Beneath Ceaseless Skies #47

by Lee, Yoon Ha

  “Sir,” Armain said nervously.

  “Shut up,” Wrack said.

  “Listen,” Kel said. “You’ve seen the disruption this place can cause when it’s allowed to grow in power, unchecked. Imagine if we could source our strength from here. We’d never have to worry about the Horologer’s tick-tock plans or the twins’ duplicity again.” She glanced at Karoc’s head. “Of course, the latter isn’t an issue anymore.”

  “No,” Jeris said. “We’d have to worry about ourselves.”

  Kel gestured to either side. “Such a small mind, Captain.”

  “It’s not that,” Jeris said, gazing at the ghosts with their driftwood faces. He had his own squad of shadows. “Truly, Kel. Everyone said you were one of the best. And you’re still alive—why now?”

  Kel’s regiment stared at him with eyes like ash.

  Jeris flung his sword at Kel and cocked his master gun for the first time in years.

  “That’s not what I think it is,” Kel said, sounding alarmed for the first time. “How did you—?”

  “Compression,” Jeris said. Most of the master gun’s substance was kept in his weapons safe. The longer it spent away from its substance, the more unstable it became. This, however, had seemed an appropriate occasion for it. He wished he hadn’t been right.

  “What did you think Terco’s intentions were, Captain?” Now Kel was laughing. “Did you think he fostered goodwill with the old territorialist out of friendship? Did you think he was being blackmailed? This was planned, if only you’d been paying attention.”

  “I’m here now,” Jeris said, “and I don’t want any part of this.” He couldn’t imagine why Kel would accept a fate as a clockwork piece, for that matter.

  Or maybe he could. He met the woman’s eyes for a forever moment, seeing in them battles lost and lost and lost, the parade of false smiles and frustrated dreams, tarnished honor and rusted hope. Maybe it was easier to stop thinking. Kel was following her captain, dead or not.

  The crowd of ghosts that accompanied Jeris—how was that different?

  I have to make myself different, he thought.

  “I can but follow orders,” Kel said. “Are you with me, Captain?”

  “Never,” Jeris said, knowing he would always wonder what would have happened if he had answered differently.

  Kel’s mouth twisted in regret. “So you’re a failure. Too bad.” She stepped aside, and they saw.

  “Sir?” Armain asked. Her voice shook only slightly.

  “Terco,” Jeris breathed. The floor of the pit was angled toward them, and there was a hole from which a noxious wind exhaled and inhaled. Across the pit was built a frame of blood-drenched wood and nails incompletely hammered in. Across the frame, writhing and grinning, was a skeleton held together with wires of bright metal. Its skull jerked from side to side. The eyes, lidless and inhuman, were nevertheless Terco’s eyes.

  “Death wasn’t good enough, was it?” Wrack said. Mid-sentence, she fired at the skeleton. It twisted. The bullet passed between two cracked ribs, making no sound as the darkness enveloped it.

  Kel and her guards stirred. “It’s a pity,” she said. “I thought you had—”

  Jeris had better things to do than to continue to indulge Kel’s starvation for conversation. “Armain!” he called out. A blur streaked past his peripheral vision as the messenger feather unfurled and went aloft in search of guard headquarters.

  Wrack, never one to waste bullets, shot at Kel this time. Kel made no attempt to dodge or wrest the gun from her. A hole opened in Kel’s chest, then widened, showing not the red of flesh and blood but a seething, swirling darkness. Kel laughed and drew her sword.

  Why doesn’t she have a gun? Jeris thought as he aimed the master gun. “Go!” he said. Wrack, who had some notion of what to expect, pelted away from him. Armain was slower, but he trusted her swift feet would serve her well.

  Jeris pulled the trigger. It depressed with a leaden click. For a second nothing happened, and he thought, I am going to feed that gunsmith to the next batch of gargoyles.

  Then the world went bright and dark as every gun in his vault at headquarters went off at once, channeling its firepower through the master gun. If this doesn’t do it, nothing will, he thought, dropping the gun, and brought up his sword.

  The ghosts remained eerily intact amid the stinging smoke and dust. Jeris reckoned he was lucky his face only stung and hadn’t been blown off entirely. The ghosts, for their part, had engaged in a battle of shadows against Kel’s remaining guards. Kel herself was scarcely recognizable, the distorted silhouette of a woman with a swelling vortex for a torso.

  “Captain!” he heard through the ringing in his ears. Whether it was Wrack or Armain, he could not have said. “Dodge!”

  He flung himself to the ground. A crossbow bolt whistled past him to lodge itself in Kel’s right arm, pinning her to Terco’s skeleton. Another bolt followed, this time for the left arm. Jeris got up and recovered his sword. He started for the skeleton, then reconsidered. Did he want to leave the sink open so it could drag the territory’s reality into increasing madness?

  He had spent too long thinking. A blow struck him from behind. He only righted himself by scrabbling at a block of rubble. His hand left streaks of blood. He stabbed upward, meeting flesh, then pulled his sword free with a sucking sound to chop at the limb of the guard behind him.

  Wrack was the first to return to his side. “Gargoyles,” she said.

  Indeed, above the stairs, gargoyles were flocking. Jeris sighed, expecting they would crumble into corpses in short order. But they circled rather than landing. For once he found their presence reassuring, in case another bird-construct manifested.

  “Hold the others off,” Jeris said. Armain, who had caught up with Wrack, half-saluted with her sword before taking her place at Jeris’s back.

  He had to seal the sink until a reliable replacement territorialist could be found. He sheathed his sword and grabbed the wires, pulling them toward each other. His hands went numb. He snarled and kept twisting the wires together. The skeleton folded in upon itself with appalling ease, and Kel’s form seeped through the spaces between bones as though she had turned into some liquid.

  Jeris was no ossuarist. But he was a guard who lived in Spine, and he knew how certain things worked. He couldn’t hold this shut indefinitely, unless—

  “Cut off my hand,” he said to Wrack.

  She twisted to look at him. She understood.

  “No!” Armain cried. “Look!”

  The gargoyles plummeted in one great flock, croaking and hissing. Jeris let go. They perched along the edges of the sink, holding the wires fast with their talons. One by one they turned gray, sealing themselves in place. Only their glittering eyes gave any indication that they were still alive, in their fashion. Jeris’s own hands were stained gray and black, with the bones showing through in ivory-gold flashes.

  There were few guards remaining, his ghosts or Kel’s. They had both stood down. Jeris did not grudge them this. “Go,” he said, because it was all he could think to say. “Find places to rest, and we’ll say the rites for you.”

  Both sets of guards saluted him before disappearing in wisps of smoke and mist. Jeris didn’t like the implications, but he accepted them.

  “Sir,” Wrack said, “you’re about to fall down.”

  No, he thought, the world’s rising again. Indeed, the stairs were inverting themselves, and they were at the top, back in the territory proper. “Come on,” he said. “We have to meet the new territorialists.”

  Two former guards, with good aim and better range—he could do worse. They could, too.

  Copyright © 2010 Yoon Ha Lee

  Comment on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Clarkesworld Magazine. She is also the author of “Architectural Constants,” in BCS #2 and Audio Fiction Podcast BCS 001 and “The Pirate Captain’s Daughter” i
n BCS #27. She currently lives in Pasadena, California with her husband and daughter.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THROWING STONES

  by Mishell Baker

  In the city of Jiun-Shi the third shift was known as the goblin watch, but some of us were not very watchful. I, for one, was so absorbed in the daily details of living a lie that it took me three months to learn that one of the regulars at the Silver Fish Teahouse was a goblin. By the time our paths collided three years later, I had been promoted to third-shift manager, and my lie had been promoted to widely established fact.

  Often during my shift I furtively watched him where he sat in his guise as a human poet and scribe-for-hire. Sometimes he was alone, his narrow shoulders slumped over a crisp rectangle of paper, his fine writing brush held in his gaunt left hand. Usually there were women at his table asserting their dominance, half-offended and half-fascinated that a man would bother to educate himself so thoroughly. To their credit, he looked the part of that second-class citizen of the Empire of Ru, the human male. But I—a liar smug in my knowledge of another’s truth—pitied those women who approached him in ignorance and waded in out of their depth.

  He always remained tranquil, even as suitors playfully mocked him and threaded their fingers through his bird’s-nest hair. His sharp indigo eyes were always open, even when a woman leaned in to kiss his mouth. He never corrected those who treated him as a common plaything, but without fail a more experienced patron would whisper the secret into her sister’s ear just slightly too late to keep the poor woman from becoming infatuated.

  It was heartbreaking each time to watch the goblin’s latest lover realize that his facial expressions, his exquisite manners, even his soul-stirring poetry came not from the heart—as a goblin he did not have one—but from a detailed study of the human race and its peculiar passions. Most limped on with their lives thereafter, never returning to the teahouse, but a few stopped eating, stopped sleeping, died of starvation or some simple fever. Two had killed themselves, one with poison, one, more appropriately, by drowning.

  The name the poet used was Tuo, a common name in Jiun-Shi, almost comically so. He may as well have named himself “perfectly ordinary man” and had done with it. This along with his absurd hair amused me and kept me from having the fearful reverence I ought to have had for a creature possibly thousands of years old. Younger goblins could not achieve such a perfect human shape, particularly not for the entire night, but despite Tuo’s obvious power and experience, I declined to be intimidated.

  I had long made note of what wearied and offended the great among our guests—the Seeresses in particular—so that I might never repeat those mistakes. But a goblin, oh, that was another thing altogether. How would one even begin? Goblins were known to dart in and out of human society wreaking recreational havoc during the night, but as children of the goddess Ru and creatures of Her divine chaos, things such as consistency and loyalty were antithetical to them. And yet the Silver Fish had hosted Tuo for as far back as anyone could trace history.

  Given the reputation of goblins in general and Tuo in particular, I had decided it was best to simply avoid him, until I realized that he might be the very being who could solve the dilemma that circumscribed my existence.

  The great are accustomed to having favors asked of them, and are on guard for it. I dismissed a hundred clever ways of attracting his notice, of fascinating him, and then one night I managed it quite by accident. At the time my attentions were entirely focused on the Mistress of Visions, who had come down from the Starlight Temple to grace us with her black-robed presence. I was preoccupied with trying to find out more about the Temple entrance examinations without drawing undue attention to myself, but when I turned away from her table I found Tuo staring at me. Instantly the Seeress was forgotten. I schooled my expression into something attentive and curious but unconcerned, a near-exact mirror of his.

  He was alone for the moment, his idle brush resting across his teacup. He crooked a finger at me: a gentle, persuasive gesture. Curling my hands into my skirt just enough to clear the hem from the floor, I glided over to his table and dropped a fluid half-curtsey, grateful that my high collar concealed my pulse.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” I asked politely.

  At the sound of my voice, he leaned forward, as though catching nuances. His eyes skimmed over my face and body with neither furtiveness nor audacity. “Please sit,” he said, gesturing to the chair on the other side of the small tabletop. He continued to watch my movements as I sat, then leaned his jaw into the palm of his hand and looked at me from a canted angle. A smile appeared on his lips, but his eyes remained unchanged, neither warm nor cool.

  “To what do I owe the honor of your attention?” I said, returning his smile politely. This close I could smell him, an odd mixture of ink and lakewater overlaid with a cheap spicy oil that one of the tea-boys might have worn.

  “Kinship,” he said. He reached for his writing brush but did not resume his work, just held it poised as he continued to watch me. “I had not thought to find another like myself, here.”

  That caught me by surprise. “You think I am a Daughter of Ru?” His kind objected to the term “goblin.”

  “You are a daughter of no one,” he replied.

  Now it was I who leaned forward, latching my gaze fiercely onto his for a moment. I had suspected that he might see the truth of me, which was one reason I had avoided him. Affecting restrained indignation, I lowered my voice. “I would request that you be careful of what you say, and how loudly you say it.”

  “While I’m aware of the reputation that my kind have made for themselves among yours,” he said, “I am not here to pull the threads of your life and watch them unravel. I am simply here to observe, and learn what I can.”

  “And what do you expect to learn from me?”

  Instead of answering, he reached across the table and took my hand. The gesture shocked me so much I pulled back, but not before the soft coolness of his palm sent a shudder through my spine. My discomfort caused something so lovely and transformative to happen to his face that it might have been taken for a sudden infatuation, but I had observed too many scholars not to recognize an academic epiphany.

  “Let us retire to an upper room,” he said, “so that we may speak with more privacy.”

  “The others will think....”

  “...that their manager is a courageous and fortunate woman,” he finished. From any other lips it would have been arrogance; from his it was arid, unembellished fact.

  I led Tuo to the back stairway, conscious of the shocked gazes of my coworkers. The tea-boys had long ago learned not to so much as brush their fingertips over my sleeve.

  * * *

  I unlocked one of the larger rooms and swept by the silk-curtained bed out onto the balcony, where I settled carefully into a lacquered chair. He locked the door behind us.

  It was past midnight, but many of the shopkeepers’ stalls were still open. The lantern-lit streets were washed with the tides of their chatter and the smells of spiced fox and yellow rice. Tuo seated himself in the chair next to me, but his gaze floated past the activity in the street and settled on the narrow Lunar Canal, where two six-passenger water taxis carefully passed one another on their ways west and east.

  “How long have you been disguised?” he asked me, just when I thought he had forgotten I was there.

  “Seven years,” I said. He had not yet specified the nature of my disguise, and I knew enough of goblins not to volunteer the whole truth myself.

  “Why?” His tone was insistent but touched with a perfect facsimile of sympathy.

  “My hope,” I said carefully, “is to earn enough money to take the Temple examination and become a Seeress.”

  He turned his eyes to me then; in the dim light they appeared bottomless. “I thought only females of your kind were touched by the Goddess.”

  I felt muscles loosen that I had not realized were knotted.
“So the High Seeresses say. My older brother claimed to have the Sight and was executed for blasphemy.”

  “And yet you believe the same of yourself? Why?”

  I shrugged. “I could name a hundred small things. I draw my hand back just before someone spills her tea. I make people look away from me if I wish not to be seen. Simple tricks of the untrained. But at heart it is a certainty, as present and constant as my sense of smell or hearing.”

  “Does your family know?”

  I shook my head. “I was told that my mother is a tertiary to the Mistress of Shrouds here; I haven’t seen her since they cut my cord. My father is still toiling away in the saltworks, if he lives.”

  “Has anyone seen the truth of you?”

  “Even a Seeress does not often probe past surfaces that appear as expected. Nor a Son of Ru, if you’ll forgive me; I have worked your preferred shift for over three years.”

  Relentlessly impenetrable, Tuo did not acknowledge my implied question. “Will there be a physical examination when you apply at the Temple?”

  “I don’t know. For now it’s irrelevant, as I do not have the money I need. When the time comes, my hope is that I will have a chance to demonstrate my talent conclusively before I am executed.”

  “What would be the purpose of that?”

  “To throw a stone into the pond, as it were. Perhaps open the way for other men, if the ripples I make are large enough.”

  “Self-sacrifice,” said Tuo thoughtfully. “A concept that has always eluded me. Social change, on the other hand, I find both necessary and pleasing.”

  He leaned back in his chair, his eyes falling half-closed in thought. “What intrigues me most about the Empire,” he said, “is that despite its alleged devotion to a goddess of chaos, its structures and hierarchies have remained crystalline for centuries.” He paused, and then the corners of his mouth lifted in a tepid smile. “It occurs to me that perhaps I could be of assistance to you.”