Beneath Ceaseless Skies #233

by Marissa Lingen

  She stared at me, disappointed. “To wallow in our own innocence is prideful.”

  “I don’t want to be innocent!”

  “You’d keep it for yourself? You’re one of so few who can share it.”

  “I won’t. I won’t.”

  I had never driven her to anger before, but I did this time. She got up and walked to the door, the heels of her boots punishing the wood, and spoke low before leaving: “You would make the town a place for empty deaths.”

  * * *

  Just before dawn, I dressed in riding pants and took my father’s gun. The handle ended in the smoothed and lacquered joint of his mother’s hip bone, a pretty piece of work that had cost a great deal. It was evidence of his superstitious nature—duelists held that mother guns gave them luck. Fortunately, my father had never tested the belief during his tenure at the bank.

  The handle felt disturbingly at home against my palm. It was as though my body welcomed another bone, an extension of those it already had. But the weird familiarity could not make up for the fact that I had never shot a gun this small before. I was accustomed to the heft of a hunting rifle, and this was a trinket in comparison. I considered filching the key to the shed, where the rifles were stowed, but decided against it. The key was close to my parents’ room, the shed door heavy and loud.

  I didn’t want to leave Red Leg forever. But I couldn’t quiet another hanged man; the very idea set my skin screaming. I had to find Lillian. She’d tell me what was happening with my bones, and she could convince the folks here to seek a new Gallows Girl. Maybe she’d even come back, once she learned that both I and Red Leg were in need. Ellie would listen to her. As learned as my tutor was, she had admitted that Lillian surpassed her in ability. By the end, she had seemed frightened of her.

  I crept downstairs and slid out the front door, holding the gun awkwardly in my right hand. The street was gray, waiting for the sun to lend it color, and the plains grasses shushed each other from behind the buildings. Even now, Jordan’s saloon would have someone at the counter, and the farmers who lived at the west end would be awake. I took a path flanked only by the sleeping, walking fast and quiet.

  Inside the stables, the snuffling and shifting of the animals made me pause. These were the sounds of home, the great, comforting sighs from the beasts who knew me.

  I was here for the one that didn’t.

  The T-bird was already on his feet, bright-eyed in the gloom. I took a piece of jerky from my pocket and tossed it gently upwards, and he snatched it out of the air with his beak as casually as a person might take a coat off a hook.

  “Will you let me ride you?” I asked. I put my hand on the latch of the stall door. The T-bird tilted his head. He had let the murderer saddle him, but murderers had the confidence to kill, and I was running scared from everything. He could probably hear my heart stuttering, smell my sweat, put the hints together quickly, conclude she is weak. I imagined myself opening the door only to have that weapon of a mouth clamp onto my neck and shake. Or would he use his talons?

  Slowly, I undid the latch and pulled the door open. The T-bird took two quick strides forward so that his chest nearly pressed against my forehead. He was too fast, I had no time to move, and I tried to stand tall without flinching away. His feathers were so close that I could pick out the shafts running through each one, the stripes of gray within the blue vanes. I also smelled him for the first time—a strong dusty scent that reminded me of old paper, mixed with the gamy, coppery tang of meals that bled.

  “Hello again,” I said. He trilled, and it sounded like bubbles rising from somewhere deep.

  Figuring out his tack wasn’t too difficult. The bridle gave me the most pause, because at first I thought it was a feed bag. But the leather pouch fit snugly around his beak, and the reins clipped to raised loops on either side. It was more muzzle than anything else. He didn’t object to it, though I felt guilty for hiding the most powerful part of him.

  The stirrup was too high for me, and I had to find Packett’s stepladder before I could mount up. The T-bird waited. He didn’t move when I set myself into the saddle, or when I turned to stash the gun in the side pouch. I wondered if they were all this obedient, once they had been reared to serve. If I needed him to attack, how would I tell him?

  Just get out. Just go.

  I touched his neck and squeezed gently at his sides with my legs. He walked.

  * * *

  Riding the T-bird for the first time felt like floating. Compared to a horse’s, his strides were huge, but they hardly jostled me at all. He comported himself like most birds, with an eerie sense of balance that kept his body still but bobbed his neck back and forth. I could feel the potential for true running coiled beneath me, a promise of maddening speed, of flying far and fast.

  “Runner,” I said, petting his neck.

  We moved at an easy lope down the thoroughfare. I saw the buildings from a new height, and it was as if I was a stranger, watching them pass. Eventually I stopped twisting my neck to either side and looked straight ahead, letting the town part before me. I pretended that I was merely traveling through, that I had no idea what Red Leg looked like as it came to life in the morning, that no one on the thoroughfare would toss me a bracelet braided from extra twine just because they saw me wandering by their stall most days.

  Those same people bet on how quick you’d quiet him. They loved that you screamed, that you took so long. Something to talk about for days and days.

  The gallows stood at my back. It itched at me, plucked at the hairs on the back of my neck until I shook my head. I didn’t want to turn and look at the beams. But when I heard the sound of hoofbeats, and Ellie’s voice yelling between them, I had to turn.

  “Kal, stop! Stop! I’m with the law!”

  Packett rode next to her, his face crumpled and sad. Sheriff Leed was at the rear. He hid under a hat and behind a huge brown beard and mustache, but I knew what he looked like without them. He’d called on Lillian when he was a clean-cheeked deputy, and they had gotten close for a while, until her training began in earnest.

  If I had left the stables at a full sprint or ridden around the outskirts of town, they wouldn’t have caught me. I knew that then and I knew it as they rode up. But my anger was still too strange—I needed her to nurture it again so that it could keep its name. I needed her to prove that it should be there, pulsing, filling my bones with red. Of course, I also hoped that she might say something new that would break it, and open a window that led back to town.

  “Ellie, your north,” I said.

  “My north, your south. Here we are.” She spoke as though she had never been my teacher, had always been hunting me. I started to cry. “Oh, Kal,” she said, and spurred her horse forward. I pulled up on Runner’s reins and he backed away.

  “I demand the right of disappearance!” I had chewed on the phrase for hours, but when it finally left me it sounded strident, like the beginning of a tantrum. I said it again, steadying myself through sobs. “I demand the right of disappearance from Red Leg.”

  Ellie shook her head. Packett frowned deeper, and Sheriff Leed eyed Runner as if the bird had somehow planned this rendezvous. He spoke to me without meeting my eyes.

  “Who will you duel for that right, Kal?”

  Runner shifted his weight, mirroring my disquiet. “Whoever most wants to stop me. I’m leaving. I don’t want to be followed.”

  “Oh, Hell’s teeth, girl, you’re turning nothing into something all right.” Ellie glared. I sniffled while she addressed me as an inconvenience. She thought me foolish. She thought me mistaken. The anger swelled in me, made my bones creak and whistle.

  “Duel me,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t waste you or a bullet.” She dismounted. “I can bring you back using skin alone. Get off that bird.”

  “You’ll duel? Skin only?”

  “I’ll call it that if you want.”

  I looked to the sheriff, and he nodded. I swung one leg over Runner’s
back, and as I thought about how best to jump down, he knelt so that I only had to step. His large orange eye was level with my own gaze for a brief moment. I almost reached up to undo the bridle straps. If I lost, I wanted him to run to the plains, then past them to places I couldn’t see. But there was no way for him to know that; and maybe his handler had ruined him for the wild. I left him standing indifferently, pawing the ground with one reptilian foot.

  Ellie and I shed our clothes without ceremony. I had no plan. She was older but far from frail—I had seen how spry she could be, catching a cup I had dropped, clambering up a ladder to the platform where I screamed. Wrinkled and wiry, she crouched in front of her horse. She let her hair fall, loosing black and gray curls to lay behind her shoulders.

  The air at the edge of town was crisp enough to give me gooseflesh. My shoes gone, I curled my toes against the hard dirt. I could feel the cold pathways on my face that my tears had left. Neither of us rushed the other.

  “Until one yields,” the sheriff said, impatient. Packett was silent. He had to have been the one who alerted the other two, once he noticed that Runner was gone. But I couldn’t ration him any of my anger, not yet.

  Ellie and I stared. I numbered the bones in my hands as though they were soldiers. When I reached the base of my right thumb, she charged.

  Lillian and I had wrestled as children, but that had been years ago. I didn’t know where to grab Ellie when she hit me. She elbowed me in the stomach first, and I doubled over, coughing. Before I could catch my breath, her arm was around my neck, and she had me in a headlock.

  “Come back now,” she said. “It will be fine.” I couldn’t answer her. My fingers scraped against her arm and I stabbed downward with my chin, but her grip tightened. She’d choke me until I fell unconscious, I realized, seeing gray dots that ate steadily away at the edges of the world. My nails raked until they found blood. She didn’t let go.

  I felt warm. I slipped from sight into the other realm, saw my bones inside me. They glowed red-hot, their edges shimmering like the metal on an anvil.

  They make swords from that, I thought as my windpipe tightened, sealed. I waved my hands uselessly upwards, trying to scratch at her eyes, her face, but her arm blocked them. I couldn’t reach.

  They bend it to make swords.

  My bones glowing, stretching, sighing as they vented some of the light. My arms reached and reached. My hands found her face and my fingers dug into the flesh of her cheeks, and I stretched them too, stretched them so they went deeper.

  Ellie was screaming. Packett was saying, “Sheriff, what’s happening? What’s she doing?”

  I crooked my arms in impossible ways, created angles that cracked. My fingers clawed and burrowed into Ellie’s face. She unwrapped her arm from my neck and I breathed. My sight flashed from bones to earth, bones to earth. Ellie turned away, still screaming, blood hitting the road, and I felt my fingers slide out of her skin.

  The light in me said, You can bend, bend, bend.

  I pulled my arms and hands back into the shapes I knew.

  “Did you know what it was?” I asked. “Did you know I could do this?”

  “You are cursed!” she said. She whirled, showing the four puckered holes on either side of her face, like shallow bullet wounds. I looked from her to the horses. The sheriff’s hand was on the butt of his gun.

  “Skin only!” I shrieked at him, and he didn’t move. Didn’t draw, just sat there, pale. “Do you yield?” I asked Ellie. My light was still hot and spreading, and it felt right, using it, honoring it.

  “You have to come back,” Ellie said. “You have to let me help.” She stumbled toward me. “To use your innocence like this, you can’t—”

  I waited for her, thinking she could not walk straight. But she surprised me, lunging and grabbing my wrist, twisting hard, twisting until something snapped and the light flared. I cried out and knelt, but she kept her hold while I batted at her with my free hand. The light in my right wrist rushed to a new, jagged end, a break in my framework. And I saw Ellie’s bones wrapped around my own, glowing faintly.

  “You can do it too,” I said, gasping from pain. “Or maybe you can’t anymore.” Her face crimped into an expression of disgust, and she shoved me toward the ground with a grunt.

  Instinctively I put my arms out to stop the fall, forgetting that one was splintered at the end. When my chest landed on it, the bone rose through the skin, a white pillar jutting from where a doctor would take my pulse. The pain was a bear trap gnashing its teeth at my wrist, grating, fiery. I willed myself not to pass out. The light seeped from the wound slower than the blood, but the loss of it ached and brought my tears back.

  “Yield, Kal,” Ellie said. But I could not. I’d die before I let a hanged man take any more of this from me.

  They make swords like this, I thought. And smaller things. Daggers.

  I clenched my jaw and gathered the light. It spiraled around the bone, smoothing it, lengthening it, pinching the end so that the break became a point. Long enough to grab, a blade birthed from the end of my arm, reaching over and past my palm. I breathed hard and watched the dirt spread beneath me when I exhaled. I pushed myself up on my good arm. I readied my daggered one.

  “Yield, Kal.” Her footsteps came close.

  “She’s holdin’ something,” said the sheriff, and I leapt up, brought my arm forward in an arc, felt my bone scrape between her ribs and pierce the softness behind them.

  * * *

  A good Gallows Girl wears the gray hood until she must hide the face of another. She does not abandon the town she was supposed to serve, a torn cloth around her bloody wrist. She does not flee on the back of a terror bird in search of her sister. She does not find her, drained of light and life in a town that hangs so many.

  A good Gallows Girl does not carry a mother gun. She does not point it, clumsily, at the sheriff in Broadcreek who surrendered her kin to dangling men almost every day. She does not sculpt her legs until she towers over him in his office, or point her shoulder blades until the tips break through the blanket of her back. She does not become a monster until he weeps. She does not escape with Lillian’s too-skinny arms wrapped around her waist.

  A good Gallows Girl does not know that all Gallows Girls can bewitch their bones. And if she does, she certainly does not tell the others, town by town, leaving feathers where she’s been.

  Copyright © 2017 Mel Kassel

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Mel Kassel writes dark speculative fiction in Chicago, where she also works as a client care coordinator at an animal hospital. Her stories have appeared in Gamut, Interzone, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and elsewhere. You can find her online at melkassel.com and on Twitter @melkassel.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  COVER ART

  “Bird House,” by Jordan Grimmer

  Jordan Grimmer is a concept artist and illustrator with over five years experience in the video games industry. His recent in-house positions include Kobojo Ltd. and Lionhead Studios. He is currently working with Leading Light Design. To see more of his work, visit www.jordangrimmer.co.uk.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.

 

 

 
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