Beneath Ceaseless Skies #219

by Grace Seybold

  There were nine of them, as Amlle had said, all black-blue with vivid blue heads and golden eyes. Jeone could see nothing to distinguish them one from another; all were huge and terrible, like shambling giants in ragged cloaks. Their stench was the same as before, rotting meat and some foul alien odor underlying it, but it was somehow easier to bear in this clean airy place than it had been in the torchlit cave. Jeone took a steadying breath.

  “My name is Jeone Serrica, once of Tene Apaioe,” she said, head high. When in doubt, make yourself look bigger. “We’re here. What do you want of us?”

  Silence. The circle regarded them impassively.

  “Answer me!” Jeone demanded. “I know what you’ve been—what you’ve done in Shasten Dhu. What I want to know is why. Tell me!” As she spoke, she was eyeing the room, calculating distances and heights.

  “Jeone,” Amlle whispered, “they won’t talk to you.”

  “They will,” Jeone said grimly, and with one sudden fluid motion she yanked the harpoon from its loop on Amlle’s back and flung herself across the room at the nearest of the birds.

  This seemed to be the last thing it had expected; startled, the bird hopped back a step, half-spreading its wings for balance, and Jeone ducked under them, the rancid-smelling pinions brushing her face, and hauled herself one-handed up onto the bird’s back. Her fingers dug into loose skin at the back of its neck, while with the other hand she held the harpoon steady, its point against the bird’s spine. “Nine of you. Do you want to lose one? Talk!”

  From across the circle another of the birds moved, very fast. Amlle shrieked and dropped to the floor, arms shielding her head. The bird stooped above her, one claw poised delicately around her skull.

  “Is it to be hostages?” a voice said out of the air. Jeone looked around warily but couldn’t spot its source. “Shall we make a trade?”

  “What for?” Jeone asked, with an indifference she didn’t feel. “I met her yesterday. For all I know, she isn’t even a person. Dragon’s blood, she’s probably worth more to you than me, as part of your experiments. Do what you want with her.”

  “Jeone!” Amlle wailed.

  The bodiless voice seemed unperturbed. “Then let us deal otherwise. What is your desire or need?”

  “What I need—” Jeone pressed slightly harder with the harpoon’s head for emphasis; the bird twitched— “is for you to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing, and, and—to stop,” she finished lamely. The absurdity of her demand struck her all at once. How could she possibly enforce any agreement? Stay here with her hostage forever? Already she was light-headed with fatigue, running on shreds of anger and battle-excitement that were fast evaporating.

  But the bird negotiator seemed willing enough to talk. Or stall? Jeone wondered, but the thought was fleeting. “Our purpose here is simple. We seek children. Like you we are travelling from another place. We stop here to nest, then move on.”

  “Children to eat?” Jeone said, aghast.

  “Mistakes are eaten. Successes are nurtured and bred. Each generation is designed closer to the ideal, in small increments, until the children are us, and we go on.” A brief pause. “Or until we fail. The experiment may not succeed. Some of us do not think it will. Some of us never believed it would.” Another pause. “But it is likely to.” Jeone realized that though the voice had not changed, more than one of the birds must be using whatever mechanism produced the sound from the air. The words had the feel of a long-argued question.

  “How many generations?” Amlle asked from the floor, her voice shaking. “How long until we’re—like you?”

  “Perhaps twenty-four generations. Not more than thirty-six. You are a malleable people.”

  Jeone tried to imagine it and recoiled. “And all that time prisoners in their village, watching their babies die, or be born strangers—that’s monstrous.”

  “You use that word easily,” the voice chided. “Are all things that differ from you so terrible? We are very old, and very wise, and have seen much, much more than you can imagine. We have survived the death of worlds, Jeone Serrica. Do not think you can judge us.”

  “I can,” Jeone insisted. “Cruelty is cruelty.”

  “Then act, if you think yourself so wise,” the voice said mockingly. “Name yourself executioner as well as judge, and kill, and die.” Then, with barely a pause, “Come, be not hasty. We will free you to continue your journey, leave you elsewhere on the worldwall so that none of us may threaten each other again.” Again, it was clearly more than one of the birds speaking. There was dissension among them. That was good. That had to be good.

  She guessed, though she knew it was a very human guess, that her hostage was the one who suggested going their separate ways. As for the one that taunted her—she couldn’t read anything in their expressions, but she thought it might be the one that stood over Amlle. Addressing that one, she said, more calmly than she felt, “I don’t want to kill you. I don’t hate you, not really. And I’ve seen more strangeness than you might think. But what you’re doing is wrong.”

  “Your kind breed animals for their meat and wool,” the voice said. A new one; Jeone was starting to be able to distinguish them by their manner, though she had no guess which one this might be. “We are as far above humans as you are above turkeys and goats. You cannot judge us. You dare not judge us. We are as gods to you. Look upon the world, Jeone Serrica, look upon it as we see it, and understand how small you are.”

  One wall of the room rippled like mist and grew suddenly transparent, and she was looking out over infinity.

  The worldwall spread boundless in all directions, fading into clouds at the limits of her vision. It was a glorious patchwork of green and black and grey and brown, of forests and chasms and every imaginable variety of banded stone, stitched with the silver threads of falling rivers. Details seemed to leap forward as she focused on them: here a vast city hewn in steps from the rock, terraces that must be centuries old all carved with calligraphy three times a person’s height; there a herd of lizards forty thousand strong moving across the sheer cliff face in their inexorable migration; there again the wreck of some massive wooden structure tumbling with terrible slowness through the air, bits of it afire and trailing smoke, tiny figures leaping from the conflagration into the unknown depths—

  In the moment of her distraction, the birds struck. The one she held reared up suddenly, its wings snapping out as it tried to buck her off, and the two nearest leapt in simultaneously from either side. Jeone threw herself flat to the bird’s back as talons swiped past her head, and she drove the harpoon down with all her strength, feeling as she did so the terrible inevitability of the moment. The bird convulsed, squalling its agony. She was killing millennia of memory, killing something perhaps unique in the world. The head of the harpoon grated against bone. Jeone tried to pull it loose, but the barbs of the hunting weapon held it fast. The bird twisted its head around, staring at her in pain and unbelief. In its dying golden gaze, Jeone could see the vanishment of ancient wisdom, the burning of libraries, knowledge lost forever.

  The other birds’ talons swept round again and Jeone dodged, abandoning the harpoon and jumping down to the floor, taking momentary cover under the dying one’s wing and letting one of her darts drop into her hand. No guarantee the poison even worked on such as these, but this had always been a long shot, a mere gesture of defiance. They hadn’t expected fighting, that was clear; generations of the submission of Shasten Dhu had made them unwary. That was her chance, but it was a small one, and she still had no real hope she would escape.

  If this is my death, Jeone thought, let me make it a good one. Dragons of my childhood, attend me now.

  She leapt out of her shelter, and instead of going for the nearest of the birds, as they might have expected, she charged straight across the open centre of the room to fling herself shouting at the one that stooped over Amlle. Its head was nearly in reach, and she flung the dart overhand into its eye, knowing as it left her han
d that her aim was true. Time seemed to pause. All the birds were screaming now and she stood poised in the middle of the open space, another dart held ready, daring them to approach her.

  “I’ve seen this before!” Jeone shouted, waving her free arm at the vista beyond the walls. “I fell from my home, somewhere up there, farther than even you can see. I fell for days. I saw cities flash past me, entire nations, empires human and unhuman. I saw waterfalls a thousand fathoms high, chasms a mile deep, jungles like green fire and skeletons buried in stone. I know exactly how small I am in the great expanse of the world.” She jabbed at the air with the dart. The birds flinched back as one. The one she’d stabbed in the eye was staggering in aimless twitching circles. “And I still matter. Everyone does. Every person is tiny and brief and glorious, and I will not, I will not let you disfigure any more lives.”

  “We will let you go,” the voice pleaded. It could have been any one of them. Then they were all speaking over each other. “Do not kill us.” “How can you even think of killing us? None of the others have ever thought of such a thing.” “We knew they would turn on us sooner or later! We told you!” “We are the last of our kind. We must not die.”

  “Why not?” Jeone demanded. “Why are your lives worth more than theirs? You’ve lived so long and what has any of it been for? You haven’t learned wisdom, or compassion, or—or anything.” She was swaying slightly on her feet now, but her hands were steady. “You’re not gods. You’re just people, and nasty, spiteful ones at that.”

  “We will leave this world,” the voice offered. “We will go elsewhere. You will not hear of us again.” “No! We will destroy you, and begin again here.” “And how many more of us will die before the children are complete? No, we must leave now.” “We will leave.” “Here, we give you lives. We do not want them. We do not want this place.”

  The walls shimmered again, a nauseating ripple, and the dim shadows Jeone had glimpsed earlier grew solid, became people—became men, naked, lips and fingers blue with cold, who slumped to the ground like broken puppets.

  “Take them,” the voice insisted: one speaker only, now, having apparently compelled agreement. “The men of Shasten Dhu, preserved here these decades for our work. They are not harmed, see, they are wholly human. The traits we have given the women will fade and vanish in the next few generations without our continued aid. All will be for them as it was. See, we give you all you ask and more. Only go!”

  Jeone nodded slowly, still not relaxing her wariness. “And you’ll never come back?”

  “Our—way of travel does not allow it,” said the voice. “In this, too, we are alike, Jeone Serrica.”

  The men were beginning to stir now, moving cold-stiffened limbs, touching each other’s faces, exclaiming with surprise. The view of the worldwall dissolved again, and the space now showed a wide white platform unfolding into the sky. “The glider will take you back to your village,” said the voice. “It will listen to young Amlle, and go, and return to us.”

  Or drop us into the sky, Jeone thought. She had killed two of them, and might well expect betrayal. But somehow she thought they were dealing honestly. Whatever their internecine conflicts, there was clearly at least one faction—possibly even a majority—that wanted nothing more than to be shut of the entire situation. Killing all of them would do that, certainly, but so would simply letting them go; it wasn’t as though the people of Shasten Dhu could pursue Shasten Tharva, after all.

  And even if it was a trap, what choice did she have? There was no other way back to the worldwall, beyond what was being offered now. And Jeone wanted very much to settle this, before the battle-rush subsided and she fell asleep on her feet.

  An act of faith, then. She bent down and touched Amlle’s shoulder. “Stand up. Walk.” Then, louder, “Men of Shasten Dhu! Come with me, quickly.”

  Confused but obedient, the men clustered around her. The bird with the harpoon in its neck had dropped full-length on the floor, unmoving, almost certainly dead. I do not want to see if they eat it, Jeone decided. She hurriedly ushered her little flock forward, out onto the platform that opened into the sky.

  Amlle sat, laying her hands flat on the stone surface. “Go home,” she told it tentatively.

  The platform, the glider, lifted slowly, separating from the open room. Jeone, looking back as they moved away, saw white towers, a confusion of alien geometries, and then descending clouds hid the strange fortress of Shasten Tharva as they accelerated away.

  Amlle was gazing enraptured at her hands. “I can feel how this works,” she said wonderingly. “I almost understand it. Jeone, I think I could take you home.”

  For a fleeting heartbeat, Jeone was tempted. To see Tene Apaioe again, to walk among the crystal groves and hear the day chorus singing to the dragons, to find out if her father and her sisters still lived—

  “No,” she said. “They said the glider would return to them; we may only get one trip. And your village needs its people back.”

  “To make babies,” Amlle said. “Jeone, I still don’t want to.”

  “Then leave, if you want to,” Jeone said with a shrug. “You’ll be able to, now. You’ve seen what’s out there, all the strangeness and the wonder. Go, see them up close for yourself, and then come home again, and bring stories back. Your people will welcome news, after being isolated so long.” She smiled. “Mind you, I expect things in Shasten Dhu will be fairly strange for awhile, too.”

  “You could stay,” one of the men offered, the first words any of them had spoken to her. “I don’t know what our village is like, now, but you’ll have a home there as long as you want.”

  Jeone shook her head. “No. It’s a kind thought, but no.”

  “Because we aren’t human?” Amlle asked, with just a hint of bitterness.

  Jeone, despite herself, laughed aloud. “You’re human, Amlle. I’ve seen far stranger folk than you and still known them to be people. Even those—” She waved vaguely at the cloud-shrouded distance into which the floating fortress had disappeared. “They were able to talk to us, treat with us—dragons’ teeth, they were able to mingle their blood with yours, however poorly. Maybe that makes them human. I don’t know. But I do know I have to keep travelling. What I seek isn’t in Shasten Dhu. Maybe it isn’t anywhere. But someday I’ll find it, maybe, if I keep going.”

  Amlle nodded soberly. “Well, then,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you again someday, somewhere down there.”

  “Maybe,” Jeone said, and thought, If neither of us falls; but she didn’t say it. She was so very tired, and the clear air made her giddy. She looked at the sky, the glider, the rescued men, and even her own private, impossible quest seemed achievable in that moment.

  Fall? she thought. Dragons’ blood. I’ll fly.

  Copyright © 2017 Grace Seybold

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  Grace Seybold has lived in Montreal for the past fifteen years, where she spends most of her time dodging oncoming traffic. She works as a copy editor for McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her fiction has been published in ChiZine, AE, Star*Line, Machine of Death 2, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other places. Her name is pronounced “SIGH-bold”.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE LAST DINOSAUR RIDER OF BENESSA COUNTY

  by Jeremy Sim

  Now it just so happens that the day Black Jonas rides into to town, there’s a bit of a blaze going. So he’s bobbing down Main Canal on the back of his pleesaur Essie, and he tightens the reins at the smell of smoke and the clangor of the fire brigade streaming up the canal behind him on their overcrowded skiffs. Black Jonas pulls to the side and takes it all in: the bone-white sunshine, the lapping of water at his boots, the faces of a town he hasn’t seen in twenty years. He scents a certain something about the air that day, hard and lonely, a feeling like a lifeless reef.

  He brings Essie up to one of the old abandoned mooring posts by Benessa Central Sta
tion. He’s back here for one reason only: to find a way back to the continent. Back to his home. But to do that, he needs to find a man named Doone. And he hasn’t seen Doone in a long, long time.

  It’s a quiet time of day, not counting the distant clatter of fire bells. Black Jonas secures Essie to a ring occupied by a massive, rusted droop-chain and walks down the promenade, noting the old storefronts as he sees them. Brackysaur bays still line the boardwalk where land meets canal, big ol’ rectangular cutouts in the once-white stone, used for loading and unloading back in the days of the dinosaur riders.

  He crosses a step bridge, heading for the nearest saloon. It’s a new establishment—Black Jonas seems to recall a line of somber warehouses here—but he figures he’s got to start somewhere. And some things about a man like Doone never change, twenty years or no.

  The saloon’s about half-occupied when he enters. Some of the crowd perks up to ogle at the color of his skin, the newness that seems to radiate off him in an old town like this. But they don’t know that he’s the old one here; it’s the town around him that’s changed. He takes a seat at the back and orders his beer three-quarters dilute.

  “Thank you kindly,” he says quietly when the maid brings it.

  She frowns and takes another canvass at him: his brown skin, his eyes, his conspicuously empty holster. “You new in town?” Her tone is not cordial.

  “No,” he says. “Not really.”

  “Then you been gone a long time. Welcome home.”

  “Long time, yes,” mutters Black Jonas, contemplating his beer. “Home, no.”

  * * *

  There’s a way about these things, Black Jonas has learned. You don’t just go waltzing in to the biggest saloon in town and start dropping questions. Not if you’ve just come in to town riding on the back of a living memory. Not if your skin’s a certain shade. Then it’s best you sit in the corner, sip your watery beer, and observe.