Beneath Ceaseless Skies #219

by Grace Seybold

  Careful to keep herself in shadow, Jeone slipped into the cave.

  Torches burned on the walls, infused with something sickly-sweet and pungent that did little to mask the rotting-meat smell of the flying creatures. Birds, not bats, blue-black feathers shading to bright blue crests about the cruel golden eyes and hooked beaks of predators. There were nine of them, even the smallest a head taller than the tallest woman there, crouched with wings folded in a crooning, swaying circle. Through a gap between them, Jeone saw what they surrounded: Dormet, naked, sweat-slicked and gasping, squatting on the stone floor with two other women supporting her. One was the hard-faced guard Amlle had argued with earlier, the other a grey-haired, apple-cheeked grandmother who kept up a constant low-voiced, encouraging murmur as Dormet shuddered and moaned.

  She’s giving birth, Jeone realized. Now? Here? Like this?

  Apparently. A contraction rippled across Dormet’s distended belly, and the birds’ crooning rose expectantly in pitch. One reached out with a wingtip to brush feathers across Dormet’s skin. The watching crowd of villagers murmured something in unison. Jeone couldn’t see their faces, masked as they were by dancing flame and shadow, but they didn’t sound afraid. Awestruck, maybe, worshipful even.

  Another bird touched Dormet, and another, all around the circle. Dormet howled. There was a sudden gush of blood from between her legs, and she sagged against her supporters’ arms. Abrupt silence from the villagers and the birds. Dormet shrieked again, and a bloody, black-haired head emerged.

  Jeone leaned closer, frowning. Hair?

  Feathers.

  Another push, another scream from Dormet’s wide-stretched mouth, and the infant’s shoulders came free: human shoulders, ordinary dark-brown skin, below a too-large head patched with wet black feathers across scalp and face. Monstrous fleshy wings followed, naked flaps of skin, one ending in a hooked claw and the other in long frondlike fingers that flexed and reached. No legs. A spill of dangling intestine, blue-grey and mottled with corruption, and the startling white flash of bone, an exposed spine trailing. More blood spurted. A thin slash of mouth opened in the feathered face, giving voice to a gurgling wail of agony. It had no eyes.

  A monster, Jeone thought wildly, a dying monster. Half infant, half—fledgling—something. How? Why?

  Dormet lay slumped against the midwives’ arms, eyes closed. The crooning began again, this time with a note of terrible sadness, not quite masking the tortured wailing. It was all wrong, all horribly wrong, and almost a relief when one of the birds hopped forward and brought down a claw in a single, surgical stroke across the spindly feathered throat. A last spurt of blood, and stillness fell.

  Jeone, shuddering uncontrollable, couldn’t take her eyes from the tiny motionless body. Her fingers dug into the cave wall behind her, seeking solidity, reassurance. Somehow the cool familiar stone only made it worse, telling her that this was no nightmare but waking abomination. She stood there, transfixed, as the claws came down again, sectioning the body, joint from bone, with grotesquely tidy precision. Solemnly, the birds each took a red-black chunk of the small corpse, and raised it high as though in benediction.

  And began to eat.

  Jeone broke and fled, barely making the cavern entrance before she vomited helplessly down the cliff. Get out of here, get away, her mind sobbed, as she clung retching to the ledge. You don’t need to know what’s going on, you don’t want any part of it, just go, Jeone Serrica, just go—

  But behind her a clamor was rising, and some part of her raged and howled at her immobile body, but she was beyond moving, stiff with horror.

  Carrion breath and a rush of wind, and rising shrieks at her back. The world spun. Talons plucked her up like an insect and bore her away into the sky.

  * * *

  Time moved strangely in flight. Jeone hung limply from the great bird’s claws, unresisting, half stunned with the overwhelming stench and the horror of what she’d seen. Darkness pitched and swung around her, her eyes sparking false lights to fill the absolute black. Sometimes they seemed to swoop through tunnels or scrape between great canyon walls; sometimes she felt her feet were trailing just above terraces or ledges. Once she cried out involuntarily as a wall seemed to loom straight ahead, but her captor flew unhesitating into it and cold needles prickled her skin, and she realized they were in a cloudbank, and then that the blackness had been gradually replaced with grey. It couldn’t be darkness already, Jeone thought. Could they have flown high and far and fast enough to overtake the sun?

  No—the faint light was all around them now, brightening rapidly into an opalescent grey-white, directionless and soft. Now Jeone could make out walls and structures, all composed of some pale stone, all glowing with some internal light. Were all clouds like this inside?

  The great bird released her and she dropped half her height to the floor, which was smooth and bruisingly hard but strangely not cold. Jeone managed to roll onto her back, meeting the eyes of the bird without flinching. In its chatoyant gaze she saw a fearsome and incisive regard, but not, somehow, any cruelty or malice. Then the moment of connection passed and it was again an unfathomable grotesque, watching her with predatory intensity. It twisted its head to preen its shoulder feathers briefly, and then gathered itself and leapt into the air, gyring rapidly upward toward a circle of blackness far above. The sky, Jeone realized: an opening from this prison, whatever it was.

  “Wait,” she croaked, her fear-dried throat cracking the words like eggshells. “Wait, please.” It was gone already.

  Alone, Jeone slowly gathered herself. She was bleeding from long shallow gouges on both upper arms where her abductor’s talons had gripped her, but the wounds weren’t severe. She still had her backpack with all her gear, somehow still on her shoulders despite the mad flight. Even her sandals had stayed tied to her belt. Some good luck after all, Jeone told herself wryly. The thought buoyed her, rekindling a spark of her usual optimism.

  It was a little odd that they hadn’t taken her gear, actually, she thought. She could easily have had all kinds of weapons concealed on her. Were the birds so confident she couldn’t escape?

  Carefully she stood, testing muscles and limbs and finding them intact. The space she was in was small and blank, a bit less than an armspan wide and about two body-lengths from end to end. It was some unguessable distance high, entirely made of that oddly warm whitish stone. She couldn’t make an impression on it with toe-spikes or fingernails. Experimentally she took out her hammer and tried to drive a piton into the wall. The impact bounced the piton out of her hand and made the room ring like a bell. Tiny chips of white flew and drifted to the ground slowly, like feathers. Jeone picked one up and let it drop again; it hung in the air like a leaf in still water, and settled with unnerving slowness. She tucked the mysterious stone chip into her vest and examined the mark she’d made on the wall. It was barely a finger’s-width deep, and the tip of the piton was visibly blunted. She might be able to climb out, eventually, if her equipment held out, but the chances weren’t good. And who knew what was waiting at the top?

  Jeone circled her cage, trailing her fingers along the blood-warm wall. It was hard to focus on, between the stone’s strange texture and its glow, but she thought there was some sort of interruption partway up, a few fathoms overhead. She wondered whether it was worth investigating, then laughed at herself; what else did she have to do, here?

  She placed herself at the end of her cell and stretched out her arms. She was able to lay her palms flat on the opposite walls and still bend her elbows slightly. This would work. She spread her legs, bracing her bare feet likewise on the walls, and took one spraddle-legged step, then another, Balanced now a foot above the floor, keeping constant pressure outward with all her limbs, she slid one hand upwards, then the other; one foot, then the other. She’d done this kind of chimney-climbing fairly often, though more usually down than up. The birds might not be expecting this sort of escape, she thought. In Jeone’s experience, settled townsfolk
usually made the routes around their home places as safe and easy as possible, and she guessed there weren’t many explorer types in Shasten Dhu.

  She could feel her muscles starting to burn with tension, but it was a good feeling: she was in control of her own movements again, she wouldn’t fall except by her own weakness.

  After only a few minutes, she came to the interruption she’d seen: there was a ledge here, and above it the hole widened, unclimbable. Jeone hooked her elbows over the edge and hauled herself up. Not just a ledge, but a corridor: what she’d taken for an unbroken surface was in fact a crossway, with tunnels going left and right. She couldn’t see where either led.

  After some thought, she pulled a thread from her talon-tattered vest, licked it and stuck it to the wall just above her erstwhile cell. Then she chose a direction at random and began to walk. Among the Hisperaan she’d learned to navigate tunnels. You kept one hand on the wall to ensure you didn’t double back on your own steps, you marked intersections with whatever you had (a sudden flash of memory assailed her, the taste of dust as she bit her nails bloody to scrawl crosses on a cave wall in her body’s ink), and you prayed.

  At least this time she had water and a little food. She took a reassuring swallow from her waterskin as she walked. The tunnel twisted beguilingly. Several times she crossed other passages, marking each dutifully. Three times there were other pits in the floor, all empty, and twice there were circles of blackness above her, high and remote. The second time, it didn’t look quite so black; was dawn coming already?

  She lost track of how long she wandered. The maze had the remote clarity of an uncanny dream, through which she travelled like some unbodied spirit. Somehow the silence and sameness and the grey cloudlike light gradually soothed away the horror of the night, and calmness wrapped itself like a cloak around her.

  Then from far away she heard someone sobbing. Jeone quickened her steps at the human sound. More turns and crossing passageways as the noise grew and faded, and then Jeone came out into a shaft similar to the one where she’d first been dropped, though only a fathom or so deep; and there was Amlle, huddled weeping on the floor.

  Jeone slid down the shaft as quickly as she dared, dropped to her knees beside the girl and held her wordlessly until she grew still. “Oh, stranger,” Amlle mumbled at last. “You should never have come to us.”

  “You should have warned me,” Jeone retorted, but without heat. “And I should have stayed in my room, I suppose. Come, it’s water down the cliff now. Where are we, do you know?”

  Amlle nodded, sniffling. “Shasten Tharva. Sooner or later we’re all brought here. I knew it was probably my turn next, that’s why Dormet and I—that’s why Llatero let us attend you. Because she might have died in the birthing, and I might—might die here, or vanish, and we—and I wanted to—before the end, I wanted—” Her vague, tearful gesture encompassed adventure, strangeness, far depths and heights. “We can’t leave the village, they don’t allow it, but you—”

  “I know,” Jeone said softly. “I know.”

  “But now they’ll keep you, you’ll be one of us instead, and they’ll make you stay in Shasten Dhu, or here, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t, I—”

  “They may try,” Jeone said, and suddenly she laughed, and jumped to her feet, pulling Amlle up with her. “Hah! We’re alive yet, and they’re not here just now, are they? There’ll be something we can do. Tell me about this place, this Shasten Tharva. Anything you know.”

  * * *

  It had been, Amlle guessed, perhaps seventy or eighty years since the birds came to the village. Her grandmother, one of the oldest women in Shasten Dhu, had been a little girl when her father and the rest of the men and boys were taken away. Some people said they had all been killed, but some of the women reported seeing men here in Shasten Tharva, from time to time. No-one knew for certain, though, and none were ever brought home. Amlle herself had seen men only twice in her life, travellers passing through the village. “Llatero and Imre tried to make babies with one of them,” Amlle added. “Their mother said it was possible. But it didn’t take. Llatero’s been unlucky with babies, anyway. None of hers live.”

  “None of—” Jeone shuddered, imagining it. To carry dying bird-creatures, over and over— “Amlle, forgive my indelicacy, but how do the women of Shasten Dhu make babies?”

  Amlle shrugged. “No-one knows. We’re all brought here, to Shasten Tharva, sooner or later, and it happens while we sleep. Sometimes the mothers are gone for a season or more, but it only seems like a few days to them.” She curled her arms protectively around herself. “I haven’t slept yet. I’ve been trying not to. I don’t want a baby. Even if it lives, even if they let us keep it. I just don’t. I want to leave.”

  “They don’t let you,” Jeone said.

  “They always find us if we try. I joined the hunters because we’re the only ones who leave the village at all, but we can’t go more than one day’s climb in any direction or they swoop in and bring us back.” Her hand stole to her shoulder. Jeone saw faint scars: old clawmarks, long healed.

  “We’ll find a way,” she promised, with as much assurance as she could put into her voice. “These birds—has anyone tried to fight them? Your hunters—”

  “No, never,” Amlle said vehemently. “What if we—what if they stopped letting us keep any of the babies? If we hurt or—or killed one of them—” She shook her head. “Sometimes people talk about fighting, especially when a birth goes badly, but we’ve all agreed not to. It’s best.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself, or perhaps repeating arguments that had been more convincing in the past. “It really is best, Jeone.”

  That explained why they hadn’t searched her for weapons, and why Amlle (Jeone noticed now with some surprise) still had her harpoon strapped to her back. “But if you killed all of them, or drove them off—” Jeone frowned, thinking. “How many are there, do you know?”

  “Nine,” Amlle said. “I’ve seen nine,” she amended. “There could be more, I guess, but if there are they’ve never come to Shasten Dhu.”

  “How do you know?” Jeone asked. “They could be different ones each time.”

  Amlle laughed. “Now you sound like my mother. She can’t tell them apart either. She can’t even understand what they say most of the time.”

  Jeone blinked. “You can?”

  “Oh, of course. Mostly everyone my age can. Teresi and Llon are the only ones who really speak their language; most of our mouths aren’t right. But we all know what they’re saying.”

  Jeone digested this, remembering the whistle-talk of the children who’d watched her arrival. Three generations of the birds’ experiments— She’d been thinking that the humans in the village were—well, normal, but of course both Amlle’s generation and her mother’s would have been born of the birds’ strange methods, whatever those were. No outward changes, not like the feathers and half-formed wings of Dormet’s baby, but who knew what kinds of things had been done to them inside? Could they even have human babies anymore? Were they human themselves?

  “Llon talks like us too,” Amlle continued, oblivious to the drift of Jeone’s thoughts. “Teresi only whistles. It makes her mother sad sometimes, that she can’t talk, but at least she lived and they let Imre keep her. So she’s lucky, if you think about it. Imre is, I mean. Not everyone gets to keep any babies at all.”

  And what would the next generation be like, the babies of Amlle and Teresi and their cohort? What were the birds ultimately trying to make them into?

  It didn’t matter. If Jeone had her way, it would end here. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to find them, and convince them to let you alone, whatever it takes.” Seven poison darts, a hammer, and Amlle’s harpoon. Not much to convince with, but there they were: you used what you had. “Do you know where we are? What direction from the village, I mean?”

  Amlle nodded. “In the sky.”

  “What?”

  “Jeone,” Amlle s
aid, stricken, “Shasten Tharva flies. Didn’t you know?”

  The chip of stone floating like a feather. A building that floated, a building in a cloud, a fortress for birds—

  Amlle slumped to the ground, hiding her face in her hands. “I thought you had a plan,” she mumbled. “I thought you’d thought of how to escape. We’re never going to get away.”

  “Of course we will,” Jeone said, pulling Amlle upright again. She was rattled, but dragons take her if she’d show it now. “Trust me. We’ll get out of here, one way or another.”

  “What if we fall?” Amlle asked in a small voice. “We could fall into the sky. We could fall forever.”

  At that, Jeone managed a true smile. “I’ve fallen before,” she said. “Sometimes it’s not the end. Come on. Let’s get moving and see what we can find.”

  * * *

  And so they walked. Now the openings they passed beneath every so often showed blue sky, and the pearlescent light of the corridors seemed soothing, numbing, an invitation to sleep. Both of them yawned and stumbled as they went, and more than once they forgot to mark an intersection and had to backtrack when they realized.

  Light-headed with exhaustion, Jeone didn’t notice when things changed, until suddenly it was all different. Vertigo overtook her for a moment as she realized she was standing on the sky—no, on a clear slab of crystal, flawlessly transparent, that filled the round room they were in like a depthless pool. Above was sky, below was sky, and all around the edges of the room were shadows, figures, dimly glimpsed within the stone as though behind a waterfall. Jeone couldn’t make them out clearly, blink as she might, and then she forgot to try as her breath stopped in her throat, for between her and them, suddenly, between one heartbeat and the next, were the birds.