Beneath Ceaseless Skies #47

by Lee, Yoon Ha

  Issue #47 • July 15, 2010

  “The Territorialist,” by Yoon Ha Lee

  “Throwing Stones,” by Mishell Baker

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE TERRITORIALIST

  by Yoon Ha Lee

  Jeris was feeding the gargoyles when the bone-map rattled. “Captain,” one of the guards said, “I think you ought to see this.”

  “Hold on,” Jeris said as a gargoyle lapped at his hand. He tried not to wince at the rough tongue. Nobody liked the gargoyles. They were ugly, awkward and, frankly, not very useful as the city guard’s spies. But Jeris felt obligated to treat them well.

  The gargoyles shuffled off. Jeris winced again and went into the guardhouse, toward his office. A bone-map of the city of Spine rattled in its frame. His lieutenant, Wrack, was peering at the map. “It looks like Circle Circle Six has gone rogue, sir,” she said.

  Jeris approached the map to study it more closely. It snapped at him. One of the finger-bones broke free of its wiring and barely missed his ear. He would have to talk to an ossuarist about fixing the map. “Wonderful,” he said. “I thought Circle Circle Six had been too quiet the last couple of months.”

  “How large a squad do you want on this, Captain?” Wrack asked. She stepped back from the bones.

  “Small to start,” he said, “twenty or so.” Jeris headed for the arsenal in the back of his office. “Prepare the scouts. We have some people to bully.”

  * * *

  To reach Circle Circle Six, they had to pass through two territories. The first was called Twin Six for its twin territorialists.

  “Just the one extra gun today, sir?” asked Merigon, Jeris’s second lieutenant, as they passed through a tunnel. It stank of piss and dynasties of rats and mold. The guards holding the lamps looked as though they would rather not see what they were walking through.

  “One’s enough if it’s the right one,” Jeris said. Merigon believed in finesse. He carried his issued sword and pistol and a slim dagger. Jeris believed in firepower. Today he had brought the master gun.

  “Coming up on the Trefoil, sir,” said the guard at point, Catrera. “The same two—” Her voice stilled. “They’re not watching us, sir.”

  The fortress, viewed from above, resembled the knot of that name. From below, it looked like a coil of snakes. The sentries at the walls were looking up, not down. Jeris couldn’t see anything in the sky but some drab clouds.

  They approached the entrance. The single watchman had a man’s face, but sea-colored light glowed from the joints of his archaic plate armor.

  “Captain Jeris, to see the honored territorialists Karoc and Piaroc,” Jeris said. Given the watchman’s sky-tilted head, he wasn’t sure he was going to get a response.

  “Piaroc is available,” the guard said flatly.

  Merigon raised his eyebrows at Jeris. They both knew that the twins always appeared together.

  Jeris shrugged. The twins made him uneasy, but they held their territory under tight control, and that made his job easier.

  “The door will open,” the watchman added. It already had.

  Jeris knew the protocols. He led the squad through and entered the parlor. The other guards clattered into the hallway behind him.

  Snake-shaped candles lit the parlor. Piaroc, or possibly Karoc, perched on a stool. She wore clothes more suited to a child, with ribbons and bright buttons. A small, sad-faced fish swam in circles within a tank of luminous water.

  “Captain,” Piaroc said. Jeris had stopped insisting that she use his name when he realized that she and Karoc never remembered the names of any of the ward’s captains, such as that of his predecessor, Terco. “Why are you here?” she asked.

  Jeris said, “If you don’t know, then you don’t deserve to hold the Trefoil.”

  Piaroc laughed. “Circle Circle Six, is it?” Her voice was light and a little too rapid.

  “Tell me what you know,” Jeris said.

  Her eyes widened. All the candles in the room flared. The room smelled of flowers with an undertone of soot. “You wouldn’t be a captain if you thought we could omit the bargaining,” Piaroc said. “We don’t trade our own, Captain.”

  Jeris tensed. “A rogue territorialist?” Circle Circle Six, nominally protected by its more prominent neighbors, had one of the highest turnover rates for territorialists. If it had just been a change of regime, Jeris would have sat back to see how long the newcomer lasted. But the bone-map’s reaction had been a clear warning that he would have to intervene.

  “You need better spies,” Piaroc said. “Disturbances have already come out of Circle Circle Six. We must deal with the circumstances—”

  There was a tiny click. The door behind him had closed. Jeris’s hand moved without thought. He pointed his pistol at Piaroc.

  “—whatever their cause.”

  Jeris’s shoulderblades tickled. He listened for Merigon, for Catrera, for anyone, for scream or sob or curse. Nothing.

  “Piaroc,” Jeris said, “it doesn’t matter what you do to separate me from my squad. We’re all guards.”

  Piaroc unfolded from the stool and paced. Jeris’s pistol tracked her heart. “There are no explanations but power,” she said. “There are no reasons but power. There are—”

  “Spare me,” Jeris said. He swung around and shot the fishbowl. It shattered. All the candles plunged into darkness, and the room filled with water.

  Piaroc swam as lithely as a fish. No, Piaroc was a fish, grown into a full, pointed set of teeth and dragging blood through the water.

  The fishbowl had been Piaroc’s first skin. There had to be another, one that would restore her shape and leave her stripped of magic.

  Jeris, who had grown up by the river, swam well. He would never have risked the fishbowl otherwise. But he needed to breathe. He rolled away from Piaroc’s first pass and felt the fish’s backwash. He drew his dagger, cursing the slowness of motion underwater, when the door opened and water flooded out. The fish became woman-shaped again.

  The people standing at the doorway, crossbows trained on him, were not his. They had no skin. Rather, they were wrapped in paper over red-streaked bones.

  Behind him, Piaroc said, “You break things too readily, Captain.”

  “Anything to buy time,” Jeris said. He was dripping. So was his gun. So was his sword. But not with blood, not yet.

  “Nobody ever buys time,” Piaroc said with delicate scorn. “We bribe it, but no one buys it.”

  “Territorialists,” Jeris said. “It’s a wonder more of you don’t go mad.”

  “And you think we don’t?”

  “This is about Karoc, isn’t it?”

  Her eyes flickered. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she said. She sounded sincere. “But he’s gone and I need him back, and to get him back I need to deliver your bones.”

  Jeris noticed that, unlike him, she was now dry. The candles, however, had not relit themselves. He jerked his head toward the crossbowmen. “Deliver my bones, to whom?” Was the new territorialist holding Karoc hostage in exchange for Jeris’s life?

  “Only rogues use other territorialists as hostages,” said Piaroc. “We know how the boundaries work. Only rogues use captains as hostages. What do captains do when they go rogue?”

  Warned by something in her voice, Jeris whirled and fired three times. A crossbow bolt whizzed past his shoulder; another grazed his side.

  Two of the crossbowmen were down. The third vanished from sight as the swordsmen behind them stepped across the threshold. Jeris rolled and came up in a crouch. He had one more bullet; it was that kind of pistol. The swordsmen fr
oze.

  “You know what happens when I fire the fifth bullet,” Jeris said. “I’m surprised you let me get this far in the clip.” Piaroc’s rapid drying had given him the notion that the water-skin was, as Wrack would have said, metaphysically dry.

  “You forgot something,” Piaroc said from behind Jeris. She sounded resigned.

  “Enlighten me,” he said, and shot her over his shoulder.

  The fifth bullet activated the previous four. Five was not a number to take lightly. The room was awash in light. The candles melted. Shards of glass formed patches of glaze on the floor, and a phantom fish swam across the wall. The four people he had shot, if they hadn’t been dead before, certainly were now.

  “I don’t mind having to exorcise a few ghosts at the end of this,” Jeris said, “if it means I figure out what’s going on faster.”

  Back in his office, the bones would be rattling twice as fast. He hoped it didn’t alarm the guard on watch too much.

  The ghosts’ mouths opened and unopened. They couldn’t respond. He would rather have interrogated them. Ghosts were always a distraction. Still, it beat dying.

  The crossbowmen slumped. More ghosts awaited outside the doorway. Merigon stared at Jeris with misty eyes, his grip loose on the dagger he had valued so much. Catrera’s hair was unbound in her ghostform.

  Oh, we pay for time, Jeris thought at the doll-figure of Piaroc’s ghost. It was time for someone else to share the payment with them.

  * * *

  Making a rendezvous while trailing ghosts both hostile and friendly was distressing. No one trusted a man who relied on the fifth-bullet effect. There were many ways to invite death into someone’s heart. The indiscriminate use of bullet-keyed dead to kill others not only resulted in local consequences, like the ghosts, but a rip-chain of effects that picked the wrong moment to come calling.

  From here on out, he had to work fast.

  Wrack had seen him—them—coming from a long way off. Even she was taken aback. “Sir, what—” She stopped.

  “The Trefoil is unoccupied,” Jeris said. His voice sounded cold and drained, even to himself. “We won’t have to worry about its next territorialist for a while.”

  Wrack took that in. “We’d better hurry, sir. The Mad Mouth let slip that Circle Circle Six is on its way to becoming a sinkhole.”

  That must be the other reason that Wrack’s squadron looked pale and grim. One of her guards, pole-thin Escan, was smoking a noxious cigar, against regulations. Jeris and Wrack didn’t see fit to remark on it.

  “Let’s move out,” Jeris said. Wrack nodded at Escan, who took point. He spat out his cigar and left it smoldering behind him. One of the veterans stomped it out with no more notice than he would have given a cockroach

  A few perfunctory stones were tossed at the squadron, and duly avoided. A bird pecked at the carcass of a gargoyle on a dilapidated rooftop. Jeris shook his head. The gargoyle breeders were always three steps behind, too.

  The Avenue, which served as neutral ground for anyone cocky enough to trust the neutrals, was one of Jeris’s favorite beats. As a first-year guard, he had started out here. He knew the corners and drainage pipes like the calluses on his feet. During those days, he had almost bled to death twice. The troubles on the Avenue recognized him as one of their own.

  The ghosts he trailed reminded him how narrow the Avenue was. Ghosts had a tendency to swallow the incidental noises in their vicinity—Jeris heard that some concert halls retained them for this purpose—and if not for gape-throated Merigon’s vigilance, their own dead ready with ghost-weapons, the original corpse-ghosts would have dragged them into a trap.

  Birds were gathering, and not for the desiccated gargoyle. Their wingbeats passed unnoticed at first. Jeris had a habit of checking the sky, though. Anything that could survive the roofworld’s vicious ecology made a nasty surprise for those below. Jeris snapped, “Crossbows.”

  All at once, the bolts thwapped upward. A dozen birds fell or were knocked aside, staggering in flight.

  “Cover,” Wrack suggested.

  The light in the alley was rapidly diminishing. The unnatural flock coalesced into a deadlier shape.

  They ran, hugging the walls of the buildings on either side. Someone from the rear said, “We’re going to be too late.”

  “The least you can do is act like you don’t believe it,” Jeris said. “Formation!”

  There was no more flock. The wingbeats had become those of a single monstrous raptor, its plumage variegated and its eyes bright as fire. Its shriek split the sky. Then it dived, talons outstretched.

  Nothing that size should have fit into the alley. This bird did. At its plunge, all the windows went dark, as if sunlight and lamps alike had shuddered lightless. The ghosts wavered, becoming more translucent in the wind of its descent.

  Jeris was separated from Wrack. This suited them fine. They worked better with a bit of distance. “Decouple the bones,” he said, and drew his sword.

  Fighting a creature formed by the corrupting influence of a sinkhole took some adjustment. Soft tissue, organs, nerves—these meant nothing. The bones were the crucial target. Break them apart and the construct would dissipate.

  Their instincts did not retool themselves as easily. One guard stabbed the bird’s giant, staring eye. The pupil dilated, but the bird’s head reared up, and the sword, corroded by flame, whipped over the rooftop. Jeris pried loose one joint of the trapped wing, barely withdrawing his bent swordpoint before the wing flexed, constrained but not powerless. All the windows broke, their shards feather-shaped. Several doors fell from their hinges. One building began to collapse in dust around its steel frame. Several of the guards pelted away. One was knocked down by a falling railing and did not get up.

  Ghosts crowded Jeris’s field of vision. He moved by sound rather than relying on sight. Time to find a better vantage point.

  “Up!” he shouted, trusting someone would hear him and be in a position to heed the order. He finally knew why they were required to carry wire spools.

  Jeris backed into one of the gaping doorways and located the stairs. He heard no one behind him as he pelted up them, two steps at a time. The ghosts of Merigon and Catrera led him up a story beyond the one he would have chosen. All right, he thought, this is not the time to be particular.

  The bird, viewed from the window in glimpses, looked vaster than before. One of its wings was half-gone. Its cries were punctuated by gunshots. The bird’s thrashing had become less purposeful, although damaging all the same, and more frantic. He had to dissipate it before its death throes brought down the Avenue. That might crush its bones, but by then it would be too late for everyone else.

  Maybe it was already too late. Jeris’s crowd of ghosts argued for it. The least you can do, he had said. And they had done it.

  Dismemberment. Jeris loaded a new clip. Test the waters, he decided, and fired at the juncture of wing and torso. Three other gunshots flared in response. Holes appeared in the bird, bloodless and feather-tarred. He marked the guns’ positions, cursing his occluded vision. Too bad they had yet to develop a lens that would filter out ghosts.

  Jeris replaced his pistol, working swiftly rather than hastily. He brought out his dart-shooter with its preloaded spool. Its tolerance for error was low, but he didn’t see much choice. All of this sounded easier to pull off when you were watching a demonstration prepared by engineers whose idea of urgent was sometime next year.

  Jeris pulled the trigger. A streak of ruddy light shot out to cross the bird’s convulsing flanks. Three others joined it. The dart-shooter kicked in his hand, then snapped loose of tension with a single red spark.

  With the last trigger point in place, the light flared into lines of taut wire, slicing through the entangled bird. Jeris sprinted for the stairs. He felt, more than heard, the shockwave of the bird’s death explode outward. The building shuddered, then held. We need better architects in this ward, Jeris thought between breaths.

  Wrack, her fac
e taut, greeted him at the base of the stairs.

  Jeris stared out at the street. The small corpses of birds—in some cases, barely recognizable pieces of birds—were interspersed with rubble and immense chunks of bone with the moist marrow exposed. The ghosts trailing Jeris had fractured under the birdform’s weight. They flickered in and out, but it was better than having them crowd his entire field of vision.

  Jeris said, “We should haul these off to an ossuarist, but some entrepreneur will handle that.” His own guards lay among the dead, some of them scarcely recognizable themselves, and all he could wonder about was the number of birds, all those birds.

  “Feel lucky it didn’t fly away and live to nest,” Wrack said.

  The survivors straggled toward the dubious shelter of his building. Its own tenants had either fled or were wise enough not to show up and protest.

  “Roll call,” Wrack said.

  They had lost a quarter of a squadron, some of them promising candidates for advancement. Jeris felt grimmer by the moment.

  “I haven’t seen that many ambushes since our last foray into Six Spiders,” Jeris said. “It’s too bad this territorialist isn’t working for us.”

  Wrack muttered, “They never do.”

  “Well,” Vertu said from the rear, “there was that time the Bramble Technician tangled up the mob we were trying to disperse.”

  “We don’t want them to garrote the crowd in the process,” Wrack said.

  They looked at the wreckage that was all that remained of the Avenue.

  “On the bright side,” said a guard being bandaged around both arms, “there will be plenty of souvenir hunters once everyone comes out of hiding.”

  “We’re not ready to come out of hiding,” Vertu said.

  Wrack glanced at Jeris. “Reinforcements, sir?”

  He picked up the doubt in her voice. “Not yet,” he said. “Who knows if another emergency will come up? And Lieutenant Sesten will need someone to work with.”

  “She could always plunder your arsenal,” Wrack said.

  Jeris decided that she was being facetious. “She’d have to fight the weapons themselves.”