Beneath Ceaseless Skies #211

by K. J. Kabza

  Then, his head nodded like he was falling asleep. “If you’ll excuse me,” he gasped, “I’m going to sit down.”

  He sank to the floor, grasping at the rough stones to steady himself.

  Perdita crouched down and rolled up Sinclair’s stained, tattered sleeve. There were fresher wounds streaking his arm on top of the nearly-healed wounds inflicted by the slew.

  “You’ve been bitten.”

  “One grazed me. I’ll be alright.”

  “You will not,” said Perdita. She opened the bag at her hip. “The gravewyrm’s venom is vicious and quick. If you don’t take the anti-venom, you will die.”

  “I can’t.” He threw his hand in the air to halt her.

  “Can’t take—?”

  “Can’t die.”

  White hair. The ocean. A gamble he could not win.

  “Lady Death,” Perdita whispered.

  “Captain Ruby,” said Sinclair, “as some sailors call her. Crimson hat and coat, ruby-red lips in a death-pale face.”

  Sweat beaded on his forehead. Perdita caught him before he fell back. She got his arm around her shoulder and sat him up against the nearest wall. He let his head fall back, and he licked his lips.

  “The wind was dead,” he wheezed. “The sun was all-consuming. Any man who hadn’t died of exposure died of thirst or else threw himself overboard in a fit of madness. Her phantom ship appeared through the blanching heat. She boarded our vessel and challenged me to a game of dice. We agreed that if I won, the other sailors’ souls would go free and I would live. If she won, all of our souls would belong to her.”

  “And yet, here you are.”

  “I rolled doubles,” said Sinclair. “She won all the sailors’ souls, and mine. I won living death and a new job. I remember her turning my soul over and over in her fingers like a meditation ball. The grin never left her face. She told me to go kill gravewyrms, because they’re loyal to her rival. The next morning, she was gone. My jet-black hair, a gift from my dear mother, had turned chalk-white.”

  “How did you finally get to dry land?”

  “The wind picked up and the ship drifted back into the waters of a busy trade route. I was picked up by a merchant clipper and taken to shore. I was sick all the time I was at sea. I felt better when I set foot on dry land. In fact, I felt extraordinarily healthy for someone who is the next thing to dead. If I was ever injured, my wounds would heal at an alarming rate.

  “I tried sailing just once more. I became ill and feverish all over again. The ocean rejects me, because I’m all wrong.”

  Perdita watched his face in the warm oasis of the lantern light. “How lonely.”

  He smiled his crooked smile, though it was sad. “Very lonely.”

  “It’s like my Grandfather Herbert always said, Misery loves company.” Perdita extended her hand.

  Sinclair nodded and gripped her hand tightly.

  “Well, now that we’re sharing our loneliness, we’re going to need to share our problems,” said Perdita. “My ammunition is not going to be enough against the gravewyrm dam. If we go back, I might be able to put something together. A piercing round.”

  Sinclair shook his head. “There’s no time. Judging by the size of those gravewyrm nymphs, they’ve been hatched for three weeks. A new brood may be on the way.”

  Grandmother Constance had once said that female gravewyrms could procreate by themselves, but all their progeny would be female. A mixed blessing: on the one hand, no larger, more aggressive males; on the other hand, even a single gravewyrm could cause an infestation.

  “Their dam must be destroyed, then,” said Perdita. “But if I can’t kill her...”

  Sinclair wiped the blade of his dagger on his cloak. He tore open the front of his vest and his shirt, baring a scarred chest of linen brown. Perdita winced as he cut a straight gash beneath his ribs.

  “What in the world are you doing?”

  Perdita’s stomach crawled as Sinclair reached inside his own body. He slid his hand under his ribs, his face contorting with pain and concentration.

  “It was not enough to take my soul and estrange me from the ocean,” grunted Sinclair. “Captain Ruby thought it would be great sport to torment me in my eternal unlife. But, I do get something useful in exchange for the constant irritation.”

  Sinclair choked in relief and he withdrew his hand from the gash. In his black-nailed, blood-stained fingertips was a small stone swirled with pearlescent white and red.

  “A corost,” puffed Sinclair. “It will pierce just about anything, in spite of its shape. Surefire way to kill a gravewyrm. Even this one.”

  Perdita took the pearl and rubbed it with her thumb. The red and white swirled on the pearl’s surface at her touch.

  “I was going to use it myself,” said Sinclair. He pressed his shirt against the gash under his ribs. The wound bled disturbingly little. “I have nothing to lose. No sense risking your life.”

  “I’ve taken that risk before,” said Perdita.

  She opened her leather bag. She lit a candle and pressed the wax into the stones next to Sinclair and placed a vial of purple fluid and a soft cloth in his hands.

  “At the very least, rub your wounds with this. It will disinfect them and numb the pain. Forget about me and focus on recovering.” She slipped the pearl into an empty chamber of her revolver.

  “I will focus on recovering and you,” said Sinclair. “Good luck will follow you that way.”

  * * *

  V. Deference

  Perdita descended through the passage slowly, choosing her steps with great care. The air was heavy with stagnant moisture, and the sloping floors were perilous with slippery ooze. Mushrooms huddled in damp corners, ghostly and sullen. The darkness here was thick and ink-like and devoured the lantern light and the sound of her footsteps.

  The air was cut by the thread of a draft whistling through an arched portal. The draft carried the sting of ashes and the sour grey stench of burnt refuse.

  Strangely, the darkness seemed held back at the threshold to the chamber. Inside, irregular patches of white fur-like mold dimly luminesced.

  Ash covered everything. It lay heaped in piles in the corners of the chamber. It overfilled the reservoir, thirty feet long and wide, and as many deep.

  The reservoir should have been filled with water, shared with an underground river. The fish of that river ferried spirits to the afterlife. Somewhere, somehow, the tunnel to the river must have gotten blocked and the water dried up. No fish to ferry the dead away, and no pure water to cleanse the space, had created the perfect conditions for the gravewyrm to thrive and reproduce, sheltered and nourished in its nest of collected ashes.

  Perdita would need help repairing the reservoir, but the gravewyrm needed to be exterminated first.

  The ashes filling the reservoir began to tremble and tumble from the heap. Perdita watched the void beyond the grate that separated the reservoir from the tunnel that fed it.

  The light began shifting. Perdita averted her eyes for only a moment, and gasped. She quickly stepped off a carpet of white mold that was moving across the floor like a shadow. Perdita’s throat tightened when she saw the shape the mold took: the silhouette of a person, reposed in a sickly, etherized state. Perdita dared a look around the chamber. All the irregular patches of mold drifted across the floor, the walls, the ceiling, like corpses floating on a river.

  Perdita steadied herself and aimed her unwavering focus on the gravewyrm, lingering just out of sight. Then, the bruise-colored flame leapt to life behind the grate, bobbed and wandered in and out of view, shifting from eye socket to eye socket. There came a roar, muted in the air but shuddering in the stones under Perdita’s feet, a noise like rusted hinges and the throes of the dying.

  The heap of ashes swelled and then sank. The gravewyrm was evidently too large to pass through the grate, but it could still reach out its legs, armored talons covered in fishhook-sized barbs. Drifting mold passed above the grate, and the dull light gli
nted off the adamantine black chitin guarding the gravewyrm’s flame.

  Perdita raised the revolver. Took aim.

  A clap as from lightning.

  A burst of bloody light flashed behind the grate. Perdita heard the chitin shatter. The air smelled of salt.

  A short, sharp hiss of rusted hinges. The flame flagged and faded.

  Many-jointed legs erupted from the ashes and snatched Perdita where she stood. Barbs cut into her clothing, into her skin. She inhaled sharply and tensed. The gravewyrm was dying. Its grip would not last.

  Gravewyrms bled when they died, but not with the ichor of the living.

  Perdita’s eyes and brain were flooded with gloom like liquid lead, rippling like deep waters, choking her. The gravewyrm’s grasp was suddenly inescapable.

  Who would tend the gardens? Who would care for the goats? Who would keep the House on the Hill clean, everything in its proper place, everything preserved, forever like it was when things were good?

  The good of the past needed to be preserved, because the future was hazy, overcast, cold, empty.

  Perdita struggled in the gravewyrm’s barbed embrace. She tore deeper wounds with every movement, snaring herself ever faster in the gravewyrm’s power.

  The past was all she had. Who would preserve it?

  Struggling will make it grip tighter.

  Perdita expelled the gravewyrm’s leaden lifeblood from her lungs and let her shoulders fall. She slackened her grip on the revolver and let the color return to her knuckles. She stilled the spasms in her muscles, let the pain be, accepted it.

  The gravewyrm’s legs resolved into wet ashes, peeled off like mud, and crumbled to the floor.

  The gloom sank, drained out of her skull, out of the chamber. Perdita’s vision no longer swam with muddy darkness, and her breath came free and easy. The mold-forms had ceased to move, though they still resembled numbed figures. They, too, would need help.

  Perdita found Sinclair back in the second chamber, standing but leaning on the wall for support, bent forward and breathing deeply. He had disinfected his wounds, and now Perdita tended to her own from the vial of purple fluid.

  She took Sinclair’s arm over her shoulders and helped him back up through the passages of the crypt and toward daylight.

  Rain poured down through the entrance to the crypt. The water drained away through channels built into the sides of the passage. They splashed up the stairs.

  Gruma croaked frantically and scrabbled and hopped out from where he had been taking shelter under the trees. The slate grey sky flashed to life, and the thunder roared a moment later.

  “And here I was expecting a rainbow,” said Sinclair.

  “Think of the thunder as a cheer,” said Perdita.

  Perdita extinguished the lantern and left it where it might dry when the sun reemerged. Gruma stood at Perdita’s feet until she opened her cloak for him. He swooped up to her arm and huddled close as she wrapped the cloak about them both.

  “You should stay in the House on the Hill until the storm passes,” said Perdita to Sinclair.

  “As long as I’m not disturbing anything,” said Sinclair.

  “No. You wouldn’t be.”

  The path through the limestone vale was furrowed with running rainwater.

  “I will need to spend some time repairing the damage done by the gravewyrm,” said Perdita.

  “I would be glad to help,” said Sinclair. “If I may ask, what do you plan to do after that?”

  “If it would be little imposition,” said Perdita, “would you object to company during your travels?”

  Sinclair’s crooked smile again. “Only if the company of a dead man is not objectionable to you. But what of the house?”

  “I will return to it,” said Perdita, “every so often. The past has shaped me, and I, in turn, will shape the future.”

  “Wise words,” said Sinclair. “It was difficult to see much of a path ahead of me before. Perhaps your trailblazing will be contagious.”

  At the crossroads, Perdita rang Xyvati’s bell to bless the travelers passing by.

  Copyright © 2016 Kelly Stewart

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Kelly Stewart lives, writes, draws, and games in Ontario, Canada. Her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and recompose, while her poetry has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2. You can find her blogging softly at kellyastewart.wordpress.com and on Twitter @rarebitdream.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  COVER ART

  “Ambush,” by Raphael Lacoste

  Raphael Lacoste is a Senior Art Director on videogames and cinematics. He was the Art Director at Ubisoft on such titles as Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed, winning a VES Award in February 2006. Wanting to challenge himself in the film industry, Raphael worked as a Matte Painter and Senior Concept Artist on such feature films as Terminator: Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Death Race, and Repo Men, then returned to the game industry as a Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. His cover art has been featured in BCS twice before, including “Knight’s Journey” in BCS #100. In October 2016, he will release Worlds, a limited-edition book of his artwork from iamag.co. View his gallery at www.raphael-lacoste.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press

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