2. HARVEST
HARVEST
YSIRA
The people of Zivora gave their dead to the desert. They carried corpses through the dust and the cacti, walking as far as they could before nightfall—though never too far, lest the wastes take them as well.
Alone among the city-state’s denizens, Ysira Naktis made this journey not to give but to retrieve.
She stalked along the hard-packed red dirt over meandering, gently hilly terrain.
The sun lay low on the horizon. As totality drew near, stubborn, final beads of light winked along the edge of the black disc.
Ysira paused in her tracks to watch, an almost ritual farewell, until only Oe’s soft blue glow remained. The vast ringed planet kept a soothing vigil with the twin moons, tonight both waxing crescents.
Night, during the Harvest season, was the only time Ysira did not feel as though she were being watched.
Long ago, in days lost to living memory when Ysira’s people had freely roamed the desert, this ritual had demanded the dead be cast into the canyon—the sprawling, fathomless divide in the world that gave the Scar its name.
Nowadays, no one made it that far. Ysira followed a well-worn path through scrubby vegetation and a labyrinth of bones, taking care not to step on the desiccated remains of men, women, and children.
Most were sun-bleached skeletons, stripped of meat and moisture by the Scar and its creatures, but a few had just been carried out today.
The funeral processions had long since departed.
When the shadow came to Zivora and no one was promised survival, the city tended to become a mess of drunken revelry, desperate crime, and idiotic spur-of-the-moment commitments.
Purchases. Business ventures. Weddings. Ysira was more than happy to get away from it all, but one could never be too careful outside the city walls.
She ran her left thumb over the stump of her little finger.
A perpetual reminder of the last time she’d run afoul of a higher power.
Her objective lay beneath a tall yucca plant, hunched like a twisted human figure at prayer.
The corpse belonged to a man in his forties.
He’d been gone a full day now, limbs stiff, skin bruise-dark where it met the ground.
Ysira knelt beside him and pulled supplies from her satchel: a bundle of rags, a jar half-full of Ogden’s special solution, and an assortment of slender knives.
She cut the man’s shirt off, spreading it to reveal his chest and abdomen.
Patches of red, peeling rash covered his skin.
Pointlessly, she waved away the flies. She began with a long incision beneath the ribcage.
She spread apart skin, fat, and muscle, scooping out clotted fluids, working through the tissue layer by layer.
From its perch on a nearby skull, a tiny owl watched her with enormous amber eyes. It hooted softly, almost reproachful.
After a decade of running errands for Ogden, Ysira knew better than to ask him why.
This was not the first time the old healer had paid her to retrieve human remains.
Once, he’d had her locate a cave deep in the canyon, to which she still returned every now and then to scrape mold off the rocks.
Another time, she’d stolen vials of pus, drained from lesions on sick goats in the High Lord’s personal stables.
People liked to whisper about Ogden, saying he was a purveyor of blasphemous knowledge, in league with demons.
He never outright denied it. He kept the Church off his scent by sending Ysira to do his dirty work, and she didn’t mind.
She’d become rather more comfortable among the dead than the living. Besides, she owed Ogden her life.
She located the head of the pancreas above the man’s third kidney and cut the organ free. She noted a fungating mass across its surface and a sulfurous odor that made her stomach roil. Cancer, just as Ogden had predicted.
Ysira’s ears prickled, picking up the crunch of dry yucca sheddings nearby. The owl took flight and flapped noiselessly away.
“Shit,” Ysira muttered. She covered her incision with the man’s shirt flaps, leaving him with as much dignity as she could muster. She dusted off her robes, crammed the jar inside her satchel, and slung her kirikilbone glaive across her back as she crept around the bend.
A man was racing toward Ysira, down the dirt path. She reached for her weapon and he skidded to a stop.
The man was young, probably younger than Ysira’s twenty-nine years, dressed in rags and clutching a roughspun sack. Red, blistering burns marred his brown skin. Not a Guardsman after all. She was almost disappointed. A fight would have done wonders for her mood.
She tilted her head at him. “What happened to you?”
No answer. His chest heaved as he regarded her with panic. Curiosity piqued, she prodded, “What’s in the bag?”
His eyes darted toward it, then back at her. “What’s in yours?”
Fair enough. Likely, he was a scavenger from the Knots.
They came out this way sometimes, braving the wastes in search of forbidden salvage from the canyon ruins.
But something about him—the way he held that sack like a clutch of rattlesnake eggs—unsettled Ysira.
Was he afraid of losing it or afraid of it?
“They’re after me,” he said. “I have to get home.” “Who?” Ysira demanded.
He had to pause for breath. “Guard. Not far.”
An understanding passed between them. Ysira seized him by the arm, practically dragging him along her path. Keeping low to the ground, they stole behind a towering one-armed cactus. They slid down a pebbled slope into a burrow half-concealed by shrubs and agave plants—
—to find someone already there.
The man, slumped against the back of the burrow, took a moment to notice them. A rainbow glaze shimmered over his eyes as he turned his head languidly sideways.
“You’re shiny,” he said.
A thorn eater. Of course. Ysira gritted her teeth and urged the scavenger along, bracing herself to wait. Hopefully, the thorn eater would keep still, hallucinate in silence long enough for the Guard patrol to retreat.
No sooner had she shuffled past the shrubs, though, than he let out a piercing yell. She lunged, prepared to choke him into shutting up. He dodged with irritating dexterity, making her fumble to hold on to her satchel.
“Stay away!” He brandished a short flint knife.
The scavenger stumbled back. He was a liability, already injured and unwilling to let go of that blasted sack.
It occurred to Ysira that she could run and leave him there.
She nearly did. But then he would have been killed or sentenced to some ludicrous amount of prison time once the Guard got hold of him.
And gods, but she’d been looking for an excuse to hit someone since the eclipse began.
“I’ll deal with this,” she said to the scavenger. “Run.”
It was the last thing he’d expected her to say. He stared at her until she enunciated, “Go.”
The thorn eater pounced. Ysira punched him in the jaw. If she was getting arrested tonight, she might as well deserve it.
The scavenger darted off into the night. The thorn eater doubled over, cursing. Ysira imagined he was a specific someone else and hit him again. Again. Again. Somewhere in that haze of red, his knife caught her in the stomach.
As she cried out, he pulled back, holding his bloodied nose. Staring at his blade—completely clean. Ysira winced, massaging the fading sore spot on her abdomen, and straightened.
“Demon,” he hissed.
Whether he’d used the word as a simple pejorative or the hallucinogen actually allowed him to see the creature coiled around Ysira’s brainstem, she didn’t know. She spread her arms in satiric apology. “I suggest—”
He spat a mouthful of blood at her and tackled her by the waist. His shoulder rammed into her diaphragm.
She lost her satchel, gasping for air as they both went down.
The jar slipped out and shattered on a boulder.
Ysira clawed through the dirt for something to use as a weapon and cringed when her fingers brushed the slimy pancreas.
She smashed it against his skull. He howled and sank his teeth into her shoulder. A strangled shriek escaped her.
“Get—fuck—off me!”
He did, because the Guard patrol chose that moment to arrive.
The thorn eater socked Ysira in the gut and ran cackling into the desert.
She scrambled to her feet, wheezing, with all the grace of a drunk with a concussion.
She still held the pancreas, now certainly ruined. Ogden would be unhappy about this.
She braced to throw it—might buy her a few seconds’ advantage—but faltered. The two men before her wore white cloaks. Knights, not ordinary Guardsmen.
Little as Ysira liked to admit it, she would not win this fight.
Even when she’d been in training for knighthood herself, she had never been above average in skill, and she’d fallen out of practice in the decade since.
More importantly, if they inflicted any serious harm on her with that steel they carried, she’d have a far more complicated problem on her hands.
She resigned herself to a shit couple of nights.
She’d spent time in jail before, and she always found a way out.
She could make it a shit time for them, too.
“Caught ourselves a corpse-robber,” said the taller, bald knight, who was entirely too smug for someone who’d done nothing but stumble across Ysira. He glanced at his peer, a pale man with a long, braided beard. “An awfully bold one, to be stealing from the dead during Harvest season.”
The bearded knight clicked his tongue. “She looks scared. Must be remembering that thieves make good sacrifices.” He demanded, “You alone out here?”
Ysira was not, in fact, scared, and resented the insinuation. She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder in the direction the thorn eater had run. “Besides him? Yes.”
“Have you seen another thief? Male, Zal, carrying dangerous contraband?” The knight spoke like a man accustomed to getting whatever he wanted.