to recall quite a few of them.”

  “Sixteen soldiers, including Fesuy. Plus one woman—a maid, maybe. All dead.” She held his gaze until it became clear he would add nothing to this pronouncement, and pointed to the southeastern corner of the room. “I found two children on the bottom floor. The mage agreed to keep them asleep. And in Fesuy’s bedroom are two girls trussed up like calves, probably shitting themselves as we speak. I think they think I’m some sort of sexless monster.”

  He raised his eyebrows, thoughts left unsaid.

  “You’re tired,” he eventually said. He stared at her puffy right hand. “You’re hurt.”

  She nodded. “My shoulder’s not feeling so great, either.”

  He lifted his left hand and looked at it, clearly concentrating. It took several dozen heartbeats, but eventually, crawlingly, the elder-cloth retreated from the tips of his fingers, up to the second joint of each digit. The skin revealed was a markedly lighter shade of brown than that of his face and neck, the color of diluted coffee.

  She closed her eyes as he ran his fingertips over her bristly scalp. He traced the seams of her skull. Gently, she pulled him toward her.

  They kissed, both tasting horrible, neither caring.

  ‡

  Vedas offered to accompany her on the roof while the mage slept, but she declined. Considering his condition, she thought it best that he raid Fesuy’s icebox and fall asleep with a full stomach, which, despite his protestations to wakefulness, he did promptly upon finishing his meal.

  She paced alone, a mindless circuit: Around the roof in one direction until she reached the skylight. Turn back. Around again in the opposite direction. Her mind wandered aimlessly, snapping back to task at the slightest sound or movement in the streets. Near dawn, just as she began to ask herself whether or not it was wise to be sleepwalking so close to a twenty-five-foot fall, it happened.

  A shadow passed across the moon.

  She crouched, peering up to see a line briefly bisecting the bone-white circle.

  A tail—she knew it instantly. She had heard the rumors of the man who had once been a tamer and now controlled a significant portion of the city. They said he had brought his
pet with him, though as far as she knew no one had actually seen it.

  Her eyes tracked the animal’s flight. Its form was difficult to determine against the night sky: gliding rapidly over the rooftops, blotting out stars as it went, the details pieced together only gradually to form an image. The gull-like wings, which appeared overlarge when compared to the thin, streamlined body at their juncture. The long, arrow-shaft-straight neck led by a smallish tapering head. Lastly, the tail, which stretched behind to nearly twice the length of the neck.

  When she had turned three complete circles to follow its flight, realization struck.

  It was becoming larger.

  She turned toward the skylight just as the mage screamed.

  Vedas had reached her by the time Churls dropped into the attic. He straddled the woman’s chest as her body spasmed beneath him. Elbows locked, he pressed her head to the floor, palms tight over her eyes. Churls came to his side and immediately surmised that his efforts would fail. Blood poured from beneath his hands, pooling quickly under the mage’s head. Already, her spasming was dying down.

  “Leave her,” Churls said. “She’s dead already.”

  His posture did not relax. “What’s happening?” he yelled.

  Before she could reply, a crash sounded behind them. Berun had ripped his manacles free of the floor. He rose, each of his thousand joints creaking shrilly, standing with half of his broad torso above the skylight. Churls watched him turn a slow circle, tracking the beast on its flight.

  Vedas stood beside her, bloody hands on his knees. She waited until his coughs subsided.

  “Do you remember a rumor about a man with a dragon?” she asked. “A man they call the Tamer?”

  ‡

  After several revolutions and one aborted attempt to lift himself onto the roof, Berun sagged, propping himself up against the skylight.

  “It’s coming down,” he said, voice disconcertingly faint. “Go.”

  His companions refused. Vedas readied the two children as Churls climbed down to untie the girls on Fesuy’s bed. She slapped them into wakefulness and led them around the room to get the blood back into their limbs. They stumbled and righted themselves, terrified of her, not wanting to be touched. Vedas pushed a screaming child into each of their chests and yelled.

  “Fao! Fao!” Go! Go!

  The girls hardly needed to be told. Both were gone without a word or backward glance. The front door slammed as they exited the house, and Churls let out a deep breath she had not realized she had been holding. She gripped Vedas’s hand, tugged him weakly toward the attic.

  He resisted. “Why here? Why now?”

  “I don’t know.” She ran a shaking hand over her face. “No, I suppose I do. It makes sense. He runs part of the city. Fesuy was a rival. When I killed him and forced the mage to focus on keeping people out, the secret became plain to any mage hired to listen to the right voices. This man—The Tamer—he’s come to claim Fesuy’s land before someone else does.”

  They stared at one another. He opened his mouth, but she held up her hand. She closed her eyes tightly against the world while she worked out things she suspected would appear simple in any other state of mind.

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “He could’ve attacked Fesuy any time he liked.” She nodded upward. “There’s a dead woman there to prove it. Not only that. He has a wyrm. Why hasn’t he used it before now?”

  She did not wait for his answer. It would not have mattered, she supposed: they were not leaving Berun alone, frozen into place where he stood, an easy target for the wyrm’s grasping claws. She climbed to the attic, Vedas at her heels. They squeezed around the inert form of the constructed man and stood on the rooftop, searching the sky.

  Vedas gasped. Churls followed his gaze and only just kept from following suit. She had been looking high, hardly expecting the animal to have banked so sharply into a descent—to be so near. Instead of measuring its body against the stars, she now tracked its movement relative to the vertical wall of Usveet Mesa. Moonlight played along metallic purple-black scales, shifting focus from one wing to the other as the animal altered course to keep its lower wingtip from brushing the occasional three- or four-storey building.

  “Orrus Dabil Alachum,” he swore. “It’s huge. I heard the stories, but I never imagined … It’s going to collapse the entire building when it lands.”

  Churls smiled grimly in agreement and sat. She patted the rooftop next to her. “Nothing we can do then, is there? Besides, it’s better to be on top of a falling house than inside it. Sit with me, Vedas.”

  He stared down at her, clearly at a loss. She sympathized.

  “Is that you, Churls?” he asked. “Churli Casta Jons does not—”

  “Churli Casta Jons is injured and exhausted,” she said. She patted the rooftop again.

  He sat, and together they waited.

  ‡

  The pressure of the wyrm’s downbeating wings pressed them flat, driving the air out of their lungs. The gale ripped tears from Churls’s eyes, but she refused to look away as the sky above her was eclipsed, becoming a massive, heaving reptilian belly. The beast fell and seemed to continue falling until surely she must be crushed. Vedas gripped her hand tightly enough to grind her knucklebones together, but she barely felt it. Her mind had become a howling cacophony. She anticipated nothing, patient while her lungs burned for air, lost in wonderment and terror.

  Huge, carriage-sized talons spread to grip either side of the rooftop, causing the entire clay structure to groan like a living thing and crack like falling timber. Even when the wyrm settled itself and the pressure in here ears finally let up, noise enveloped her. A massive sound, as though a thousand bellows were being compressed simultaneously, came from above.

  Breathing. The expansion and contraction of lungs larger than herself.

  The spell broke, and she remembered her own body’s need. She inhaled, far too fast. Pain stabbed through her chest and she rolled onto her side, shaking as her lungs seized inside her. She thought with a clarity that surprised her …

  Hypnotized by a bloody big lizard. What an idiot thing to happen.

  She finally regained control of herself and pushed up into a crouch, holding out a steadying hand to Vedas as he got shakily to his feet beside her.

  The wyrm’s belly heaved above them, a smoothly muscular wall of alien flesh. When the animal breathed in, its scales lowered near enough to touch. The house continued to groan under Churls and Vedas, quaking alarmingly with every shift of the wyrm’s wings—wings that extended over several nearby buildings, shielding the sky from view entirely. It was said by men who made their livings along the deeper shorelines of Knoori that oceanic creatures could reach an enormous span, but without water to support a body, how could it possibly … much less fly …

  Churls and Vedas exchanged a wide-eyed look, and she surprised herself by recalling a moment when, as a child, she and a neighbor boy had nearly been trampled by a draft horse that reared before them. They had shared the same stunned expression of horror and amazement.

  “The head,” Berun said, voice almost unheard over the sound of the wyrm’s breathing. His next words were lost, merely a fading brassy undertone.

  The head. Churls and Vedas turned to watch it swing in toward them upon its long neck, its perpetually grinning visage growing and taking on definition. It was a great, predatory wedge, bony and sinewy and blunt, filled with recurved teeth that hung down from its upper jaw even with its mouth closed tight. Its eyes burned with a visible amethyst light and smoke poured from its nostrils. Long past the point where Churls thought it would stop growing, it grew, until it was before her—massive, an entire creature of its own. Able, should it choose to, swallow her whole without pausing to chew.

  A man sat upon it. He slid down its side and dropped onto the roof.

  It took several seconds for Churls to see him as anything other than a small thing standing next to the wyrm’s gigantic head. She blinked, and the imag
e reoriented itself.

  He was not a small creature, except by comparison to his pet. Though not unusually tall (she marked him at a little over six feet in height), he was immensely broad through the shoulders, chest, and thighs. In loose-fitting garments, he might fool someone into believing him fat, but his tight, sleeveless vest clearly strained against slabs of muscle. She knew his belly, ample though it was, would be a solid drum if collided with it. It would be ridged with muscle, a steel washboard.

  This was a man not easily knocked down, or even swayed from side to side.

  He wore a leather cap and a pair of smokeglass goggles. She could not yet tell the color of his skin or determine a likely nationality.

  “You are Churls and Vedas,” he said. He spoke softly in a baritone rumble, yet it carried easily over the sound of the wyrm’s bellows-breathing. He looked down at the constructed man near Churls’s feet, torso half-in, half-out of the skylight. “And this, I assume, is Berun.”

  “Well done,” Churls said. “You know our names and you ride a dragon, and I bet they call you the Tamer for fairly obvious reasons. What do you want?”

  To her annoyance, he chuckled. He took a step forward, and she tensed. Vedas did not move perceptibly, but the elder-cloth closed around his features. She wondered why he had not done this earlier—it would have helped him breathe as the wyrm came down—and realized he had likely decided not to on account of her. She could not be shielded from it, and so neither could he.

  She clenched her teeth and put her hand on the pommel of her sword. She was not as good with her left arm, and the weight of her gimp right shoulder would throw her off. Still, her opponent stood unarmed.

  Next to a dragon, she reminded herself.

  The Tamer stopped after two steps, smile in place. He held up a broad, placating hand.

  “To talk to you,” he said. “That’s what I want, and all I expect. If, afterwards, you decide to accompany me, so much the better.”