Beneath Ceaseless Skies #231

by Stephen Case

  Issue #231 • Aug. 3, 2017

  “Deathspeaker,” by Stephen Case

  “The Broken Karwaneer,” by Jeremy A. TeGrotenhuis

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  DEATHSPEAKER

  by Stephen Case

  I.

  “I don’t know how to do it.”

  She cries in the night in the darkness of our chambers, and I hold her head against my scarred chest.

  “I don’t know how to keep control,” she says. “They all fear me. They are mad to kill me. I don’t know how to make them see.”

  I lie awake when she has quieted. I hear the guards changing their posts at the doors. I say their names silently in my mind.

  She did not say my name.

  For a time I almost hated her for that, and at times I still do—when I catch sight of my burned, blackened visage in a mirror or glass. When I hear the muffled gasps as I limp past servants or courtiers who are new to the palace; when I catch the hushed whispers.

  She did not speak my name, though I gave it to her.

  I thought she would flee the fortress where she had been held prisoner. I thought that with the knowledge I gave her she would be free of the king’s hold on her. Instead, she came to his palace with more courage and anger than I believed possible. She knew the names, as many as I had been able to give her, but she could not have known them all. She was escorted by luck or by fortune, surely.

  Or by something darker.

  She whispered names in the darkness, and men died or fled, too terrified to realize that for the moment, she walked in ignorance.

  Not for long though. She found the archive, found the vast library where King Tsud kept his endless ledgers of taxation and genealogy. There was a single clerk there, a bent, beetled man as near-sighted and cowardly as the others who kept Tsud’s scrolls.

  A man like me.

  “What is your name?” she whispered.

  He blinked with fear but squeaked it like a bird before a snake. “I am Drawoc.”

  I can see her face as it must have appeared then, with the smile as long and narrow as sunset on the plains. “I will speak your name now if you do not do as I say. Bring me the ledgers of the King’s privy council. And then bring me the lists of his guards.”

  The man hesitated.

  “Consider quickly. If you do as I wish, you will have brought me aid in my hour of need. If you do not, you will be dead.”

  The ledgers, sharp and crisp in clean ink (for I had written many of them myself) were brought.

  She read quickly.

  I imagine Tsud in his throne room on the night of her escape, after she has the names before her in his own palace library. Perhaps he has by that moment some indication of what has happened. Perhaps some have been sent to his Deathspeaker’s fortress-prison to see why her guards have not reported. Guards had by then already found me and torn me from my room and my desk. They recognized my birds about the fortress walls. They realized who had conspired for her freedom.

  I imagine Tsud in the light of hastily lit lanterns. (I was in agony in the dungeons below, tortured for the role I played in her release.) Suddenly his vizier falls silently. Then his chamberlain. His cupbearer. His chamber-master. His lieutenants, one by one.

  She did not yet speak his name.

  “More lists,” she whispered to her cringing clerk. “His attendants. His courtiers. His horsemen.”

  They died.

  Tsud fled from room to room, down dark hallways, in a castle full of the dead. Those who had not been spoken had abandoned him. He was alone with the candlelight and the beating of his own heart.

  She came for him in the grand audience chamber. It was a cruel jest, though she could not have known it. The acoustics of that chamber are flawless. He heard her footfalls. She stopped and waited out of sight, in the curve beneath the spreading marble pillars. Shafts of moonlight speared down from the star-paned window at the chamber’s summit. She wanted to see his face.

  She tells me this, later. “I wanted to watch him die. I wanted to see the light leave his eyes.”

  “Why?” I ask. This was after she found me, after she dragged me to the king’s chambers and bathed my wounds herself.

  “For what he had made me.”

  She whispered his name, “Tsud,” and he fell.

  * * *

  In that first dark night of her freedom, she read the names of all the hetmen, the chieftain of every village, the mayor of every town, the head of every major family and guild. She reads quickly, and her tongue does not stumble.

  “Like grass,” she whispered to me when she was finished. “That was what you said. Like mowing grass.”

  We had done this before, when she was a prisoner in Tsud’s service and I was the scribe charged with translating the names of his enemies. She had been used as a weapon against his rebelling provinces, for she is a deathspeaker. She kills by naming.

  Now her she kills of her own will, for protection. The old leaders are gone, mowed down in a single evening of reading.

  We dispatched messages for the new hetmen of all surrounding villages and cities, the sons and scions of the manors and estates, to send their sons and daughters to the palace in groups. Never less than two, never more than five.

  We hold the entire kingdom hostage, the two of us. We have their names. Those that Drawoc cannot find for her, I search out myself in the stacks of Tsud’s library. Tsud was nothing if not meticulous. He has every clansman and kinsman listed, along with their wealth and their holdings. They send a tithe of their family to us, and we use them to again people the palace.

  “Your name is your allegiance,” she tells them when they arrive. She meets them in the hall where she killed Tsud. She stands on the raised dais in her simple black robe, elegant and terrifying. “You will speak it always. You will call each other by your given names at all times in my presence and outside of it. You will know that I hold your names always in my mind.”

  They are terrified. They must be. Their trial is coming.

  “Speak your names.”

  They do. But how to know whether they speak the truth? How to be sure our tithe is genuine, that it harbors no assassin planted within the palace with a false name?

  There is no way to be certain. But we take our own tithe.

  The group from each family, from each hetman’s tribe. They have given their names. The guards who have already passed the test, whose names I hold in my head as surely as I hold my own, are waiting for our command. She repeats one name. A single name, chosen at random from the group. If that person dies, the remaining pass the trial. If that person does not die—if the name spoken was a lie—they are all killed. Then she reads the names aloud of all in the city or village from which they were sent.

  A single party failed the trial. It was enough.

  And thus she reigns.

  * * *

  She wants me to give her a name.

  I tell her I cannot. “No deathspeaker has ever had a name. None can be given to you.”

  “They call me Empress,” she says.

  I cannot describe her voice. It is soft, like darkness, but with an edge to it, a huskiness that makes me think of nothing more than a line of black clouds scudding against a coming storm, sweeping the sky of stars.

  “That is a title.” I soak in the evening, like an old man. My joints ache where they were torn and stretched. Though she is an empress, she fetches my towel. She will let no one else, though the palace is full of servants. “It is not a name.”

  “Why can’t I have one?”

  Her face is petul
ant, very much like a queen’s, though I saw the old queen—who was no mother of hers—only rarely. She died soon after Tsud brought his deathspeaker from the south.

  “I do not know for sure,” I answer honestly. I read all I can find regarding deathspeakers in Tsud’s library, and since she has come to power I continue to search for any hidden scrolls or documents. “It might break your power. But it could kill you. Where would I be if you were to speak your own name?”

  She stands before her mirror. Her robe is open, and she stares at her form as though she has not heard me.

  “Who am I?”

  “You are the Deathspeaker, Empress of all Tsud’s domain.”

  She turns toward me.

  “Tell me again of the city of my birth.”

  I tell her what I know, which is not much. It was a trading outpost, barely a village, in the dunes of the far south. There were rumors a deathspeaker had appeared, that a child had arisen with the old power. The journey there from Tsud’s borders had taken weeks.

  “How old was I?”

  “It was hard to say. No one knew your parents or from where you had come. You were a girl of perhaps a decade and a half.”

  She presses her dark skin against mine. She had been in Tsud’s keeping for perhaps a dozen years before I summoned the knowledge and courage to release her.

  Much later she murmurs in the dark: “Is it wrong, what we do?”

  I imagine for a moment she is speaking of us now. “Nothing is wrong not done in hate.”

  “The death.” She is sleeping beside me, or so it seems. “All the death.”

  I brush her forehead with my lips, and then I rise to gather names for the coming day.

  We are both trapped.

  * * *

  There is a faint tap on the door of the outer chamber, and I take a candle and open it. One of the chambermaids is waiting on the other side, her face shrouded in darkness.

  I greet her with our only, ever-present defense: her name. “Suoromit. What is it?”

  She inclines her head. “A company of travelers has arrived at the palace gates, my Lord Keeper.”

  “There is something different about this group, Suoromit, or the guardsman on duty would have found them lodging in the outer wall until a morning audience.”

  The name of the guardsman in command this evening, I recall, is Rees.

  “Yes, Lord Keeper.”

  I wait.

  “They are from beyond our borders, my lord,” she says. “The emissary claims to be from the court of the Bone King. He will not wait until morning.”

  This is news indeed. As vast as were Tsud’s domains, they were said to dwindle to a speck in comparison with those of the Bone King and his endless holdings in the north. Tsud had waged a war for decades against the southernmost of the Bone King’s border fortresses. He had spent the lives of hundreds of spies trying to learn the name of even the most insignificant of his lordlings. But the Bone King remained unmoved in his distant capital, and Tsud learned nothing.

  “Feed them in the great hall,” I tell her. “See to their traveling creatures. Tell them the Empress sleeps but will see them in the morning. And send me Rees.”

  * * *

  I meet him in the room that was once Tsud’s privy chamber. The skulls of huge beasts from the south still adorn its walls, along with tapestries woven of golden thread and sealsilk. The table alone dwarfs the palace room I slept in when I was a lowly scribe. It is piled now, as always, with names.

  The hatred Rees’s eyes bore when he first came to the palace has dimmed. He still watches me though with the same guarded suspicion he must see in mine.

  I have no protection here but the knowledge she bears of his name, and his certainty of that knowledge—his certainty that his name would be on her lips the moment she learned I had been harmed.

  I have done nothing to earn hatred, besides what I have enabled her to do and become.

  It is reason enough.

  “Rees,” I say. He inclines his head. “What do you know of the Bone King?”

  “Nothing beyond childhood stories.”

  “And what have you seen tonight?”

  “I saw men taller than my brother—who is the tallest man I know—ride in from the night on beasts with curled horns and matted fur. They are dressed in thick robes, with blades and much leather. There are a dozen, but they made no resistance when we took their weapons and placed them in the watch room. Their skin is pale and they have no beards.”

  I steeple my fingers. “What kinds of weapons?”

  “Long blades. Heavy. They seem carved of stone.”

  “Not bone?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Do you think they are from the Bone King?”

  He shrugs. “They are from the north. Beyond Tsud’s—beyond the Empress’s domains, it is sure.”

  “Who serves with you on guard tonight?”

  He lists the names, though I hold them all in my head. It has become difficult, as the ranks of guards have swelled again, but I memorize them all.

  “I want you, Trela, and Seye to join these travelers in the great hall tonight. Approach them in friendship and learn what you can. You are canny.” If the offered complement means anything, he does not show it. “I want you to report to me before the Empress meets them in the morning.”

  He will think I want information about the travelers, but in truth I want to know the reaction of our own men to these strangers. Will they see them as aliens and enemies? Will this be our salvation, an outside threat to unite us into a kingdom ruled by something more than fear? Or will they be welcomed as potential saviors from the reign of a dark queen?

  Rees would rather be on the walls tonight, I can see, and so I know I have chosen well. He inclines his head again and leaves.

  * * *

  In the morning before the emissaries from the Bone King have risen I speak with Rees again, this time in the antechamber behind the audience hall. His face is tired, weariness having erased the grim suspicion of the night before. I had the servants pour the best wine from Tsud’s labyrinthine cellars late into the evening, hoping it would loosen tongues and disarm countenances. I am unsure from Rees’s face whether it has been effective.

  “What news from the north?”

  “They are a close-mouthed people,” he grumbles. “They ate and drank well, but they spoke little. I think they knew what we were about.”

  “Are they to be trusted?”

  He shrugs. “They gave no names.”

  “Is the Bone King a myth?”

  Again a shrug, though this one slower. “Their leader, the one who speaks for them. Tall, with a face like flint. That one rests confident. He speaks for a great power.”

  I nod, feeling the beginnings of hope in my broken chest.

  Soon the newcomers are brought to the great audience chamber. This is where she stalked Tsud in darkness on the night of her release. This is her stage. She is in her element, in her power, here. I cannot help being proud, my pride mingled with desire, when I see her standing in her gown of deep blackness, poised as death herself, beside the throne.

  The men from the north are strange. They are as Rees described, tall and angular, wrapped in folds of leather and fur. I can only trust the guards were thorough in their search for weapons.

  I wait several steps below the throne, trying not to lean too heavily on my curved walnut staff. I am her mouthpiece. She remains silent and imperious.

  They arrange themselves before the throne in a loose semicircle.

  “Speak, strangers from the north.” My voice is harsh, and the chamber magnifies it.

  One steps forward. He inclines his head and, ignoring me, addresses himself to a point a few steps below where she stands. He does not raise his eyes to her. For now, he knows his place, treating her as though she is rightful ruler here.

  “We are emissaries from the Lord of Deep North. We have ridden a month and a day to reach this place. We were sent by my lord upon
the fall of Tsud, whose bones were weak and worm-eaten.” He pauses for a moment before continuing. “My lord wishes to know whether the words spoken upon his horizons are indeed true, whether there is a new Great Power ruling in the south.” Here he bows low.

  When it is clear he has finished, I ask him what he wants.

  “My lord sends his greetings and pledges friendship. We bring, as a symbol of this pledge, snow-stones, precious beyond measure.” He reaches into a fold of his cloak and removes a small leather pouch. The contents, poured into his hand, fill the chamber with light. Some of the guards gasp.

  I venture a glance at her expression. Her eyes are bright in the glow of the stones, but her face remains passive. She knows her role too well: it is death.

  “And what does your lord ask in return for these splendors?” I ask.

  “A token, from one such as yourself,” he says. There is a scroll in his hand. “Merely a demonstration. That my lord may know and honor your power.”

  It is a test.

  She steps forward, takes the scroll from him, and hands it to me without looking at it.

  “What is your name?” she asks.

  Her voice is calm, dangerously so, though I doubt any but I can hear the anger beneath the surface.

  He forgets himself for a moment and stares directly at her, uncertain.

  “I am not a servant,” she says slowly to his silence. “I speak only names of my choosing. There is no one—no one—who gives me names.”

  The emissary knows the danger here, but I wonder about those of the palace court who are listening. Do they realize what she is saying, why she is so enraged? She spent years imprisoned with the sole task of readings names given at Tsud’s command.

  “But the Bone King,” the emissary begins, preparing, it seems, to gather himself in the certainty of the power on whose behalf he speaks.

  “Bone King is a title, not a name,” she interrupts. “And were he here in all his bitter glory, I would speak no names at his bidding or request.”

  Is that pride I see in the faces of our guards?

  “I will ask you again, if you truly wish to take a message of my power to your lord: what is your name?”