Beneath Ceaseless Skies #122

by M. Bennardo

  “There you are, Lady Chaladon.”

  Surprised, she turned to see an imposing, fleshy woman behind the counter, her hair piled high in imitation of the old Imperial style.

  “Did you sleep well, my lady? Begging your pardon,” the woman added deferentially. “Not often we have a Deep Dancer like yourself here.”

  This must be that Mistress Etta that Lia mentioned. So. She knows who I am and apparently we’ve met, or at least she thinks so. Chaladon covertly touched her pendant, seeing the same magical aura coming from Etta as well. Aloud, she said, “I slept quite well, Mistress Etta, thank you.”

  Etta smiled in relief. “Was half worried after Lia come down here. She said you woke up a bit ornery-like. Then again, she’s a scatterbrain if ever there was one—I only took her on for her da needed the coin, though he’d never ask it—”

  “Lia did quite satisfactorily,” she assured Etta.

  “Well, glad to hear that, Lady. Breakfast’s laid through there, if you don’t mind—”

  “Thank you,” said Chaladon, and went in through the archway.

  The sideboard in the dining room was shining rosewood backed by a mirror. Chaladon was sure it hadn’t been there last night; she checked her reflection and was almost surprised to see her own angular blue eyes and bright blonde hair bound up in a topknot. Everything else seemed so strange, so jarring that it was a relief to see that her appearance hadn’t changed.

  The food was plentiful—eggs with calli, cubed potatoes, thick slabs of ham and steak, breakfast rice, fruit. She filled a plate and retreated to a table under the windows, in a shaft of sunlight. In front of her sat a man and woman of middle years, both in sober traveling garb—but the cut of their clothing was a hundred years and more out of date.

  Was she adrift in time? she wondered again. She knew such things were possible. She thought of the Clock of the Long Now, that great timepiece which regulated the passing of ages for all the world, and its ancient, inhuman guardians; cutting a man or a woman loose from the flow of time was well within their power. Or was this a town of spirits, perhaps? Or— A superstitious dread came over her. What if I myself am dead and have not yet realized it?

  Suddenly a horrible sense of disjunction came over her— looking around the sunny dining room, she seemed to see with a strange doubled sight the wreckage beneath: a thick layer of dust, shattered tables lying on their sides, broken windows, gaping holes in the walls, the beautiful rosewood sideboard wrecked, with its doors hanging off and its mirror cracked—

  The mirror crack’d from side to side, she thought, and shivered.

  And Triune Goddess, the people— As that terrible unreality seized her, it seemed as if she were sitting in a room full of corpses that by some sorcery had been given a shallow semblance of life: going about their business, never noticing as their hair fell out and chunks of flesh dropped off and maggots bred in their bodies—

  Stop it! She pinched herself, hard. Concentrate on the here and now. Chalise had always said the true weapon of the Deep Dancer was her disciplined mind.

  Yes. The here and now. And part of the “here and now” was the plate of food before her.

  She studied the eggs, spiced sausage, toasted bread and fruit closely; it all looked just as she would expect. It smelled right, too—leaning over it, she caught the scent of the herbed eggs, the light sweet scent of fruit, the rich aroma of spices and fat from the sausage. But what would happen when she tried to taste it?

  Will I bite down on empty air?.... Or worse?

  She regarded her plate with some unease. She knew the legend of the Deep Dancer Terashi, whose drummer Sarto had been carried off by Hel, the Queen of the Damned; to rescue him, Terashi had taken the Phantom Train to the other side, only to find that Sarto had partaken of the food Hel had offered him and was bound to remain there forever. Could that happen to her?

  It was time to find out, one way or the other. She loaded her fork with some potatoes and took a bite.

  The roof did not fall in, nor did the world suddenly revert to the way it had been the night before. The potatoes were solid, not thin air; they felt and tasted... much like potatoes everywhere. Except—

  No, she realized. They didn’t really taste like potatoes at all. They didn’t actually taste like anything—sawdust, perhaps, or cotton.

  Interesting.

  She held her pendant again and looked down at her plate. It was glowing with the same aura that surrounded everything else. Experimentally, she swallowed, and once again the world failed to change around her. She tried bits of meat, bread, fruit, and it was all the same: for all the taste, she might as well have been eating sand.

  One strike against the “adrift in time” theory, at least. An illusion, then? But who was casting it?

  “Would you like some cha, miss?”

  Chaladon looked up in surprise to see the young girl from before hovering with a silver pot in her hand, watching her shyly.

  “Lia? What are you doing here?”

  “Mistress Etta, she tells me that when I’m done straightening the rooms, I’m to serve in the dining hall. And it please you, miss.” Lia offered a modest curtsey. “Cha?” Once more she held out the etched silver pot.

  Somewhat bemused, Chaladon let Lia fill her cup, studying the girl. Lia was not tall, perhaps shorter than Chaladon herself. Her coloration was different from those of the Central Empire—not a surprise; the farther away from the Center, the more diverse the people seemed to be, almost as if the eternally raging Ever-storm had shattered the Nations in population as well as in body and flung the peoples outward. Lia was olive-complected, with long dark curls, so unlike Chaladon’s pin-straight, blonde hair.

  Somewhere back in her heritage, Lia must have had a River Trader in the family tree, Chaladon thought, and felt a sharp, pang; from her brief time among those daring people, she carried memories both precious and bitter. Yet not pure River Trader, though—the tilt to those eyes bespoke a different lineage, one Chaladon could not quite make out; and the grace in her step was of a different type from that required by a pitching riverboat deck. And the River Traders were certainly long gone.

  “Are you from around here?” she asked.

  Again that quick curtsey. So many of these rural girls tried to emulate the true Imperial bow; still, Chaladon could tell the difference. Lia’s, however, was very, very good. Chaladon suspected she’d be good at the dance, too. “Oh, yes, ma’am. Da owns a spread outside town. Corn and cows,” she added with a small laugh. “Next year, if we can prove up—oh, but I’m sorry, Lady,” she said, catching herself with some embarrassment. “I reckon I told you all this already.”

  “That’s all right,” Chaladon said, smiling. “It sounds lovely.”

  “Well, it ain’t much but it’s good enough for us, ma’am.” She paused. “If’n you don’t mind me asking...what’ll you do today, my lady? It’s not often we get someone...well, like you out here.”

  Her question recalled Chaladon to herself with a harsh jolt. She had no idea what her next course of action should be, or even if she should engage with the townspeople at all instead of trying to leave at the first opportunity. Think, she told herself. What would she do if she had just come to a normal town?

  “I was hoping,” she said slowly, “to speak to whomever is in charge. Your headman or headwoman.”

  “You’ll be wanting Mayor Gemma, then. She lives at the west end of town. Proper house, with a porch and rails,” she added, obviously impressed. “Real glass too, brought all the way from the City itself. She’d probably want to see you anyway, since you’re—” she flushed in embarrassment “—a Deep Dancer and all.”

  Chaladon could not help but smile. It was somehow impossible for her not to like Lia. “You know, Deep Dancers are human women, just like you.”

  “No, ma’am,” Lia said. “We’ve never had no-one around these parts like you.” She fidgeted awkwardly. “I ought to be going. Etta will get mad if I spend so long talking to one gu
est.”

  “Go then,” Chaladon told her, and watched Lia move off. Was I ever that young? she thought. The girl’s simple politeness, and the easy way in which she had spoken of her father and her town, charmed Chaladon, and made her muse wistfully about what it must have been like, to grow up here in such a simple place so far from the Center. The way she moved...if she had been born back in the Empire, a crèche would have taken her for certain. Challia, she mused. It had a nice ring to it. Or Teralia, Hellia, Sthalia... they’d have to change it for the line of Aldara. Aldella? Aldalia?

  Her musings stopped abruptly. Of the five lines of the Deep Dancers, only the line of Chaladon was left... and she was the last of it.

  Enough. Keep moving, she told herself. What next?

  To speak to this Mayor Gemma, of course. She pushed back her chair and rose.

  Now if only she could think what to tell her....

  * * *

  Outside, the air was already beginning to fill with the promise of oncoming heat. Chaladon lingered on the veranda a moment, looking up at the sky, measuring the sun’s position with her fingers. Two hours yet till noon.

  She should have turned west, but this was the first chance she’d had to examine this town closely. Chaladon studied the people in the streets as they moved on about their business. They weren’t Shades, at least. She had dealt with Shades before; some were intelligent, but the ones she had seen simply milled aimlessly, leaving no trace on the world around them, as filmy as an image on the daguerreotypes she had seen long ago. Watching the drovers stir up clouds of earth and shoo flies away from their livestock—breathing in the reek of cattle and horse dung—she had to admit that the inhabitants of the streets were all too real.

  Or were they? For as she watched, she noticed something: none of them left town by the western road. Now and then, someone ventured to the west end of the main thoroughfare—past an ornate house with an iron railing, almost certainly the mayor’s house—only to pause briefly, then turn around and head back. It was so subtle that Chaladon might have missed it; but after she watched for perhaps two fingers against the sky, she was sure.

  She glanced toward the eastern end of town and saw no such pattern there. Farmers bringing their crops into town; riders with bandanas around their necks, men and women out walking, all came and went freely.

  Mystified, she stepped off the veranda into the street and headed west. Stranger still, the people she passed all seemed to recognize her; most nodded to her, and some greeted her with “Good day, ma’am.” Then, as she drew near the edge of town, she saw it: a barely perceptible shimmer, dancing in the air and blocking the entire road. She clasped her medallion again. The glow of magic stretched across the road. Much brighter than the background ambiance, it formed a visible barrier. She laid her fingertips against the shimmering air and felt a substance that yielded slightly before firming into solidity. She pushed harder, and it was as if she had touched the surface of a pool of water: spreading ripples formed around her fingers.

  What was this?

  She ran her hands over the transparent surface, wondering if she could push right through. She leaned on the membrane with all her weight and felt it stretch, but not enough. Someone had put this here. But why? And why only on this end? She glanced back to the eastern edge of town, where the traffic came and went. Is it to keep them in—or me?

  At last she stepped back from the barrier, recognizing that further effort to bypass it would be futile. Whoever made this spell had made it well. She tipped her head back, running her eyes along the barrier to the top, following it up into the sky....

  And stopped, completely caught off guard by what she saw.

  The Rift was gone.

  Above, the sky stretched, an unbroken eggshell blue with the cotton fluffs of white clouds floating lazily past. Had it ever been so pure, so blue before, in all her wanderings? She could not remember. When had—?

  No, she thought, it must have been that way since she awoke. She simply hadn’t noticed, too distracted with the other changes. But if the Rift was gone....

  What did it mean?

  She didn’t know. Hopefully, Mayor Gemma would.

  * * *

  Gemma’s door was opened by an elegant footman in a dark coat. He showed Chaladon into a parlor with another Farsa carpet in red and gold, as well as polished blackwood cabinets and a fireplace whose mantel held gilded pewter candlesticks. As with the hotel furnishings, it seemed—just for a moment—that Chaladon could see devastation beneath: tattered carpet; splintered floorboards; shattered furniture; thick dust....

  Then she blinked and it was gone.

  “Lady Chaladon.” Mayor Gemma was a robust battleship of a woman with iron-gray hair arranged in a row of curls. “May I just say how honored we are to have a Deep Dancer in our little town?”

  “You knew I was here?”

  “But of course.” The mayor’s broad smile reminded Chaladon uncomfortably of the courtiers she had known when the Empire still stood. I suppose politicians are the same the world over. “Please, my lady, take a seat. Edward!” The footman appeared at once. “May I offer you some cha, miss? Direct from the Cha Plains—you won’t find finer, even in the City itself—”

  “Yes, please.” Chaladon settled into a green upholstered chair. Mayor Gemma dismissed Edward with a nod.

  “Of course I knew you were here, Lady Chaladon,” she continued. “Senpost is a small town, and news travels fast. Besides, Lia was all over town this morning gushing about the important guest staying under Mistress Etta’s roof. Triune bless her, when she gets thrilled with a secret, she can’t hardly keep it to herself.” Mayor Gemma smiled with amused indulgence. Edward returned with a cha set, the liquid steaming in a blue-patterned pot, a sugar bowl next to it, and two cups with matching saucers. Graciously, Mayor Gemma poured for her and the sweet, spicy scent of fine cha filled the air. “I see you like the set.”

  “I haven’t seen one like it since my time in the Empire.” Placing the cup and saucer on the edge of the low table between them, Chaladon subtly laid her fingertips on her pendant again. That same magical glow. Carefully, she took a sip. Like the food at breakfast, it was completely tasteless. Hot water, nothing more.

  “Yes, Senpost has strong connections with the Central Empire. The realm of Ut has long been one of the Empire’s oldest allies, and the relationship has been good for both our lands.” Gemma sipped her own cha, steam wreathing her face.

  I’ve never heard of you before. Chaladon studied the mayor over her cup.

  “Senpost is the best stop on the Outer Courier Route; and in my younger days, I used to ride that route, so I know. It’s only been an incorporated town for four years, but the folk’re justly proud of what we’ve accomplished. We’re a friendly town looking to grow.” She cocked one eyebrow. “Which, after all, is why you’re here, Lady Chaladon.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Mayor Gemma frowned uncertainly. ”What you told Etta, last night, when you got in? That you’d reached the end of your wanderings—you wanted to settle down, found a new crèche? Several girls in this town’d make excellent Deep Dancers.... Etta’s girl Lia for one. If you—”

  “I’m sorry, but there’s been a mistake.” Chaladon was surprised at the twinge of muted longing that passed over her when Mayor Gemma mentioned founding a crèche: stability. It seemed she could see herself sleeping each night in the same bed; feel the joy of forming untrained students into full-fledged Deep Dancers; the relief that she would not be the last practitioner of her millennia-old art, that others would follow....

  Lia would make a wonderful dancer. A powerful ache filled her. She saw Lia in full regalia, flowing through the movements of a pattern piece....

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated, when she had mastered herself. “But I did not come to this town to establish a crèche. I came because—” What to tell?

  Mayor Gemma’s face fell. “Oh. Well, I suppose Etta must have heard wrong.” Then her expression b
rightened again. “But all the same, perhaps you’ll consider it? The townsfolk would be thrilled to have a Deep Dancer settle here, specially the parents of little girls who want their daughters educated.... I’m sure you know how rare it is to find learning out here. No offense, my lady, but—” Gemma paused. “You have the look of one who’s been walking the roads for a long time. That kind of life wears on a body. Men and women, they need a place to call home. Senpost could be that place for you, ma’am. After all, this town needs you too. There’s a space for you here, shaped to however you think you’d fit. It’s a quiet, friendly town, the sort of town that’s easy to settle into—

  “—and difficult to leave.”

  Chaladon started. She stared at Mayor Gemma, scrutinizing her, but the mayor seemed the same slick, cheerful, friendly politician as before.

  “I’m—I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said that Senpost is a town you’ll hate to leave, ma’am,” Gemma answered, smiling.

  No. No, that’s not what she said— Again that feeling of unreality swept her. It seemed that beneath and behind Gemma’s pleasant outward appearance, there lurked the dark outlines of something else—

  Then Chaladon blinked and the impression was gone.

  Did I see it? Or....

  “I’m sure Senpost is a wonderful town,” she said, trying to redirect the conversation, “but unfortunately, I cannot stay long. I am just passing through.” Just passing through; somehow, the words made her think of the barrier at the west end of town... and suddenly she knew what to say. “I’m here to look for magic or sorcerous phenomena; anything unexpected or unusual. Has anyone reported any strange happenings?”

  “Well, that’s a shame, ma’am.... Sorcery?” Gemma shrugged again. “Nothing like that around here. We don’t have much truck with sorcery.”

  “Of course.” And yet this whole town reeks of magic. Chaladon decided it was time to move a little further into the open. This too was a dance, in a way: a dance of evasion, of reveal and retreat. She took another sip of the strange, tasteless cha. “I asked because with my art I have in fact detected the presence of sorcery—extremely powerful sorcery—centered on this area. Any information you have would be helpful, even if it’s no more than rumors.” She considered, then added, “I have come on a commission from the Empress of the Center herself to investigate such things.”