Beneath Ceaseless Skies #134

by Margaret Ronald

Long clawed hands slashed at my face. I brought my blade up, but this was no contagion-driven shambler but a greater devourer, lean and uncannily quick. The thing moved fast, darting first to the wall and then uncoiling like a cut spring, this time lunging for Mieni.

  Mieni never even flinched. She never defended herself either, instead ducking inside the devourer’s grip. To my horrified amazement, she scrambled up the devourer, using its bony body as a ladder, and grabbed its face, prying the jaws apart. The devourer snarled at her, but she simply inspected the sharp teeth, nodded to herself, and jumped away.

  I met the devourer blade-to-claw as it dove for her again, and managed to first knock it back then slice it across the face. The antivenom hissed and smoked, peeling the edges of the wound back, and the devourer gave a keening cry, reeling just long enough for me to make the two swift stabs to kill it. Throat then heart, within the space of three breaths; that’s how they taught us in Patrol, and it’s a more difficult task that you’d expect when a cut throat doesn’t even slow a devourer. This one, though, slid off my blade in a heap.

  I stood over the body, panting. If there were more, I hadn’t heard them yet. Mieni lifted one of the devourer’s clawed hands, examined it, and let it drop again. “Not good,” she murmured. “Not good at all. Some things, I do not like knowing... Mr. Swift! Mar de sang, you are cut!”

  I raised one hand to my forehead, where a trickle of blood had started. “It’s a slash, not a bite.”

  “Caution, caution, that must be our byword when dealing with things such as these.” She picked up one of her scattered oranges—still gleaming faintly, even in the dim light—regarded it thoughtfully for a moment, and tucked it back into her bag. “Come; my home is not far, and I have copious supplies of antivenom. You will have dinner, yes?”

  Mieni bundled me off to her flat, and I sent my sparrow to let the disposal unit know that there was a greater devourer dead in the River District catacombs. Whether they’d do anything about it was another matter.

  Mieni lived in one of the old tenement buildings that koboldim had taken over and subdivided the floors so that the number of rooms was doubled. Mieni’s flat, however, differed in one major way from most: the foyer was human-sized enough that I could stand, though not without some claustrophobia. The far wall opened onto the subdivided space of the rest: a kitchen below, a library above, and a little wooden staircase connecting the two. Some years ago, I had asked about the unusual accommodations. Mieni had only smiled and said that I was not the only one of my stature to seek her aid.

  She insisted I apply a full dose of the antivenom to my forehead, then began work on a salad (washing the orange thoroughly, I noted with some relief). I perched in the armchair with a kobold-sized cup of tea, similar to what my niece might use in a tea party, and watched her bustle about. It reminded me a little of when I’d had to hide in a kobold enclave during the war, though the setting was much changed. In a city so depleted by the war, though, we did need them. That might have been why so many resented their presence.

  I sat back in the chair gingerly, as if it were made for koboldim rather than humans. “I think I’ve figured out how Elariel ended up on that rooftop.”

  “On, on.” Mieni gestured at me to continue while she checked the flame under a pot. She nodded, then scurried up the stairs to the library.

  “Ageless use the split-step to travel quickly, like Avrin did this morning. Elariel knew that he was being targeted by the Usurper; he must have had a delayed-action magic set to whisk him away if he were in danger. Only it didn’t kick in in time.”

  “And by the time it does, his magic is fading with his death, so it fizzles and drops him on a roof.” Mieni produced an egg from one of the bookshelves—what it was doing there, I had no idea—and nodded to me as she descended. “Excellent guess, Mr. Swift. You are learning.”

  I shrugged. Mieni’s not-undeserved arrogance could be a little wearying at times. “It doesn’t solve anything, though; it just means the murder scene could be anywhere. And I don’t think a devourer could have done it; those were knife wounds, not claw and bite.” I drank the rest of my tea and grimaced at the taste. “Was there a point to our detour today?”

  “Oh yes.” She split a garlic clove and rubbed it on the inside of a wooden bowl. “If nothing else, it served to teach me humility.”

  Now it was my turn to snort. Nothing in this world or any other would ever teach Mieni humility.

  “I am very sorry to have gotten you wounded,” she added.

  “I wouldn’t mind if I knew why we went there. Why did we need to see a devourer, Mieni? What did you learn?”

  Mieni was silent a moment, gazing into the boiling water. “I am not sure. No—I wish not to know. That is different. And you, Mr. Swift, I think you would see the connection were you not so enthralled by the cent-ans. Though I do not blame you; it is easy to set aside one’s instincts when dealing with them. It is how they are, even in the home country.”

  “They should never have been exiled.”

  “It is a voluntary exile. Had not Elariel stated as much in his protests? And for the cent-ans, exile is much more weighty a decision than for koboldim or draugar.” She regarded the egg, turning it between her fingers. “For you or for me, leaving a home is a simple thing. It may hurt in the head, it may fuss in the preparation, and we may be abandoning much that we love.” She sighed. “Much. But it is still simpler for us. The cent-ans, they are part of their home, and it is part of them. To be separated is to leave behind their true selves.”

  I glanced sidelong at her. “You have a guess how it was done.”

  “A guess, no more. And enough that I have my doubts whether to speak it.” She bared her teeth, then gently lowered the egg into the water barehanded, shaking boiling drops off her fingers as if they were nothing. “Do not distract me, please. If we are to have a proper coddled dressing then I must time this.”

  I sighed and set my teacup on the floor. “At least they had each other. Even if exile was harsh, Elariel and Avrin were closer than any human couple could be.”

  “. . . twenty-eight, twenty-nine, how so, Mr. Swift? Thirty-one....”

  “They were bonded. She even felt him die.” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine being that close to a person and then having that taken away.”

  “Sang!” The salad bowl tumbled off the table, and I turned to see Mieni staring at me. “They were bonded? You have proof of that?”

  I sat up “What—on the roof, while you were examining the body. She said she could no longer feel him on what they shared.”

  Mieni put both hands to her ears, tugging at them. “Why did I not think of this? Of course, he was so much older than any other cent-ans, and she his bonded partner, it would make perfect sense!” She ran to the back of the kitchen, opened the window, and shrieked a string of kobold words into the street. “Mr. Swift, we must go. I hope you are agile enough to hang on to a railcart.”

  “I—yes, but what—”

  Mieni shut off the flame and muttered darkly at the now-overcooked egg. “Salad another time, Mr. Swift. Now, it is a matter of preventing another death.” She hurried to the door, then turned back to me. “And bring that orange!”

  * * *

  The railcarts used by koboldim are one of the reasons that their presence in the city has caused friction: narrow carts balanced on a single wheel, made so that as long as the load is in balance, they can be steered with a single light touch. Useful, yes, but they tend to be handled recklessly, and this was no different. A team of kobold youths charged after this one, driving it along the streets faster than a horse could gallop, and even though Mieni and three other kobolds clung to the other side, I still had to hang on and shift with it to keep my weight from throwing us all into the gutter.

  “You are a fair inspector, Mr. Swift,” Mieni said as we careened through the streets, as casually as if we were still in her flat. “But you have the same blind spot for the cent-ans that all humans have. You a
ssume that because they look like you, they are you. Their exile is not your homesickness; their bonding is not your marriage.”

  We bounced off a corner, and I snatched my fingers back in time to avoid getting them crushed. “How so?” I managed.

  “It blends their lives, Mr. Swift. Not in the sense of your metaphors; in truth. And Avrin is young—and Elariel was old, as even cent-ans count it. Very old.”

  “I don’t see what that—”

  Mieni shook her ears at me. “How many older cent-ans came with him into exile? How many are still in this City?”

  That stopped me cold, mainly because it seemed irrelevant. But Mieni was right; of the Ageless who had fled to the City, few of the elders remained. Even my old commander had left the city within months of arriving, and he had never been one to compromise with the Usurper. He hadn’t even announced it, just up and vanished one day, like Elariel’s elder kin, and Whitebreath the strategist, and the Lord and Lady Modian....

  A horrible suspicion began to bloom in my mind, borne of Mieni’s questions and the devourer—and the wounds in Elariel’s throat and chest. Before it could solidify, though, we lurched to a stop at the high arched doors of Elariel’s home. The other koboldim scattered, leaving Mieni and me to face the two silver-faced guards alone. “No admittance,” one said with a sneer, and I couldn’t tell which of us the latter was meant for.

  I took my warrant scrip from my breast pocket. “Arthur Swift, City Inspector, following—”

  “Cent-ans,” Mieni said, her shrill voice cutting through mine. The next words she said were neither koboldim nor any human language; I thought they sounded like phrases I’d heard in the war. Both of the Ageless paled and stepped aside. “I dislike calling in favors,” Mieni muttered as we passed through the door. “Not only do I have few resources, but the sensation of obligation is unpleasant in the extreme.”

  We hurried up through the halls to the highest room, where Elariel had held meetings of his expatriate council. The door was locked, and Mieni nodded to me. “Swift, City Inspector!” I called, and set my shoulder against it.

  “Go away,” said a weak voice. Avrin’s.

  I may not be as strong as I was during the war, but I will never be called weak, and the Ageless prefer delicacy over sturdiness in their surroundings. The lock splintered after the second kick, and Mieni and I burst into the room.

  It was high and arched, a breath of openness in the cramped City, and almost empty. Avrin huddled at the far end, curled on her husband’s council chair, her auburn hair a waterfall hiding her face. Before her stood a table with two long blades suspended point-out on a rack, as if primed for something to be impaled upon them. Beside them stood a crucible just coming to the boil, smelling of lavender and bergamot and white crescent. “Antivenom?” I asked without thinking. “Is this—”

  Mieni hurried ahead of me, both hands held out. “Cent-ans, bon cent-ans, you do not have to do this. There are other ways.”

  “So my husband said,” she whispered, and never have I heard an Ageless sound more miserable. “Said it for years, while refusing the one way we knew would help. But he was wrong.”

  She looked up, the fall of her hair sliding away from her face, and I caught my breath. She was still the same beauty that I’d seen that morning, but something had changed in the planes of her face in the hours since, something more than just the ravages of grief. Her teeth were less even, more pointed, and the nails of the trembling hand that she raised to her face had grown out coarse and cruel. And behind the ever-luminous silver eyes there was now a faint gleam, the pale light of devourers’ eyes in darkness.

  “Judas,” I whispered. No wonder we’d never been able to find out how the devourers got into the city. They were already here. They’d been welcomed in.

  “You are changing,” Mieni said, and I think only she could make it sound compassionate rather than an accusation. “As Elariel changed. As all cent-ans change, do they not, when they are far too old and severed from their home.”

  Avrin curled farther into herself. “He became a devourer,” I said, and she flinched. Mieni made a harsh, silencing gesture, but too late; I went on anyway. “And you killed him.” With the antivenom, and two strikes to the heart and throat, the same that would have killed a devourer who’d completed the change. And the multiple knife wounds after, to hide the two fatal wounds, to hide how an Ageless—even a decayed and changed Ageless—could be killed....

  She nodded, her head heavy on her slender neck. “He was dying, and worse than dying. He would have become what we have feared since arriving in this city. Since we came here, and those who were older than he began to change, away from the green earth of Poma-mèl.”

  Mieni shut off the flame under the crucible, and Avrin winced, her nearly-clawed hand stretching out to it. I started to wince in sympathy, driven as always by the intensity of Ageless emotions, but I clung to the memory of the devourer instead. “I thought,” she whispered, “I thought because I was here, because we had bonded after realizing what might happen, that maybe it wouldn’t happen. But it did. And because my life fed his, now I—” She lowered her hand and turned her face to the high empty dome of the chamber. “And I am so hungry,” she wailed.

  Mieni nudged me. “Mr. Swift, the orange.”

  I started, remembering the orange from Poma-mèl, and held it out to Avrin. She stared at me, and for a moment I thought she might forego the orange altogether and simply devour my hand. But instead she seized the orange and tore into it, peel, pith, and all, shredding it in great, inelegant bites. And when she looked up from her juice-stained fingers, there was a little more—not humanity, but something like it—in her eyes than before. “I must die, too,” she whispered. “Please—I cannot become one of those things.”

  “There is another way,” Mieni repeated. She approached closer, closer than I dared, and laid one brick-colored hairy hand over Avrin’s slim, golden fingers. “You can go back—”

  “I cannot go back,” Avrin said, a little of her composure returning. “Do you know what it would mean for the expatriates, that Elariel’s bonded wife returned to lands under the Usurper’s control? Even to set foot on them long enough to heal? He would not go back, and he—and I have tried to be true to him, even as I had to end him.”

  “And if no one knew?”

  Both of them turned to me, Mieni’s brows drawn together in consternation, Avrin’s in puzzlement. “If you isolated yourself in mourning for your murdered husband,” I continued, more slowly, “then your absence would be explained.”

  “If I returned,” she whispered, and the longing in her voice hurt to hear. “You would—would do this for me?”

  I nodded. “I know a few of the smugglers. They take pilgrims—they might take a leper, wrapped up from sight. Someone who has a need to get to Poma-mél unseen.”

  She rose, still holding on to Mieni’s hand. “And you would keep it silent? That my husband was changing, that we change?”

  I could not answer. So instead I bowed, as I had once bowed to my commander in the war (my commander who, I realized, must have become one of the greater devourers, perhaps even the one I’d slain today). I had forgotten that Avrin, too, had commanded human troops in the war, and when I straightened up, she too had taken on a martial posture, one hand out like a captain giving orders. “I will owe you, Arthur Swift,” she said, her voice ringing through the chamber much as her husband’s once had.

  * * *

  Mieni and I stood at the edge of the river docks, watching the barge make its way down past the locks—minus its cargo of smuggled oranges and sparrows, plus one veiled, cloaked figure. “They didn’t question the leper story,” I said after a moment. “Humboldt doesn’t question much, if he’s paid well.”

  “That is the case all over the world,” Mieni said. She turned to face me, the same scowl on her brow as in Elariel’s council chamber. “So now, Mr. Swift. We keep her secret, I suppose, and prepare more antivenom against more devourers.�
��

  I bowed my head. “I lied,” I said, unable to look at the figure in the boat as if she might hear me. “I have to tell Patrol, at least, and then.... Well. I don’t know what it’ll mean, politically, but they have to know where the greater devourers are coming from. So that we can be on our guard against the next, when another Ageless disappears. To keep the City safe.”

  When I looked up, Mieni’s eyes were wide. She blinked at me several times, then chuckled and thumped me on the knee. “Well-lied, Mr. Swift. Well-lied indeed. Perhaps I was wrong about you and your approach to the cent-ans.” We stood a moment longer at the docks, and Mieni shook her head. “Still, the decision she made, to bond her life so tightly with another’s, that it put them both in danger of becoming monsters—”

  “Devoted,” I said, watching the still figure at the prow of the barge, looking forward to when it might finally reach Poma-mèl. “A love for the ages.”

  Mieni glanced at me out of the corner of her eyes. “Or perhaps I was right about you and cent-ans, after all,” she said sourly. “I was going to say incredibly foolish.” She thumped my knee a second time. “Come. I have procured fresh greens and an egg. Even if you say you are eating enough, I will not believe it till I have fed you.”

  Copyright © 2013 Margaret Ronald

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  Margaret Ronald’s short fiction has appeared in such venues as Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and Clarkesworld Magazine. She is the author of “Dragon’s-Eyes” in BCS #9 and BCS Audio Fiction Podcast 007, and the series of stand-alone stories set in the same steampunk world that began with “A Serpent in the Gears” in BCS #34 and includes “Salvage” (BCS #77), “The Governess and the Lobster” (BCS #95), and four other stories. Soul Hunt, the third novel in her urban fantasy series and the sequel to Spiral Hunt and Wild Hunt, was released by Eos Books in 2011. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston. Visit her website at mronald.wordpress.com.