Beneath Ceaseless Skies #231

by Stephen Case

  She has fled.

  The Bone King’s broken soldiers shamble through empty corridors. The Bone King, quiet with rage, takes a silent seat on Tsud’s throne. This was the place of her power; this was where she defied his first advances.

  He holds a folded parchment in his hands.

  “Read it,” he says, thrusting it at me.

  His generals have assembled around us after securing the palace. Some have removed pieces of their armor. They watch us, those who still have eyes.

  “Four days,” I read haltingly, translating it into their harsh and angular tongue. It is written in her hand. She left it pinned to the armrest of Tsud’s throne with a tiny silver blade. “A hard march northward will bring you to the River Swift in four days. If you are beyond the river and marching north in four days, your army will be spared.”

  The Bone King laughs once, harshly.

  “Wait for my sign,” I read. “Tonight at moonrise.”

  A few generals glance upward at the star-shaped window, through which the first stars of evening are visible.

  “Enough of this,” he says. “Tsud’s lands and palace are nothing to me. I want her.”

  “She will run,” one of the generals speaks. It is Reggad. “She will continue to fight.”

  “She is a coward,” the Bone King says, “and I will burn her land until they bring her to me and beg me to take her.”

  I glance upward at the window again. An ivory sheen has come to the glass.

  Reggad falls.

  His armor strikes the floor with the sound of blows, steel on stone.

  No one moves.

  “He is dead,” someone whispers when the echoes fade.

  In the silence that follows, they look to the Bone King with wonder and a kind of hunger.

  “Reggad!” the Bone King shouts. His voice thunders in the chamber. “Reggad!”

  Reggad does not stir.

  One of the skeletal guards lurches in from the antechamber beyond. “They are dead. All of the new soldiers, all of hers.”

  The moon has risen. She is naming them.

  She is freeing them.

  “She does not know your names,” the Bone King bellows to the generals before him, his face a mask of fury. He has risen from his chair. “Your names are buried in the north. You belong to me!”

  The Bone King flings her silver blade onto the floor beside Reggad’s unmoving form.

  “Leave me,” he says.

  They go, but the hunger does not leave their eyes.

  * * *

  While she is a fugitive in her own kingdom, I sleep in the chambers we shared. My birds have not returned, and I am glad for it. I wonder whether they circle in the darkness above or whether they have found her, wherever she wanders tonight.

  When the knock comes on the door I believe for a moment it is again Suoromit, coming to tell me of the arrival of the Bone King’s envoy. Instead it is a soldier, young and pale, though the side of his face is a wreckage of splintered, twisted flesh and scar.

  “Keeper,” he whispers, forcing the door open and thrusting a knife at my throat. Another pushes past him into the room. He is one of the generals who were in the chamber that evening, a hulking mass whose neck has been severed nearly through, ages ago. Blood bubbles at his throat as he speaks.

  “You are to be killed this night,” he rumbles, each of the words sounding thick and wet in his mouth.

  I could do nothing against them, even had I weapons. Beyond them, in the corridor, I can see more of the Bone King’s soldiers.

  “Why?”

  “Because you will hear our names.” He speaks his, a collection of angled consonants that tumble through my mind like clattering steel.

  The others whisper as well, and I realize they are all speaking their names, offering them to me in the darkness.

  “You can take them to your queen?” he asks.

  I shake my head. Without my birds, there is no way to carry a message, and though I have begun to devise one in my head, there is no script I know to carry the strange shapes of their names so they could be read.

  “You will try.” The others are glancing up and down the corridor. “The Bone King fears this. I have advised he tear the tongues from those of our soldiers who still speak.”

  He carries an axe with a haft nearly the length of his leg. His grip shifts on it now.

  “We are sent to kill you,” he says again.

  “If you do, no one will ever speak your names.” I can feel the hesitation among them, in the shadows of the corridor. I have never been skilled in the art of rhetoric or appeal, but I am dead now unless I find a way to convince them. “You will have an eternity of this.”

  The first soldier raises his thin blade, but the general waves it back.

  “No one leaves this palace,” he says. It is almost a question.

  “I was raised within these walls.” My heart is hammering. I find in this moment I do not fear death, for I am surrounded by something far worse. Rather I have a desperate desire to do something of use, and a desperate hope that by doing so I may see her again. “There are passages beneath the walls.”

  “All the corridors are guarded.”

  “They will join us,” I say. “I will take your names to the Empress. She will release you.”

  There is a murmuring in the corridor behind him. They cannot understand all I am saying, but the thought of death wakes hope within them.

  “The Bone King still holds the young dead,” the general says. “Loyal in their immortality. Not yet broken.”

  It is now. I feel as though I see this moment suspended in the world-ice, a forking of the paths or a shattered duality held for a moment in balance.

  I cast what little weight I have onto those scales.

  “Then we will break them.” My twisted walnut staff is beside the door. I grab it and push past the general, into the corridor beyond. I have picked up a few words of their tongue. I speak one now as I limp down the corridor and feel the ancient, deathless soldiers fall into a shambling phalanx behind me.

  “For death!”

  They take up the cry.

  * * *

  We make it as far as the Hall of Division, where Tsud kept his long ledgers and where his moneychangers collected what was due of the tax convoys that came each year from the outer provinces. On the far side of the long rows of counting-tables—tables I had played among as a child—are passages that lead down to the tunnels connecting the dungeons to the deeper passages and treasuries under the walls.

  But a mass of men can only move unseen in darkness for so long, and someone within the palace sounds the alarm. Voices call from the upper walls, and torches appear.

  The soldiers of the Bone King do not make battle.

  They carve meat.

  It is confusion. I am pushed to one side, forced beneath the row of wooden tables that are splintering even now. I hear bellows in the guttural tongue of the north and occasionally echoes of my rallying cry: “For death!”

  But none die. The butchery never gives way to the exhausted silence following a battle. Men continue to hack at one another, breaking themselves and each other on their black armor and thick blades.

  The Bone King has not spoken my name. It would be easy to die here.

  But I know these halls too well.

  There is a small staircase that spirals back toward Tsud’s library. I make for it, hoping to pass unseen through the melee. A few soldiers follow me.

  We spill out onto a wide, empty corridor, for the moment untouched by the chaos we have left. I find the bloody general still beside me.

  “Through the library,” I say.

  There is no chance of pushing through the deep tunnels now that the alarm has been sounded, but I had been told the library harbored passages as well.

  I had lived my life in that library, or so it seems to me. Even as a child, when my father returned from his journeys on behalf of Tsud’s father, he would bring me there. We would read togethe
r in the evenings beside the fire. The maintenance and cataloging of Tsud’s books had been the work of the lifetimes of a dozen scribes, of whom I was one.

  It is fitting then that I should die there.

  From the wide windows along the library’s south side one can—by daylight—see the outer wall of the palace. Yet when we arrive we find the doors already secured against our passage. It is clear our ruse has failed. We hear the sounds of shouted commands behind us.

  The skeletal guards at the doors part, and the Bone King enters.

  His face is a storm. I had seen Tsud angry in the many years that I served him, but his anger was that of a petulant child. I had seen the anger of the Empress as well, which was a dark and silent fury.

  The anger of the Bone King is a destroying fire.

  “Do you think I would not know?” he screams. “Your names belong to me. You are mine.” His voice drops in tone but not volume, still echoing off the shelves around us. “I have eviscerated living men. I have had men boiled alive or ravaged by beasts. I have tasted their flesh myself. They do not die. Do you understand me? They do not die!”

  This last is so loud it makes the long windows of the library shudder.

  “You.”

  He does not have my name. I had given it to her, freely, over and over, but she would never speak it.

  But the Bone King will surely take it from me now.

  I prefer death.

  There is still time. The names in the silent, dry scrolls around us are calling to me. I feel in that moment that I am indeed only a shadow in the midst of a crystalline world mapped and frozen around me.

  I feel her eyes on me.

  The next instant there is a crashing against the wide library windows. I can see one of my birds beyond, clawing at the glass and beating black wings.

  It is only a moment’s distraction, but I take it. I tear a torch from the hand of one of the soldiers beside me and run into the stacks, passing the torch low along the shelves as I go like a burner in the fields torching stubble.

  I will die among the scrolls.

  The fire catches quickly, but I continue staggering forward. The Bone King and his soldiers will escape, or if they do not they will simply burn and find a new and more horrifying shape in which to continue their deathless existence. But I will die.

  I still hold my name, and I will die.

  The books and scrolls blossom around me, as though they are the ghosts of trees that have waited centuries to flower.

  Here though there is a wall of books that do not burn. It is hard to see anything now because of the heat and the play of smoke, but the absence of flame makes apparent what I had never found in my life in the library: here is a false shelf with a hidden door. I stumble toward it, pushing against it, trying find the catch to release it, when a huge shape rushes past and batters through like a wave.

  The darkness beyond sucks at the flames around us. There is a hand on my arm, an iron gauntlet still hot from the flames. It is the bloody general whose name sits now in my mind like a jagged spike.

  “The Bone King,” he says, his voice coming more hoarsely than before. “He burns. Behind us.”

  “Dead?”

  It seems incredible he should have been defeated, that he would have descended like a storm from the north only to break upon the promise of release she has offered with her namings.

  “Not dead.” The general has already moved past me, his shambling footsteps ahead clanging on stones in the darkness. There are other soldiers among us, and it’s impossible to tell whether they are those who were with us before or if they have joined us since, streaming from the Bone King’s standard like rats from a sinking ship. “He named himself long ago. We go to find her now,” the general continues, farther down the tunnel. “For death!”

  The men around me, those who can still speak, take up the call.

  We emerge, hours later, beyond the walls. The moon is on the horizon and light is growing in the east. We are free of the palace, but the growing light does not make our situation any less nightmarish. These monsters speak their names, over and over again. They pass them back and forth among themselves like currency. Those who cannot speak scrawl them in angular runes on whatever surfaces they can find: helmets, breastplates, their own flesh.

  “If we are captured,” the general rumbles. “Hold them all. Any who find the Empress. Bring us to death.”

  I try to hold onto them, but the names are uncouth things, born under a harsh northern sky.

  No outriders from the Bone King pursue us, but by the time the sun has clawed its way into the eastern sky, dust on the horizon ahead shows we have been found. In a few moments, riders surround us with leveled lances.

  “Deserters from the Bone King!” I shout, raising my arms. “We seek asylum with the Empress!”

  They halt beyond reach, but two of them move forward. The first, when he approaches, I recognize as the haggard form of Ekip. Beside him rides Rees.

  “Lord Keeper!”

  I am amazed to see a smile cross his weary, embattled face. All of the men with him are tired and dirty, but they wear set, stormy faces. They have seen their land burn.

  “We seek asylum,” I repeat, lowering my arms. “These are fleeing the Bone King’s service.”

  “Why?” Ekip’s face is guarded.

  “Because the Empress has the power to release them, to give them death.”

  Around me the broken soldiers echo their names, as though hoping to speak the syllables to as many ears as possible that might carry them further.

  “Where is she?” I ask.

  Rees gives me a puzzled look. “She received your letter,” he explains, reining his heaving horse closer. “She is in the seat of her power, where you bid her come.”

  * * *

  And so my peregrinations bring me full circle.

  She waits beneath the branches of the Grey Conclave. Her generals would not let her leave the safety of the monastery. They waited the hours it took for each of our ragged party to be hauled up the immense grey-green walls one by one. When we arrive where she waits in the center of the grove, the soldiers of the Bone King kneel as one before her.

  “Hail, Lady Death,” they say.

  Her eyes take them in, find mine, and move on.

  “They want release,” I say. “They bring you their names.”

  “What will you give me for this service?”

  “Names, Great Empress,” their broken general says, the blood still bubbling at his ruined throat. “More names.”

  She nods once.

  It takes time. She speaks them all, and they fall on the soft grass of the hill. Their armor spills around them like black leaves. The wind whispers through branches above.

  Then only their general remains, and he is still listing names, dozens and then perhaps hundreds, and she is repeating them back. My birds have found me, the two that remain. They rest upon my shoulders, and I feel something like whole again, though she will still not meet my gaze.

  When he has given them all, all those he recalls from his service with the Bone King, he kneels again and places his forehead against her foot.

  I wonder how old he is, how long he has been broken and undying in the Bone King’s service.

  “And your name?” she asks.

  It comes to me. He would speak it himself in a moment, but of all the shared syllables, shattered and uncouth and strange, that I have been given and that have tumbled from my mind, this one rises up unbidden.

  I speak it.

  She repeats.

  Then he is gone.

  She shudders and pulls herself erect. I have never seen her drained after a naming, even when we toiled together by candlelight over the lists and ledgers Tsud constrained her to speak in her fortress-prison long ago.

  “Keeper,” she says. “I must speak with you below.” She points to the opening of the dry well.

  Since I have been gone the monks have fashioned a lift that allows one to descend w
ith their feet in a loop of rope. She descends first, and I follow.

  My feet have barely touched the ground in the chamber beneath when her weight slams me against the wall of stone.

  “Never presume to know what is best for me,” she hisses, her breath hot and fierce. “When I want you gone, I will send you away. Do not leave before.”

  Then she buries her face in my neck, and I hold her.

  “I will name you,” she mutters into my chest. Her shoulders shake only slightly. “If you leave again, I will speak your name into the darkness.”

  We wait together for a time, two children holding each other in the night, two lovers hemmed by silence. Presently a slow dripping from the silvery chamber beyond breaks the stillness.

  “What is that?” I ask, with a growing sense of dread.

  “What I must show you.” She pulls me toward where the world-ice waits in the chamber below. “The price.”

  Her skin looks ivory in the glow from the luminous ice.

  “Your letter,” she explains when we stand before it. “When we learned the Bone King’s power, I knew I would have to come here before I hoped to pit myself against it, before I tried to speak names he had already spoken and take them from him. I don’t know how my power works, but when you wrote of this, of the world being here... I knew I would need to draw on it.”

  The sound of dripping comes again. There is a puddle beneath the shard. As I watch, a pearly drop slides from the ice to fall to the surface below. “It is melting.”

  She nods. “The abbot says I have drawn power from the ice itself and sped its dissolution. And if what they say about it is true...”

  “Your victory over the Bone King has moved the world, the ice, toward disorder.”

  “I do not regret.” She squares her shoulders. “You saw what they were. I watched you in the library, within the ice. I sent your birds to aid you. But I am Death. To save my kingdom, I have spoken the death of a world.”

  The shard before us drips steadily in the silence.

  “Help me, Keeper. Help me find a way to fix it.”

  I take her hand. “Always.”

  I can see into the world-ice more clearly than before. I can see the shape of the Bone King’s influence, peeling away to the north, broken against the sharp bright spires of the Empress and her kingdom. I can see the consequences of its cost, moving in static waves through the lattice of the ice itself, warming and breaking it.