Beneath Ceaseless Skies #14

by Brennan, Marie; Hoffman, Erin

  And then wait for Valrassuith to finish dying.

  She would probably die before her world did. They had perhaps another two generations left—maybe more, maybe less; no one knew what hastened or slowed the inevitable decay.

  Except Last.

  If that was all that going home held for her, then Alsanit might as well stay here and die. It would hurt less than facing her people with her failure.

  Night came and went; it seemed longer than night in Valrassuith, but perhaps despair lengthened it. Alsanit sat with her back to a bedpost of carved bone, stared at the wall, and wondered what she should do with herself. Commit suicide? Starve to death? Set up a new life, exiled from her own world? The question filled her with such apathy that when Last reappeared in the doorway, she simply stared at him, dully, half-believing him a figment of her imagination.

  He looked down at her for a long moment. The morning light coming in through the room’s one small window made him shine slightly, like a god.

  “I make no promises,” he finally said, in a quiet, heavy voice. “Other people have tried this, and it didn’t work for them. They must have done something wrong. But it’s the best I can give you.”

  “I don’t ask for promises,” Alsanit whispered. “Just for hope.”

  He nodded, slowly. “Very well.

  “Lots of people try to stay in their own realities, and never go anywhere else. Doesn’t save them. But you can’t abandon your own world, either; it needs you to survive. So you have to compromise.”

  Alsanit waited, the words burning themselves into her memory, blazing with the possibility of survival.

  “Have someone—your own shoemakers, if you still have any—make boots with hollow spaces in the heels. Take soil, or small stones, from Valrassuith, and put this into the spaces. Wear the boots at all times. If you do that, you bring your own world with you, wherever you go. You’ll always be standing on the ground of Valrassuith, no matter where you are. And this may—may—save you.”

  Hope gave Alsanit new life; she roused from her stupor and began to crawl across the floor to where Last stood. Tears of gratitude fell from her eyes.

  Last stepped back before she could kiss his feet. “Don’t. Please. Just go back to your people.”

  “I will,” Alsanit whispered. “And—thank you. Words are not enough, but . . . thank you.”

  And carrying his words like the treasure they were, she went to give her people hope.

  * * *

  The night after I saw Alsanit for the last time, I drank myself into a stupor. If you want to solve problems, that’s a shitty way to do it, but if you want to wallow in your misery, drinking’s the way to go. My problem had no solution. All I could do was wallow.

  Alsanit wasn’t the first to ask me that question, nor the last. I’ve sworn to myself time and time again that I won’t answer when they ask, that I’ll just leave, hide, stay away from them. And I try. But they always hunt me down. What else can they do? I’m their one chance at salvation, their final hope for saving their dying worlds. They can’t leave until they get their answer.

  So I give it to them.

  No one ever wants to hear the truth. I’ve tried telling them, and they refuse to accept it. They prefer lies. So I tell them what they want to hear. I make up some interesting falsehood, something that sounds plausible; maybe I take it from the rantings of a streetside preacher who died four hundred years ago, and to them it sounds new. And they smile, and weep, and thank me; sometimes, like Alsanit, they try to kiss my feet.

  And then they go away, and their worlds die.

  The lie I gave Alsanit is a special one. It’s one I actually tried, along with all the people of my world, back when there were such people, back when there was a world I called my own. We put stones in our boot-heels and prayed it would make us safe.

  It didn’t save them. And it didn’t save me. I kept those stones in my boots for seventy-five years after the rest of them were gone, thinking they were the only things keeping me in existence, until the day I got mugged in Ettolch and the mugger stole my boots. Then there was nothing keeping me “grounded,” keeping me on my native soil, and still I didn’t die, didn’t fade, didn’t vanish.

  I don’t know why.

  That’s the truth no one wants to hear. I don’t have the first clue why I’m still around. I’ve outlived the normal lifespan of my race many times over; even if my world hadn’t gone away, I should be dead. I tried all the theories that were in fashion back then, but so did everyone else around me. They’re gone, and I’m not. Maybe the answer lies in some subtle interaction of the things I tried; maybe you need to spend precisely this amount of time in your own reality and that amount of time outside of it, while simultaneously eating specific food in specific weights, and if you get the numbers exactly right, behold, immortality.

  I doubt it. But then again, what do I know?

  Not much. Except that I’m still here, unlike everybody else.

  Copyright © 2009 Marie Brennan

  Comment on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Marie Brennan is an anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. Her stories have sold to more than a dozen venues, including Talebones, On Spec, Intergalactic Medicine Show. Four have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “Remembering Light,” also set in the Driftwood world. Her series of historical fantasy novels centering on the faerie court of London includes Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, and A Star Shall Fall, out in September 2010.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  STORMCHASTER, STORMSHAPER

  by Erin Hoffman

  “Tell me what you are,” Ruby said, and the blade of the longsword, streaked with warm vermilion, did not shake.

  A fresh sweat broke out on the Verani captain’s forehead, welling up through a pate that already gleamed in the beating sun. It must have stung the cut that still sluggishly bled into his hair. The twitch of his hands said he was considering lying to her, asking what she meant. “What I—?”

  “Save your honor and do not make me ask again,” Ruby said, deepening her voice like Mother’s when her commands were questioned.

  It was all the man needed. His hands fell to the deck where he knelt and his chin dropped. He was silent for two long heartbeats, long enough for Ruby to wonder what it must be like, a captain from the land empires knowing now that his only immortality would be the emblem she, his last enemy, would carry on her skin, a living memory of pain. “I am wind over the sea,” he whispered, and this time the words were thick with a truth, his last; “a cold nor’wester before morning, clouds chased by the sun.” Though his voice did quaver, he did not weep; as he surrendered his spirit’s secret shape, the form of his unique humanity, Ruby swallowed an unexpected rush of pity and admiration.

  A stillness stole over her, at its core a wild uncertainty like a swaying deck that she clamped down on hard. How could a man that had fought with such violence have an essence so gentle? A mystery that would die with him, if he fell here. If she killed him.

  “Ruby.” Mother’s voice was cold as the north sea in winter. She would not say in front of the gathered crew what she had said so many times behind the thick door of the captain’s cabin. “You are sixteen and unmarked. It shames me.” Mother, who carried more marks than any freebooter on any sea in the world, not just the West, where she ruled.

  It shamed Ruby. She clenched her sword hilt, willed herself to coldness. He will go back, she told herself, if he lives he will go back and the empires will think they have won, that they can trespass here. Were their roles reversed, Ruby knew without doubt that the Verani would slice her throat with not a moment’s hesitation.

  The sharp thunk of boot-heels, and Mother’s shadow fell across her. “You prolong his suffering,” she hissed, deep anger clipping her words, and disgrace crept through Ruby’s blood like seeping bilge. “Finish this, Ruby,” she ground, low and terrible, but it was with pain, “or so help
me I will put you off at the next port.”

  The captain watched stoically over the waves. He had to have heard Mother’s words, but if so he gave no sign. “Thank you,” Ruby told him quietly, and opened his throat with her blade.

  A roar like a swift thunderstorm filled her ears, covering the choking of her foe, and her heart began to pound again as the thick stench of copper filled the air. For an instant blackness rimmed her vision, and if it weren’t for all of the blood she would think the man’s thrashing a grisly pantomime.

  Adrenaline faded, and she began to remember her own wounds: a stinging at the back of her neck that had been far too close, she’d hear about that, and a long mark down her calf that she suspected would show quite well when it scarred. The sun was strangely bright, or else the return of vision stunned her.

  Mother’s expression was a wild mosaic. The lift of her eyebrows was pride, the redness of her cheek excitement, the whiteness at the corner of her lips apprehension, maybe even sadness. Though there were crow’s feet framing her famous green eyes, no grey yet marked the riotous scarlet curls that would not be contained by her battered leather cap. Those were the curls that chilled the bones of many a lookout, seen through a spyglass; they proclaimed her Rhiannon, the Sea Queen, commander of the flagship Viere d’Inar, the Crown of the Sea. And down from them, covering her neck, her arms, virtually her entire body beneath her linen and armor, a maze of inkwork, some said a thousand tattoos—one for each man or woman she had killed, as was custom. With a sharp gesture between two onlookers she ordered the body of Ruby’s opponent, now two moments dead, commended to the waves.

  “You’re a woman now, Ruby,” Mother said, all trespass forgotten, then reached out to pull her closer by the neck, banging their foreheads together, grinning fiercely. The cinnamon musk of her leather oil engulfed them. “You’ve had your first blood.” The hands all laughed at that, and Mother waved them back to their posts, dispatching a small group to see to the new vessel and tally plunder. When the sundries were assigned, she turned back to Ruby. “Where’ll you have him put?” she asked, intent as an osprey sighting prey.

  “Left hand,” she said, sweeping a fingertip down the inside of her thumb and half holding her breath. Mother smiled again with wolfish pride and Ruby felt a warm glow through her middle.

  “A good place,” Mother said. “No hiding it. And it’ll hurt like hell.” Her relish was unmistakable. “We’ll have it done here, at the helm, and Wymar will add a mark to the wheel to celebrate it. You and our Lady Crown will be bound at last.”

  “At last,” Ruby said, as the two crewmen lashed the wind-man’s sword to his wrist and lifted him over the rail. The splash was heavy but the sea swallowed fast, and soon was peacefully lapping the hull once more.

  * * *

  A stiff breeze, cold and sweet, shook the Viere’s furled sails like albatross feathers, filling the twilight with the sound of snapping canvas and creaking rig. Ruby leaned out over the prow, feet braced against the wooden wall, arms stretched down toward the water with fingers spread. She twitched her left hand, reprimanding her fingertips for ticking towards the still healing ink on the inside of her thumb. The reed needles had, indeed, hurt like hell, but the meticulous wind spiral with the sunrays below (“clouds chased by the sun,” his voice whispered when she looked at it, so she didn’t, often) had been lauded by all as a near-perfect first mark. Wymar had done well. He’d lost his legs to a cannonball five years ago but earned his keep tattooing flesh and sewing sail. When her eyes strayed toward the black ink she still saw the Verani captain’s scuffed boot slipping across the rail to join the sea’s final darkness.

  The waves below were green and lively. When Ruby closed her eyes the sea rushed up inside her, thundering through her blood. For an instant she was a girl again, terrified, nearly overwhelmed by the cold vastness, swallowed into the dark. Mother, awed (Mother was never awed), telling her she had a great gift, a blessing from the goddess of the sea. Blessing or not, some terror still lived there, when she opened herself to the waves. But she always came back to do it again. Here there were no sails, no beams, no orders and no captain—only the wild water. Mother might think it a gift, but only because she would never know Ruby would wear only this if she could, not the weight of a captain’s tricorne. The truth, as truths often did, would break her heart.

  A hum in the back of her skull told her that a storm was approaching—big, but not enough to threaten the Viere d’Inar. The waves knew, carried the song of it out across the miles, up from deep fathoms, down down down from the glass surface. Ruby had loved the sea, adored it with a deep and terrible rapture she had never felt for anything living or dead, from the moment she first reached out to it—but she loved it in a storm best of all.

  With her hands stretched in the salt air, Ruby poured herself into the sea, exulted in its rush and churn.

  And the storm came, first blotting out the sun, then piercing the fabric of cloud and wave with needles of white fire. She gave herself up to it, to the primal abandon, the madness that brushed so close to death. It flung her away from mortality, danced at the edge of oblivion, washed away identity and everything with it, filled her with the real.

  Rain hissed across the deck from stern to prow, soaking her to the skin in moments. To those huddled in the cabin this would seem a quiet storm, meditative almost, the drum of rain and the occasional rolling boom of thunder on the waves—but Ruby felt it through her blood as a wild symphony, shifting clouds and folding whitecaps crashing together in rhythms that vibrated her ribs and cleansed her heart.

  But then—there was something else.

  It took her a long moment to distinguish it, to pull the piercing cry out of the exultant wail of the storm across the serrated waves. She struck rain from her eyes impatiently and squinted into the clouds. There, finally—an erratic white shape tossed to and fro between thunderheads. When it dropped close enough to make its size and form recognizable, she gasped in a breath that brought a lungful of rain with it, choked, and stumbled toward the alarm bell.

  The storm swallowed every other gong of the bell, but the rumble of boots up the steps and across the deck vindicated her. Shouts of surprise and wonder stopped her from pointing out the twisting shape in the sky.

  For several long minutes they watched helplessly as the creature—an impossible relic, eagle’s head and lion’s body, a gryphon, her heart insisted, but it could not be—battled the storm. It would disappear entirely into black anvil clouds, sometimes for long enough that they were sure it had escaped the storm, but inevitably it reappeared—lower in the sky.

  Finally—and now they could spy wings, tufted tail, hooked beak—the figure passed beneath the storm’s intense influence and gained control of its flight again, though weakly. Mother had come to stand beside Ruby, and by her white-rimmed eyes Ruby knew that she, too, had thought the last gryphons extinct decades ago, now nothing more than a nautical tall tale told by bearded men with the blue madness. But here was one dropping out of the sky.

  And coming closer.

  Gradually the crew began to realize that the creature was, in fact, headed for the ship. A low murmur of concern and suspicion grew into a buzz of alarm punctuated by shouts as the gryphon circled the ship, dropping ever closer.

  Mother brought them to quick order. “Clear a space on the deck, all of you,” she barked, and the crew scuttled. “Stay away from the rail. Get your backs against something tall!”

  The gryphon was so close that they could feel the added wind of his wingbeats. In one final pass, he nearly clipped the mainsail, then folded his wings—more of a collapsing motion than anything with deliberate elegance—and dropped straight down, impacting the deck with a force that caused the entire ship to list starboard. As all hands leapt for purchase, Ruby dove for a salt-crusted cleat in the deck and wrapped herself around it, stomach lurching as the Viere quickly swung herself aright.

  Silence, and then, slowly, she looked up.

  What had
been a distant figure tossed by the wind was now a large heap of giant feathers on the deck. For one horrified moment Ruby wondered if the impact had killed him. How she knew it was a ‘him’ was a mystery, but there was no more mistaking it than the hugeness of the sky or the color of the sea. As he lifted his head, Mother gripped Ruby’s arm.

  The fury of the ocean spun in his indigo eyes, strange and familiar. Ruby pulled away from her mother and stepped close to kneel near the massive white head. “Who are you?” she asked. Could he speak? Would he?

  ( Ellisar, ) he said, and the crew drew back as one at the voice in their minds. Ruby turned the “sound” around in her head. Even strained, exhausted, his voice was brassy and more resonant than a human’s. The gryphon’s head lolled to one side as if in a swoon, but the eye remained keen, searching the sky. ( I need—to go inside, ) he said, as if the last word were strange even in thought.

  The crew erupted in objections. Some wanted to toss him back into the storm, others insisted that this would be powerful bad luck, and still more wanted to hold him hostage while he was weak. A few even blamed him for the storm itself. The contingent that wanted to toss him back to the wind and waves seemed to be winning out when the gryphon clawed his way to his feet. A desperate certainty filled Ruby; this gryphon knew the sea, knew it as none Ruby had ever met could claim to. They would not have him. She tensed, ready to defend him with her own body if need be, searching the crew and picking out who was most dangerous. Valentin, the Maresh knife-brawler; Jarek, whose real name none knew....

  The gryphon’s quiet stare visibly chilled the hearts of the most hardened sailors—even old bald Remi, who had known sea wars and the systematic loss of all his blood-kin—but something about the way he lifted his wings sent a ripple of electricity up Ruby’s spine. ( Unwise, ) he said only; and as he spoke, the waves beyond the ship grew steeper. Masts creaked as the sea picked up speed again, rolling against the hull with slowly increasing force.