Beneath Ceaseless Skies #219

by Grace Seybold

  Issue #219 • Feb. 16, 2017

  “Gravity’s Exile,” by Grace Seybold

  “The Last Dinosaur Rider of Benessa County,” by Jeremy Sim

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  GRAVITY’S EXILE

  by Grace Seybold

  Jeone Serrica, clinging one-handed to the piton embedded in the basalt above her head, whirled and kicked out with her left foot. The toe of her clawed sandal thunked solidly into the lizard’s lower limb. Ichor gushed over her foot, blue-green and cold. The lizard hissed, its leg jerking wildly, and Jeone yanked her foot free before the spasm could pull her loose from her handhold.

  With her other hand she fumbled in her belt for a weapon. Her dagger was gone, her hammer too precious, her few remaining poison darts no use against a reptile. The lizard, as long as she was tall but far more agile, watched her cautiously from a few arm-lengths away, its lidless eyes flicking back and forth. Jeone wondered if it was intelligent. She’d seen other kinds of lizards in other places, long ago and far above, that had been trained to carry burdens and follow orders. Could she bluff it?

  Keeping her eyes locked with the lizard’s, she bent her knee carefully and untied her dripping sandal, working the knots loose one-handed with the ease of long practice. The thumb-thick spike on the sandal’s tip, invaluable for driving footholds into soft rock or dirt, was probably not long enough to do any real damage to the beast, unless she managed to strike throat or eye. But if its sluggish brain was smart enough to recognize that this was what had just caused it pain—

  “Hyahh!” Jeone brandished the sandal in the air, stretching as far toward the lizard as her handhold allowed. “Have some more of this, why don’t you? Hah!”

  The lizard skittered back a few more steps. Encouraged, Jeone swung her right foot forward, wedging it securely into a crack in the rock, and then in the same motion let go the piton and caught the top edge of the crack with her right hand as her momentum carried her forward and down. The movement jarred her shoulder badly and she nearly lost her grip, but she managed to hold on, still upright and half a body-length closer to the lizard. She waved the sandal again. Bluish drops described a sparkling arc in the air, lit from below by a sudden shaft of sunlight. One struck the lizard’s muzzle and it flinched. “Yah! I’m coming for you! Taste your own blood, monster!” Jeone looked for another handhold, envying the creature its sure-footed grace. Even her many years of climbing down the worldwall couldn’t compare to its suckered feet and cliff-dwelling instincts. But if it didn’t realize how overmatched she was—

  The lizard opened its mouth wide, displaying needle-sharp fangs beaded with venom. Jeone bared her own teeth in return, grinning fiercely. Blood pounded in her ears, and she felt its pulse in her fingertips where they dug into the stone.

  Woman and monster hung motionless against the rockface for an endless moment, eyes locked together. Then, abruptly, the lizard clacked its teeth shut, spun on two feet, and skittered away. Despite its dragging rear leg it was unnervingly fast, and in a few heartbeats it had disappeared around a knob of rock and was gone.

  Jeone let out a long, shuddering breath, the exhilaration of the fight draining away all at once. With exaggerated care, she tucked the sandal into her belt and pulled herself into a more secure two-handed hold, resting her cheek against the cool stone. Her skin was beaded with sweat. The sun was coming up out of the downclouds now, the day well started. She should get moving, retrieve her pitons and hammock and whatever of her worldly goods the lizard’s sudden attack hadn’t scattered into the cloudy void. Jeone smiled bitterly, picturing some far-down kingdom surprised by a sudden rain of camping equipment. It was the sort of thing that just happened every so often, no matter where on the worldwall you lived: rains of tools, fish, bodies, stranger things. One day Jeone herself would no doubt run out of luck, and her falling body would startle someone far below—

  She shook her head, dispelling such dark thoughts. They came every so often, and then passed like clouds. It was a clear dry day, a good travelling day, and she was alive, improbably as that was after so many years and battles: still alive, and still climbing. With a grin that was pure delight in sun and life and movement, Jeone reached for her next handhold and resumed her long climb.

  * * *

  The sun was evening-high, disappearing into the upper clouds and turning them apricot and apple-gold, when Jeone first saw a sign of civilization: a metal hook driven into the stone, and rust streaks below it where something had been attached, a pulley assemblage perhaps. Looking down, she could make out chisel marks in the rockface starting a body-length below, where handholds had been crudely chipped out to make climbing to this point easier. She guessed this must be the upper bound of someone’s territory, and studying the hook with a practiced eye, she judged that it had been cleaned less than a season ago. There were people nearby, people well-off enough to own metal and settled enough to leave fixtures in place and maintain them. Jeone smiled. Food, new gear, a solid surface to sleep on. It wasn’t that she couldn’t survive in the wilderness, even with half her belongings scattered and gone—she’d lived on the rockface with nothing but a knife, more than once in her wandering life, but she was tired and wanted rest.

  She followed the handholds down, keeping a wary eye out between her feet for movement, in case the locals were unfriendly. Though if they were halfway competent, she wouldn’t see an attack coming. An attacker from above always had gravity’s advantage, so most towns oriented their defenses that way. Jeone had helped more than one place set up such defenses: overhangs to conceal defenders, false footholds to crumble under an enemy’s weight, unexpected sheer drops and narrow chimneys to force attackers to pause or descend singly, while locals with harpoons and nets struck from concealment. She knew that kind of warfare well.

  The best thing she could do was to approach openly, without subterfuge, and try to look like she was no threat—which, given her current bedraggled and weaponless state, should be easy.

  The carved-out path became clearer as she descended. At one point there was a head-sized niche beside the trail with a crude clay figurine in it, a winged human adorned with freshly cut garlands of orange moss: a local deity, Jeone decided, and gave it a wide berth. Past that point the hand- and footholds were closer together, so that even a child might have used them, and they deepened until the path was almost a ladder.

  Then it curved downward around an outcropping of rock, such a blatantly obvious place for an ambush that Jeone almost laughed aloud. Someone had built it to convey a message, clearly. She shrugged, and tilting her head back, began to sing as she descended. The song was one she’d learned among the Ataliia, in a tongue no-one spoke for miles above even there. Jeone, though gifted at languages, had forgotten most of the rest of that one, but she liked the tune.

  Memory is the clinging mist

  And time is the falling water

  Downward falls the water always

  But in the mist season the clouds return

  Oh my soul, drift upward like the clouds

  Be tranquil oh my soul...

  The path widened under Jeone’s hands and feet and ended in a level ledge, and she looked down in the last light of the sun over a scene of pastoral calm. Carved terraces spread out below her, thickly planted with vines, and fruit trees slanted outward into the sky, some hung with nets and platforms. Figures moved among them, from grey-headed oldsters to children young enough to still be on tethers, busy at evening tasks. A little girl scattered seeds along a narrow porch and whistled, calling a flock of red-brown fowl to their roost. Three women, one heavily pregnant,
gathered red melons into sacks slung over their shoulders, clambering gracefully from one terrace to another despite their burdens. Cooking smoke drifted from the mouths of caves. A baby cried, somewhere, and was hushed. At the opening of one entrance into the rock, an old woman sat carving a branch, curls of wood fluttering into the sky below.

  Jeone frowned, breaking off her song. Where were all the men?

  “Stranger!” someone called, part hail and part warning. Heads turned upward, stillness spreading in an expanding ripple.

  “Be welcome, stranger,” a clear high voice said beside her ear, and Jeone jumped, nearly losing her footing. Glad of the width of the ledge, she turned her head. A cunningly hidden crack in the rock beside her now framed a lean young woman holding a wickedly barbed harpoon in both her hands. “If you come in peace, be welcome to Shasten Dhu.”

  * * *

  Jeone examined her cleaned sandal with satisfaction, turning it this way and that in the yellow glow of the lantern. The lamplight gleamed on polished brass and dark brown wood and glittered in the quartz embedded in the walls of the village’s guest quarters. Shasten Dhu might not have visitors often, Jeone thought, but it certainly knew how to house them. More or less.

  Her two hosts—guards?—watched her curiously. Amlle, who Jeone guessed was barely two years a woman, still clutched her harpoon in one hand. Everything she said was perfectly pleasant, but she seemed to stand on a knife-edge of vigilance. Her companion, Dormet, was the pregnant woman Jeone had seen before. A more unlikely guard was hard to imagine. But in her too there was a wariness, one that Jeone didn’t think could be accounted for by the mere presence of one unarmed stranger.

  Quite a bit about the way she’d been brought here had been odd, really. Once Amlle had ascertained that Jeone was alone, she had hustled her under shelter with extraordinary haste, claiming a danger of predatory dusk-flying bats. No-one, she’d said, went out at night. It was entirely plausible, and yet to Jeone it had sounded suspiciously glib.

  As she’d passed through the outer level of the village, Jeone had tried to spot the source of the oddness that troubled her. No men, that was the obvious thing, but she didn’t think it was just that. She’d been to other communities where men and women lived apart, whether for part of the year or for always, but they hadn’t felt like this. Out of long habit, she didn’t ask; a nosy stranger was one less easily trusted.

  Otherwise Shasten Dhu looked like a hundred other villages. Amlle led her down the ladder-path past terraces of sun crops and folded water traps, past the openings of home caves where cookfires smoked and larger caverns that might be storage or gathering places, workshops, or farms for shade crops of mushrooms and lichen. It was all very placid and ordinary, and yet Jeone couldn’t help but feel that something was very, very wrong.

  There’d been a brief argument at the entrance to this cavern, between Amlle and a hard-faced older woman who also carried a harpoon (hers, unlike Amlle’s, gouged and stained with use). They spoke in fierce whispers but with frequent gestures at Jeone and at the sky. She tried not to appear too interested. Eventually, the woman waved Jeone and Amlle on, and they entered a long cave with rooms branching off to either side. Dormet brought food and washing-water, and the two stayed with Jeone as she cleaned herself and ate.

  That too was strange, Jeone thought, as she tested her sandal’s thongs. No-one else had come in. Normally there would be a stream of villagers finding reasons to come and see the stranger, eager for tales and news from up the worldwall. Children, if no-one else. She hadn’t so much as heard movement in the corridor outside. Everyone had watched her curiously as she passed through the village, whispering to each other. She’d caught snatches of their conversations, “the stranger” and “the boundaries” and “the sky.” Some of the children were whistling to each other in what Jeone thought must be a private language; she’d been to other places that used whistle-talk or drum-codes or the like, to convey secrets. All that was normal; but no-one had followed her inside, and that, she thought, was very odd.

  Satisfied with her footwear, Jeone smiled at Dormet, who returned the smile uneasily, and sat back down to lay out her gear. Hammer and precious steel pitons, too few. Braided rope, spun from the wool of Thuino’s goats—absurd and ornery creatures, Jeone remembered with a smile, but worth the keeping. Waterskin and wooden eating bowl. Red-striped darts in their bird-bone case, too few again; she could carve more easily enough, but she had no more poison. If those giant lizards were a usual nuisance here, the people probably hunted them, and perhaps she could trade for venom here.

  Her dart-thrower was gone, though, and the pouch of medicines she’d carried so carefully from Adar Hol. Along with her knife, her whetstone, her firestarting kit, her lucky dragon’s tooth (Becoul had sworn it was a dragon’s tooth, anyway), her mist-season clothing, her blood sponges, and her carved spoon. She had three fathoms of waxed linen cord left of her coil. One mitten had turned up, snagged on the rockface, but not its mate. And of course the clothes she’d slept in and was still wearing, sleeveless vest and knee-length breeches, wide belt and tablet-woven knee and elbow bands, and the cunningly made hammock that folded itself into a backpack. All in all, Jeone decided, it was a poor haul, but after all she’d left home with less, and she’d fled the caves of Hisperaan with nothing, and she would make do.

  Dormet began to stack the food dishes. Amlle was gazing at Jeone’s meager possessions as though they represented all the treasures of the deep world. Wanderlust, Jeone thought. It was a disease of the young everywhere. Had she ever been that young?

  “Stay,” she said to Dormet, as the pregnant woman started to leave. “I have questions, and you must as well—?”

  “Oh, yes!” Amlle said eagerly; then, crestfallen, “But we can’t, we really can’t, they’re gathering soon and we have to—” Dormet kicked her ankle, not bothering to be subtle. “We have to go,” Amlle finished lamely. “Stay here and don’t leave. Please.”

  “Dangerous bats?” Jeone inquired.

  “Um. Yes.” Amlle cast a pleading look at Dormet, who shook her head firmly. “Listen, tomorrow, all right? I’ll—we’ll talk tomorrow. This is just—you haven’t chosen a good time to come here, and—”

  “Amlle,” Dormet said, and jerked her head at the doorway. With an apologetic half-smile and a final “Just stay here!” Amlle followed her companion out of the room.

  Alone now, Jeone repacked her gear, including the several pieces of cheese and melon she’d tipped discreetly into her lap during her meal, and the stubby fruit knife she’d tucked into her shorts while passing Dormet the dishes. It would need to be sharpened, but nonetheless she felt better with a weapon, however inadequate. After all, she’d been warned that wandering about was dangerous, and since that was exactly what she now planned to do—

  Jeone shouldered her backpack and tied her sandals at her waist; the toe spikes were handy for climbing but she could move more quietly barefoot in these caves. She padded to the room’s entrance, which was merely closed with a heavy leather drape, the blotchy skin of some unknown beast. Clearly she wasn’t exactly a prisoner here. Either they thought she really would stay put, or they wanted her to wander so they could punish her for trespassing—but that seemed unnecessarily devious when she was in their midst already.

  She listened carefully. Silence.

  Beyond the curtain the corridor was clear. It was an old space, long-settled: floor smoothed by countless footsteps, ceiling darkly burnished with old soot and smoke. Some local variety of glowmoss, orange-red, clung in well-trimmed strips to the wall between each pair of rooms. All closed with drapes, all silent, twelve in total. Why so many empty rooms? If Jeone’s quarters were the usual, each could have housed a family. Then again—no men. Had some recent disaster depopulated the place?

  She listened at a few of the drapes, peered into one room to verify that it was empty (and apparently long untenanted), and then crept to the cavern’s entrance and looked out. It was full night
now, only the faintest patch of glimmer where the sun had risen beyond the upclouds and out of sight. Jeone wondered idly whether it was shining its daylight on her home by now. Not likely, not yet; she’d come down so very far.

  Jeone twisted her head to scan the cliff face. Dim light marked other cave mouths, fires or glowmoss. Or maybe not fires; none flickered. Moss then. Where was everyone?

  There: that was flame, for certain. Firelight shone from one of the larger caves near the bottom of the village, down below where she’d seen the orchards earlier. It was hard to see through the spreading branches, but as Jeone watched carefully, she thought she saw fluttering movement occlude the light, once, again. Maybe there really were bats? All this could be completely innocent, after all. But Jeone had learned to trust the feelings in her bones that presaged strangeness, and right now they fairly quivered with it.

  She eased herself over the edge, bare toes feeling for footholds. As in most villages, these had been deeply carved to make getting around easy, and even supplemented with metal bars in places or flat ledges for resting. Every few fathoms there was a round eyebolt for attaching a child’s tether. It was a trivial climb, and in no time Jeone was down among the trees.

  She lay full-length on an overhanging limb and peered down, just in time to see something flap past the fire. The wind of its passing was carrion-rancid and she jammed her knuckles against her mouth to stifle a choking noise. Other shapes moved in the cave entrance, and as Jeone’s eyes adjusted, she realized that what she’d thought were children were grown women. Which made the flying things—she saw more of them now, gliding in to land—her own size at least, with wingspans twenty feet from tip to tip. “Bats,” she whispered to herself, with a wry grin.

  Whatever they were, they seemed to have all arrived; the air was clear. Jeone made herself wait five minutes, counting breaths, before swinging down from the tree limb and shimmying over to a ledge beside the cave mouth. It was one of the largest caves she’d seen earlier, and from inside she heard the low hum of a crowd. They must all be here, all of Shasten Dhu, and by the stomach-churning stench, some large number of the flying things as well.