Beneath Ceaseless Skies #231

by Stephen Case

  There is an entire world there, a world’s past and future mapped and suspended in a frozen maze of glassy silver.

  Or rather, a fragment of a world.

  Our world.

  * * *

  “You can see,” the abbot told me when I emerged, hours later. The pink fingers of dawn were clawing at the sky to the east, but he waited patiently beside the well’s mouth.

  I was breathless from the climb, which had been agony. I knew, however, that I would make it again. Now that I had seen the world-ice, I was powerless to leave until I had fully mapped its depths.

  “What is it?” I asked, when I had caught my breath from the climb.

  “It is the world.”

  I shook my head stubbornly. There was the rising light around us, bringing shapes into existence and giving them form. There was still, at my back, the sound of leaves in the trees they say eat dead men’s bones. But more than any of that, there were memories of her and our nights together in the chambers of a dead king.

  “It is only a reflection,” I said. “I know there is truth in it. But this is the reality.”

  “A question of perspective,” the abbot said. He led me away from the trees, down to a stone bench where a simple breakfast had been prepared. “But we have studied the cartography within for centuries. We know for certain what you only felt in your bones upon seeing the world-ice for the first time—it contains within its depths the history and future of our own world. One hundred years worth of reading or travel or study will not teach you what you can glimpse within the ice in a single evening’s viewing.”

  He had his point. I had seen more than I thought possible, in the confines of that crystal lattice.

  “From your eyes,” he told me, “I see that you understand.”

  “I perceived. But I don’t understand.”

  “What did you perceive?”

  “The impurities within. The fractures and filaments.” He nodded, and I continued. “They appeared random shapes and forms, but then it seemed they represent moments, or realities. I felt I could see the thread of my own life, a miniscule ribbon running from a tangle of cracks I knew to represent my own house and the histories of my fathers. But as I traced it, it changed, and I knew I was seeing my own journey to the monastery and then, somehow, my own knowledge in that instant.” I kneaded my aching knuckles. “How is this possible?”

  “Your eyes are sharp.” He reached for the loaf of bread between us. “Our mystics speak of the world’s Breaking as more than a splintered kingdom. The Breaking was rather the creation of time itself—the point at which a timeless, crystalline world was lost and the staggered march of time began. The world was broken and its pieces hidden away in secret places beneath the earth. This is one of them. And they have been fracturing since then, creating the brokenness of growth, death, decay, life.”

  “The world-ice is...”

  “Melting,” he finished for me. “Slowly, of course. Almost imperceptibly. The pattern changes. Fractures grow. Complexities arise.”

  The light had now touched the highest leaves in the grove around us.

  “We have witnessed the rise of the Deathspeaker within the ice,” he explained, “and the bright, spreading whorls of her influence. And we have seen the jagged shadows of the Bone King growing as well.”

  “I came here seeking the Bone King’s name.”

  He nodded as though this was a reasonable request. “But to see such detail within the ice, you must have keen sight indeed. Such knowledge is hidden in the very smallest of the ice’s aspects.”

  We ate the remainder of our breakfast in silence. When the sun began to rise up over the wall of the monastery, he turned to me.

  “You will return to the chamber this evening.”

  I nodded, exhausted and resigned.

  * * *

  I am weary now. But you must know this before I sleep, so I write this too-long letter and send it with my swiftest bird. Here, in your realms, is a great secret: a shard of the world-ice that mirrors (or contains) the world itself. I will not search these books for the knowledge we seek. I will seek it in the patterns of the world. I will learn the Bone King’s name, even as I watch the fractures of his power spreading in the ice.

  I remain, as ever, your servant.

  * * *

  Time passes.

  My bird returns, but he brings no response.

  * * *

  III.

  The Bone King is here.

  In the light and the cold, I can see his shape.

  The abbot told me that were it not for the cold, certain men would have tarried their entire lives watching the ice, straining to see into the folds and terraces of the lucid crystal. There are libraries in the monastery devoted to the journals of those who have plumbed its depths with their gaze, who have spent their lives mapping the cartography of its interior and attempting a translation into the events and realities of the world it manifests.

  Some see more clearly than others, he says. I can read the interior of the fractured shard of world-ice, and my vision grows sharper the longer I gaze. I stand as close to its angled face as possible. I see the threads of our own kingdom, the narrative of Tsud and his family stretching back generations, into the heart of the ice. I see the whorls of bright spars marking your rising. But above it all, dangling from the upper reaches of the crystal like a spidery stalactite, I see the dark fractures of another power and the empty reaches within that seem to drink light, the shape of the Bone King’s advance.

  The lines are growing.

  But to link names to these shapes, to know the history and the nature of his kingdom and his kin, either my eyes cannot follow or the light does not go.

  I need more time in this cavern.

  “The Bone King is here.”

  A monk has stumbled into the chamber, breathless and terrified.

  “The abbot sent me.” He gasps and repeats his message.

  I see it, at the upper edge of my view: the dark fractures of the Bone King’s influence shuddering forward as the ice continues its slow slide toward disorder to finally intersect the ivory filaments of your kingdom.

  “His armies,” I say, “have marched southward, far to the west. They are in the valley.” I pause, squinting. “They are at the walls.”

  The young monk nods hastily. “With a message.” The terror in his eyes is palpable. “For you. Come.”

  When I emerge from the chamber of ice, the trees of the grove are roaring. If they are truly the voice of seven ancient monk-warriors, it sounds like a multitude.

  Beneath them the abbot is with a group of senior monks around the mutilated body of a man.

  “He was thrown in, over the walls,” a monk explains, pointing. “The message.”

  It is burned onto his bare, torn chest. The letters are angular but legible, written in our own tongue: Send the one called Keeper.

  The broken figure moans.

  “He’s still alive.” I look at the stricken faces of the monks. “Kill him. Put him out of this misery.”

  “We have tried,” another monk whispers. “He will not die.”

  The abbot is leaning on two brothers for support, but his face is set. “You need not obey this monster. They cannot take these walls.”

  “There will be more bodies,” I tell them.

  My course is clear. I am loath to leave the secrets of the chamber below me, but I told myself I was leaving the palace to be of service. I do not know how he has found me or why, but I came here seeking knowledge of the Bone King.

  Now he is here.

  They lower me from the gateless walls by the same rope ladder I ascended not long before. The walls—grey with age and lichen—still seem immense, but the tents of the Bone King’s army are spread below them like a sea of fog. I descend to them, my birds specks of darkness far above. I have told the birds to stay behind, but one ventures too close. An arrow takes him, and he drops past me to the ground below.

  When I reach the grou
nd, gaunt men who look brothers to those who came to the palace as emissaries are there to meet me. We walk in silence through the camp, toward a wide, white tent that rears up above the others. Around us men in black armor move in silence. They walk strangely, some lurching like broken clockwork, others legless and pulling themselves along on carriages of spiked wheels.

  At the entrance to the tent we stop and one enters. He is inside for a long time. I hear no words from within or from the camp around me. All is silent. Finally, when I fear I will not be able to keep to my aching feet longer, the man emerges and beckons me to enter. He takes my walnut staff from me as I pass within.

  Inside, the Bone King sits on a narrow throne. He is tall, and though seated I can tell he would stand even taller than the men who led me through his silent camp. His face is almost impossibly thin, and the long fingers he holds folded beneath his chin are white as naked bone. At each side of his throne stand two guards, naked from the waist up and even more skeletal than him. Their bodies are emaciated, sickeningly thin, but their faces are impassive.

  “You are the one called Keeper.” His voice is thin and reedy, like wind over rocks.

  I incline my head.

  “You wonder how I find you and what I desire.”

  It is not a question, so I wait.

  “Your queen was not the only power at play when my envoy stood before her.” His accent is not as sharp as that of the men who visited the palace, but it is indeed a voice from perhaps a continent away. It stumbles and pauses over our words. “There are spells to aid tracking, and they were laid upon those in that audience who were of importance. We know where you are, and we know where she is.”

  I know very little of spell-craft, and I tell him so.

  “When we saw you had left the palace,” he continues, “we assumed you had fallen from favor. Yet now we find you here, not far from our line of march. There is the stink of old power about this place.” His narrow nostrils flare. “Why are you here?”

  I always lie as little as possible, because I do it so poorly. It was this lack of subtlety, this failure at subterfuge, that allowed me to be so easily found out when I freed Tsud’s Deathspeaker.

  “There is knowledge here,” I say. “The monks sit upon a wealth of lore. I left the palace to seek knowledge of you.”

  He smiles. The room seems to drain of light.

  “And what would you know?”

  “Your name.”

  His laughter is loud and ringing, harsh and twisted. “Have you not guessed?” he finally asks when the laughter has bled from the canvas walls.

  Terrified, I shake my head.

  “I have no name. I am a power, like your queen.” He steeples his long fingers before him. “Indeed, I am much like your queen. Where she is the night, I am the blistering, bone-bleached day.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You would not. The men we sent to your palace gates had not been named. Would you give me your own?”

  My mind still reels to find his armies already within our borders and to be speaking with one who was for so long only a cloud on our horizon and before that only a tale to frighten children. Our armies, I tell myself, trying to recall what I had seen in the ice, even now must be moving to counter him. Such a force as this could not move without our knowledge. Yet he speaks as though he has no fear, as though this kingdom already belongs to him.

  “No,” I answer.

  “Not willingly.” He smiles again. “And you would be wise to withhold it. Our names are our power. Yet my spies tell me in this land every name is known.”

  “The Empress would be powerless without it.”

  The Bone King arches a nearly invisible eyebrow at the title of Empress but says nothing.

  “I have been tortured before,” I add. “I would not last long. But I have no useful knowledge to give. I am just a scribe. I know nothing of the movements of armies or their dispositions.”

  He leans forward slightly. “Your posture and your countenance bear witness to your torture. It was clumsily executed. Did you wish for death?”

  I remember the rack, the flames, and the hook.

  I shudder.

  “You wished for a death that did not come.” He gestures to the starved guards standing at attention beside him. “My Famine Guard. They have not eaten for seventeen years. Do you think they long for death?”

  I stare.

  “You walked through my camp and saw my army. Had you seen what was hidden within their armor, you would not have had courage to walk farther.”

  I think of the man thrown over the walls with the message carved in his flesh. The monks said they tried to kill him out of mercy. They said he wouldn’t die.

  The Bone King smiles again. “Have you guessed my power?”

  I begin to shake.

  “This girl you call Empress.” His voice is lower now. “She is like me as the night is to the day. My naming brings life. Those I name can never die.”

  I find it difficult to speak. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “So that when my armies break the walls of your palace I will not have to force my words into this soft and sluggish speech. So you can explain to her who I am and why there is no hope of resistance.”

  He stands.

  “I have waited in the north for centuries for another power to arise. You think this is a war. It is not.”

  He smiles for a third time, and I feel despair.

  “This is a courtship,” he says.

  * * *

  It is dark. My birds are far away.

  The first of her armies we meet is that of Reggad the Unbreakable, who had once been Tsud’s most feared general. The Bone King’s hordes attack in two waves. The first are those who have not long been in his service, the champions whose naming by him gives them the immortality of young warrior gods. They meet Reggad’s cavalry in a long series of skirmishes.

  They do not die. They are unhorsed and mauled, but the sight of them rising again to their feet is too much for Reggad’s knights, who retreat in confusion.

  The second wave are those who have been broken in past battles and are now encased in the ubiquitous black armor of the Bone King’s horde. They are slow, but they are legion, and their ranks swell after each engagement. The young, agile immortals are hewn and broken and join their numbers. They overwhelm Reggad’s encampment on the third day, and the general is brought in chains to the Bone King’s tent.

  “Tell him,” the Bone King says to me.

  Reggad believes perhaps I have turned traitor. His eyes are crazed and his face bloodied. There is a long gash across his temple.

  “Do not tell him your name,” I say. “If you tell him your name and he speaks it, you will live. You will not be able to die.”

  Reggad’s face is enraged and confused.

  “He has spoken the names of all his soldiers,” I tell him slowly. “Do you understand? He has spoken all their names.”

  Reggad will be one of them.

  He screams.

  I have heard stories of men under torture who have bitten off their own tongues and spat them in the faces of their captors. Reggad does not do this.

  “Reggad,” the Bone King echoes when the general’s screams have shaped themselves into his name.

  I have turned away long before, but the skeletal guards will not let me leave the tent.

  Reggad does not stop screaming.

  “Take him to be fitted for armor,” the Bone King says, repeating these words in our own language for my benefit, though I am already picking of pieces of their tongue. “Then take the names of all our captives.”

  “They will not fight for you,” I tell him.

  “They will,” the Bone King explains, “because the choice will be life in my service or death. Some will choose death. But they will not receive it. At least one in their company will choose life. At least one always does. And that one will tell me names. I will speak the names, and then my men will dig a pit. I will give the
m one more chance to swear fealty to me. Those who refuse will be buried alive. They will stay alive.”

  I taste bile at my lips.

  “In the north, when I first came to power, I left legions alive beneath the frozen steppes to grow slowly mad in the earth.”

  He scowls and spits.

  “You will tell them this,” he says. “You will make them understand.”

  * * *

  I am dreaming of her.

  My nightmares in the palace were of finding myself again in the dungeons of Tsud, again on his rack for having freed her, and I would wake begging her to speak my name and release me. Now my dreams are darker. In my weakest hours, when the moans of the Bone King’s horde and the screams of his new recruits filter through the thin canvas of my tent, I wish again she would whisper my name into the darkness and free me from this deeper hell.

  We have been skirmishing with the armies of Tlih and Reidlos across the plains south of the palace. They have grown canny to the Bone King’s power. Instead of meeting his forces directly, they burn the fields before them. When they are forced to battle, they aim only to maim. When a soldier is so broken he cannot walk, the Bone King’s smiths must fashion wheeled armor, and this takes time.

  They have also learned to allow no prisoners. The wounded in the field kill themselves or each other rather than be taken captive.

  Reggad and his men fight alongside the Bone King.

  I dream of the world-ice as well. It was, I thought, my mission to seek in its depths knowledge that would protect us against what is now happening. In my dreams I am pressing my face against its surface as against a window, trying to see the shapes within. If I were there again now, I would bring fire and try to burn into its heart, to melt out the twisted fracture of the Bone King even if it meant melting the world around it.

  * * *

  We take the palace. The armies hampering our progress fade away, and the Bone King’s path to the capital lies open. The gates are unguarded, the city empty, the palace itself as uninhabited as it was on the night of the Deathspeaker’s release.