Beneath Ceaseless Skies #65

by Rambo, Cat

  Her opponent taunted her. Every few days another feather appeared. Laid atop her pillow, on the tray beside her breakfast, drifting on the windowsill. A marker in her book, turned a few pages beyond where she had been reading.

  She burned them in the fireplace but said nothing to Balthus.

  Inside you is your worst enemy. What did that mean? The thought ate at her like a parasite. Was she at odds with herself? Was she overlooking the obvious, making mistakes she should have realized? She found herself outside her actions, watching them with a critical eye.

  She faltered sometimes. The fine lines around Balthus’s eyes meshed and deepened when he frowned at her, but he said nothing aloud.

  But he wanted the Falcon captured, and soon. He was angry about the losses, the time that would be necessary to create more Beasts. For the first time he did not communicate his plans but expected her to guess them in a way that left her scrambling to catch up at times, trying to figure how to incorporate each creature he created. He did not consult her. She could have used more winged Beasts, to replace lost scouts, but she did not dare request them.

  * * *

  It shocked her when Balthus, finally making a move, caught the quarry she had sought so long. Little consolation that his victory came by cheating, not the sort of thing she would have ever embarked upon.

  She could see why Balthus had moved with such efficiency, though. Was not all fair in war, as in love?

  It was through an exchange of hostages, one of the sacred customs. By doing it, she thought to pay the Falcon tribute, let him see she respected him as an opponent, perhaps lure him into complacency. It was not until they had been dispatched that Balthus revealed that one had been a Siren, a woman created to entice, who would cast her magic over them.

  “She even looked a little like you,” he said with a smile. Then added, “As you were, I mean.”

  She made no reply aloud, but had he been able to read her thoughts, his smile might have faltered.

  * * *

  Aife went to the cell where they kept the Falcon. She took two guards with her, trailing her as she made her way down spirals of stone. On the third landing, a torch burned beside his door.

  Her hand spread like an elderly starfish on the door’s surface as she leaned forward. She found herself trembling like a hound ready to be loosed on the scent.

  He had been sitting on the bunk. He sprang up as her shadow crossed the rectangle of light on the stone floor, approached the door till he was inches away from the bars and the hood’s edge shrouding her face, but not far enough. He recoiled as he saw her fully, recovered, stood still, but this time not as close.

  She looked at him all the while. Rumors had not lied about his handsomeness. Slim and brown-skinned, his hair as black as ink, a few white strands at the temples somehow making it seem even darker.

  Aife could have loved this man, long ago, in her soldier days, before the weight of death had settled on her shoulders. He was young and beautiful, so beautiful. So alive. She wanted him as she had not wanted anything for so long. She put a hand to the bars, looked at him, hoping to see the same recognition there.

  Only horror and revulsion

  She had thought her heart dead, but that was not true, else how could she feel it aching now?

  Still, she had to question him. She took two guards in with her but motioned them back when they would have seized him. Leave him his dignity for now.

  “How did you know what I was doing for so long?” she said.

  He sneered. “Are you not a dead thing, to be commanded by magic, like all dead things that walk must be? I had my necromancer working for months, trying to find a way inside your mind. On the night of the year’s third moon, he succeeded.

  “After that, all was clear to me. His magic let me take control of you from time to time. We could not risk it for long, though, so I used it to trouble you, making you lay down clues for yourself: a feather to stir your thoughts, send them in the wrong direction. And it worked, until your master chose to trust you no longer.”

  Had Balthus realized what had happened? That closing her mind to him had opened it to other magical controllers? Surely he had not known it at first but only later, had used it to infiltrate the Falcon’s camp, to discover his plans in order to catch him?

  “Your compatriots,” she said, “including any magickers with them, are dead. You are here in Balthus’s castle, and will be wrung of information as a sponge is of water. Will you yield it up easily or will you force him to twist you hard?”

  She watched him as he considered her words. She thought that it would be hard to kill him, but she’d do it nonetheless. She had killed pretty men before, and seen many of them used to coaxing their way from women die as quick and efficiently as the ugliest man.

  Sometimes they were a little more theatrical about it all. He seemed like he would be the theatrical sort.

  She touched the silver chain. She had refused jewelry for so long. It was something that made you a target, or gave enemies a chance to grab at it. And here it had happened, just as she had always feared. Her worst enemy had been in her head, and it was not herself.

  She thought, though, that if she could have freed him, she might have. He was that pretty. It would have made her happy, to know that he lived somewhere, that he knew it was by her mercy. If only that was possible.

  Footsteps, coming down the stairs. Who?

  The Falcon twisted at the air with his hand. She felt the chain constrict around her throat, puppet fingers slipping into her brain.

  “It seems my necromancer’s magic lingers after all, after all,” he said. “I suspected you could not resist coming close enough that I could control you, even without his assistance. What shall I have you do? Kill your master seems the most obvious step, doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps,” Balthus said from where he stood on the stairwell.

  Aife was pulled upward, her limbs someone else’s, a loathsome intimacy that made bile burn in her throat. The guards were on their knees, choking, hands at their throats, trying to pry away invisible cords. She was thrust towards the door, trying to keep her arms out to maintain balance.

  Balthus raised his hand, palm towards her. The green blotch had grown like a bracelet around his wrist. A blob of silvery liquid covered the center of his hand like the moon, pulling her forward, a mystical tide washing through her, making her heavy, restoring her to herself. She shuddered, shaking off the last of the netting over her senses.

  “You are not one sixteenth as clever as you think you are, puppy,” Balthus said .

  “Enough to rid you of your most powerful tool!” the Falcon exclaimed. She twisted away as he flung something at her that dispersed in the air, a handful of motes. She felt it settling on her back and shoulders, saw red sparkling dust riding the breeze, falling on her gray skin and setting it smoldering wherever it landed.

  Where was water, anywhere close at hand? The privy pot in the cell was dry. The guards were recovering, as she had, and so she discarded the thought of quenching anything in their blood.

  Fire blazed along her skin, burning deep, too deep to extinguish. She staggered towards the door, where Balthus stood. His face was stricken. She saw herself, a fiery angel, reflected in his pupils, saw the thick velvet of the cloak gone lacy with flame. She opened her mouth to appeal to him and felt it fill with flaming dust, go hiss-flickering out, the heat stealing any chance at words.

  Fire, and more fire, and then final darkness.

  * * *

  Only to awake, agonized. Balthus’s face above her yet again.

  Was that all it would ever be, from now on?

  She was bone now. Bone and some sort of spectral, invisible flesh that netted her limbs into order and gave her the power of sight. She moved her fingers and they clacked and clicked against the planes of her face as she tried to touch whatever held her together.

  Opposite her a standing mirror, green-lit, presenting her rippled and obscured as though drowning. H
er skull, wavering in the reflection, capped with a tiara— a golden hawk, wings stretched out to cup the bone.

  Wolf was there past the mirror, pressed against the wall of the chamber. Watching her with loyalty. Whatever she became, he would follow. It was reassurance. She would always be a leader, no matter what.

  Truly a monster now. She would have to give up some of her illusions: the pretense of meals and cosmetics and clothing. What good would armor be, except to hang on her as though she was some sort of display rack?

  “I have made you a present, my dearest,” Balthus said. His fingers stroked her skull, bumped along her teeth. He released her and stepped aside.

  Undead, skin already graying. Ah, the fine dark hair, the silver strands like penmarks in reverse. The once-piercing eyes now blue and cloudy marbles.

  Marbles full of hate and spite and helpless malice. Hers forever more, her handsome toy, given her by her master, perhaps to torment, perhaps from love and an impulse to please. Would she ever know his motives, would she ever understand if she was puppet or lover, source of amusement or font of something else?

  Endless days stretched before her, in which she would never find the answer.

  Copyright © 2011 Cat Rambo

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  Cat Rambo has worked as a programmer for Microsoft and a Tarot card reader; professions which, she claims, both involve a certain combination of technical knowledge and willingness to go with the flow. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons, among others, and her work has consistently garnered mentions and appearances in year’s best anthologies. Her collection, Eyes Like Coal and Moonlight, was an Endeavour Award finalist in 2010 and followed her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories. Visit her website at http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  PLAYING FOR AMARANTE

  by A.B. Treadwell

  I first caught sight of Amarante in the sea of pale silk that glimmered in the low light of the concert hall like pearls underwater. She wore carmine.

  Even from my poor vantage on stage, that color spoke its name. Would that it had also spoken—what? A premonition? A warning?

  A carmine bodice, auburn hair caught up with combs of amber, and a rapt, transported stillness. She leaned forward from the second row, listening. My foot on the treadle slowed and stopped, my hands stilled against the glass rims. Ethereal tones from the armonica lingered, mingled, sustained themselves into haunting disquiet. The last reverberation died away.

  The concert hall held its breath, and I held mine.

  In the wash of rising silk and waistcoats and stunning, concussive applause, I caught one flutter of falling. The woman on the second row spilled into the aisle. A flash of carmine pooled on the floor.

  I remember leaping from the bench. The applause trebled. I ran to the edge of the stage, but already I had lost her. The crowd closed over her without a ripple.

  My instinct was to find her, she who was no one to me but a listener in a crowd of hundreds. Even then, before the threads of my life began to unravel, when my innocence was complete and my heart untroubled, I trembled at the intensity of my response.

  I would have sworn on my life that I had never seen her before, but I startled nearly out of my skin when my own voice whispered in my ear that her name was—is—Amarante.

  * * *

  My patroness the Comtesse Sophie de Grasse parades me through the concert hall foyer. Her skirts swish down the grand stairs, and her open bodice breathes perfume: essences of iris, jasmine, and orange blossom.

  I open the coach door and lift her by a gloved hand. We sit facing one another. It would be a mistake to ask Sophie about the woman. The way she strokes my knee, I can tell her mind is on other things.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she says. Her face is aglow this night, and she looks the age she pretends to be.

  “Oh?”

  “We have an invitation to dine with Madame Geoffrin.”

  Even as a newcomer to Paris I have heard of Mme. Geoffrin. She is the most famous hostess in all of Europe. “At the Monday salon?”

  “No!” Sophie pulls me closer. “Tonight!”

  Now I understand the blush that glows from her cheeks and neckline. The most preeminent salon in Paris has rearranged its schedule for us.

  “You are the guest of honor,” she says. Her eyes sparkle. “Joseph Haydn will be there! He’s here for one night—rumor has it the head of the Loge Olympique orchestra hopes to persuade him to write a Paris symphony—but Madame Geoffrin has taken great pains to make sure no one knows. He asked to meet the young virtuoso who’s turning Paris inside out. Can you believe it? This could be our gateway to Vienna!”

  Vienna. Winter home of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, builder of palaces with gold-plated halls, theaters dwarfed by murals of Apollo, and sponsor of the finest orchestra in the world. Suddenly Sophie’s dream of introducing me to Haydn’s patron seems dizzyingly real.

  Her words penetrate too quickly. I am to play the armonica for Joseph Haydn. The most celebrated composer in Europe. Tonight. Sweat turns to ice on my skin.

  The carriage jolts to a stop, and Sophie slides into my lap. She kisses me deeply. “Carry yourself like an artist.” She smoothes the ruffles of my shirt.

  I am dizzy with perfume and the rush that answers Sophie’s touch.

  Vienna is a dream; meeting Haydn, delirium. Perhaps one day, to train under him and play alongside the best musicians in the world with Apollo’s reflected glory falling over us. In all my life, there will never be another chance.

  I whisper a prayer in my mother’s rustic dialect.

  The coachman opens our door, and we step out.

  * * *

  The bellman announces us as “Monsieur Persèe Durand and the Comtesse de Grasse.”

  The inverted order of our names arrests me until Sophie gives me a nudge, and I remember that in this room, on this night, it is my name that matters.

  The drawing room is draped with brocade and tassels in shades of sea foam. Niches hold potted orchids, gilded cages with rare birds, and chaise lounges where the silken curves of the old aristocracy brush against the rumpled waistcoats of the intelligentsia.

  A great mirror hangs above a marble fireplace, doubling movement, guests, and light.

  A woman with a long white braid draped over her shoulder sweeps toward us. “Welcome, Comtesse! Monsieur Durand, a pleasure.” She presses Sophie’s hand in both her own.

  “Madame Geoffrin.” Sophie’s voice is breathless.

  Our hostess, the most coveted contact in Paris, holds a hand to me. I kiss it.

  Madame Geoffrin laughs. “What pretty manners! I see your hand in this one, Comtesse.”

  Sophie smiles at me and links her arm in mine. “No, I’m afraid he came to me this way. I have only taught him bad habits.”

  “But what a lovely bouquet your bad habits make, Comtesse.” Sophie and I turn to see a man in a well-cut dress coat sweep a dashing bow.

  “Monsieur Franc La Ronge, philologist, playwright, philanderer, poet to the Hapsburg court.”

  “Madame Geoffrin exaggerates. My poetry is doggerel.” La Ronge kisses Sophie’s hand. “How is your husband, Comtesse?”

  Sophie colors prettily. “At home, poor man. Managing distillation. Perfume is a demanding mistress.”

  “I would not want any other kind,” says La Ronge.

  My head is spinning. This La Ronge fellow pens verse for the Empress. How many heads of state are but one degree away from the guests in this room?

  Mme. Geoffrin touches my arm. “I have a place for you in the great room.” She pulls me away, and I glance back only once at Sophie. She does not look for me.

  Heads turn as I cross the room with Mme. Geoffrin. I pass faces as familiar as the profiles on currency. They stare because I am out of place, I think, but then a second thought sends bright hot
needles across my skin. Perhaps they stare because they know exactly who I am.

  The most beautiful and powerful men and women in all of Europe know my name.

  The most beautiful save one. I search the room and find every shade but carmine.

  “Madame Geoffrin,” I venture. “Did you attend this evening? There was a woman in the second row. Did you see her fall?”

  Mme. Geoffrin inclines her head toward me. “I was not in attendance, but surely my guests would have mentioned anything untoward. The second row, you say?”

  “Yes. She wore carmine.” For no reason at all, I blush.

  “I will inquire discretely for you.”

  “Thank you, Madame.”

  Mme. Geoffrin leads me to a curtained alcove lined with low benches. Another great mirror catches the reflection from the other room. Below it sits an inlaid stand the size of a sewing table. The stand conceals the instrument, the armonica. A chair waits for me.

  A man steps out of the shadows.

  “Monsieur Haydn,” says Mme. Geoffrin.

  Every hair on my head turns to glass.

  “Monsieur Durand,” she says.

  My hand shakes in his grip.

  “A pleasure, Durand,” says Joseph Haydn. “Now, if you please, Madame Geoffrin, I cannot endure another moment’s wait. Show me the instrument.”

  Mme. Geoffrin opens the case. The armonica flares in the candle light, graduated glass cups nested on a spindle.

  “Ingenious,” says Haydn. “I had not envisioned it arranged horizontally.” Some of the rims are painted gold. “For the black keys?” he asks.

  She nods and I can see she is proud of the instrument. It is a wonder. “Please, Monsieur Durand.” She invites me to sit.

  I settle on the bench and arrange my hands. Mme. Geoffrin brings me a bowl of water, and I wet my fingers.

  “It’s played like a piano,” I tell Haydn. “The sound is the same as that made by a damp finger drawn across the rim of a water glass. See how the glasses spin when I pump the treadle below? Put your finger here.” I show him middle C.