The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

“The Northrite are involved in some confrontation on Jasilix,” Ribsnack says from her invisible seat in front of a computer window, a band of silver now resting across her brows. “Yesterday, the Northrite tried some Elemiscist and found her and Uden guilty of high crimes.”

  The Moonriders are traveling to Staggenmoire to raid Cirx’s planet with the help of his knights and destriers.

  Cirx is their war captive, broken and lost after losing his Mir.

  His head hangs between his knees. He hasn’t spoken a word in the last couple of weeks. A feverish chill still haunts his skin, a compressing force all around him in the cramped confines of the ship, the sensation mingling with the hum of the reactor and drives.

  The word Northrite rattles around in Cirx’s mind and solidifies in a ball of hate.

  “That means war for Uden and the Northrite, probably the galaxy,” Saltmane says, a dark tone creeping over his words. “Easier raiding, I figure, but everything will be less stable, our takings more meager.”

  “Who they fighting on Jasilix?” Two-eyed Jack runs a rake of fingers through his scraggly neck beard.

  “The Frontiersmen,” Ribsnack says.

  Saltmane spins on his seat. “That’s odd even for Northrite.”

  “Will there be deaths without justice, no rest for the slain?” Riesbold stands, his armor creaking, his wounded shield arm still in a sling.

  “Sit, Knight, you’ve no authority,” Saltmane says.

  Riesbold does not obey.

  What’s he trying to do? Get us killed, for nothing?

  “The waters of Staggenmoire are still there, the wine and the horses.” Riesbold stands over the knights and a partially armored Helenica, the Angelwian woman who was captured as well, all seated along the perimeter of a walkway exiting the helm.

  “What Staggenmoire’s lost can be rebuilt.” Tegard locks the fingers of one hand around the wrist of his other, his arms encircling his knees as he sits near Ribsnack, always learning, always questioning her when others aren’t listening. He studies Cirx as if the Fiend Slayer may still be buried somewhere beneath the outer armor and hull of his walking corpse. “Our dead cannot be replaced, but more will fill their positions.”

  “Shut up.” Two-eyed Jack’s eyes gape like full moons—white, maniacal. “You don’t have rights like you did. We prefer captive warriors strong and unbroken, but if we need to beat understanding into you, we will.”

  Cirx’s men stare at him, waiting for something.

  After a moment Tegard shakes his head a bit and turns to Ribsnack. He whispers while pointing to the image of a specific blue planet in a vast map of worlds.

  Cirx lids his eyes. His desire for Northrite revenge—for blood—runs thick through his arteries. “Tegard, stop!” Then he addresses Saltmane. “What my knights are trying to say is you convinced us that the Northrite tricked me into killing innocent Silvergarde soldiers. They also probably destroyed my castle.” He silently vows not to retaliate again without substantial proof. “The Moonriders could pillage whatever the Northrite leave on Jasilix, or you can kill me and all of my knights right now. Tegard will not give you the exact coordinates of Staggenmoire unless we first travel to Jasilix.”

  Saltmane grumbles. “We can’t face the Northrite in combat.”

  “The battle will likely be over before we find a rogue Strider who can take us to Jasilix,” Ribsnack says, her eyes yearning, perhaps even sympathy lurking beneath a mask of hunger. Then her eyes move in rows, reading some unseen script. “Just under two days flight time to the outpost on Mecetrame, our best chance in the vicinity for a rogue.”

  “The aftermath of such a battle will attract a lot of scavengers,” Oldenbane says through split lips. “We can raid them as well as the Frontiersmen’s station.”

  Cirx’s breath freezes in his chest. If the Northrite were gone, he would not be able to obtain a confession from them, would not be able to exact his vengeance. He prays that if the Northrite are gone, they left clues as to their next destination or proof of their involvement in the destruction of his castle.

  Saltmane huffs. “If any organization did to my people what the Northrite did to yours, I’d be obliged to make them suffer, or die trying. I wouldn’t respect a man who felt differently.”

  Hope unfurls in Cirx’s chest, but his mind cannot fathom the hypocrisy. “Then why do you do this to others?”

  “It’s the way of our people,” Saltmane says. “Take or die, retaliate or die. Your target’s as good as any for us, as long as when it’s over you fulfill your promise of the legendary fiend, the elements, and wine.”

  Cirx folds his arms across his breastplate and sigil of the three raindrops. “Shall we travel to this outpost?”

  “Less than two days flight time to the nearest possible rogue Strider for hire,” Saltmane mutters, mulling over what Ribsnack said. He slowly nods. “Ribsnack, inform the armada to go ahead with their previously planned agendas. We’ll meet up at Staggenmoire afterward. Oldenbane, take us to Mecetrame.”

  I’m a backward, ignorant fool, but I’ll exact my revenge no matter how big an advantage my nemesis fiend has acquired, no matter what it looks like. Monster. Demon. Human.

  ***

  Cirx exits the blood-red ship and stares across a sea of blue crested with white foam. A champagne sky. At least there’s a sea on this outpost planet, Mecetrame. It’s not an arid wasteland like that of space or that Angelwian planet.

  Waves roll in with a roar like a thousand voices crying against the wind, crest, fold over, and smash against a beach of orange rock.

  Cirx hears the voices of Staggenmoire’s dead in the water’s words. Kitasha. Erin. Enix.

  A few Moonriders scour the nearby port city for a rogue Strider. Cirx, his knights, and Helenica, who the Moonriders seem to believe is a knight, are kept in close vicinity to the ship and are being watched as they wait for a potential Stride—whatever new technology that is—to Jasilix. Helenica hasn’t spoken a word amidst mourning for her husband and people. She’s lost everything Cirx and his knights have lost; she is one of them now.

  “The Voracious Sea.” Ribsnack sits on a nearby rock, tossing palm-sized stones into the water, watching waves roll and crash. “Teeming with red titan sharks. The water’s apex predator. A prison island lies somewhere out there. The Space Pearl uses it for specific prisoners because it’s mentally and physically debilitating. A black-side report said they recently shipped a lone female out there.”

  Cirx imagines fiends with sleek skin swarming in the depths just beyond his vision, hunting prisoners. He’s reminded of stealth sharks in the Eventide Sea, hunters who control all life below the surface. Creatures the size of watch towers, whose skin change color to match the green or bluish tint of the sea, whose attacks have been described by a few who have witnessed other creatures or men being eaten as rows of white teeth emerging from beneath the crest of a wave. Consuming prey with the roll of the water. Mixing blood with turbulent white foam.

  “Who is she?” Cirx shakes his head to clear the memories.

  “No doubt someone guilty of defying or insulting the Northrite or the Pearl if she’s out there,” Ribsnack says. “The report said she’s some woman who has an affinity for animals and is a former employee of the Pearl, a menial worker, probably more like a servant.”

  A servant? A servant being punished by a wicked master is someone who deserves justice. If this woman defied the Northrite, she’s a hero. Cirx should try to help her, should help free anyone that group of fiends imprisoned.

  “Will the woman die?” Cirx asks.

  “Inevitably,” Ribsnack says. “From years of prolonged starvation, if the sharks don’t get her. There’s supposedly some food, but not enough.”

  Starving prisoners? Cirx imagines the leaders of this Space Pearl as fiends of darkness chained to the Northrite fiends.

  Out there, someone’s life slowly ticks by, stranded, probably wishing for a quick, painless death. And they are likely innocent. Like the S
ilvergarde Cirx wrongly attacked and killed.

  His stomach folds on itself like the waves and hardens in a ball of guilt.

  Who could ever sentence a woman to such privation and misery? Cirx imagines she looks like Kitasha, pining for her lost husband, her children, fiends laughing from within the waves around her.

  Ribsnack says, “My guess is that she was involved in the death of the Pearl’s Supreme Emperor. The only other thing the article mentioned was that she’s from Silvergarden.”

  Silvergarden.

  Cirx stumbles and almost falls face-first into the sea. Suddenly, his tongue is as dry as the emptiness of space. Besides for that of his family, he carries no greater guilt: a maiden Cirx may have wronged without knowing it. He may have killed her husband, her father, her brothers in those Silvergarde barracks.

  Cirx steps into the rolling tide. Waves slam against his boots, carrying their own foamy saliva, then flatten into tongues and recede. Even the water is hungry.

  Two-eyed Jack laughs from behind Ribsnack. “You want the woman for yourself, Knight? To be her hero, trick her into fucking you? We won’t go anywhere near that island. The Pearl and probably the Northrite themselves monitor all air, surface, and underwater ships in the island’s vicinity. Even with the most covert technology, no one’s ever slipped past the perimeter.”

  “There are sharks, and so there must be other fish and even huge mammals in the sea,” Cirx says. “These watching eyes must not concern themselves with all of that.”

  Two-eyed Jack grunts. “No, of course not.”

  Cirx turns and strides back into the ship.

  Ten minutes later, he’s followed by a clomp of hoofbeats. He leads Kallstrom by the reins and stops at the margin of the ebb and flow of crashing waves.

  “You ride away,” Two-eyed Jack says, “and in five minutes we start killing your knights one by one.”

  Cirx kisses Kallstrom’s soft muzzle, picturing Kitasha out there and what he has to do: let go of his last connection to his family to save another. He crushes the recurring tide rising in his eyes.

  “Run, my friend,” Cirx whispers into Kallstrom’s ear. “Find the island. Rescue the maiden of Silvergarden.”

  Cirx will likely be dead in a few days in a battle with the Northrite anyway. Then Kallstrom will be at the mercy of the Moonriders. He imagines Kallstrom locked in a stall inside a ship for the rest of his life, being flown around space, the Moonriders forgetting to feed him.

  Cirx says, “Until we meet again, in this life or in the Sky Sea, riding with the Horseman. May your hooves always stay light on the waves.”

  He swings the reins over Kallstrom’s neck and smacks his rump.

  Kallstrom snorts a blast of vapor, kicks out, and gallops off over rock and water. The stallion leaps crests of white foam and disappears between swells, stirrups flapping against his flanks.

  Cirx turns back to the ship, the tide rushing from his eyes.

  Two-eyed Jack stares, scratching his neck beard, his eyes glossy, unblinking.

  Ribsnack watches in wonder for a minute. “Does that make you happy, to imagine you can help?”

  Cirx climbs back aboard the ship. “I’ll never find happiness on this side of the Sky Sea.”

  Elion

  Elion’s eyelids peel open. The lights in the room are low. He’s sprawled out on an antigravity mattress, his mind reeling through images of the trial.

  His head throbs as lights dance across his vision in waves of pain. Another hangover but amplified in a synergistic manner with the lump on the back of his skull where someone hit him for good measure before carrying him off, the passed-out fool. The fool who didn’t bring the target in. Got drunk with her instead, to try to comprehend the situation.

  So the Northrite didn’t pay Elion’s contract, as he never delivered Nyranna, only evidence against her.

  Blood throbs in Elion’s ears, in his temples, in his chest. His anger with the Northrite adds to his distress. Technically, he still works for them and is allowed to stay at the palace.

  “Get up.” The ghost girl, Natani’s, apparition floats about the ceiling. “You need to help that woman, help me, help us. She could’ve been me. I could’ve been her, if you didn’t kill me.”

  “I mean to help you … her.”

  “You’re obviously not determined enough, then.”

  Elion groans and rolls off the invisible mattress. His knees and ankles pop as he stands, scratches, and drinks from a flask. The liquid becomes tendrils of burning alcohol as it glows and spirals down into his gut, awakening his body with fiery heat.

  Nyranna couldn’t have poisoned Goldhammer if she didn’t have the assassin spider at the time she visited Staggenmoire. And Elion was wrong; she didn’t have the king’s pearl either.

  The pearl wasn’t with the king’s body, and there were no reports of its fragments being found. Then who took it? The Northrite didn’t even mention the missing jewel during the entire trial, as if they didn’t care about it any longer, or forgot. Or took it for themselves.

  Elion exits his guest chamber, weaves through the palace, and takes a seat inside an elegant foyer on one of the upper floors, a seat where he can watch the room where Breman is keeping Nyranna.

  Sweavers are everywhere.

  Hours pass without event. Elion yawns, reads from the three-dimensional projection of his v-rim, gulps packages of egg whites, sips water, and downs the contents of a flask.

  The door across the way opens.

  The blue-and-bronze-uniformed police commissioner emerges, his medals shimmering beneath epaulettes. He leaves the door open behind him, but titanium bars flash down and slam into place.

  The sweavers outside look in on Nyranna. Breman moves off, carrying something.

  No, the item is floating at his waist, a piece of luggage with a bizarre symbol of some kind on its side.

  Elion wanders over, nonchalant, looking up at the soaring windows and cascades of leopard-spotted ivy. He follows Breman’s slapping boots.

  The symbol on his luggage is a field of bodies sprawled over glacial roses. Black on yellow.

  Something in the back of Elion’s mind shouts. He realizes it’s a symbol on the dead women, but the colors he remembers from somewhere else, although he’s not sure where.

  Breman stops abruptly, turns to face him, and removes a white glove by tugging on one finger at a time.

  “What’s the luggage case for?” Elion asks, unable to come up with a better distraction.

  Breman is silent, studying Elion for a moment, focusing on his unsteady feet, judging his intoxication. “It’s part of an ongoing investigation and none of your business, bounty hunter. Stop drinking and take another contract, one you can complete.”

  Breman stamps a heeled boot and marches away, a rosary of yellow and black dangling from the rear pocket of his uniform—the same image of dead people and roses engraved into its lowest pendant.

  The symbols on the dead women used to frame me.

  Elion stumbles out to the palace’s liquid obsidian doors and exits. Outside, wind keens like flocks of great, invisible birds, knifing through his alloy suit. Fires burn in the sky, floating clouds of flame.

  Only Nyranna’s face fills his mind, the woman of his dreams, the woman at the trial. He recalls the dead woman’s face in his bed, so similar, yet ritualized in murder. Then other dead women hounded his trail.

  “You must protect her.” Natani descends from the hellish sky.

  Even with Adersiun’s help, Nyranna would end up the same as her. A ghost.

  Elion has to figure out why someone wants Nyranna framed for murder. He stumbles around the massive perimeter of the floating antigravity bed carrying a mobile city, then collapses and lies still.

  Elbowed lances of lightning crackle above, thunder jumping in answer, rumbling his eardrums. Elion’s dreaming, intoxicated, concussed all at once.

  The symbol on Breman’s luggage and the rosary settle into his mind. Memories clear like a de
nse fog to reveal the cold of a winter landscape: white and without depth. There’s enough detail to make out Nyranna’s face as well as the dead woman in his bed.

  “Black on a field of yellow.” The ghost girl rests on his chest. “We saw that somewhere without the symbol. I remember irritation, shoving a man onto the street.”

  On the Pearl, Elion shoved a man trying to offer him a card onto the street. He wore a robe of yellow. The Angelwians.

  Elion opens his virtual v-rim screens and searches through information. The card of the Angelwians: yellow with black images of corpses amidst a field of glacial roses.

  “We saw that before,” Natani says. “Before the encounter with the Angelwian.”

  Elion’s head hurts as he reaches back. He’s lying in a dense fog, in bed with the dead woman, but she’s still alive. She breathes softly, her ribs expanding, relaxing. Asleep. He can’t see the walls, the ceiling, the floor, all veiled in forgotten mist. His head swoons, but he swallows the dregs in a green bottle. He cannot fall asleep, his insomnia worse than most nights.

  Fog condenses and becomes a hooded man in a yellow cloak. It’s only a floating head now. The portion of the face that is exposed is familiar but not enough so that he can place it, the rest of the image shadowed. The eyes beneath the hood focus on Elion’s drooping eyelids. They come at him with another bottle, tipping it up for him to drink.

  A feeling of familiarity awakens inside Elion, and he trusts this visitor immediately.

  The man reaches out and closes Elion’s eyes almost fully, blurring his vision. Then the visitor turns to the woman, a tattoo—a dripping black sun—on the back of the hooded man’s hand.

  Natani is there as well, reliving the moment. She gasps as he focuses on the tattoo.

  She knows something … and so do I, something about my past, my family.

  Upon the back of the cloak of the intruder is the image of corpses scattered about blooming glacial roses.

  This has to do with me and the Angelwians … Are the Angelwians killing women to frame me? Or is it just one man?

  Elion wonders if Breman is an Angelwian and is hiding it, or if the luggage case and rosary are truly evidence.