Beneath Ceaseless Skies #232

by Scott Andrews

  She built up joy, shattered it; brewed a tincture of love and the loss of it, of security turned to rank fear. And she made it beautiful.

  She went to Jarad with the vial in hand three hours past dawn. She had not slept; neither had he. He looked at the vial pinched between his fingertips, looked at her. “What is this?” he asked.

  “My Mastery,” she said. “There is a ship down at the dock. Send it with them.” She walked away, and pretended she had not seen that he began to weep with the violence of relief.

  Sarai returned the Bellman’s Sigh to the supply room and went to her room to wait.

  A week later, she had her Mastery, a dark tattoo on the back of her hand, indelible. “The queen is pleased,” Jarad said, a strange tone in his voice. “The queen is, by all accounts, entranced.” He gave her a look that was fear as much as satisfaction. She smiled to try to ease his worry, but he only shook his head and left her.

  It was another two weeks before Nissa came. “She isn’t dead,” she said without preamble.

  “She was not meant to die,” Sarai said. “It isn’t my talent.”

  “She won’t leave her room. She won’t speak. She’s fallen into a melancholy mood,” Nissa said, voice almost sweet. “She mutters of deceit and death and shoves even the poison-tamers’ hands away. Not that they let her, of course. They’ve plied her with poppy to make her sleep, and our brother sits the throne in her place. For now, they say, until she’s well.”

  “A great misfortune,” Sarai said, nodding.

  “They suspected you,” Nissa said, and Sarai tasted something bitter in the back of her throat. “But when they gave the scent to others, it did nothing. It smells lovely, that’s all. Some don’t care for it at all. One man said it reminded him of his brother.”

  Sarai smiled. “There was nothing of poison in that scent,” she said. “Only memory.” Distilled and woven to lift the spirit, to shatter it.

  “You will never leave this place, now,” Nissa said, but even then she was wrong. When Nissa left, Sarai took down the sachet from her wall and pressed it to her nose. Red-bark and ambergris, salt-tang and oud-wood. Memories leapt and sparked and danced. She was on the golden sands again, the red-gold cliffs. In among the green-shadow trees, bare feet flying.

  Come home to us, her mother called, and, eyes shut to the endless gray, she did.

  Copyright © 2017 Kate Marshall

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  Kate Marshall lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and several small agents of chaos disguised as a dog, cat, and child. She works as a cover designer and video game writer. Her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, and other venues, and her YA survival thriller I Am Still Alive is forthcoming from Viking Children’s. You can find her online at katemarshallbooks.com.

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  NO PEARLS AS BLUE AS THESE

  by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  When she comes we scatter coins before her, every disc polished, some so new they are still warm from the making. She walks bare-footed but does not seem hurt or troubled by this gleaming path. I catch her smiling from the corner of her mouth as she treads on these symbols of wealth, the luster and hard glint of Tarangkaya’s prosperity.

  She is robed tightly, cerise brocade and propolis sash. Her scalp, shaven in the fashion of her country, is painted in red ink with the calligraphy—again her country’s—signaling luck, fertility, a hundred children.

  I am similarly patterned, from the back of my head to my brow, my bare shoulders and my arms, as my skin makes for good canvas. In retrospect perhaps I should not have been there, a foreign and startling sight to the foreign and startling bride. But the household’s bulwark must preside, like a pillar or statue. I even gleam like one, mostly celadon and the odd tracery in umber and old ivory, the shades of my skin back when I was still mostly skin.

  The bride glances at me once before she curtsies to my house-lord, proper and correct: she dips just so, the brilliant sash unfurling on the ground like abacus beads, and kisses the hand of Samonten Tarangkaya. They enter each other’s arms and hand in hand go into the house.

  * * *

  I hear that on the western continent, those like me are created en masse, roughly and madly. Their mothers die screaming in the act of childbirth, cut open and the weapon-child carved out like the pit of a nectarine. The infant comes out with flesh of rough stone or clay, brittle and uncomely. The result is inferior—they are the infantry of their nations, prone to short and brutal lives, someone else’s currency to spend.

  In the bride’s country, there are no children created like me at all.

  I’m watching the kitchen, where they cut fruits and tremulous pastries with a razor thread as though everything is a throat in urgent need of being garroted. I taste one dish, and another, confectionery and savory in no particular order. Nothing tastes like anything—peaches and oranges distinguished by texture rather than tartness, smoked pork in honey and jasmine rice differing in size and shape rather than piquancy. I could still taste, and enjoy, just five years ago. But as I come into my power, the inessential functions slough off. My sense of smell is fine. Taste is gone entirely.

  What I retain is a palate for poisons and toxins, small malaises that can be baked—soil and fertilizer—into the growing of pepper flowers or chili fruits. These are the only things which make impression on my tongue. Sour, hot, sweet, even gingery; the world of poisons is possessed of infinite variety. I once asked the chef to make me a meal entirely of toxic things, cursed bean sprouts and vividly green poison-frogs, but the idea distressed him, and in any case his pride forbade him to cook something he couldn’t taste. In the end I came to an agreement with Samonten’s chemist, who concocts the most interesting cocktails and condiments.

  On a tray of sanded wood and bronze lips, I put the plates I have tasted and verified, and I bring them to the dining hall. This is not proper precisely, but the household’s bulwark does what she wants. Unlike the servants, I cover the hall in steady strides, the weight of tray and plates light in hand. They did have to teach me how to balance it right, especially the tiered stand where each layer of bowls brim with condiment and shark-fin soup.

  Samonten’s guests, especially innumerable today, watch as I pass their tables by. There is a competition among them to get me to serve them too, this being their one line of contact with the Tarangkaya bulwark. Some are artless, sending gifts. Others more guileful, positioning themselves where I walk or requesting certain drinks they believe I exclusively handle. I serve only Samonten and today also her bride, at the table they have to themselves.

  Up close I see that the angle of the bride’s eyes has been sharpened by a line of ink; a lavender blush radiates on her cheekbones and her lips are rouged white, save for the midpoint where it is crimson as coins. Her name is Yut, which in her language means moon.

  When I set out her food and Samonten’s, Yut vacates her seat and gets to her knees in obeisance. The lord and I share a look, her amused, me embarrassed. What has Yut heard about the thorn, when she has been sent to wed the rose? Samonten puts one hand on her bride’s shoulder. “Yut, my love, get back up. We’ll introduce you later. Not now.”

  The bride makes mortified apologies under her breath. Around us the guests and relatives lean forward, avid. It is no secret that Samonten’s retainers and trade partners would rather she had accepted one of their own, if not as first wife then second or even third, and here a foreign girl comes along to claim the prize.

  I take my place by their side, sipping tea that tastes like nothing, not even rain. Taste is a visceral thing, a breed of information the human mind does not easily retain the way it retains numbers or names, or even the syntax of foreign tongues. I understand in the abstract when others say tea is bitter. But I no longer recall what type of bitter precisely—the bitterness of arsenic, or charred wood, or quicksilver? So it goes with all the others.

  On
ce or twice I catch Yut studying me, hypnotized in the way of a mouse before a leopard. I finish my tea.

  * * *

  A proper introduction then, in the library where past house-lords and bulwarks gaze down on us, an assembly of portraits and busts. Oil and anglerfish ink, jade and ivory, at least a hundred different materials to commemorate much more than a hundred years of history. We sit like so: the newlyweds on one side, myself on the other, separated by a sliver of table.

  Yut keeps her gaze down. I am not the first bulwark she has seen. Two or three escorted her from the port, but they were in their prime, fully arrived at their endpoint—immense, like mountains in motion. I am still human in scale if not much else.

  “Go on,” Samonten is saying to her bride. “Ask. Bidaten will not bite. She has been my companion since we were very young.”

  “I don’t—” Yut begins, quickly stops.

  To Samonten I say, “Perhaps discussing my nature in front of you seems inappropriate to her. Perhaps she’s not that curious, my lord.”

  “She is very interested in bulwarks. When we met back at the Coral Garden that was all she’d talk about. Why, if your hand were available, Bidaten. Can you take her to the wall tomorrow?”

  “Of course,” I say over the bride’s protests—I wanted you, my lord; as for the wall I don’t want to impose—and arrange a time. Once a week I visit the wall; it may as well be tomorrow. We agree, or at least I say and she doesn’t disagree, on two hours past noon. She’ll need the morning to get familiar with the household, with Samonten.

  Theirs was an unexpected courtship. There is advantage in it, but that was more serendipity than calculation. There were more convenient picks at home, with greater prestige and dowries; Yut’s foreignness is an unnecessary hindrance. But Samonten wanted, and was wanted in turn. I never thought she would be drawn to someone like Yut, nearly ten years younger and timid, built like a stage mannequin. Slender limbs and narrow waist when Samonten usually prefers women broader, more solid. A first for everything.

  Most of the night I spend patrolling the estate. I still need sleep but less and less of it. The labyrinth that cups the Tarangkaya land in its palm extends on, seemingly without end to the naked eye. It curves back upon itself; a visitor crosses a bridge into the fourth gate only to find themselves back at the entrance. They might enter a pavilion of basalt teeth and chalcedony chairs and find themselves exiting a pagoda of bronze banners and silver tiles. Without guidance from the house-lord, bulwark, or (sometimes) the designated heir, navigating the land is a futile matter.

  I check each defense post, passing my hand over the bells and the beetles to ensure they are awake and alert. I climb up the roof, breathing in the smell of autumn, damp and floral and coppery. The roofs are turning blue and the canopies of eyes and ears have extended their branches, preparing to blossom and fruit for the winter. Few animals inhabit our land; most fall prey to the needlebirds with their taste for fresh meat, their tendency to attack in flocks.

  More than Samonten’s, the labyrinth has been my domain since I could walk and comprehend, and she cedes it to me as such. It will remain mine until I leave, though that may or may not be in her lifetime. The stages of a bulwark’s life resist exact forecasts. Samonten and I are peers in age, but in growth physical and intellectual I’ve been developing much faster since I was three.

  Yut’s retinue stays elsewhere in the city, will remain here a week before they depart for their island home. Her family, I think, chooses to linger in case she quarrels with my lord early and the matter proves irreconcilable. After that, Yut will be on her own. In a way, I’m glad I could never have been sent abroad. Samonten is the only one of our house I genuinely love, but I wouldn’t want to adapt to another household, one in which I’d be always the lesser, the stranger.

  Come noon I perform my routine at lunch preparation. One of the noodle dishes tastes sweet-sour, radiant to my palate. The chef and I isolate the poison down to the oyster sauce. I ask for the whole bottle; he is offended but accedes and goes off to chase down the supplier. And then to scorch, if not discard, every last utensil that came into contact with the sauce. His labor is demanding, and Samonten treats him better than most of her cousins.

  Yut is pink-cheeked when I see her again, animated. When she says my lord’s name it is in a whisper, a change of pitch, a certain heft. As she climbs onto the elephant, she asks whether I’ve ever fallen in love, perhaps an inquiry as to the psychology of bulwarks. Adjusting her buckles and securing her to the seat, I say, “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly! Surely the answer must be absolute.”

  “I’ve had my share of lovers. The first made a mark, for a while.” A magistrate who seduced me for novelty, curious what sleeping with a bulwark would feel like. Dead since, of a natural cause: assassination. “But I wouldn’t say I have ever given my heart to anyone. And to be sure, they do say we don’t have hearts. Not the sentimental organ, at any rate, merely the cardiac one.”

  We pass the temple where Samonten and Yut will visit in several days to make their nuptial offerings. Like most of our city it is a composite of plant, fabric, glass; wooden boughs and chiffon leaves, delicately blown shells. A flock of needlebirds and two bulwarks for defense. I know neither intimately. Bulwarks are never raised together unless they are adopted into the same household, or in this case, the same house of worship. Like me they are human-sized and, perhaps from familial proximity, they look very alike: verdant skin striated in silver, deep-set eyes fringed with petal lashes. Yut gives them the same glance she gave me on arrival, albeit briefer. Losing interest, or—hopefully—more interested in Samonten now.

  We disembark from the elephant. She keeps pace with me as we scale the wall, up its sheer white steps. She does get winded halfway, but I’ll be fair: it is a great deal of height and the stairs are steep. There are no lifts or pulleys to bring us to the top, a matter of security. Laborer or magistrate, we all climb.

  At the summit, unsheltered from autumn sun, she looks down on the bulwarks who range our city wall. Her breath hitches, audibly. Below us, my future: the bulwarks from the city’s foremost houses and temples, commanders of our matchless army. Bipedal or pronograde according to their inclination, earthbound or airborne. Our mature shapes are deeply individual, smelted from long lifetimes. Beasts that exist and beasts that never will, conjoined to human elegance.

  “A friend of mine,” I say, gesturing to a six-limbed bulwark: humanoid from the waist up, leonine from the waist down, plated flesh and snakeskin mane. The other gate-guard is tower-tall, acute angles all over, four prismatic eyes and six glass hearts arrayed along her collarbones . Decorative; at that stage our heart disappears entirely and our brain becomes our sole vital organ. I catch their gazes and bow to them. They acknowledge with seismic nods.

  Yut exhales. “They are so beautiful. Not that you aren’t.”

  Normally I’m indifferent to flattery—bulwarks are beautiful by definition—but she is earnest and artless. I half-smile; she colors brighter, though that’s mostly exertion. “I’m a long way from what they are. There’s no comparison.”

  “Oh, but you’re already so...” She stops herself. “What will you look like, when the time comes?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Some of us develop it over years, sketching, sculpting. Watercolor or charcoal or nielloware. Tattoos.” An understandable preoccupation. One wants to be one’s best self at the final stage.

  “Not you.”

  “Not really.”

  She glances at me sidelong. “What if you wanted to dedicate yourself to some other pursuit? Making beautiful pots and cups. Building stunning houses. Priesthood and the glory of prayer.”

  Desertion is a solemn sin. I would be executed and my house dishonored. “I don’t see the appeal, not particularly.” Most bulwarks don’t think much of prayer, even though—or because—our grown forms inspire comparison to apotheosis.

  “You say that a lot,” Yut murmurs. “Do you have to be s
o ambivalent?”

  Toward her specifically, or in general. I suppose I’m prone to evasion, not that anyone else but Samonten would say it to my face. On the way down Yut is quiet, thoughtful. Her sweat has the scent of fresh baking, a hint of pepper.

  * * *

  An entire week passes before someone tries to kill Yut.

  She is on her way to a cloister where icons from her native land are housed, the gods of braided rice and dried roses, deities who hold sway over fishing and pearl-diving. The lane toward it is narrow, lined with vendors who drape their stalls in variegated tarp and chittering, darting lizards. She insists I must try the plum pastry and the toasted tortoise. Able to taste or not I still have to eat, so I oblige. The textures are interesting, if nothing else, the aromas quite pleasant. As an aside, I let her know these are safe for her consumption. It is around then that the first shot comes, ricocheting precisely toward Yut’s head, a phalanx of comet arrowheads veering exactly for her heart.

  I deflect them without much effort and look for their source. A balcony, high up. Yut has exhaled a conjuration of shadows, inky blots that unfold tattered and owlish; that surprises me—she is not panicking, not even distraught.

  The shadows come with me as I give chase, flitting where I point, tangling in the assassin’s limbs. They cut the way razor threads cut fruit or tender meat. Straight through fat, muscle, bone.

  When I’ve dispatched the assassin (human necks are easy to wring), I check for marks that’d reveal their allegiance and credentials; finding none, I behead them. Samonten will be able to dissect the brain and skull and get answers.