Beneath Ceaseless Skies #184

by Ian McHugh

  “We are stronger than you, in the dark,” said Zsuszanna.

  “We are more than you,” said Freydis, although how many of those who had emerged from the ravine were still fit to fight, she was uncertain. She looked at Thorfinn as she added, “And we know how to kill you.”

  His eyes were already on her. With great deliberation he drew the wooden practice blade from its sheath. Behind him, the ceorls let their spears fall beside their horses’ feet and did the same.

  “We will pass,” Thorfinn said. “And then you’ll leave this domain.”

  He nudged his horse into motion. Freydis carefully eased off her bowstring, holding wispy-beard’s eye as she did, and turned her mount to follow him. Wispy-beard didn’t move. Styr and the other ceorls fell in behind.

  “Light some torches,” said Styr.

  Brands were lit by those that carried them and passed along the line. Freydis peered uselessly into the dark.

  “Are they letting us go?”

  “I believe they are,” said Thorfinn, looking straight ahead.

  “Are you letting them go?” she asked.

  “I believe I’m doing that, too.”

  Thorfinn’s face was cast in shadow with the light of the torches behind him, so she couldn’t see his expression. Hallveig’s head flopped loosely in the crook of his arm. Her hair glistened in the torchlight with clotted blood.

  “Is the shapechanger really dead?”

  “She is.”

  She could hear the strain in his voice, keeping his feelings in check. She fell silent. The only sounds were the soft steps of the horses and the occasional snort of one or other of them, the gentle clink and creak of tack and amour.

  Thorfinn didn’t speak again until they were clear of the trees. “We’ll send messages in the morning to the neighboring domains. Word will spread. There’ll be nowhere left for them to run.”

  “They must know,” said Freydis. “Why did they let us go?”

  “You saw Zsuzsanna,” he said. “She made the bargain with Aetheling Hafgrim when we were children.”

  “Yet she hasn’t aged,” Freydis said. “Are they immortal?”

  “Or just long lived. Either way, it’s too precious for them to risk.”

  Her gaze fell again on Hallveig’s broken body. “It wasn’t just a double-cross to make us fight the bear. They were too afraid. If you’d failed...”

  “They would have run,” Thorfinn finished.

  “You’ll be aetheling, now,” she said.

  “Me?” Thorfinn harrumphed. “I’d see to it that the thegns elected you, sister, but you must have a mind for your living child. Arnora needs you.”

  “I...” she began, but stopped, unsure if she meant to argue his presumption that she should be aetheling, or that her daughter needed her, or that she could not be both aetheling and the mother Arnora needed.

  He was right on all counts. She would make a good aetheling, but it would be at Arnora’s expense. Vengefulness had already clouded her sight, she realized, as it had Hallveig’s. It could as easily have been her body that Thorfinn was carrying back, now. Or both of them, slung across the saddles of their horses. And then where would Arnora be?

  But it wasn’t that way, and would not be.

  All was dark ahead, except for faint slivers of yellow light around the window shutters of the greathouse. The sky was clear, the stars a bright sweep across the sky with the Moon yet to rise. Freydis let go a breath that she hadn’t realized she was holding.

  She turned her gaze upwards, to the stars wheeling across the sky.

  It was done. They were free.

  Copyright © 2015 Ian McHugh

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Ian McHugh’s stories, appearing in publications including Asimov’s, Clockwork Phoenix 2 and 4, and multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, have won grand prize in the Writers of the Future contest, been shortlisted five times at Australia’s Aurealis Awards (winning Best Fantasy Short Story in 2010), reprinted in Australian year’s best anthologies, honorably mentioned for world year’s bests, and appeared in the Locus and Tangent Online annual Recommended Reading Lists. His first collection of short stories, Angel Dust, was published in late 2014. His full bibliography, along with links to read and hear stories online, can be found at ianmchugh.wordpress.com.

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  BLOODLESS

  by Cory Skerry

  Kamalija knew the traveler wasn’t human the moment the man stepped out from the edge of the woods. He was pretty in a sharp, silver way, as if his nose and cheekbones had been cut into a block of weather-bleached wood.

  Bloodless.

  When he stood in full moonlight, perhaps thirty paces from the wall she guarded, he paused and cocked his head.

  “Peculiar. I was expecting another dirty old man,” he said. A smile dented his uncolored cheeks, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Two out of three isn’t a bad guess,” Kamalija said.

  He barked laughter, surprised, but she remained stoic, leaning against the logs of the wall, her arms crossed over her chest, her breath invisible in the freezing air.

  The ritual circle of her own blood that had been poured into the earth confined her close to the wall’s stone plinth, only about twenty paces toward the forest or back into the town, and she didn’t want him to find out exactly how far she could go until he’d come close enough to regret it.

  Finally, he took another step forward, but just one. “What did you do, to earn such a fate?”

  Kamalija shrugged. “I suppose they ran out of old men.”

  The traveler’s smile spread, a true grin now, baring his scarred gums and wolf teeth in the silver moonlight. “It’s about time.”

  It was Kamalija’s turn to smile. Usually the bloodless who approached the town wall tried to sneak past her, and when she caught them, they cursed and snarled as she cut their wicked throats. It wasn’t that she wanted to chat with the vile things, but after thirty-seven years of guarding the wall from marauding bloodless, this was new.

  Peculiar, as he’d put it.

  “And this is just the West Gate,” he mused. “If I visit the others, will I find such alluring company?”

  “Try this gate first, joskri,” Kamalija said. Only so much patience could be afforded by novelty.

  Even if he somehow made it past her through the gate, she still had the other half of her circle to catch him inside. But she wouldn’t let him make it that far; the inside guards were there to deal with travelers. Kamalija was here to deal with monsters.

  Enchanted bone knives brushed her knuckles on either hand, tucked just under the edges of her fur-trimmed cloak. He couldn’t see them, but he must have known she could be armed faster than he could blink.

  “I’m Lafiik,” he said. “It was good to meet you.”

  He crunched away through the days-old snow. Where a mortal man might have sunken to his knees, the icy crust barely came to Lafiik’s ankles. His panther steps led him out of the moonlight and into the cover of the firs. He looked back once, smiled, and disappeared under the silver-green branches.

  Kamalija felt like a cat stroked from tail to neck. She didn’t move, in case he was still watching, or in case he had friends.

  Instead, she licked her own teeth as she always did after meeting another bloodless. She couldn’t remember what her human teeth had felt like, though she could imagine: stubby and flat, like wood chips, but smooth as stones from a stream.

  These ones, the ones she’d lived with for so long, were wolf’s teeth, from a shaggy white monstrosity her older brother Kamouk had killed just for her. “Only the biggest wolf with the biggest teeth is good enough for my sister,” Kamouk had said. “You’ll be the fiercest bloodless in the Violet Mountains.”

  Kamouk had held her hands in his when they pried her teeth out of her jaw; the procedure had to be performed while she was still alive, or the wolf’s teeth wouldn’t take. She had squeezed
her brother’s fingers until they were purple, screamed and screamed, but he was the one who got sick down the front of his shirt. He never let go of her hands, even while vomit dried in his beard.

  It had been a long time ago, she thought. He had had children, and they had had children of their own. Kamalija could have had grandchildren herself by now, if she’d lived.

  The moon rolled across the sky, eating and shitting out the stars in its path. This was the sun, for monsters; both the kind that came from the demons of the wild and the kind made in the Storykeeper’s cellar. Kamalija watched the mottled disk for hours, waiting for a fight that never came.

  * * *

  “Sorry, Great-Aunt Kamalija. I was so busy helping mother, is all.” Muskii sounded bored, not contrite, but she proffered a cup of herbs and lambsblood.

  Thin clouds glowed over the sun, but they held back its rays. All the snow in the Violet Mountains glared white without glittering. Kamalija considered baring her white teeth, too, bright and savage in the morning light. She imagined fear pouring heavy into Muskii’s red-brown face, weighing her young features into a different shape, one of regret, awe, and respect.

  Instead, Kamalija accepted the sacred concoction with ungloved hands. Her nails scratched against Muskii’s mittens, and the girl flinched.

  The liquid greased the dry nubs of Kamalija’s tongue and coated her throat. Though it was cool, warmth flared in her chest. The heat was a reminder that she was still human in a way that the joskri bloodless would never be.

  While Kamalija drank, Muskii tried to slink away, but she only made it a few steps before Kamalija spoke. “When they cracked open my chest and replaced my heart with the witch star, I was already dead, but your grandfather held my cold hand for every minute of it.”

  The ensuing silence weighed on her fourteen-year-old grand-niece just as she’d intended.

  “Yes, yes, everyone says he was a great man,” Muskii said. “May I go? I have chores.”

  Kamalija handed back the empty mug, wondered how many times she had performed this same action. She could have counted: her years as bloodless, multiplied by days in a year. Could have counted, except that the gift which was supposed to be a nightly libation had become irregular.

  “Yes. Go,” Kamalija said. Muskii’s stout fur-wrapped legs strode over the frozen mud outside the gate, her new hips and breasts accentuated by the belts in her tunic. Kamalija had been that very age when she took sick, when the council voted that even though she was young, she should be given the chance to develop her already impressive talent with a blade.

  She folded her hands over the witch star in her chest, its presence warmer than the sun in the sky, and watched the forest for signs of joskri bloodless who wanted to force their way into the city. The familiar trees lifted her gaze like hands cradling a babe, each of their silhouettes known to her even better than the songs of her ancestors, which she hadn’t sung since she was exalted.

  The west gate was a thick-timbered slab twice the height of a man, across the center of Kamalija’s circle. If another town were to lay siege to hers, she could scrabble up the wall and fight from the crest; if marauders made it inside, she could at least prevent them from leaving with hostages. She’d never had to do any of those things, and she suspected that a long peace was the reason her family sometimes forgot to feed her.

  * * *

  Fresh snowfall had softened the world that afternoon, and as dusk fell, the sky cleared enough to release a bright moon. Kamalija leaned against the wall’s stones, rough and pitted with centuries of weather, and watched the shadows of the woods. She wanted to kill something, wanted to feel the hum of her knives in the chill air. They were carved from her grandfather’s bones, etched with sigils of silver and set with garnets. He’d been a gate guardian, like her, and she imagined she could feel his ghost’s approval when she set the blades to their task.

  A leather wineskin slapped into the powdery snow at her feet, emanating heat and the reek of fresh death. It contained a well-fitted wooden stopper carved in the shape of a wolf’s head.

  Now that he’d given his presence away, Lafiik sauntered out of the blackness between the firs. “I noticed your heirs forgot to feed you tonight,” he said.

  Kamalija didn’t move. “Life should never be stolen.”

  “You’d take mine, wouldn’t you?”

  “If you come so close, you offer it to me.”

  Lafiik chuckled. “It was a deer, O Exalted Guardian. Drink with a clear conscience, but drink now, before it cools.”

  “We wouldn’t feed a gift from you to even the most ill-behaved of our dogs, joskri,” she said.

  His smile faded, but he walked closer. Closer. Her fingers tensed on the handles of her knives.

  “Do you think we’re so different, that what you name joskri is a beast, like a wolf or lion?”

  “I’d sooner sup with a wolf or sleep beside a lion.”

  “Neither you nor I sleep,” Lafiik said, amused. He stopped just outside her circle—he must have been watching her for days or weeks before he’d shown himself, because he knew exactly how far she could reach. Kamalija’s witch star burned its righteous warmth in her chest, a gift for the bloodless warrior against the bloodless anathema. He’d been stalking her.

  “They told me everything they told you,” he said. “They’re lying.”

  Lafiik gripped the hem of his tunic and peeled up his shirt.

  And then he stepped into her circle, as vulnerable as she ever could have wanted. Kamalija knew it must be a trick; she darted forward, knives out, but fell to a crouch three steps short. Snow piled in furrows in front of her boots.

  Lafiik waited, his silver-brown skin so like hers, his nipples and navel dark against that expanse of cold flesh. Purple scars, like hers, ragged down the center of his chest. Was that supposed to prove something? All the bloodless she’d killed had those scars—the demons could propagate in an honorless parody of the sacred ritual.

  “I mean it,” he said. “Feel my star.”

  “You don’t have a star.”

  “A landslide destroyed my city’s wall, and my blood circle along with it. When your circle is broken, you are freed—not dead. Feel my star,” he repeated.

  He was so still he might as well have been truly dead. They would be there all night, she supposed, waiting to fight. She couldn’t understand what ruse this was, and after so many years of nothing, she found peculiarity, and the curiosity that came with it, intoxicating.

  Before she could talk sense to herself, she tucked one blade into the sheath in her sleeve, and still holding the other, she placed a palm against his chest.

  The heat struck her hand a half of a second before she even touched his skin. The contact didn’t burn—it was pleasant, just like her star, the only heat in an otherwise dry and cold existence—but the act burned something else, some part of her she didn’t have a name for.

  “Kamalija!”

  The voice came from behind her, from the gate.

  The strange moment broke, and suddenly the stranger in her circle was an enemy again, and Kamalija struck out with her knife. Lafiik had already ducked back, and the blade dragged then stopped at the line where they’d poured her blood, as if the air was made of clay. She couldn’t force it any further, and she watched his back as he bounded into the forest. He turned around once, light on his feet, and gave her a wave before slipping into the shadows.

  Niinom Redfingers, the Storykeeper, stood in the maw of the gate, with two curious human guards peering over her shoulder. “Tomorrow, we will speak of impurity,” she said, and stepped back inside the safety of the city.

  Kamalija spat toward Lafiik. She hoped he saw her upend his gift and pour it out on the snow.

  * * *

  Her open derision toward the joskri didn’t save her from Niinom Redfingers’s scrutiny at noon. Two guards took her place, live humans who normally served only as a second round of defense, in case anything made it past their bloodless guar
dian. Nothing ever had.

  In spite of her youthful appearance and worrisome behavior, they treated her with deference, dropping to one knee as she approached and rising after she passed. Inside the gate, her circle covered the guard shelters, and Niinom Redfingers beckoned her into one.

  The barracks weren’t in use; it was no time of war. But on the edge of every bed, her relatives sat, their feet flat on the floor.

  Niinom Redfingers didn’t waste any time. “Bloodless Kamalija, you didn’t kill the joskri. Your heirs ask why.”

  Kamalija considered, just for a moment, asking to have her star removed. She could be buried, her bones made into knives for the bloodless who took her place, her soul tethered to the pennant forest in the tallest tower of the city. But her grandfather had served for over a hundred years, and she was barely a third of the way there.

  Besides, she didn’t want to stop slaying monsters. From the moment she had been exalted, the moment she felled her first joskri outside the gate, she had loved being the hero.

  “I would have taken care of it, if I hadn’t been interrupted. This joskri was smarter than most. It calculated where my circle ends, and it even tried to bribe me. I was insulted, and thought to trick it back.”

  “You touched it in a familiar manner,” Niinom Redfingers said. “An affectionate manner.”

  Something flared in Kamalija’s gut, something even hotter than the star that kept her alive, and she struggled to answer in an even voice. “I cannot know how it looked to you, thirty paces away, but it was not affection. Perhaps you witnessed a growing slowness of limb.”

  This was a condition that bloodless guardians endured in their last days, before it became time to donate their bones to the weapons of their successor, and lay down to rest. Her heirs weren’t rude enough to whisper, but she heard them easing their weight forward, alert. It was her nephew, Muskii’s father, who was the currently favored choice, but if he lost the trials, the honor of guarding the gate (and all its attendant privileges) would go to another family.