art by Prince Satyrn
"There is a tradition, here on Artephius. We call it the Fas'Har. It is a practice of vengeance, mostly enacted by widows of men who have been slain," the shaman said, slowly, after he'd made sure that Ariachne had regained her faculties.
"I don't see how..." Ariachne began. The shaman clicked his long tongue against his palate, silencing her.
"For months, the widows learn to live as criminals," the shaman said, tracing his long, triple-jointed finger in the air, weaving a story out of his pipe smoke, "to skulk in dark places and consort with twisted souls. To tread in twilight and learn the hissing language of the vulture-men. To find the wrongdoer, they become them. When the process is done, the widow will find the murderer, no matter how well they may have hidden. No matter how deft their disguise, the widow will be able to spot the killer even in a beehive of a crowd. When this is done, the killer is apprehended and they and the widow are cast into the fire, to burn together."
The shaman paused then, reaching for a stick to stoke the embers in the pipe, sending out a cloud of short-lived fireflies into the air.
"Why would you do this? Why punish the widow for another's crime?" Ariachne blurted out, baffled.
"In the process of finding the wrongdoer, the wronged has become them," the shaman said, leaning back to blow a plume of smoke into the air. "To find her quarry, she has stained her soul, soaked it into the blood of past victims. To destroy one monster, the widow has herself become one." Long, sinewy fingers stirred the smoky cumuli, weaving brief constellations. All its eyes searched her own.
"What does this have to do with me?" Ariachne lied, "he hasn't wronged me!" It felt different when she said it. The shaman's face betrayed no human emotion.
"You have walked in the Messiah's footsteps, have you not? Seen the consequences of his actions. I am told he has been elevated, in the eyes of the Dominion; become a demon prince with a king's ransom as bounty for his capture," the Shaman said, one hand weaving the air with the pipe, the other tracing a symbol in the dirt, dispelling it with a flick of his fingers. "The frequencies are pregnant with rumours of his crimes, enacted in the dark places in between the endless heroics. He has waded knee-deep in the blood of thousands."
Ariachne nodded, her and the Other moving in tandem, a tiny shred of synchronicity. The shaman raised himself on his hindmost legs, and stood on his haunches. "What do you intend to do, once you have found him?"
Not a nanomoment of hesitation. "I will kill him."
At that, the shaman rocked on his hind legs, then finally reached for a cured leather satchel hanging from an appendage she hadn't noticed. She watched the shaman intently, her nerves on edge. Was it rummaging for a hidden weapon? A secret capsule of poison, to be crushed and flung at her? Her filters didn't wholly keep out the acrid smoke from that pipe. Had the creature already poisoned her?
She traced the outline of her pocket-sun, holstered against a hidden vest pocket, and released the safety mechanism. She could draw and fire the flashstem at a moment's notice, and reduce the savage into a heap of glowing embers with a laser so strong it sucked electrons from the vacuum itself. Her knuckles grasped the ivory hilt of the weapon, ready to draw...just as the shaman produced the wax cylinders, holding them at eye level, very careful to be observed. Their surfaces were covered in a mesh of recording grooves, the edges capped by the telltale bronze adapted for an outdated recording device, a date etched clumsily on its surface.
"This...was all we could salvage from Ground Zero at the Godbomb crater. Two Fusenge lobes." the Shaman said, almost apologetically, as he handed the tubes to Ariachne. "Memory cylinders, if you like, once plugged into the back of an old technocrat's sweaty, wattled neck. There may not be much saved within them, but take them. Decipher and use them at will. Most tech will interface."
With reverence, the Shaman wrapped the cylinders in a strip of purple hide, its exterior glistening in the faint light.
"Find him," the shaman croaked, placing the cylinders into her lap with two different-looking mantis-like hands. "I hatched, suckled and buried three sons, in Uk'mal. This motherless thing made my good boys swear that they would die for him."
Ariachne secured the cylinders inside the backpack compartment of her suit, snug with her 02 tanks, inside a felt pouch limned in off-world foil to keep them safe from most of the elements. As she did, the shaman waved her away.
She didn't go, not immediately. Beads of amber pooled in the grooves between the shaman's eyes. Ariachne bowed as low as her sword-training days advised, swallowed a knot in her throat, then turned and shouldered her pack and began to walk the narrow road along the ragged mountain range. That constellation of eyes glowed on the backs of her eyelids every time she blinked, dogging her every step, long after she crested the horizon and was gone from view.
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by Konstantine Paradias & Edward Morris
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