Carefully not looking at the dizzying slope of the planet-mountain Kiluoa, Tam focused her eyes on the weigh station ahead. Two hundred and fifty pounds. That was the combined weight limit for this race. Why was she racing again? Her vision blurred as she staggered under the mass of her gear, even as down became left as the gravity fluctuated beneath her.
X X X
An audience with the Sovereign was rare for a junior student of Tam’s caliber. Tam’s abilities were generally weak, and she hoped to serve the Clan quietly and efficiently, doing odd bits of maintenance that couldn’t get in the way of the more important work her peers focused on. Perhaps one day she would garner a position on a bone ship, flying between stars and serving the Clan. The Sovereign shouldn’t even know that she existed, let alone her name, let alone ask to see her.
And the seeing went one way. Tam would never look into those eyes, didn’t want to have her soul unmoored from her body for an errant thought. Looking down, she had a hard time hearing the command. Her, to compete? To represent the Clan in a competition that only happened every hundred years? In a sport that she’d never heard of?
“You will find all the gear you need in the Sports Museum. Take the sled from the display, and enough to fill up your bones to the weight limit. Win, at all costs.”
X X X
Kiluoa was an aberrant planet. There was something like a wormhole in the core of the planet, and gravity did strange things. The planet looked more like a giant cone than a sphere, and gravity generally pointed towards the flattened base of the planet. A track wound its way from the peak of the planet around and around the mountainous shape, plunging ever downward to the bottom. As planets went, it was small, but Tam had heard of smaller oddities in space. The track was over 4000 miles long, and one of the officials had said that pilgrims used to walk their way up the mountain. But today, Tam would be riding down it.
Gentle tittering came from the other racers as they spotted Tam. In fairness, Tam didn’t look impressive. Standing barely five feet tall when not bent over by a sled as long as she was tall, Tam looked, at best, like she’d missed quite a few meals in her life. Her dark hair had been hacked off whenever it got too long, and the rags she barely wore only drew more attention to the body paint that covered her from head to toe in a greyish-white drab. Nothing formal, just another layer of protection from the world.
Each racer put their sled onto the scale in their starting stall. Climbing aboard, most of them had to toss out a few items when they were over the weight limit, as an official watched carefully. Most of the sleds had wheels, and brakes, and other drag mechanisms to slow them down, which puzzled Tam. Her sled had no such things.
X X X
Tam hadn’t even known the Sports Museum existed until directed there by the Sovereign. When she found it, she understood why. Calling it a crypt would be generous. Calling it a closet would be more accurate. Names were carved into the wall, listing the winners of the Kiluoa race. A round twelve racers, their names carved into the stone by a dozen different hands. Tam recognized none of the names, which seemed unusual. A race so important that the Sovereign insisted she win, yet none of its winners had gone on to do anything memorable for the Clan? Not that Tam expected to be remembered for her own work anyway, but even by the strange standards of her Clan, this seemed unusual. Leaning against the wall, a single sled, more brown than ivory. Everything about it screamed hard use to Tam’s eye. The runners were battered and pitted, and the rest of the frame was rickety, with the top of the sled so thin it was hard to believe it would hold even her slight weight. The only adornment was the skull on the front of the sled, eyeholes aimed forward. Exactly the sort of decoration the Clan was known for.
X X X
After tossing her sled onto her scale (twenty-three and a half pounds), and stepping beside it (one hundred and seventeen and three quarters pounds, including the sled), Tam reached over to her bag. She began pulling out bones, and strapping them around the sled. Femurs and tibias along the sides. Fingerbones tucked into anywhere she could. Two ribcages, to arch over here, one inside the other. And one canteen full of life-giving fluid, so she could sustain herself in this marathon race.
Her official blanched at the wobbly pile of gear as Tam pulled out a rope made of sinew and tied it all down. One last check, and she was over by a few ounces. The official began to object, but Tam pulled a bone knife out of her bag and hacked away the last few inches of her hair. Discarding the knife, Tam stepped back on the scale. Two hundred fifty pounds exactly. The official nodded at her, and Tam slipped onto her sled, feet first, one on either side of the ornamental skull. The other competitors, who had been joking around, quieted down as an official started re-explaining the race.
X X X
While the children of Clan did play games, even though Tam was never very athletic, she was rarely picked last. Her team’s equipment never failed, because Tam could fix almost anything using the barest minimum of her energy. Bone bats become stronger in her hands. Balls became smoother and rolled further. Fixing things was as far as Tam would ever get with her power, but she did it all the time, and she was good at it.
X X X
As the race started, Tam’s sled immediately shot ahead of the other competitors. She was able to spare them a quick glance before she raced ahead, surprised that all of them seemed to have their brakes engaged. How did any of them plan to win if they didn’t go fast?
Not that her sled was that fast. It bumped and clattered along the track, and Tam immediately started shaping the runners. She made them stronger and straighter. She made the sled contour itself better to her body, as her sled picked up speed. Her body paint slid from her body, the crushed bone in the paint filling in seams in her sled, the brown of the sled shifting to ivory. Her heart began to race, but she consciously slowed it down. Even if she could average as much as a hundred miles an hour, the race would still take 40 hours. And she suspected that would be a high speed beyond her capabilities, so she needed to pace herself.
X X X
There had been nothing in the Clan archives about the race. How did the Sovereign even know it existed? No times. No descriptions. And, even after hours of searching, no mention of the racers who had brought victory to the Clan. What happened to them when they came back? Why weren’t any of their revenants even available to her? There must be a crypt somewhere that stored their bones, but Tam never found it.
X X X
About a hundred miles in–Tam had seen a mile marker– and Tam felt like she was picking up speed. She’d made the sled more aerodynamic; most of the femurs had been blended into a shield over the ribcages, with just enough space to see through. She took a sip from her one canteen, all she had allocated, to keep her on her edge. The life energy in that one mouthful was sweet, and called to her, begged her to drain all of the blood, all of the life force that had been imbued into it in rituals no one outside the Clan would ever see. But resist the temptation she did, distracting herself as she entered the night side of the planet-mountain with the views of the starscape above.
X X X
Three hundred miles in, and Tam felt the jolt as her right runner hit something, and the sled started to flip. Instinctively, she put out her arm to hold up the sled, and felt the scrape as her forearm met the ground at a hundred miles per hour. Turning off her pain sensors, she focused on fixing her sled, sliding more bone mass off of her shield, reassembling the shattered right runner into a functional edge before lifting her right arm and looking at what remained of her arm.
Not much. Probably the necrosurgeons could fix it, but, really, she’d be better off just grafting on a bone prosthetic when she made it home. For now, she just pinched off her arteries, stopping the fluid loss, and tucked the mangled remnants of her limb down by her side, feeling her blood soak into the bones of the sled, giving it renewed vigor.
X X X
A thousand miles in, and Tam finally realized why the other racers had started so slowly. All of them had packed food for days, and none of them expected to actually race. Somehow they knew how deadly this course was–perhaps they’d done their research in well-maintained archives–and they’d take a leisurely ride down the mountain, and perhaps race at the very end. But Tam had already broken her runner three times, and once flipped head over heels over a large rock. A less skilled necromancer would have died already, but each time Tam had used bones from her dwindling stores to repair her sled. All in on the race now, because if Tam slowed down, it wasn’t clear she’d make it to the bottom. Her canteen of lifeblood was almost empty, drained to sustain her energy even as her lifeforce repaired the sled.
X X X
The wind was finally starting to chill Tam, and it took her long minutes to realize that she’d used the last of her spare bones. The ribcage shield was gone, repairing three more breaks in her runners, and one fracture to the undercarriage where she raced over–or was it through–a boulder right in the middle of the track. She’d lost track of distance, the occasional signposts whipping past her unseeing eyes in a blur as she focused on nothing but keeping the sled intact and racing down the mountain.
X X X
She felt the left runner crack on a rock, and knew she had but moments before she wiped out. There were no bones left to repair the sled with, all that remained atop the ever more rickety device was her own body. Which would soon be tossed off the track when the sled failed. She’d already lost one arm to this race, and now she would lose her life, and fail the Sovereign. Dying was acceptable, but she shuddered for a moment at the shame she would bring on the Clan. She needed a femur to repair the sled, and she still had two.
Hesitating for only a moment, she willed her leg open, the femur sliding out onto the sled, pulled in to repair the broken runner. For a moment, blood poured over the sled, not a drop falling to the ground as she used her own life to repair the sled, before closing up the wound, and praying that the race was near completion.
X X X
Faster and faster she went, truly one with the sled. She’d stopped donating her bones to the sled, and had instead just opened up her back and connected the sled to herself. She felt every rock and bump as she came across it, and made small fixes to the sled as it needed them. She pulled tiny amounts of bone mass from across her body–and knew that she’d spend months or years repairing the damage she was doing. She’d hobble like an old lady for the rest of her life, but her sled would not fail her.
X X X
Three thousand miles. It felt like she’d been racing for years, the constant jarring and bumping as her body hit every rock and pebble on the way down. Her hips ached from holding her body to the sled, her legs long gone. What little fat she’d had had been boiled away absorbing the impacts, and her muscles were sore from twisting the sled to keep it straight. They felt like wiry ropes, flayed by the dust and sand of the last five hundred miles, as she raced through a windstorm. Her sinews were stretched holding her skeleton together, making sure her joints stayed together, and she didn’t scatter her body across the rocks.
X X X
Tam. She still remembered her name. She’d been racing down this track for her whole life, her body in tune with the ground racing beneath her runners, her ribcage stretching from side to side, holding the sled together. She’d turned around at some point, her head now at the front of the sled, the skull that had been there long absorbed into the sled to repair some fix or another. It was hard to see, but Tam no longer needed to see. She could feel the track with every piece of her body, and respond as needed, although she felt slower and slower with her reactions as the miles accumulated. She wished she could look up to see the stars one more time, but her neck was so stiff that her head felt locked in place, and her eyes didn’t seem to be working. Were her eyelids glued shut? Or had the wind scoured her eyeballs?
There must be a wind, but Tam no longer felt it on her skin. She didn’t hear the air past her eyes, nor taste dust on her tongue. She recalled never really smelling much anyway, so she didn’t miss that, and all that mattered now was her sled, and staying on the track. Repairs got harder and harder, as each time she chipped part of her body, there weren’t any spare parts to repair with.
But the race wasn’t over. Down she went, hoping she’d see the finish line around the next curve, or the curve after it. Her willpower drove her on. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought to breathe, but air seemed less necessary.
X X X
The ringing of the bell distracted Martin from his beer. As mayor of Cingart, the town at the base of Kiluoa, his world was normally full of petty politicking. But the Clans had descended on Kiluoa, and so, for this week, he had to make sure he kept his head attached to his shoulders, and preside over one event: the finish of the centennial sled race down Kiluoa. The bell told him that the sensors they’d placed twenty miles up on the mountain had just gone off. But that was impossible, since the race had only started yesterday. The competitors had wisely been taking their time carefully navigating the dangers of the mountain, except for that one foolhardy child covered in fetishes who’d certainly crashed and died in the first hours.
As he lifted up his beer, his assistant raced into the bar. “Mayor, there’s a sled on the mountain, and it’ll be here in minutes!” With a curse, he raced out towards the finish line, seeing a handful of Clan representatives coming along with him. By the time he reached the bottom of the track, he could see the sled with his own eyes. But it looked odd, so he pulled up the binoculars his assistant carried to look more closely. The sled was similar to what he remembered: a bone affair, rather than the high-tech carbon and steel the other competitors had used. Perhaps that child had survived after all, but where was she? The sled had a few rags of clothing streaming from it, and an ivory polished skull at the front. It hit a rock, and he saw the right runner reform itself, the body of the sled becoming thinner, a rag released to float free in the wind, and the sled righted itself, racing through the finish line. It coasted to a stop at the feet of the black-robed representative who had come with the child, who leaned over to whisper something to it. Standing up, he turned to the other officials, none of whom would look him in the eye.
He turned to the mayor, and in a voice that sounds like he hadn’t spoken in a century, said, “Mayor, will you announce us the winner?”
Martin paused for a moment, because there had been nothing in the rules about a sled winning the race without a racer. As he started to object, he saw the skull on the front of the sled turn slightly towards him, and he decided that discretion would be the better part of valor. “Of course.”
X X X
The Sovereign finished carving a thirteenth name on the wall. A battered sled, more a skeleton than a racer, was gently and reverently leaned up against the wall. A sled made of thirteen lives, each one determined to bring honor to the Clan at any costs. A closet that was a crypt, even if, in a hundred years, it would be mistaken for anything but.