Chapter 3
Empty sky
Helpless, Lyric presses against the blood spilling from Iriset’s ribs.
The dart jerks with her agonized gasping and Lyric tries to push it all back in, take it back, he never would have commanded this, but that doesn’t matter, it happened anyway, and Iriset mé Isidor is going to die again. In his lap.
He puts his other hand to her forehead, brushing sweaty hair away, and holds her against the crook of his knee. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I know it hurts.”
Iriset’s lashes flutter and her hand flings up to grasp at his shoulder, digging in hard.
Lyric remembers a skull siren, fluttering, too, and grasping, and he knows he can’t kill Iriset any more than he could help that dying remnant of apostasy. But he’s stronger now. He can make it faster.
Rubbing his thumb at the crease of her brow, as if that could possibly offer comfort, he wraps his bloody hand around the dart and, without hesitation, pulls hard.
It slips, and he grits his teeth as she whimpers. He tries again: The dart jerks free, and Iriset’s mouth gapes open on a hoarse, choking cry.
“Pressure,” says a voice in Lyric’s ear, and he instinctively obeys, flattening his palm to the wound.
Hot blood seeps through his fingers, filling the nail beds and finding every wrinkle in his knuckles.
No, wait, this isn’t what he was doing, he was trying to help her die faster, easier. Who said that?
Lyric whips his head up: He’s in a small crater in mirané-brown rock, and scrambling down the wall toward him is a monster.
He presses harder in shock and Iriset groans.
The monster is vaguely human-shaped, covered in rough green scales, from the clawed feet digging into the rocks as it skids down the crater wall to the sharp spines lining its elongated skull instead of hair.
Tattered pink cloth covers its hips and ties around its neck like a little cape, beneath which are powerful shoulders over two pairs of arms with four-fingered hands tipped in claws with a wicked hook where a thumb should be.
The lower arms are smaller, attached to the ribs with extra elbows of some kind, and Lyric cannot stop gaping.
Its eyes are huge, round, and bright as verdigris with no white at all.
The pupils are tight slits in the bright sunlight, hooded by thick brows of sharp scales, like an alliraptor.
Its cheeks are scaled, too, in ridges as along its jaw.
It has a lipless mouth but a scaly human nose.
All its exposed skin is yellowish-green, like an old bruise.
That lipless mouth is moving, speaking to him, and the longer arms reach toward Iriset but Lyric leans away, pulling Iriset, too.
He is staring at a human-alliraptor hybrid creature and he can only think of the alliraptor that appeared with Aharté and the Holy Syr in those stories from the end of the Apostate Age—the alliraptor She Who Loves Silence also loved, and Lyric says, “Aharté.”
“Aharté,” the monster answers, and then says more, and its head turns to look at another person carefully sliding down the edge of the crater.
This one is human, a young woman with Osahar-peach skin stretched too tight around colorless lips as if she were recently ill.
She arrives and does not shy away from the monster, but touches its shoulder to nudge it aside, speaking to Lyric with horrible, penetrating looks.
Lyric wants to cover his eyes, wants to demand they both cover their eyes, put on a mask, anything to stop staring at him, but he can’t.
The woman’s eyes are luminous gray and large over sharp cheeks, and her red-brown hair is cut bluntly across her forehead and equally straight at chin-level.
“Aharté,” she says, and her voice is quiet.
She kneels and Lyric flashes his gaze finally down at Iriset in his lap.
Blood coats the corner of her mouth, a smear of it spread down her jaw and staining her collar.
Then the woman tears at the remains of Iriset’s shift.
The rip echoes through the ringing in Lyric’s ears and as he watches, the woman flexes her hand, her fingernails gleaming like quartz, like the tips of design styli, and she uses small crystal claws to draw a force-net right there in the air, over Iriset’s ribs, a little cage she twists in both hands and pinches into the edges of Iriset’s bloody gash.
With a bright click of something, teeth maybe, the cool air surrounding Lyric coalesces in an ecstatic charge, raising hair all over his body.
Ecstatic snaps together in a visible flash and burn and Iriset arches, head lolling against his knee. Then the design net is gone, and the ozone flavor fades from the air.
The tears in Iriset’s robe are wet with blood, but he pulls them away to find no gaping puncture, no bleeding.
The edges are welded together, bright red like burns.
His hand trembles as he touches the hot skin.
Her ribs expand with breath. Lyric bends over her as pure joy shivers through him, bringing a wave of exhaustion behind.
The woman is speaking again. Lyric raises his head. Her voice remains soft, urgent and earnest. He can almost understand.
“Is she all right?” Lyric says. “Will she be…?”
The monster murmurs something and he glances fearfully at it, willing himself to be calm, to swallow his discomfort. No—to be honest it’s disgust and horror, and the monster who is maybe also a human turns away as the young woman speaks again, but slowly.
Lyric recognizes a word, then another. It’s not mirané, but he does know it, he—
Old Sarenpet.
The words form in his mind: He’s fluent in reading it, but he’s never attempted speaking it before.
“Wife…” he hears, and “needs help” and “go”—or “leave”?
Lyric says in Old Sarenpet, “Help… up.” He shakes his head, frustrated.
The language has no personal pronouns, and in reading that’s easy because the sigil for whatever the subject or object of a sentence is can simply be repeated.
It will take practice to teach his ears and tongue to understand and speak smoothly.
Do they use personal names for me and I and us and them?
Someone else speaks, maybe a question, and he hears the word moon or star and maybe man. Lyric looks beyond the woman and monster to the edge of the crater as another voice joins the discussion, which grows swiftly into an argument.
Standing around the rim of the small crater are a quad or so of people staring down at them wide-eyed, whispering.
None are miran, but they could be Osahar and Sarenpet, colored like southern sand and sun-baked browns and freckled desert peach, dark hair in braids and strange short-chops.
They wear sandals and pleated skirts knee- or calf-length with layered tunics instead of the robes and trousers of Lyric’s people.
Dark paint lines most of their eyes and some lips, some have chunky jewelry, their hair bound up in heavy combs; others have shade-fans tied into elaborate braids.
Most with the fans and braids wear a uniform pale purple: attendants, Lyric guesses from a lifetime of being attended.
The rest give the impression of finery and expense.
They must be nobility or of a high caste.
None of them wear actual masks, but they do have elaborate face paint that looks like scales or flowers along cheeks, and two have headdresses involving elegant feathers, and another’s eyes are so bright a pink they almost glow.
And Lyric slowly realizes it isn’t face paint or headdresses or impressive illusion: That man has scales, and those women have feathers instead of hair, crested like a bird from the Bow, and the eyes are—the eyes are real.
The monster beside him isn’t a monster, it’s a chimera. This is—
Human architecture.
Now that he sees it, he can tell there is a uniform beauty to all the people, symmetry and smoothness as if they’re works of art, not human. His breath thins out, shallow with alarm.
“Eliri will help Aharté,” says the young woman at his side, the one with crystal claws. There is no other sign of apostasy about her. Iriset would like those claws, Lyric thinks numbly, if she could see what this apostate does with them.
“Eliri,” Lyric says tentatively. “Name?”
“Yes.”
“Lyric,” he says. The murmuring of the crowd starts up again, but Lyric doesn’t think his name means anything in Old Sarenpet—at least not that he knows. It’s a thoroughly mirané name.
“Does Lyric need help climbing out?” Eliri asks. She has yet to make an expression. Though her gaze tracks to Iriset’s face repeatedly. “The Moon-Eater will see Lyric Aharté and wife and then wife will be properly healed.”
“Yes,” Lyric says, shying away from the Moon-Eater because—because well…
He stands gracelessly, arms full of Iriset.
Eliri and the chimera each take an elbow.
He flinches from the chimera and it widens its eyes, then darts away, whipping a thick, stiff-looking tail around as it digs claws into the crater, skimming up like a lizard.
The crowd leaps away from it, too, and it’s gone.
Lyric shifts to tilt Iriset’s head against his shoulder as he hooks his arms under her thighs and around her back, holding her against him. He doesn’t know how to climb up, and he doesn’t know how to let Iriset go.
“Be calm,” the same voice that said pressure murmurs in mirané.
Suddenly arms of force wrap his waist, lifting, and Lyric chokes back a cry.
He struggles to hold on to Iriset and his posture as he’s carried up the crater smoothly by this invisible thing.
Eliri steps back, and Lyric raises his chin, wipes his face clear of expression, and goes with it.
Whatever is happening will make him look powerful as long as it doesn’t throw him back down.
Looking powerful is a good strategy in unknown situations.
The crowd backs away, watching indeed with awe, and Lyric’s boots settle to the flat ground and the invisible arms release him. Lyric resists the urge to glance back. He waits, holding Iriset, trying to control his breathing because obviously he can’t control anything else.
Several bystanders reach down and help Eliri up.
When she’s at his side again, Lyric says, “Wife needs help,” impatient to end this strange quiet.
They’re standing in a rock garden of some kind, spread with tiny obsidian gravel that eats light, interspersed with red flagstones, twisting crystalline columns, and flowering spider cacti.
The rock garden is bordered by trellises teeming with lush flora that shouldn’t coexist with the desert rocks and dry air.
Beyond the garden rises an elaborate complex of clustering silver spires like skeletal fingers reaching up into the stark blue sky.
A forest of them, some towering so high the afternoon sun itself is half hidden by the tip of one spire.
The silvery, metallic walls shimmer strangely, pockmarked by bubbles of colorful glass like windows.
Lyric’s eyes ache from how bright it all is, and the relentless bold blue of the sky.
Lyric takes a trembling breath and focuses on the woman Eliri. “Please,” he adds in Old Sarenpet.
“Come with Eliri,” she answers, holding out a hand she sweeps toward the widest trellis path. Without waiting for an answer, she turns and walks. She says to a young person in the violet skirts, “Go to Alis Healer. Bring to the Moon-Eater’s Pit with surgery tools.”
The attendant dashes off and Lyric follows Eliri. His arms ache already and he hitches Iriset closer. The small crowd comes, too, after a moment’s hesitation, flowing behind them like a river. The Moon-Eater’s Pit. The Moon-Eater, god of apostasy, in this garden of chimeras and apostates.
Lyric breathes carefully to avoid panic and holds his gaze forward, determined not to stumble or distract himself.
Flashes of silver flicker as the sun glints against the spires.
He smells flowers everywhere, hears piercing birdsong and some animalistic calls that sound almost like human laughter.
There must be an explanation for what is happening—Iriset has to know, she’s the one who did it. Lyric needs her to wake.
Focusing on Eliri before him, Lyric takes one step at a time.
He is only walking a strange labyrinth, that’s all.
Eliri leads him without rushing. Her tunic is finely embroidered with dark purple flowers and her skirt falls nearly to her bare feet.
Despite her simple attire she commands the respect of those near her: They give her breathing room, none near enough to touch accidentally despite their eagerness to lean closer to stare at Lyric.
They pass a gardener, standing with his mouth dropped open.
A trowel falls from his hand, tip sinking into the gravel.
The gardener points at Lyric’s face. Someone from the crowd hisses and darts forward to make the gardener step back.
Lyric ignores it. Ignores everything. It’s not the time for conclusions, not when there’s so much information he needs, when he’s aching all over, when he senses eyes upon him, and eddies of forces scratch and kiss his skin though they aren’t clearly ecstatic or flow or falling or rising. He must stay calm to survive.
Eliri starts up a broad flight of obsidian stairs leading toward a yawning atrium. Iriset groans softly in his arms and Lyric clenches his jaw. He is so angry with her, but right now she’s everything he has. (Lyric and Iriset share a skill for compartmentalization. And dramatics.)
Pausing, Lyric settles his feet against the ground, breathes in a calm eight-count and he can feel the echo of it in the marriage knot, alive and throbbing inside Iriset.
Then, as Lyric has done countless times in his life, he looks up at the vertex of the sky to find peace in Aharté’s steady moon always looking right back down.
But the sky is empty, a swath of blue and painfully white sunlight, cavernous, infinite.
There is no moon.