BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue009

  Issue #9 • Jan. 29, 2009

  “Dragon's-Eyes,” by Margaret Ronald

  “Of Thinking Being and Beast,” by Michael J DeLuca

  PODCAST STORY

  “Sand-Skin Man.” By K. C. Shaw

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  Dragon's-Eyes

  Margaret Ronald

  “It’s an easy question.” Skald leaned across to adjust the boot. “All Michel wants to know is if you speak the language. Just a yes or no will do.”

  The man strapped to the table spoke through clenched teeth. “Not that simple.”

  “Really? That’s a shame. Well, I’m sure we can make it that simple.” He turned and pulled out a drawer, standing aside so the contents were visible.

  There was a knock at the door. “Bronze Michel wants to see you,” someone said through it.

  “Me or him?” Skald asked without looking up.

  “You.”

  “Be there in a minute.” He left the drawer open and gave the man a pat on the shoulder. “I’ll try not to take too long.”

  The man on the table didn’t whimper—he’d got a while to go before that—but the thin keening sound came close to it. Skald closed the door and pulled off his hood, then began the long process of strapping his blades back on and jamming his feet into his boots. The last took longer than he liked; Skald couldn’t bend as easily as he had at thirty, and he couldn’t straighten up as quickly as he had at forty.

  Bronze Michel was waiting down the hall, weighting down the edges of a map on a long table. “Six-Blade,” he said as Skald entered. “You took your time. Any luck?”

  “Not yet. Why the interruption?”

  “Close the door.” Skald did so, and Michel upended a bag onto the map, spilling red and gold stones across it. He picked up a few and let them fall through his fingers. “You know what these are?”

  “If they’re still what they were when we were both razormen, they’re dragon’s-eyes.” He caught the flicker of annoyance across Michel’s face; the man didn’t care to be reminded of the days when he was little more than a young street tough with ambition and a gift for bringing others into his net. “They’re pretty, but useless. Can’t put them in jewelry, not unless you want the nobles crying upstart on you; can’t wear them for the same reason; can’t even sell them to a far-trader for more than a couple of coppers.” Not that he hadn’t tried, but the traders hadn’t considered them valuable. Only city nobles did, and Skald had long since stopped caring about them. “Why? Planning on courting the old nobility?”

  “Hm? No.” Michel stirred the heap of stones with a forefinger. They rattled together, light washing over their clear, smooth surfaces. “Do you know why they’re called that?”

  Skald shrugged. “Never bothered. Probably same reason whores get called night blossoms.” He eyed Michel, marking the man’s quiet concentration. “This doesn’t have to do with your dragons, does it?”

  “My dragons?” Bronze Michel shook his head and tapped the stones, making a sound like bird bones clacking. “No one’s seen a dragon within city limits for centuries. Don’t you listen to any of the stories?”

  “Not when you listen for me.”

  Michel let the joke pass. These days, when it came to dragons or anything else having to do with the old royals, he lacked a sense of humor. “Dragon’s-eyes must be more than just pretty stones with a pretty name, Skald. I’ve found out who brings them into the city. I want you to learn everything you can about where they come from.” He cleared away the dragon’s-eyes, tracing a path along the map. “You’ll have to leave for a bit, but I’ll put you in touch with a man in Wullfort.”

  Skald bent over the map, examining the route Michel had indicated. “North. There’s not much up north—just knifegrass and yokels who think screwing a cow is the high point of the day. Nothing good comes out of the north.”

  Michel smiled, but only briefly. “The old royals did.” Skald snorted. “And their dragons.”

  “Yeah.” Skald scratched the back of his head with rusty fingernails. “That’s why you’re sending me. Because of this dragon obsession of yours.”

  The smile returned. “I’m sending you because I trust you.”

  Their eyes met across the jewel-strewn map, and Skald chuckled. “All right, then. Speaking of dragons, if I’m leaving tomorrow, I’ve got some work to finish tonight.”

  It took him more time to unstrap the blades and pry off the boots, and by the time he was done, he found himself thinking less of dragons and more of a hot drink. Work couldn’t wait, though, and he pulled on the hood nonetheless.

  The man on the table hadn’t moved, though he’d tried to. Tear-tracks, some still fresh, cut across the lines of his face. “Please,” he said. “I’ll tell you about the dragons. Just let me go.”

  Skald glanced at the steel “beggar’s boot” clamped onto the man’s left foot, at the bulge of flesh above it and the vise that could only tighten further, then at the open drawer and all its tools in plain sight. He nodded. “All right. Tell me, then.”

  He leaned down, and the man whispered in his ear. Skald straightened up with a sigh. “You know,” he said, “I believe you. I really do. But the trouble is, Bronze Michel won’t.” He took one of the little gleaming tools from the drawer and held it up to the light. “So I suggest you come up with a lie, and come up with it fast.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The master of the wagon train was a woman ten years his junior, though the years of traveling under the sun had burned her to look his age. Nona also had enough scars to shame a razorman, judging by the healing pink streak over one eye and the fine network of short white lines across her entire left cheek. She listened to his fake story, listened harder to the money he was willing to pay for passage, and finally nodded. “We lost our one of our drovers a few nights back, so you’re welcome to join us. But I’m surprised that you’d want to leave the city. Most razormen don’t leave even to be buried.”

  Skald shrugged. “Live this long and you get tired of the city,” he lied.

  “Or it gets tired of you. Well, then.” She turned toward the assembled wagons. “Keia!”

  A girl scrambled over the backs of the wagons, bounding down from the last with the grace of an athlete. She gave the carved dragons over the city gates a hard look, as if she found their squat viciousness lacking. “Yes, mother?”

  “This is Skald Six-Blade. He’ll be coming with us on the run to Wullfort.” She put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. The girl was a younger version of her mother; her hair was a shade darker, and her skin though tanned wasn’t yet scorched. “Six-Blade, this is Keia. Maybe you could give her a lesson or two on how fighting’s done in the city.”

  “Nona,” Keia muttered with the intonation common to all exasperated children. “I know all that stuff already.”

  Nona shook her head. “The Sisters won’t have taught you this. Take a good look, girl: most razormen don’t make it to thirty, and this man’s lasted twenty years more.”

  Keia’s eyes widened at that. Skald nodded to Nona, flicked Reap and Sow from their sheaths, and cut a pattern in the air so fast it was visible only as afterimages of silver. He snapped the blades back, bowed to Keia, and presented her with the tuft of hair he’d cut from her head in the process.

  It wasn’t really razorman work, he acknowledged even as Keia laughed and Nona grinned. It was the sort of trick that razormen did in the taverns before heading out to put their knives to real use, the kind of trick that Skald still practiced on his own. And practice or no, it had been a little slower than it ought.

  But it had gotten him a place and,
judging by the look in Keia’s eyes, a follower.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  They saw their first dragon three weeks out: a speck in the sky like a scrap of rust-colored silk caught by a purposeful wind. Spring had followed them as they plodded north, but the dragons didn’t seem to bother migrating just yet. “Or maybe they’re coming south,” Keia told Skald as they rode in the last wagon, Skald at the reins, Keia keeping him company.

  “Dragons don’t come south,” Skald grunted. Not even the sideshows and grotesqueries that made it to the city every summer had a dragon; something about how quick they died in captivity. He’d seen pictures, and every arch in the city had its own heraldic dragon, but never one in the flesh.

  Keia shrugged. “They did it once. Back when the royals moved down to the plains.” She pointed. “There’s another.”

  “If you say so.” It wasn’t more than a red dot at this distance, crouched just at the edge of the plain, where the land began to dip into the hummocks and hills that would mark the rest of their trip till they reached Wullfort and the Basin above it. (How a basin could be above a city was something Skald hadn’t yet figured, but he decided he’d work it out in time.) Keia had described the route in detail as they trundled along it, in between asking for more stories of the city and showing off her own not inconsiderable knowledge.

  “They won’t eat unskinned meat, you know,” Keia said. “That’s how people knew they weren’t just animals.” She stretched, then hopped off the wagon to walk alongside. One of the riders ahead whistled through his teeth and tossed back a waterskin; Keia caught it easily.

  “I knew a man,” Skald said without thinking where the story would lead, “back in the city, who sold dragon-skinned leather, the scraps from their kills. If you looked gullible or just couldn’t hear so well and thought he was selling dragon-skin, he’d charge twice the price.”

  “That’s stupid. The first time anyone told someone about their dragon-skin, they’d learn they’d been cheated.”

  “Yeah, but he’d still have their money.” Skald’s smile faded: that man had made a few other claims, ones that had drawn attention. He’d be back at his stall by now, but walking with a stick and scared to death of Bronze Michel. The beggar’s boot was effective like that.

  Keia was silent a moment, holding on to the side of the wagon as if it was her guide. “Nona sells dragon’s-eyes.”

  Skald raised his eyebrows. “Really, now? I’d always wondered where those came from.”

  “From Nona.” Keia spoke with easy confidence.

  And that’s how they made it into the city. That was probably Michel’s first step; the rest was up to him. Skald flexed his fingers.

  “Did you know that none of the old royals could wear a crown unless it had dragon’s-eyes on it?” She apparently took his silence for skepticism. “It’s true. I looked it up at my old school.”

  “School?” Dragon’s-eyes could wait, he decided. It wasn’t as if either of them would be leaving the wagon train soon.

  “Nona left me with the Coldwell Sisters when I was born.” She said it proudly, as if she were claiming kinship to kings. “They have a school there, for all the lords’ bastards and priests’ sons. Their library’s three stories tall.”

  “So I guess you learned everything there.”

  Keia smiled a secret smile. “Not everything.”

  From a different girl, he’d have taken that for a tease; from Keia, though, it seemed to hold another meaning. Skald gazed at her, thinking of the children he hadn’t had, the sisters he’d left. Would they have been as strange and alive as this girl?

  Keia noticed his interest and cocked her head to the side, considering him as she’d considered the stone dragons on the city gates. “Why does my mother call you Six-Blade? You’ve only got four.”

  Skald smiled. “Not quite.” He shifted the reins so that he could gesture freely. “This is Reap,” he said, touching the blade on his left forearm. “This is Sow. This—” left hip, “is Wail. And this—” right hip, “is Moan.” He reached behind his back and unshipped the small, cruelly curved blade that rested there. “And this last is Mercy.”

  “That’s still only five.”

  “They did teach you well at that school.” He sat back and drew up one leg and rested it ankle on knee, so that one large boot faced Keia. “The sixth’s name is Surprise.” He flexed his foot.

  Keia stared at the crescent of steel shining just past the toe of Skald’s boot. “Oh.”

  “You’re lucky.” Skald flexed his toes back into their usual cramped state, and the blade retracted. It hurt more than it should have—he limped in the mornings now, which he hadn’t two years back. “Most people only see it after I’ve kicked them. And then of course there’s my seventh blade, but you’re a little too young to see that.” He winked at her.

  “Oh. Oh!” Keia laughed, loud and a little shocked at herself. From her place several wagons ahead, Nona looked back at them with raised eyebrows, but she was smiling.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The story about Skald’s “seventh blade” made it through the camp in a night, as did the rumor that Nona had played the part of its sheath. This last wasn’t true, though Nona had invited him to her wagon a few times to share a pipe of bitterleaf. She had a filthy sense of humor and a surprising giggle when startled into laughter, something that Skald tried to do at every opportunity and succeeded at only a fifth of the time.

  He gave little thought to finding out more about dragon’s-eyes. Better to leave it untouched for now, he believed, than to push too hard and incur Nona’s suspicion. So he told himself, and enjoyed the journey, forgetting origin and destination both.

  It wasn’t until they were two weeks out from Wullfort that he remembered, and that only because of the dragon. One of his oxen had demonstrated the intelligence of its kind and had wandered through a patch of knifegrass, lowing anxiously once it realized what was happening. Skald cursed everything about the north and bound the dumb animal’s cuts, but it was still lame, and thus his wagon lagged well behind the rest.

  They weren’t quite so far behind, though, that he couldn’t tell when something had happened. Rafe, the one with the lazy eye, even stood up in his wagon and tried to signal to Skald, waving both arms like a deranged puppeteer before his partner dragged him down.

  Keia ran up to him. “Dragon’s hunting,” she said, out of breath but still alight, as she was with any news of dragons. “Nona says to stop and wait until he goes over.”

  “What, so we can make an easy meal for it?”

  She shook her head. “They don’t attack humans; they don’t like anything we’ve touched. All the stories say so. And it won’t attack me.”

  “Sure it won’t,” Skald said, or started to. A huge buck, antlers still dangling scraps of their winter velvet, charged around the side of the closest hill. Behind it came the dragon.

  It hung so low in the air that its claws split furrows in the long grass, wings sweeping the air like bloody sails. All down the train, oxen lowed and balked, and the drovers flattened themselves against the boards. The buck screamed and ran straight for the treeline—and for Skald’s wagon. “Keia, get down!” Skald yelled.

  She only stared.

  Skald was almost ready to let the oxen bolt and grab Keia instead when the buck faltered half a wagon’s length from them. Two sets of black-stained talons, each as long as Wail or Moan, sank into it, and the deer went down with one last strangled cry. The oxen lurched and strained, but the dragon ignored them, settling down to pare the skin from its prey like an urchin with an orange.

  The reins went slack in Skald’s hands as his oxen froze. “Keia,” he whispered, “don’t make any sudden moves—” He turned his head in time to see Keia walking toward the dragon.

  She approached the dragon slowly, hands held out as if in surrender. It was nearly skeletal, skin stretched over long bones and tattered wings flapping like the gaunt-children in the midwinter parades. It looked up and blin
ked at her through milky, opaque eyes. “Hello,” Keia said. “It’s me.”

  The dragon snorted, hot bloodied breath so powerful it struck Skald in the face even from this distance. He rose, still clutching the reins. “By all that’s unholy, girl—”

  The dragon’s head snapped up to glare at him. It hissed, sank its claws deep into the dead buck, and leapt into the air. Keia ducked away from the carcass, and spots of blood spattered over Skald as the dragon flew overhead. It disappeared into the woods, still dragging its half-peeled meat.

  Keia bounded to her feet. “Did you see? Skald, did you see? They know me. They recognize me—”

  “I saw.” Skald was suddenly exhausted, weary to the bone, as if a score of evenings had settled on him at once. “Go up to your mother. Tell her we’re fine. Get.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Keia didn’t speak of her bravery, if bravery it was, and the other drovers either hadn’t seen or weren’t talking about it. Skald, though, couldn’t shake the dread he’d felt, and so he went to Nona. To his surprise, Nona just laughed. “Good for her! She knows dragons don’t eat humans; she’s not about to shriek and run like a fragile city girl.”

  “It was more than that,” Skald insisted. “She was reckless. She deliberately put herself in danger.”

  “I didn’t send Keia to the Coldwell Sisters just so she’d learn to be a fainting idiot. They’re good teachers, and Keia’s a good learner. She knows what she’s doing.” Nona sighed and patted Skald’s shoulder. “Look, I know you mean well, but this isn’t the city.”

  Skald just shook his head. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

  Nona regarded his sour expression and sighed. “Six-Blade, if you were any more protective I’d think you were her mother. I just have more faith in her than you do.” She squeezed his shoulder. “And she certainly shouldn’t fear anything from dragons.”