Beneath Ceaseless Skies #177

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  * * *

  Dry Fallen Leaves

  Aya woke empty and lost.

  Time swirled aimlessly around her, pulsing like blood through her veins. She could not see beyond the inside of her eyes, and the gold that had filled the spaces between her fragmented selves had seeped away. She felt tendrils of death seeping in to fill the void, a reassuring emptiness, freedom from the constant longing and need that came with physical form.

  A familiar sound came to her ears. Shakki. Sha sha sha sha, The rhythm brought her back to the slowness of time, the solidity of reality. It was a sound that should have been accompanied by pain, but there was no pain. Distracted by the sound, Aya lost the tendrils of death. She tried to find her lost oblivion, but instead of searching within her mind, she inadvertently opened her eyes.

  She was home. Mother knelt on the tatami mats on the far side of the room, working on a soldier. The soldier was Aya. Time shimmered and broke. There was no pain, so Mother could not be inking her tattoo.

  In another place, she remembered dying, falling into a state of clarity and peace. An army of tattooed soldiers had marched against her, puppets of the fae. If they were not protected, why did Mother still sketch color into skin? Aya opened her mouth to ask, but instead of words her dry throat only croaked.

  Mother set down her tools. She brought tea. It was warm like golden magic, and Aya choked and knocked aside the cup. Heat spilled down her chest, then quickly passed. Cold damp cloth against her skin brought remorse. A sense of loss. A memory of thoughts that did not belong to her. YMsei. The faery had wanted something. Something important.

  She chased the memories in her mind, but reality shattered any time she came too close. The muddled sensations of life were overwhelming. The gold had controlled her, imposed an artificial order and a clear goal. Peace. The faery had brought her back to negotiate a truce. The only peace she’d ever known was death, and she longed to slip back into that unending darkness.

  Mother brought another cup of tea. Aya let it warm her from the inside, longing for the golden magic that she loathed. Anything to help her find a direction. When the cup was empty, she practiced setting it on the table and picking it up. After several repetitions, she heard the sound that called her back to the present moment. Shakki. Sha sha sha sha.

  She stood on wobbly legs and carefully walked across the room. The girl that was not Aya had dried leaves tattooed on the bottoms of her feet, the fallen leaves of winter. Mother had drawn those very leaves onto Aya’s feet, but these were different. Aya’s leaves were red and black. Faery blood and ground red wings, dark-colored protection against dark fae magic.

  These leaves were tinted with gold, as though illuminated by the first light of dawn. Aya picked up a small vial of golden ink. If she drank it, would the gold pulse through her veins and make her whole?

  “I sent most of the golden wings with a runner to the capital, for the Imperial Army,” Mother said, gently taking the vial from Aya’s hand. “I should have sent it all, but I kept enough for Suki, and for you, if you can bear the pain.”

  Pain was nothing, but Aya wanted death, not golden skin.

  She reached down and touched her sister’s face. In broken mirror-shards of time, she remembered the baby she had held so carefully when she was six, the wide-eyed confidant she had whispered to when she had her first kiss, back before the fae had slaughtered most of the men. Suki’s body was cold and hard like winter stone. Her skin did not swell pink or bleed where Mother poked it with her needles. She did not smell like gold, and she made no sound.

  Tears ran down Mother’s face as she worked. “She always wanted to be like you, except in this. I abandoned her when she was alive, but I will grant her final wish. I will finish her tattoo and keep her safe from the fae.”

  Suki had been alive.

  Aya remembered watching through a golden haze as her sister died by her own hand. Suki had wielded the sword, but YMsei had killed her nonetheless, while Mother stood and watched. Was that peace? The fae could remake themselves on a whim, and even if Aya could negotiate peace with the current generation, it would not last.

  She would let Mother tattoo her with gold, and she would continue to fight.

  But gold would not be enough. The fae would retreat for another thousand generations while only a decade passed here, or perhaps just the blink of an eye. Time was always changing, never constant from one swirl to the next. Eventually there would be magics in silver or green or blue. And each time another color would need to be added to the tattoos, until the pictures held all the colors of the world. Only then could the fae be banished for good.

  Shakki. Sha sha sha sha. Layers of color, cycles of war.

  Someday, the dragon on Aya’s back would be richly colored in blues and greens. She would be adorned with pink cherry blossoms and white water lilies, yellow chrysanthemums and brown fallen leaves. The signs of all the seasons, set in human skin. She would fight against faeries with wings of every color, and when the war was truly finished, she and Suki—and all their fellow soldiers—would find peace in the eternal black of death.

  Copyright © 2015 Caroline M. Yoachim

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other places. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  STONE PRAYERS

  by Kate Marshall

  Mattar comes to the house of Anaharesh in search of a single word; a word to end a war.

  “There are a hundred words for the weight of starlight in a cupped palm,” Anaharesh tells her over a cup of tea, steam patting their cheeks like a distracted auntie. “Only thirty-nine, though, for the smell of frost the morning before a heartbreak.” Anaharesh had not spoken until she was grown; her throat was too full of words not yet born.

  “I only need one word,” Mattar tells her. Her knees ache. She has been sitting too long in this round house with its cedar-wood smell and wind chimes singing spirals in the eaves. Her son’s armies march as she sips bitter tea, carving out an empire mile by mile.

  “The word you want has yet to be spoken,” Anaharesh says. Her teeth click against the rim of her cup; she is watching the herbs settle at the bottom. “I know it, of course. But I cannot give it to you. You must find it when it is formed.”

  “That could be a world away.”

  “Or a thousand years from now,” Anaharesh agrees. She turns her head one way and then the other, eyes lidded. She is listening for something in her own chest, and when she hears it she smiles. “But it is not. It is very soon, this word, if not very close.”

  The splinterman outside stamps his foot, coughs. Mattar knows two words for the impatience of a man obeying orders he does not agree with. In Kilin-kasa, it is spoken with a laugh; the Korondi tongue calls for bared teeth. Neither is quite right for this soldier, assigned to watch an old woman when he wants to march to war.

  “Where do I look?” Mattar asks.

  “You look where the road brings you, Three-Times-Woken,” Anaharesh says. The name is a cat’s tongue against Mattar’s skin. There are thirteen words for what she is, and none of them please her.

  Mattar rises. The splinterman’s feet cuff the planks. He hears her, she hears him, and they both make their backs straight. He conceals his minute disobediences; she conceals her creeping age. When she stoops past the crooked lintel of the round house, the sun falls on her neck like a blade. With the hanging edge of her silk wrap she dabs sweat from her throat, in which there are a thousand words and more but not the one she needs.

  It is a word to end a war, but the war is almost won.

  * * *

  It is the nature of empire to calve new words, and Mattar has walked ruined roads and suffocating marketplace
s to find them. She knows the word for how a Kilin-kasa woman turns a wax-melon in her hands three times before she asks a price—tsa-tsa-tsa. She knows the name the now-dead Enokoans had for her, diabi-sai, witch-mother. She knows, too, the syllables of the arrows of the Hasha as they fall, tulbuku, on Korondi shields and Korondi flesh.

  The Hasha wield their spears precisely and their words carelessly. She envies their poets for their freedom, that they may laugh at blood or weep over it or exult in it, all with the same sounds, the same calculus of lips-tongue-teeth.

  Her gods are not so generous.

  She walks with the splinterman along roads raised brutishly from the marsh. The needs of empire brought stone and sand to a place loved only by droning insects and fat yellow toads, and now these clean curves lie like ribs across the land.

  “Where will we go?” the splinterman asks. The priests have sewn the bones of lesser gods beneath his skin to make him strong; it very nearly saved him. He died six days ago, but she has not the heart to tell him.

  “We will follow the road,” she says. “And see where it leads.”

  The roads of the Korondi empire are carved with a curse. Take me where I need to be. They are only words to those who still have breath to speak them, but a ghost is subject to instruction. He is a creature of externality and precedent; he is no longer anything of himself. The curse will carry him without concern for the demands of geography or the persistent reality of living flesh.

  She sews him to her skin while he is sleeping, with thread spun from the wind of a lesser god’s wingbeats. The thread is dear, and she is loath to part with it, but she can taste an ending at the root of her tongue. Time is contracting. She has no choice.

  He steps off one road and onto another, eight hundred miles and more. The thread tears furrows in her flesh, but she follows before it breaks.

  They stand between the Arch of the Victorious Tiger and the Arch of the Compassionate Vulture, in the city of Wa Shulen. The structures are called by some the Gate of Life and the Gate of Death. She decides this is auspicious.

  The splinterman, alarmed, clutches the air where his blade should be, but the dead bear no weapons. “Peace,” Mattar says. Ithanay to the Hasha, le-sha here, words she has carved again and again into her temple’s walls, and watched them vanish. Peace is imprecise, and the poetry of divinity demands precision. The prayers of the faithful rise unheard, discarded for their formlessness; the gods refuse to intercede, because they do not understand.

  “Peace,” she says again, and the splinterman’s confusion sheds its anger, turns lost. Everywhere the streets are full of the living, but they do not resent the intrusion of the ghost. In this city, the living keep companionship with the dead. The women with bells on their fourth fingers and the men, their lips bisected by a black stain, touch their thumbs together as they pass, brief welcomes for the ghost, even a ghost so clearly hatched of an enemy’s last breath. They are less content to let her pass without comment.

  Her skin is the darkest they have seen; by birth she is Kilin-kasa, with whom they have no quarrel, but her feet first touched Korondi dust, and her dress reflects the style of her upbringing. She does not wear the folds and drapes of this city’s women, and if she speaks she will not have the music of their tongue. She does not belong here. She will not be tolerated long. She must move swiftly, and so she does, the spirit of the splinterman cleaving close. His feet tread on her hem but have no weight to hold it.

  “Where are we going?” he asks. His voice encloses its own echo, tripling itself. He has been dead seven days; on the eighth his ghost will be gone. “How did we get here?”

  “We were carried by our need,” she says. The streets here are narrow. The buildings jut out until the roofs cluster so tightly they blot out the view of the sky. “And we are going to see a god.” There is no reason for the road to bring them here, except for that.

  Her gods are made of stone, but these people worship a beast of bone and sinew. They keep their god and their emperor in the center of their city. He is an emperor of nothing; his empire was broken before he was born, and the Korondi now seek to suck its marrow. But his palace rises from the shell of a god, and so an emperor he is called.

  She marvels at his people’s trust. They have known war. The Hasha who now defend them have, in other times, swept like brushfire through their principalities; the people of Wa Shulen have three-and-thirty words reserved for the destruction those horse warriors bring. And yet there are no walls to keep her from the garden of the god, no guards, no questions.

  They pass through the gate to the god’s garden, as any pilgrim may. The lowest gutter-child is permitted to walk in the shadow of the great creature, to stand in its footprints. And the creature is great. It stands on legs as thick around as six masts lashed together, and its head could host a rich man’s home. The palace sits at the center of its whorled and weathered shell, and looks small.

  The splinterman mumbles soft-mouthed prayers, ill-defined. “I’d heard the tortoise was the largest,” he says. “The largest of all their false gods. But I didn’t imagine it would be such a brute.”

  “You have the shards of its cousin’s bones within you,” Mattar reminds him. “Do not neglect to be grateful in your approach.”

  “How could we kill a thing like that?” he asks.

  He is imprecise even in his questions. Does he mean How will we kill it, when Korond’s blades break the Hasha line, and my brothers march unimpeded into this garden? Or does he mean How did we kill the others, whose bones and shells and claws seed our soil, with which we bind divinity to our flesh?

  “The king will find a way,” Mattar says without joy.

  The lesser gods that once walked Korond’s fields and forests are generations gone, but Mattar has seen a living god die. She was in the mountains of Enokoa when the vulture fell screaming to the mountain-top and watched villages vanish beneath the avalanche that rose to mourn it. The snow drowned Hasha and Korondi, and drowned the Enokoans too, who tended the peaks where the vulture roosted, breathing the thin air and marking their skin with the words the wind made between the rocks.

  Mattar bends to her knees before the massive tortoise, guilt a sharp pain between her shoulder-blades. If it senses her, if it knows what she has done, it shows no sign. It crops a stand of trees with a snap of its jaws. Its eyes are the color of milk; blind, and old, older than the words to describe it. Stairways trace the wrinkles and ridges of its limbs, and dozens of paths lead across its great shell to the palace. From this distance, Mattar sees the banners of the Hasha Alliance moving toward the palace, their bearers smudges against a setting sun. The Aghan or his envoys must be here to call upon the emperor.

  “I am called,” the splinterman says. He has his orders and he remains beside her, but she can see him straining against the song now rising from near the foot of the creature. They are Hasha words, it is a woman’s voice, and Mattar knows what she will find when they follow it, but she nods her head and lets him help her to her feet, lets him lead. He’s taken her this far; she can let him go, if she must.

  They walk through tenderly kept gardens, over red bridges rubbed dull with use and past waist-high shrines to the ancillary spirits that breed and gather in the god’s shadow. At the foot of the god is a smaller garden, a garden of stones. Beyond the stones lies the last archway before the stairs that lead to the god’s back.

  On the tallest rock sits a boy, bare-chested. Below him rest two women; one of them sings, and when the splinterman reaches them she smiles at him. Her song will lure him to the ghost roads, if she continues.

  “You would rob me of my escort?” Mattar asks.

  The singing woman looks to the other, who holds out a flat hand. The singer shrugs, her song dying. They are both Hasha, both young, but the one who has gestured wears the braid of a blooded warrior. Mattar marks the knots of colored thread in her hair, reading her history. She wears the red of a marriage-bonded woman, the green of a mother, the black—almost un
seen against her dark hair—of the Aghan’s own kin. In the heat of the city the women have shed their mail coats, and the thick felts that guard them against the bitter wind of the west; this woman wears only soft white leathers, and Mattar knows who she is.

  “I would beg leave of the Aghan’s daughter to let an old woman keep her companion, for one day more,” Mattar says, looking into the eyes of the woman born to kill the Korondi king.

  “It is not our custom to let the dead walk where they will,” the Aghan’s daughter says. But she has already folded her fingers and dropped her hand, a kinetic language the Aghan himself constructed. Leave us to speak alone, the gesture says. The singer unfolds herself from her perch. She takes the splinterman’s hand as she walks away, and the boy scrambles after them.

  Mattar watches after them. The splinterman has been dead for seven days and she never bothered to learn his name, but once he is gone she will be alone. She finds she is not ready to lose him.

  “I know you,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “You should not be here.”

  “And who do you know that I am?” Mattar asks.

  “You are the mother of the wolf who bites at our flanks,” the Aghan’s daughter says. “You stood on the far slope the day the vulture died. You spoke the spell that destroyed Enokoa.”

  “I spoke no spell,” Mattar says. “I spoke a prayer, and etched it in the mountainside. You were there that day as well. I heard them calling up the ranks. The Blooded Stag has sent his daughter, they said. The demon in white.”

  She smiles, a press and twist of her lips that makes her look old. “So they call me.”

  “I know the weight of names,” Mattar says.

  “And I know the weight of old bones. Sit, Grandmother. There is no war in the tortoise’s shadow, or so the emperor assures us.” The Aghan’s daughter gestures to the rock beside her, and Mattar takes the seat with a grateful sigh. “You have come here in the company of a ghost, without weapons and without a host behind you. Why?”