Ajax Kallistrate

I’d never traveled the Underworld alone. To do so now, with omen-songs riding the wind and every tongue heavy with rumors of a broken seal, would’ve been foolhardy — but to take a soul-reaver with me? That wasn’t my choice. I shared my rations with one who didn’t eat only because the city could afford no better, neither hireling nor sanctioned priest, just myself — a debt-ridden old mercenary — and this creature molded from human flesh into death’s handmaiden.

Her name was Makes Shadows Shift, so I called her Makeshift. She was eight feet tall and as emaciated as a weeks old cadaver, and so unnaturally still I began to doubt she breathed at all. She never sat. Never slept. Never spoke. She’d been trained at the Sanctum Dolor for purposes unknown, and lent to me freely, without terms, for their coffers were deep and influence had never come so cheaply. She’d taken vows in two worlds to become what they’d made her. I didn’t yet know what that was.

We walked on foot, as no mount would bear her, and passed the Sphinx Gate in six days, crossing the boundaries of inhabited land and following the river as it snaked its way through the marshy heath. Tonight we’d reach the ruined temple that breached the Underworld. I’d hoped to enter it by the grace of daylight, a boon to mortal travelers, but a storm-laden wind had been against us — a warning or a last chance to turn back I didn’t know — and we were delayed. Night had come to this forlorn stretch of wild lands, and from within it blew the hot breath of the fane, an exhalation like the sigh of a lost soul.

The temple’s rocky crest rose on the black horizon, limned in gold by the sharp crescent of the waxing moon. I hadn’t thought to look for good omens, and took the one that was proferred, sending a whispered prayer to Omela Ahma of the Waters for even so slight a lamp in the darkness. Makeshift didn’t pray. She kept walking, her stride modulated to match my own until my breath came faster, unwilling as I was to slow down, to reveal any weakness, though she wouldn’t have noticed.

I didn’t halt until we’d reached the shattered outer wall of the fane. It had once been a monastery dedicated to a god so old it had forgotten its own name. It had been overrun a hundred years ago, first by reformists who had slaughtered the monks, and then by thieves who had slaughtered the reformists, and finally by the teeth and claws of nature. Home now only to beasts of the field and lubas and gulagar and other malformed things escaped from backwater cultists, it stood like a gap in the night, a blasted place that had never felt the touch of a blessed hand. I’d been here before, a dozen times, and each time I swore I wouldn’t return.

Makeshift stood with her back to the moon, either oblivious to its presence, or so much an atheist as to be beyond caring. Her arms hung limply from her shoulders, her back slightly curved, her legs splayed at the knees. Her hair stood out in whorled knots, an adornment I hadn’t expected when we were introduced, and her reaver’s robes — a diaphanous silver cloud that blurred if looked at directly — shifted about her bare feet as if with a will of its own. Her face was turned away, and in profile, had a noble cast, the empty eyes sunken over an aquiline nose, the chin at once stubborn and over-long, every aspect of her body stretched as if by long use of the arts that made her both feared and pitied.

The urge to speak rose in my throat. An oblate’s instinct, I suppose, though I’d been many years breached of my vows, to manifest resistance with the power of ancient words, to make true every thought by repeating it aloud. But I only took a breath. Makeshift wouldn’t have cared what was said, and the gods already knew what was in my heart: I didn’t want to be here, but I’d do what I’d come to do — or die in the attempt. It was in my nature more so even than that of the Reaver.

I stepped through a gap in the wall, desiccated leaves crunching underfoot. Makeshift followed behind, the rasp of her claws against the stonework strangely reassuring. I caught a glimpse of a ghostly tendril extruded from within the sleeve of her robe, her peculiar gift for hunting down anomalies in both worlds at once.

Nothing moved within the great pile. A breeze blew cool with the draught of coming night as it hissed through the remains of a broken tower to funnel into the open bailey. I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me even with the glad assistance of the maiden moon, and kept a hand lightly on the rapier at my side. It wouldn’t do to draw prematurely. Some of what called the ruins home might dismiss us if we proved no threat.

Makeshift moved silently, the grass bending only briefly as she seemed to float over the dusty cobblestones. The illusion unnerved me. I glanced at her and caught a warning tremor in her face, the skin drawing tight over her cheekbones as she lifted one cadaverous hand.

I dropped to my knees. I drew my dagger, the long rapier useless in close quarters, and a breath of air touched my cheek like a whisper as Makeshift’s hand passed in front of me. Her long fingers curled as if to swipe at my face and I lurched backwards, my teeth bared in fury — until I saw the glimmer caged by the reaver’s pale hand: a glyph ward, cast in the shape of a dart.

Makeshift dropped her arm to her side. The moon painted an outline of the creatures that surrounded us. Six or eight, or ten, I couldn’t count them by their eyes, as they had so many. One was a luba — humanoid, as tall as Makeshift, its multitude of arms as flat as tentacles and each one bearing a phosphorescent glyph. The rest were a mix of wild and constructed, once-human and never animal. Some rose up on two legs, others hunched over on four, all of them seething with a hunger that pinched my mind, an urge to yield without the futile waste of resistance.

I whispered a glyph ward of my own, six words to reseat the soul — “I am foretold of the light” — and to my surprise, Makeshift echoed them, a double blessing, her voice like the rush of a wind-drawn flame. The luba’s glyphs faded to a lifeless gray, but the creatures didn’t falter. Only steps from the breach in the world, they would have risked far more for such fresh prey. A mouth swelled with teeth. One creature paced back and forth on human hands. The others shifted, uttering plaintive moans, until at last they surged forward as one and the luba leapt in a graceful arc, sighing as if in anticipation of the downward plunge into the crunch of bone.

This time I moved before Makeshift. I drew my rapier and swung, cutting the luba in two. Bloodless, it fell with a screeching wail as I ran my blade through a second, and then a third, the whole mass moving now — angry, fearful, and most of all, hungry — until, dismembered and oozing a foul ichor, the survivors crawled away. Mewling piteously, they rejoined those that were still whole and slithered together into the darkness, and down into the gaping maw that opened into the Underworld.

I took a steadying breath, my rapier hanging limply at my side. I drove the blade deep into the earth, speaking aloud a heartfelt prayer to Oma Oman of the Blood that she might cleanse it of the stain of the unshriven. And she did, tugging on the blade with an added benediction before I could free it, clean and unblemished.

Makeshift stood as stoically as before, unmoved by the attack. Her robe clung to her narrow chest, as still as the dead, though for the first time I detected the tiniest throb of a pulse in her throat.

“Remat a atta,” I said in the old language, the one taught at the Sanctum Dolor. When she didn’t react, I spoke again, in the coarser tongue of the new people. “I am yours.”

This time she did respond, and for a long time after I wouldn’t understand what it meant. She swung her head in a broad motion, as if she lacked the fine control required for a simple negation. “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

Puzzled, not knowing how to reply, I sheathed my rapier. The gap to the Underworld awaited, and I had no time for riddles. Six days from now, I’d either stand triumphant over the enemies of the living, or I’d be one of them. I resisted the urge to look back at Makeshift, to reassure myself that I didn’t travel alone — for what kind of company was a reaver of souls?

Without another thought, either of prayer or regret, I stepped into the breach.

July 17, 2016

It was a miscreant’s feast that day in the harbor, the guts of the ruptured galley spilling over the sand like a defeated army. Boxes of wax slabs, sheets of tin, coiled wire; a hundred sopping yards of Aqualest wool; glittering shards of glass daubed with precious drops of perfume, solvent, dye, tinctures, spirits. A single unbroken flask of tanner’s eyebright. Seventeen splay-ribbed barrels that had yielded their fermented nectar to the sea at the behest of the rocky shore, and another two dozen kegs stinking of spoilt beer.

It wasn’t the wreckers who took the first prizes. They’d had no hand in the ship’s demise, and were in fact sleeping the deep sleep of the sated only two days after they’d brought down their last victim. It wasn’t the fishers either, who ordinarily would have seen the foundering ship long before the ship could see the shore, for they’d been away already a fortnight on the great herringers in a distant northern sea. And it wasn’t the lonely children hunting for a meal, or escaping from the too freely given blows of their elders, though they would be released from the pinioning gaze of their schoolmaster in time to be the second to plunge eager hands into the ship’s generous gifts.

No, the first was myself, of course. It’s the only reason for my telling this story, and I do have a purpose — bear with me — in telling it the way I have. I’m not a miscreant, or at least not the usual kind. I’m not a thief, or at least not always. I’m a vagrant, a wanderer, an itinerant fortune teller.

I saw the ship that morning from my sandy bed upon the heath. A solitary scrap of sail fluttered like a disconsolate hand from the very top of the broken mast. I knew nothing of ships, but a cold chill echoed through my heart. No mortal could have survived whatever force had taken apart that construction of wood and iron. It heeled one way and then another as it approached the shore, as if in its final moments it agonized over which stretch of yellow sand would make the softest bier to rest upon. I watched, the way one watches the dysrythmic fluttering of a dying bird, fascinated by the movement toward flight and continuity that starts and starts over, but never finds its place and must start again.

Futile.

I didn’t walk down to the beach until the outgoing tide threw up the contents of the ship, one wet-shiny piece at a time. The corner of a sand-swamped box, a sliver of glass reflecting the sun like a tiny beacon, a muddy wad of wool, the lucky bauble of tanner’s eyebright — and the only article among that sorry mass of lost and found wealth that intrigued me enough to draw my bare feet across the stinging heath and into the icy water.

It was a book. A glyph book. I recognized its metal clasp even from across the distance of the waste, as the contorted shape stamped into its unblemished brass seemed to rise above it, dancing like a smoky flame. I recognized it. I’d seen it once before, many years ago. It had been possessed by a rag man, a wanderer, a man very like myself — or perhaps it had possessed him. He told me it held a secret no man wanted to know: the circumstances of his own death.

I hadn’t believed him. I’d still been a young man then, and death had seemed like a foreign thing, a word divorced from ordinary language. Glyph books were of this world, and served only their true masters, and death couldn’t touch so harmless an art. Better tell your tale to the bone-casters and the skin-lifters, the white-eyed devotees of a truth revealed only after a lifetime of oaths and sacrifices. Glyph readers were a new order, a simpler order, and we’d have no truck with any mixing of the two. I’d sent him away.

And now here it was. Thirty years later, and me half a world away from where I’d been, and barren of book and craft and home and my next meal. I can’t tell the story now of my fall from grace, but only that I couldn’t — even had the home and meal been proffered in exchange — refuse the lure of that twisting glyph, that abomination of language, a fusion of the words “yield” and “conquer.”

I walked down to the beach. The book was trapped beneath the remains of the crate in which it had been housed, an iron-bound thing wrenched from its moorings and overflowing with saturated straw. I worried it with a trembling hand, dislodging a splintered board that pierced my skin and let my blood mix with the sea, drop by drop, until I’d freed my prize.

I sat where I was, in the wet sand, with the tide sucking at my bare ankles, and ran my fingers over the battered green leather of the book. It wasn’t oxhide as I’d assumed all those years ago, it was something thinner and yet more resilient, its discolorations only temporary blemishes. I could wipe them away with my hands, and I did, its surface smooth, untorn. Whole. Even after its disaster at sea, it felt after a few moments of care, as if I’d just lifted it from the hallowed shelves of that great underground library.

I walked away, leaving behind the recoverable Aqualest wool, a yard of which would have fed and housed me for a month, and the tanner’s eyebright that wouldn’t have fooled a half-penny shill but would have served a fishwyfe in exchange for a suit of clothes and a pair of shoes, and the tin and the wax, and the coiled wire, the former salvageable for an extravagant price in the inland towns, though the latter’s value had already been greatly diminished by the salt sea. I walked away, back through the heath even as the sharp voices of children echoed up from the gap that separated the coastal village from the shore, as the first of the wreckers woke from dismal sleep, and the herringer fleet turned back toward home with holds near to bursting with their harvest.

The contours of the glyph brushed across my hand like thread, or fine hair. They drew with them lines of fate that clung to them, weighed them down, thickened them into tendrils, vines. I couldn’t turn away from the story they told. The children all, sickened by the dye that had leaked into the sand, would perish that night in their mothers’ arms. The wreckers would trade their unlooked-for boon to a betrayer who would sell them to the lord’s warden, and every man and woman among them would be hanged. The herringers, already bearing for home, would fall afoul of an embargo, and disease and starvation would claim them in a long embrace.

Only one miscreant who had scavenged from the emptied belly of the doomed ship would survive long enough to tell the tale. Myself, of course.

For I am Skyborn, and this is my story.

July 7, 2016