“Maybe,” Waray probably agreed. She licked the yolk from her fingers, then retreated into her cloaks. She wanted more eggs. She wanted a bonfire. She wanted to sleep. But mostly she wanted more eggs.
VIII
While they’d outwardly accepted the reality of Waray being heir to some of the most vile blood in all of creation, it would be many nights before either cousin slept without one eye open during her watches.
The first such night hadn’t treated Ashtadukht especially well. She’d somehow managed to fall asleep against a tree whose gnarled trunk had wreaked havoc on her back. So it’d be fair to say she’d earned the right to wake in a foul mood. She eased forward as if she were ripping the scab off an unhealed wound, and rubbed her ribs.
Tirdad grunted nearby.
She glanced at his bedding, which he’d evacuated in favour of dozing peacefully in a patch of grass. His hair and beard were a powdery white. She blinked and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Strangely, it did no good. Still white as a salt flat. Upon closer, less blurry inspection she realized the entire front of his body had been powdered. What’s more, his boots were on his hands and he was surrounded by the contents of their packs, all neatly arranged like a laurel of sundries.
“Waray will regret that,” she muttered.
Ashtadukht went to stretch, and when her wrist resisted, she tugged crankily. It relented. She reached high above her head and, just as she craned to look into the treetop, a cataract of something wet and metallic-smelling splashed on her face. Many curses had lined up on her tongue in response, meaning to sortie at once, when the first was truncated by a thump on her skull. Then another. Then another.
Then she was crawling over Tirdad, letting those curses fly. “Damned barrel-screwing, rat-sodomizing, lord of all that is pissed u—”
Something larger than the rest slammed into her back, which caused her to knee Tirdad in the gut, who instinctively threw her off. She rolled to her side and onto some of their less forgiving supplies.
“Fingernail-swallowing, ravisher of tortoises and—fuck, fuck, fuck!” Rage brought her to her feet, where she applied a white-knuckled grip to her sleeves and looked around.
“Waray!” she thundered. “Where are you, you fucking copper-fed whore? I’ll kill you!”
Ashtadukht swept her glare over the aftermath. Their packs had been used to store an assortment of fruit and blood-filled pouches, then suspended in the branches where she slept. Tirdad was looking around confusedly, now half covered in red paste where he’d been splashed. She lifted her hands to see that they too had been powdered and were now a pasty mess.
Some part of her conceded that Waray had put some work into this one. There was even the severed head of the wolf she’d likely killed for the blood lying there amongst the fruit. Ashtadukht figured that must’ve been the more painful thump.
But she still fumed.
“Waray!” she shouted again. “Waray! I know you’re out there!”
“Please stop,” said Tirdad. He was sitting there like a person who’d been utterly defeated, hands in his lap and staring at the boots they wore. “You do not expect her to leap out and confess when you are ready to rip her head from her shoulders, do you?”
“Oh, I’ll do worse than that,” Ashtadukht growled. “Much worse.”
“Yeah.” Tirdad tapped his tongue to the powder on his arm and raised his eyebrows. “Salt. Probably grabbed a chunk of it while we were in the Lut. Put some thought into this one.”
“How can you be so calm?” asked Ashtadukht, still strangling the cuffs of her sleeves.
Tirdad chuckled. “Do you know how many pranks she has played on me? At this point, I suppose I would be more disquieted if she stopped. You are the lucky one, to have been mostly left out of it until now.”
He smiled. “I like the laurel. Think she is honouring me? Like biggest chump or something? Figures, though. The one night I fall into a deep sleep she does this. Must have been waiting for the opportunity.”
Ashtadukht sighed. She considered searching the area, but knew better than that: Waray excelled at fleeing. And she hadn’t forgotten what happened the last time she followed the half-div into a forest. The trouble with letting her go was that Ashtadukht knew the rascal would return once she’d cooled down a bit. It was the pattern the half-div had followed in all her pranks on Tirdad.
“Frustrating, is it not?” he asked.
“Yeah. I won’t be nearly as mad when she gets back.”
“You are learning, cousin. I suppose this means she is comfortable wandering off again.” Tirdad pulled on his boots—onto his feet this time—and eyed their packs, which were still dripping blood. “At least she had the courtesy of doing this near a creek. Imagine if we were somewhere more arid. I am going to go wash up and pray—cannot allow the div in her to disrupt that.”
“Right behind you,” said Ashtadukht. Some of the paste had already become an uncomfortable layer of crust. It irritated her, and she liked that it irritated her. She wanted to come down hard on Waray when she did return. With a fist, or the head of a wolf, or something blunt and hard. She didn’t really care what it was as long as it did damage. “I don’t know what makes her think we’ll forget this and just, just write the whole thing off.”
“Because we will,” replied Tirdad. He was using a branch to fish their packs out of the tree only to discover they’d been secured with some sort of braided cord. He shook his head and dropped the branch, obviously not set on getting them down at the moment. “And because we have. I think she revels in the grief it brings, and experience has no doubt taught her that she can get away with it. While I do not believe retaliation would stop her—she enjoys it too much for that—it would prevent her from being so brazen about it.”
“I wish you’d act more bothered by it,” Ashtadukht said as they started for the creek. “That’s probably why she’s resorted to including me. Throw a fit or something. Like you used to.”
“I do not throw fits. And it does bother me. She probably knows that or she would not do it at all. Besides, it think I prefer it this way. It is comforting to know you are not being excluded.”
“Comforting?”
“Yes. That you are not being left out.”
“This isn’t something I want to be involved in at all,” argued Ashtadukht. “I don’t see why—oh. You just enjoy watching me get worked up, don’t you?”
“Exactly.”
She glowered at him while searching for an adequate riposte. When it came, she decided not to deliver. She’d be lying if she claimed to have never watched amusedly while he brooked these pranks.
“Yeah,” she said, her ire already beginning to deflate. “Remember that time with the fish, the sock, and the rope?”
• • • • •
When, days later, Waray decided it was safe to casually strut up to them in the middle of a field, Ashtadukht decked her on the jaw right away. It was, in immediate and bright-hot hindsight, a terrible decision in which both parties were generally at a loss.
Ashtadukht had her mouth agape, exhaling like she’d just bitten into a hot pepper and staring at her hand as if it were covered in fire ants, while she shuffled in circles. She wasn’t sure why she was shuffling in circles, but something visceral told her that if she stood still the pain would be unbearable.
For her part, Waray took the blow like a champ. While it did knock her off her feet, it was mainly utter bewilderment that brought her hand to her cheek. Her jaw dropped, and she just stared unblinkingly at the circling star-reckoner. She was overturning nests in her brain, sorting through all the higgledy-piggledy up there—and there was plenty of it—to try and piece together what exactly had just transpired.
“That’s,” Ashtadukht started when the pain was finally such that it didn’t command her to shuffle and gasp. “That’s for covering me in fucking wolf’s blood.”
“Oh,” said Waray, knee-deep in discarded and disjointed thoughts if her lingering confusion was any in
dication. “What a thing. To be clobbered by a šo-traitorous pal.”
She tilted her head and worked her jaw experimentally. “Oh,” she said, opening wide to pluck out a tooth. She held it before her eyes and pursed her lips. “That’s not supposed to come off,” she ventured. “Scales, but not that.”
“You cannot throw a proper punch at all,” Tirdad remarked.
Ashtadukht glowered.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Much better.” She leaned over Waray, and took her by the jaw. Waray emitted something between a hiss and a whine but did not resist. “I hit you because you went too far with your last prank,” Ashtadukht explained. “Next time it’ll be much worse. Don’t test me in this.” She gave the half-div’s jaw a squeeze, which drew another hiss, before snatching her hand away.
“Harsh,” said Tirdad.
“She needs to learn that her pranks won’t fly with me,” Ashtadukht growled before stomping off. She’d been working hard to maintain her irritation over the last few days.
Tirdad frowned, pulled a pinecone from his pack, squinted at it, drew his head back confusedly, then tossed it over his shoulder. The next thing he extracted was the bottle he was looking for. He offered it to Waray. “Have a sip,” he bade her. “Only a sip. It will help the pain.”
She snatched the decoction, which she eyed suspiciously even as she began chugging it.
“Stop!” Tirdad cried, slapping it from her hands. “Are you insane? Spit it up. Now!” He took her by one shoulder and reached to shove his fingers down her throat when she wrenched free and crawled away, throwing him a glare as she did.
“You dangled it there and said drink the thing,” she protested. “You dangled it, and were thinking about how you were being šo-kind to a šo-wretched div. Patronizing.”
Tirdad frowned. The accusation stung. “A sip. I said a sip. That much may kill you if you do not get it out of your stomach now. Right. Now.” He took a step forward. “Now. This is serious.”
“Maybe.” Waray canted her head and rubbed her abdomen. “Feels fine. Can’t get poisoned; can get drunk. Tried both. It’ll burn coming out, though. Burn something fierce.”
She tongued the vacant plot of gum. “Feels weird being empty there. Cries out like a šo-squawking chick, too. Oh, dropped it.” She peered around, and perked up when she spotted her tooth between Tirdad’s boots. “There,” she muttered.
“Waray.”
“Think you can put it back in?”
“I do not—actually, yes.” Tirdad picked up her tooth and walked over. “Open wide.”
When she obliged, he took her by the base of her skull and, avoiding her fangs, shoved two fingers down her throat. She just looked up at him expectantly, like he would eventually remove his hand and her tooth would be repaired.
“Why are you not gagging?” he asked.
She shrugged.
He removed his fingers and curled his lip at them. “Yet I can put you on a boat and you will keep nothing down.”
“A boat is bigger,” Waray replied. “And dour.”
He sighed and wiped his hand on his tunic. “Do you feel a burning in your gut?”
“No.”
“Your chest?”
“Not anymore.” Waray looked away pitifully, channelling her inner human. “Been too long.”
“I . . . see. We should get going then.”
“To the city below? Took a gander,” she said apathetically. “Or aroundabouts. Creepy-looking.”
Tirdad creased his brow. “Hmm. The nearest city is many farsangs away. There is no way you made it there and back.”
Waray’s head canted so sharply it careened. She blew out an exasperated breath. “It’s nearby. Šo-very close. I think.”
“Show me,” he said, and held out her tooth. “Here.”
“You pinecone-arsed quack,” Waray grumbled, snatching it from his palm.
Ashtadukht was waiting patiently, one hand fiddling with her sleeve while she watched the exchange from afar. She felt relieved to no longer hoard anger like some sort of philosophical dragon despoiling hamlets and bringing home rage and fury to pad its halls. But she also felt like she’d been a dragon. It’s one thing to punish a person; it’s an entirely different affair to punish a person you care for.
She put on a stern face and folded her arms when they approached, careful to keep her doubts to herself. “Well?”
“Waray says there is a city nearby,” said Tirdad.
“Oh?” Ashtadukht turned a pointedly unsympathetic stare on the half-div. “Seems like a lie.”
“Already asserted your dominance,” Waray grumbled, averting her gaze. “Don’t have to be mean.”
“There aren’t any cities nearby,” Ashtadukht rebuffed. “Not being gullible isn’t the same as being mean.” Still, Waray was right: she’d made her point, and anything further was needless cruelty.
She softened her delivery considerably and decided to indulge the half-div. “So explain how you supposedly happened upon a city all the way out here?”
“The stars?” Waray ventured uncertainly. She canted her head and smacked her lips, which were tinged with blood. “Maybe. There was this šo-miffed bird. It was pecking me, and I was trying to talk things out. Civilly, I think. Had no business being home when it was anyway. Should’ve been out.”
“Waray,” said Ashtadukht. “Get to the point.”
“. . .”
“Waray.”
“I won.”
“And the city?”
“Oh, I found that šo-cheery place yesterday.” Waray shivered. “Felt like—wait. Not that. Šo-eerie. That. The walls were too long. Like they wanted to stop growing but the taskmaster wouldn’t have it. They kept going, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t—” She flexed her hands. “I couldn’t catch up. Everything just kept increasing, and it was too much. Like trying to snatch the air all at once when you can’t even get a fistful. It was too much.”
While neither cousin realized she was describing an anxiety attack, they did get the vague idea from her body language and pitch that the half-div had been genuinely unsettled by whatever she’d come across, city or no city.
“Where’s this place?” asked Ashtadukht.
“Around.”
“Take us there.”
“Maybe not?” Waray asked hopefully. “Maybe somewhere nice?”
“Your fault,” said Tirdad, all too familiar with what would happen next. “You should not have stirred her curiosity. Just do as she says.”
Waray surrendered with the type of defeated sigh a guide would give when well-meaning but plainly stupid adventurers insist on visiting the trap-ridden tombs of The One Most Slithered, or some other vengeful deity. “You’ll be chopped in half,” she warned, and plodded away.
She conducted them around the foot of the ridge they’d been following and into a clearing that was decidedly not a city. She came to a halt as abruptly as if she’d walked into a wall. “But.”
“Is this your city?” asked Tirdad.
Waray shook her head, at an utter loss for words.
“The Rostam Inscription,” Ashtadukht observed somewhat icily. She had a feeling Waray was up to something. “Well, inscriptions. Yeah, it’s a necropolis, but it isn’t very city-like. I thought we were farther away.”
Unlike Ashtadukht, who had visited this site twice already, and wouldn’t have appreciated it at this point in her life regardless, Tirdad awed at the monument.
Four giant inset crosses had been carved into the rock face by an empire that predated his by centuries unknown—and obscured in the time since; nevertheless, an empire that had surely laid the groundwork for the age-old nation he served. So impressive were the carvings that they appeared to Tirdad as if they’d been pressed into the stone by the stamp seal of Ohrmazd himself, which had applied embossed rock reliefs depicting kings of yore, and an entrance to a tomb too high for men to reach where those very kings were laid to rest.
Below those reliefs wer
e more recent carvings, contemporary inscriptions that portrayed the investiture of Kings of Kings and their entourage. Some displayed triumphs over foreign powers, while others stressed the right to rule as sanctified by various divinities.
He strolled over to the rock face and ran his fingers admiringly over the nearest such relief.
“It’s all too horizontal,” Waray pondered aloud. She cocked her head and leaned to the side. “Too horizontal.”
Ashtadukht was in the process of asking what exactly Waray was getting at when the half-div swept her arm at an angle to designate what she believed to be the correct alignment, and in doing so sheared the rock relief as if her scrutiny were slicing through fabric.
The entire ridge fell away and heaped like a discarded dress around the foot of a vast wall that stretched to either side as far as the eye could see. Only patches of gypsum plaster remained, exposing the baked bricks at the core of the wall to the elements—where the bricks hadn’t left vacancies. In short, it was in disrepair.
Instead of the straight-facing gate used in many cities, the fortifications from one side reached around the other to create a funnel where invading forces could be neatly channeled into a lane. Ashtadukht nodded to herself. She wasn’t particularly military-minded, but living with a prominent general had imparted some small appreciation for these things.
“Told you so,” Waray said uneasily. She lowered her voice to a whisper and turned away from her victory. “Told you so.”
“What just happened?” asked Tirdad.
“If I were to venture a guess, Waray dispersed a powerful illusion with a mere wave of her hand,” Ashtadukht replied. “Every bit as impressive as it sounds.”
“And the Rostam Inscription?” Tirdad asked almost mournfully.
“Probably safe and sound. My initial reaction was that we’d lost our bearings, but the real thing should be farther out.”
“Good,” said Tirdad, thick with relief. “Good. Makes you wonder how many people have stumbled upon this pretender and thought they were standing in front of a national monument.”
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 15