Beneath Ceaseless Skies #220

by Sara Saab

  “Good. Our ride is here.”

  I become aware of a shape, low and dark as a log or a hunting crocodile. It’s a boat, silent, and filled with silent men who offer us hands. Once Kaeler and I are pulled aboard, the men rocket us between the banks using their hands as paddles. The oubliette is gone and the city bridges arc majestically over us. The movement, and the calming shushes of the ghosts, lull me to the edge of sleep just as the alarm is raised.

  Bells ring out from the Judicial Plaza and voices call out from bridge to bridge above us.

  “Gods,” mutters one of the boatmen. “I didn’t expect them to be so fast.”

  “Hide,” whispers a ghost in my head.

  “We need to get off the river,” says Kaeler. “If they know of the escape, they’ll have already dropped the gate. There’s no way out, this way.”

  We continue for ten minutes—long enough for the silhouettes of pursuing boats to come into view behind us—before grounding suddenly and violently against an abandoned stone boat ramp. The four boatmen jump out and brandish blades. I cannot see their faces, but I see no trace of fear or hesitation. One of them claps Kaeler on the shoulder.

  “With me, Lash,” says Kaeler, leaping from the boat and offering his hand. His eyes flicker in the moonlight. “Our brothers will buy us a delay.”

  * * *

  I try to run, but my joints have suffered and I can’t keep up. Before we even make it up the boat ramp, Kaeler makes an exasperated noise and crouches so I can climb onto his back.

  He stands, holding my forearms together with a single hand. “You weigh nothing, brother.” He exhales, and jogs into the cluster of merchant buildings, all of which are dark and closed for the night. Just as we are concealed, we hear shouts and fighting. The guards have arrived at the boat ramp.

  Kaeler must feel my tension because he pats my arm and says “We’ll have time. The men I brought are demons in battle.”

  As if on cue, the shouts from the ramp turn to shrieks and the sounds of armored bodies—the city guards, I realize—collapsing onto stone and splashing into the river. There is a hush, then, and I see all four of our companions trotting into view, crouched low and gleaming with sweat and blood.

  The ghosts churn within me, but I can’t tell if they are excited by the violence or disconcerted by it.

  I drop from Kaeler’s shoulders and we all confer in the shadowed entrance of a warehouse.

  “There were two boats in pursuit,” says the lead boatman. “Three men to a boat. Sentries, though, not soldiers.” He grins. “They stood no chance.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  The boatman looks at me for the first time, for a long time, then raises his sword hilt to the center of his chest and nods to me. “It is an honor.”

  I do not know why.

  * * *

  I am in a box. Hidden in a warehouse, in the dark, with Amarana and its ghosts. “Until the city lowers its guard,” said Kaeler.

  It is as timeless as the prison beneath the Judicial Plaza. But even in the timelessness and lonely darkness there is no peace. The ghosts of Amarana are awake, sharks at chum.

  What do they want from me?

  “Remember,” one hisses.

  I remember only pieces.

  “What do you remember?

  I remember a man, younger than me, and a hollow in his abdomen where his organs had been.

  I remember something in the hole—clockwork and wires—and a voice, whispering as if to itself:

  “silver to copper, then

  silver to black;

  silver to copper, then

  silver to black”

  and there was tension in the voice—concentration, and perhaps fear of the terrible potential.

  “What do you remember?”

  Steady hands. A voice—Kaeler’s—saying “Amarana will fall.”

  “What do you remember?”

  Five toned bodies scooped out like gourds. False brass sides attached to them to conceal the bombs. Celebration.

  “What do you remember?”

  Fire and blooming death and falling.

  Then darkness.

  * * *

  The box is moving.

  * * *

  The box is moving.

  I am so thirsty.

  * * *

  The box is a coffin. I’m sure of it.

  My lips crack and bleed. My body shakes uncontrollably.

  Kaeler has forgotten me. He is dead; they are all dead; all life has been crushed beneath the heel of the world but me, gasping in the darkness like a fish on the shore. There are no brothers.

  There are only ghosts.

  * * *

  A noise awakens me. I don’t know where I am. The noises of the city have long stopped. I don’t know when it is. I’ve slept more than once.

  The ghosts have kept me company, reciting hour after hour of stories of Amaranan lives snuffed out, and they know my mind. “You are not dead,” they whisper. “Not yet.”

  A sudden crack of light almost blinds me, and the nails of the box lid shriek as they are wrenched up.

  I don’t want this. I want the dead to whisper me into oblivion. I want to lose myself. To become clay, formless, like I was before the hands of the world first shaped me.

  “This is your resurrection,” says a ghost. “You are not done.”

  Reluctantly, I sit up and there is jubilation. Twenty faces, thirty, I cannot count the crowd, but their mouths are all open and shouting and their eyes are wild. From the blur, Kaeler steps forward and raises his hands.

  “Welcome,” he shouts, toward me but in a manner meant for the audience, which cheers in response. “My brother: Lash the physician! Lash the bombmaker!”

  Bombmaker.

  That’s what I was.

  That’s how I flooded my past self with blood and glory. The doctor who learned how to conceal bombs from even the most attentive guards, who learned the delicate wiring from a toothless clockmaker

  silver to copper, then

  silver to black,

  always in that order, never permitting the copper and black wires to cross—who perfected the implantation procedure. Lash the bombmaker, who—

  “—struck Amarana to the ground.” Kaeler was still shouting to the crowd. “The man who brought the spinning hub of our enemies to a grinding halt! Welcome home!”

  Home. I am overwhelmed. Home!

  “We will never have a homecoming,” says a ghost. An old man’s voice. “Our homes are spread to dust on the valley floor.”

  The words pull me away from the fleeting sensations of the room and back into my mind.

  This is not my home.

  I want to protest. Home was a small two room shack, warm and pleasantly dim, filled with the smell of cinnamon and the voice of our mother singing and the sound of our father’s hushed conversations with huge, faceless men. I played with toy soldiers and learned my letters there, under the tutelage of mother’s mother. Home was where father was taken by Justice, months before Kaeler was even born.

  “You never knew our home!”

  Am I speaking out loud? No one seems to have noticed, except perhaps Kaeler who is very still and looking at me. The crowd is too excited to see me. Everyone is smiling with their teeth and every nerve is telling me to run.

  I’m weak.

  “We know,” say the ghosts.

  I can’t do this.

  “You must.”

  I’m— I haven’t said the words, but I realize abruptly I mean them. “I’m sorry!”

  “Apology,” hisses a ghost, and I can feel her like a blade in me, “is insufficient.”

  * * *

  Night comes fast in the valley. The sun lowers but does not dim until the edges of cliffs eclipse it. There is no twilight warning—the unsuspecting can be caught off-guard, lost in the dark among the many false paths and treacherous falls that line the valley’s walls and floor.

  The sun is low, and I understand the dangers. But, fixe
d by Kaeler’s eyes I still find myself wanting to flee, to deliver myself to the wilderness.

  “We need you,” Kaeler says.

  I don’t know if I can do this.

  “Ask him what he needs,” instruct the ghosts.

  So I do.

  “The loss of Amarana brought the junta to chaos, but they’ve mostly recovered. Administrative functions—even for the remote regions—have been moved to the capital.”

  “You need my bombs.”

  “More than ever. Amarana had a single failure point, which is why we hit it in the first place. But the capital is hardened, and the ideal targets are well-distributed.”

  “So you’ll need to hit multiple locations. Depots and offices?”

  Kaeler shakes his head. “They’re too well-protected. They learned at least one lesson from Amarana.” Then he laughs, and it is terrible. “But they didn’t learn every lesson.”

  “Listen now,” say the ghosts. “Listen closely. Listen and remember.” They fill me again with their final sensations—smoke burns in my lungs, and the ground slips away beneath my feet and I am falling, I am falling...

  “We’ll hit their markets. We’ll hit their homes. Their hospitals. Their nurseries.” Kaeler’s face is fierce. His conviction is absolute. I remember a time when that conviction swayed me. “They are protecting their brain, so we will rip out their heart.”

  * * *

  They give me a medical student—a skinny, nervous young man called Heit—to train.

  “We’ll need more bombs than you can provide, brother.” Kaeler claps me on the shoulder and pushes Heit into the room with his other hand. “Heit will be of great help to you,” he says, but he smiles as he says it. Kaeler never smiles.

  “Be cautious,” say the ghosts.

  “I am always cautious,” I say, then kick myself for speaking out loud again without meaning to.

  Kaeler raises an eyebrow. “I understand. You have standards. But properly trained, Heit will be a second set of arms for you. Teach him everything.”

  Kaeler walks out and I’m left alone with Heit.

  Well... not entirely alone.

  “Do not trust him,” says a ghost.

  “He is one of them,” says another.

  “He cannot be—”

  “I know!” I shout, and Heit drops a scalpel he was examining and looks at me in alarm.

  “It is an honor, bombmaker,” he says, mumbling, while stooping to pick up the scalpel.

  I wince. “Call me Lash. Only Lash.”

  His eyes grow huge, and I’m reminded of my welcome here. I am a hero.

  I don’t need the ghosts’ jeering to feel sick at the thought.

  “How old are you?” I say.

  “Nineteen.”

  Nineteen? So young; was I ever so young? I was only two years older when Kaeler...

  “Surgical training?”

  “Yes. Two years.” He looks me in the eyes for the first time. “My mother always said my hands were a gift.”

  “And demolition work?”

  Heit finds the scalpel and drops it trying to return it to a table. “None, bombmaker. Lash.”

  The ghosts break in. “He is your tool. Use him.”

  “Teach him.”

  “Yes... teach him.”

  I make a squeaking noise and smile, too large, and I can feel my left eyelid flutter. “Ah, so I will... teach you.”

  * * *

  Heit learns.

  The ghosts riot.

  And I... drift.

  Heit and I, we carve bodies—I don’t ask where Kaeler gets them—so he can learn where the incisions are made, where the explosives are packed, how everything is fused and resealed. Camouflaged.

  But I spend as much time arguing with the ghosts as I spend teaching Heit.

  He asks why we hide the bombs inside people—why not just packs that can be set down? The ghosts scoff and spit, and I explain about the search protocols, and how in areas of heightened security every cart and every bag is searched. A person with a bag filled with the expected travel necessities—and nothing else—can walk in with thirty pounds of explosives in their gut primed for detonation.

  “Is that how you killed Amarana?”

  The ghosts seethe. They tear at me.

  I cannot remember the faces of the bombers I operated on before Amarana. But I remember they were young, and I remember their twitching excitement—the same excitement Heit demonstrates now. And again the ghosts remind me of my purpose and assail me with a hurricane of their last moments, and by the time they stop I am curled on the floor, weeping.

  I forget to answer Heit’s question.

  * * *

  I try to focus.

  I want so badly to think clearly again, but the ghosts won’t leave me alone. “Do you know what the brothers say about you?”

  I don’t care about what they think.

  “They say you’re crazy,” says a ghost.

  They’re right.

  “They think you’re dangerous.”

  I try to turn back to my lecturing, but they interrupt me again.

  “They’re plotting, right now, Kaeler and those closest to him.” This voice is of an older woman, and it reminds me so much of mother’s mother I cry just to hear its softness. Heit looks at me in alarm, but the ghost keeps talking. “They’re going to ask you to sacrifice yourself. To be the next bomb.”

  I close my eyes, and all I see is surgical cuts and the removal of pulsing organs and explosives, then wires, always silver to copper, always silver to black, wires bristling from the empty cavity of our sacrificed brothers and sisters. My whole body shakes at the thought, and I whisper, “What should I do?”

  Heit steps forward, hesitates before he touches me. “Sir?”

  The ghost’s voice is understanding but firm. “You’re going to say yes.”

  * * *

  “Good,” I say, and it is. The brass is smooth on my sides—better than I could have crafted it myself. Heit has listened well.

  Kaeler’s voice disrupts my thoughts. It is too muffled to understand his words, but I recognize the tone. He and the men he calls brothers—I spit at the thought—are in the next room, deep into yet another planning session, no doubt arguing about me, about where I will strike.

  Of course, my brother didn’t trust me with the detonator. But he should understand better than anyone: a compliant man is as reliable as a button.

  “Now the wires,” I say to Heit, Heit-my-scythe, and I smile at the weight of the explosives within me.

  I am walking death; I need no button to push; Kaeler cannot—

  “He cannot stop you,” say the ghosts.

  He cannot.

  Ghosts crowd against me. Their fingers brush my back, tracing the pattern of the streets as they fell, as they still fall, over and over, accompanied by our ragged cheers and the screams of children. I sense their anticipation, but I don’t feel it.

  I feel only relief.

  Heit licks his lips. He is so eager, but he doesn’t understand. His young mind is filled with future, unaware we have already been cut down by the past.

  All that remains is to fall.

  I try to pity the boy, but the ghosts don’t allow it, so I simply watch.

  His nimble fingers pluck at cords within my abdomen to complete the wiring, just like I showed him:

  Silver to silver;

  copper to black.

  A single spark leaps. Beneath me, the stones bloom.

  Copyright © 2017 Kurt Hunt

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Kurt Hunt is, in no particular order, a father, a lawyer, a husband, a human, and a daydreamer. Sometimes he writes things, but usually he doesn’t. His fiction has been published at Strange Horizons and PodCastle, among others.

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  COVER ART

  “Pillars of the Gods,” by Ward Lindhout

  Ward Lindhout is a concept artist currently living and
working in Japan. Having studied game design in his home country of Holland, his love for original videogame design drove him to the land of the rising sun. After having worked on titles like The Evil Within and Metal Gear Rising he is now working at Capcom. He is passionate about designing new worlds and their inhabitants, drawing inspiration from traveling to the many beautiful countries the world has to offer. View more of his work on his website at www.artbyward.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press

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