Starless

by Jacqueline Carey

  It was strange to think that the last time this place had been used as a campsite was when Vironesh underwent his own trial. We gathered stalks of dried gorse and chunks of near-petrified dung to build a campfire just large enough to brew a pot of mint tea, then sat around the campfire sipping tea from tin cups. It was comforting to have something familiar to do.

  “This must take you back,” Brother Merik remarked to Vironesh. The purple man grunted in assent.

  We drank tea.

  Nim the Bright Moon rose, just waning and pale. Dark Shahal followed, very nearly full. The tethered horses dozed cock-hipped beneath their light, giving the occasional stamp or whuffle. It was all very peaceful, and it was hard to believe this might be my last night of existence.

  Wrapping myself in my robe, I slept.

  Although I had hoped for rain, morning dawned bright and clear. Brother Merik rekindled the fire and brewed another pot of tea. I drank from my tin cup and gnawed on strips of dried goat meat. The mint tea was at once warming and refreshing. The goat meat was hard and tough, but it yielded a smoky savor after long chewing. I found myself acutely conscious of these things. I tried not to think about why.

  And then there was nothing left to do, no cause to delay. It was time. Time to venture across the Mirror; time to undertake the trial.

  Brother Merik withdrew a small pot of kohl from some inner pocket of his robe and offered it to me. “It will help keep you from going desert-blind.”

  I dipped my forefinger into the black paste and smeared it over my eyelids and all around the sockets of my eyes. “Thank you, brother.”

  He saluted me. “I wish you luck.”

  I wrapped my head-scarf low over my eyes and high over the lower part of my face, the better to shade my eyes and keep from losing my breath’s moisture. I touched the shaft of the feather thrust through my sash to make sure it was secure, and settled the weight of the water-skin strapped across my chest.

  “Khai.” Brother Yarit took a shaky breath and gazed at me with tear-bright eyes. “See you tomorrow, kid.”

  I swallowed and nodded before turning to Vironesh. “Do you have any final counsel for me?”

  My mentor gave me a long, impassive look. “Don’t flinch.”

  Thus armed, I set forth across the Mirror of Heaven, heading in a straight line toward the rising sun.

  For the first couple of hours, I felt strong and fresh. I kept a slow, steady pace. I kept my head low, shielding my eyes from the sun’s glare. Although I was mindful of the desert’s peril, I was young and strong and fit. A day’s walk, even through the worst heat of the day, should not be too difficult to bear. I needn’t worry about keeping watch for snakes or scorpions in the Mirror. Sunstroke and heat prostration were the only things I need fear, and so long as I was careful not to overexert myself and to drink sparingly at regular intervals, I would be fine.

  Or at least so I thought.

  As the sun climbed higher, it became obvious that I had greatly underestimated the effect of the Mirror. The glittering white plain reflected the sun’s light until it became a dazzling glare from which there was no escape; and as the sun traveled across the sky, I could no longer use it as a guidepost toward due east, but must rely on landmarks. While there were none in the Mirror itself, there was a two-pronged mountain peak in the distance that Brother Merik had told me I could use to orient myself. It had seemed an easy enough thing to do in the gentle grey light of dawn, but in the blinding light of midday, my vision swam and I feared to trust it.

  Brightness above, brightness below. I thought of those mariners from days of old who were accustomed to navigate by the stars, and how they must have felt when the children of heaven fell to earth and darkness swallowed the night skies, leaving them directionless and lost.

  I … I was being swallowed by light.

  Still, I kept going, squinting through tear-stinging eyes at the distant peak and readjusting my course.

  When the sun stood high overhead, every instinct within me told me to halt, to rest and take shelter. Of course, there was no shelter to be had, but I might pause, might make a canopy of my scarf and robe. I might close my eyes beneath the shade they provided and take a brief respite.

  No one had said it was forbidden.

  No one had said it wasn’t, either.

  I had wondered what it was that would be tested within me; well, now I could guess. My will. Ignoring my instincts, I hunched my shoulders against the beating hammer of the sun and kept walking.

  From a distance, the Mirror of Heaven looked to be one flat, uniform surface. At close range it was not so. There were expanses of soft white sand that sank and yielded beneath my feet so that each step became more arduous than the last. I trudged across them, feeling the effort sap my muscles. There were patches covered with a thin, brittle veneer of salt that cracked beneath my sandaled feet. If I stepped carelessly, the sharp, broken edges scored the bare flesh of my ankles.

  The tang of salt and minerals hung in the forge-hot air above the Mirror. It sucked the moisture from my skin and left me parch-mouthed.

  I sipped warm water that tasted of goat’s bladder, swishing it around my mouth before letting it trickle down my throat.

  I kept going.

  I kept going.

  By the time Zar the Sun was behind me, I was staggering. My aching head was swimming and my eyes were filled with dazzling brightness. The distant peaks faded in and out of my vision. I only hoped I was still headed due east.

  Stretching before me, my shadow told me otherwise. Oh, but I had a shadow, and the respite from the endless brilliance it afforded filled me with gratitude. Wiping the salt-stinging sweat from my eyes with my sleeve, I summoned the dwindling reserves of my will, adjusted my course, and followed my shadow eastward, step by unsteady step, until the sun vanished in the west and the outlines of my shadow became vague.

  Wait.

  Were I not fairly certain the true trial was yet to come, I could have wept with relief upon allowing myself to fold my legs and sit.

  Willing my mind to stillness, I waited. The day’s heat dissipated with surprising speed. I touched the hawk’s feather in my sash, hefted my water-skin to gauge its fullness and reckoned it nearly half empty. I drank no more. Nim the Bright Moon rose, a silvery crescent in the dark sky, transforming the landscape around me. I was a single point of life in a strange barren sea.

  I waited, my mind drifting.

  Shahal the Dark Moon rose full and round and crimson, drenching the plain in bloody light. As it climbed higher into the sky, the wind began to stir, and I felt an answering stirring within my blood.

  Pahrkun the Scouring Wind was coming.

  There were no scuttling ants or creatures of the desert to give warning here in the Mirror, but I felt it in the touch of the wind against my skin, in the rustle of the sand, in the vibrations deep within the desert that spoke to me and said, He comes, he comes, he comes.

  And soon I saw him, a looming figure in the distance, eyes like twin sparks of green fire.

  Remembering what Vironesh had done, I rose on shaking legs and genuflected three times toward the east, bowing my head and stretching out my hands to touch the ground before me as my knee brushed the sand. I sat once more. My mouth had gone dry again, this time with fear and awe. Stride by stride, Pahrkun drew nearer, his immense form cloaked in folds of swirling sand that shifted and flared around him. Buffeted by the rising winds, I squinted through the sandstorm. My heart was racing and I could feel my pulse thudding in my throat. I fought the urge to fling myself facedown upon the desert and hope he would pass me by.

  The wind faded as Pahrkun planted his feet in the sand and halted before me, bringing me into the stillness at the center of his being. At close range, his massive limbs and torso appeared man-shaped, albeit wrought of basalt or obsidian. The Dark Moon made a crimson nimbus around his vast head.

  Pahrkun’s face …

  It was not a face as we understand such a thing to be. It
seethed with life, the life of the thousands upon thousands of carrion beetles of which it was comprised, crawling over each other in a writhing mass, black carapaces touched with a hint of green iridescence in the bloody moonlight.

  For a delirious instant, I wondered if I had suffered sunstroke after all.

  Deep-set green eyes regarded me from on high. The mass of beetles shifted to form a mouth that opened and spoke with the voice of the desert; the soughing of a sandstorm, the rasp of a snake’s scales, the dry whirring of a beetle’s wings. “Khai.”

  My name drew me to my feet with an unexpected surge of joy. Standing in the eye of the storm that was Pahrkun the Scouring Wind, I pressed my palms together and touched my thumbs to my brow in fervent salute. “Yes, my lord Pahrkun!”

  Could such a mouth smile? It almost seemed to me that it did. “Do you bear my token?”

  I drew forth the hawk’s feather. “I do, my lord.”

  Stretching his right arm down from the sky, Pahrkun opened … not a hand, no. Where a hand would be was a banded onyx scorpion, three times larger than life. I gulped involuntarily, my mouth making a dry clicking sound. Vironesh’s warning took on new meaning. The stinger at the end of the scorpion’s tail quivered as it opened and closed its claws.

  My hand trembling, I placed the hawk’s feather in the scorpion’s claw. Pahrkun raised it to his seething face, opened his mouth that was not a mouth, and blew out a breath of air hotter than the midday sun. The feather glowed white for the space of a heartbeat then disintegrated, minute flecks of silvery ash drifting down around me inside the column of wind that surrounded us.

  “Breathe,” said Pahrkun, and I drew a deep breath in response, filling my lungs. “Know that to wear my mark is to carry my token within you. To carry the breath of the desert inside you. Do you understand?”

  “I think so, my lord,” I said.

  Pahrkun’s immense head lifted, green-glowing eyes in their deep crawling sockets gazing toward the west. “Life and death. Fire and wind. These are the things over which my sister Anamuht and I hold dominion in Zarkhoum.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  His head dipped, his gaze returning to me. “If the time is upon us, these are the gifts you and your soul’s twin will carry to the end of the earth. These are the gifts you will summon, Sun-Blessed and shadow. Remember this.”

  “Yes, my lord.” I hesitated. “My lord Pahrkun, how am I to know if the time is upon us?”

  “Do not concern yourself about this, for they are events beyond your control,” he said, and there was a strange reassurance in it. “Concern yourself only with events over which you may exert control. Above all, concern yourself with your charge.”

  I inclined my head. “Yes, my lord.”

  “Is it your will to wear my mark?” Pahrkun the Scouring Wind asked me. “Is it your will to fulfill your pledge?”

  To wear his mark … it was the second time the god had spoken of it. The sandstorm howled around us. I thought of the odd glittering scars that marked Vironesh’s face and swallowed again. “It is, my lord,” I whispered.

  “Then kneel.”

  I knelt on the white sands of the Mirror and Pahrkun went to one enormous knee before me, and although he did it with such deliberate grace that it made no sound, I felt the earth nonetheless shudder beneath the impact. His hands—no, not hands, not even close—reached toward my face. The banded onyx scorpion on the right, and on the left … the left was a shadow-viper, eyes milky and blind. Red moonlight glistened on its black scales and its forked tongue tasted the wind.

  “Khai of the Fortress of the Winds, from you I require the gift of perfect trust.” There was a gentleness like the softness of a spring breeze to Pahrkun’s mighty voice. “Do you give it to me?”

  The scorpion’s eyes glittered in the bloody moonlight, the scarlet bands on its thorax muted by the Dark Moon. The segmented tail that curved over its back twitched, the wicked stinger as long as my forefinger. The shadow-viper’s head wove back and forth, its sinuous, muscular length describing coils in the air, its tongue flickering.

  I was afraid.

  I was very afraid, for this was madness by any measure. And yet, as when Vironesh challenged me to spar on the bridge above the Dancing Floor, there was a certain wild exhilaration in the terror. Vironesh had stood where I stood; Vironesh had done this. Here in the heart of the Mirror, Vironesh had received Pahrkun’s mark and been rendered proof against the poison that killed his charge.

  I could do no less.

  “Yes, my lord.” I lifted my face to meet Pahrkun’s gaze. “I do.”

  “So be it,” said Pahrkun the Scouring Wind. “I accept your pledge.”

  The shadow-viper swayed, drawing back its head and raising its blunt nose. Its forked tongue flickered. The banded onyx’s tail twitched.

  I closed my eyes.

  Don’t flinch.

  They struck at the same time, twin lines of fire raking across my cheekbones. Not to kill, only to score, but oh, by all the fallen stars, it hurt! And as the venom entered my blood, I understood that this was only the very beginning of pain. Opening my eyes, I saw the scorpion and the serpent withdrawing as Pahrkun rose to his feet, his distant head once more blotting out the night sky.

  “Khai of the Fortress of the Winds, you have my blessing,” the god said to me. “May you survive it.”

  I gave no answer but a grim nod, for a spasm of pain gripped me and rendered the muscles of my face too rigid for speech. Pahrkun the Scouring Wind took his leave and the sandstorm of his wake engulfed me, flaying my skin as he departed.

  The storm of Pahrkun’s passage abated.

  The storm within my body continued to rise. Somehow, I had fallen onto my side. I curled into myself. Poison raced through my veins, agony contorted my limbs. I fought to draw breath; one, then the next, then the next. If I lived to see the dawn, perhaps I would survive.

  Instead, darkness dragged me down.

  NINETEEN

  My eyelids flickered.

  “Khai?”

  It was Vironesh’s voice; and impossibly, there was a note of genuine concern in it. I forced my heavy eyelids open. “Am I alive?”

  The purple man raised his eyebrows at me. “Barely. How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know.” I took stock. No water-skin, no dagger, no hawk’s feather … no, that was gone forever. My face ached; my entire body ached. My skin was tender. I touched my cheekbones and felt the raised lines of twin scars, rough with embedded bits of sand and mica. “Where am I?” Glancing around, I realized I was lying on my carpet in my own cavern in the Fortress of the Winds. I wrinkled my brow, feeling the gesture tug at my fresh scars. “How?”

  “Oh, we rode into the Mirror to fetch you,” Vironesh said. “Dead or alive, that was always the plan.”

  I prodded my cheekbones. “Good to know.”

  “You did it,” he said quietly. “You’ve been insensible for a few days, but here you are.”

  “Alive,” I said.

  Vironesh nodded. “Alive.”

  So.

  I was alive; I was a shadow. Pahrkun had found me worthy of my pledge; Pahrkun the Scouring Wind had marked me as his own. Wherever I’d been born, I was a true child of the desert now. The poison of a banded onyx scorpion and a shadow-viper had coursed through my veins, and I had survived.

  Vironesh left to procure a bowl of broth for me. I was standing on wobbly legs and testing my strength when Brother Yarit entered my chamber and gave me a broad grin. “Hey, kid. I heard you were awake.”

  I eyed him. “More or less, but I’m as weak as a babe.”

  “Well, you very nearly died,” he said in a pragmatic tone. “Vironesh is of the opinion that the Scouring Wind dosed you with a bit more venom than he ought, you being bhazim.”

  I frowned, feeling the flesh of my face tug on my unfamiliar scars again. “And weaker because of it?”

  Brother Yarit raised a forfending hand. “Just smaller, Khai. You’re a fa
ir height, but there’s less mass to you. Don’t worry, you’re young and resilient. You’ll get your strength back.”

  Abashed, I saluted him. “Forgive me, Elder Brother. I don’t mean to be rude.”

  “It’s all right.” Brother Yarit shrugged. “You’ve been through an ordeal.” He lowered his voice. “And you’ve been initiated into one of the world’s great mysteries. Keep it close to your heart.”

  “I will.” My legs were beginning to tremble with the effort of standing. Folding them, I gazed up at him. “So what happens now, Elder Brother?”

  “Rest,” he said. “Regain your strength. Resume training when you’re ready. In ten days’ time, we ride for Merabaht.”

  Merabaht.

  With the prospect of the Trial of Pahrkun hanging over me, I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what came next if I survived. Now I did, and it made the blood quicken in my veins. “Truly?”

  “Truly,” Brother Yarit assured me.

  I spent that day abed and I daresay I should have spent the next, but I was too excited by the prospect of the future unfolding before me to allow myself to convalesce a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. Vironesh made no comment, merely allowed me to batter myself into exhaustion against his defenses. On the third day I paid a price for my folly, but I persevered, pushing past the lingering aches and weariness that plagued my flesh. I took my temporary weakness as a lesson and concentrated on finding the spaces between into which an angle of attack might flow, and I was rewarded by Vironesh’s nod of approval.

  Day by day, the scars on my cheeks healed; my body regained the strength and quickness that the poison had sapped.

  In a week’s time, I felt nearly myself.

  Preparations for the journey were under way. Brother Yarit had decreed that there would be ten of us going, for we had but a dozen mounts between us, the largest number of animals that the grazing and the watering hole of the horse canyon of the Fortress of the Winds could sustain.

  I took it as a given that Brother Yarit would be one of our number, and was surprised when he told me otherwise. “But why, Elder Brother?” I asked him in bewilderment. “Surely this is the opportunity for which you’ve longed!”