Beneath Ceaseless Skies #87

by Khanna, Rajan

  He heard Nancy’s voice again: “She has no idea, and if he keeps on like this, I’m afraid—” And he remembered all the times later that Nancy would frown at something the bears said and whisper to him, “I can’t believe it. I refuse. I saw the way they acted around each other, and I swear she loved him back.” Saw Greta in a red dress, in a hall full of bears, a hall he had not designed but had visited, once, with Nancy....

  She doesn’t know where he is, he realized suddenly. She’s got some sense of which direction to look, but that’s all, and if I wanted to I could lead her to him right now, or I could make sure that she never, ever reaches him.

  “Are you all right?” Jack started, and saw Greta looking at him expectantly; the fire was out and all her things were packed. “Where did you go just now?” she asked.

  “Nowhere,” he said, and shook his head as if that would clear it. It didn’t.

  “Well, if you’re ready—”

  “I am.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  * * *

  They walked all day, and all day Jack watched Greta. Here was, he thought, the one the bears always referred to as “the betrayer,” and right now she was his only friend in the world. He wished he could remember more, or that Nancy were here to help him choose....

  After an hour or so Greta changed direction slightly, and Jack heard himself say, “No.”

  Greta stopped and turned, confused. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m not....” Something was drawing him, tugging gently at his stomach, and he thought in panic, but I’m not supposed to give away the secret! I should make sure she goes the wrong way!

  She loved him. He had to believe that she loved him. Not just because of what she said about the compass, or what he remembered Nancy saying about her, but because of how real her fear had been when she was still caught in the dream, “It’s this way,” he said, though still unsure.

  Greta frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  Jack took another deep breath, and said, “The castle I built for them. To hide him. It’s this way.”

  Her eyes widened, but she didn’t argue, just gestured for him to lead.

  Nancy, he thought, let me have chosen right. And he let the castle draw him to it.

  * * *

  They arrived with the sunset; the forest had grown thicker all day until suddenly they stepped through and the white stones shone red before them like they were burning. Greta stared up at the huge, glass-smooth structure for a moment before she murmured, “What now? They’re not just going to let us walk in.”

  “No,” Jack said, half to himself, “I don’t imagine they will....” Something felt off about the castle, something not as he’d built it, but he couldn’t put his finger on what....

  “Well, is there some sort of side door, or a secret entrance that wouldn’t be guarded?”

  Jack shook his head. “It wouldn’t make a difference whether it’s guarded or not, except to me. The things I build... they know, somehow, who should be there and who shouldn’t, and the people who shouldn’t never find a way in.” As he spoke he walked hunched-over along the edge of the woods, studying the castle wall until he spotted what he was looking for: a hair-thin crack he couldn’t see but knew was there; the door leading to an escape passage. He smiled slightly. “But I can.”

  They moved slowly, crouched as low to the ground as they could manage, and he hoped that the combination of tall grass and deepening dusk would be enough to hide them from any watchful eyes. The closer they drew to the castle walls, though, the more Jack felt in his bones that something was very, very wrong here. He didn’t understand until he placed a palm beside the secret door and felt a sudden, sharp pain.

  “What’s wrong?” Greta asked.

  “I don’t know, it—” He held out his hand a couple of inches away from the wall and thought he could almost hear the stones speak to him in their sleep. Intruders, they rumbled, invaders, thieves, murderers, spies, little rodents trying to creep in through the cracks, but we won’t let them, no, no matter how they might gnaw or dig with little teeth and paws, we will not move and we will not fade, we will stand for centuries without tiring....

  Jack frowned and drew back his hand. “I don’t understand,” he whispered.

  “Don’t understand what?” Greta hissed back.

  “It’s... I’ve never been shut out by one of my buildings before. And I’ve never felt one so... awake, and lively.” He held out his hand again and thought, it’s me. Don’t you recognize me? I built you, I’m a friend, please let us in, we mean no harm....

  The rumbling felt louder, and Jack had just enough time to see Greta’s eyes widen and to wonder if she felt it too before he heard, liars, too, trying to convince us they made us! We made ourself, with help from the bears. We directed our own creation—we remember it—and we will not be fooled into betraying our friends who helped us to grow so tall and strong!

  “But I am you,” Jack whispered, letting his hand drift just a little bit closer to the wall. “Don’t you remember me?”

  You cannot be us, the stones replied. We would know. We would remember.

  Slowly, Jack drew away from the wall again and just sat for a few seconds, thinking. He’d expected to get in without any trouble, but now....

  “Can you convince it to let us in, or not?” Greta asked, eyeing the castle warily.

  “I think so,” he murmured.

  “So do it now before someone sees us!” she hissed.

  “But—”

  “Jack!” she interrupted. “Please. I don’t know if he’s all right, or if I have time to.... Just please, whatever you have to do, if you can get me in there I’ll do whatever else needs doing.”

  He studied her for a moment, the intensity of her gaze and her body crouched to spring into action the moment the door opened, and he realized that any lingering doubts didn’t matter. He believed her when she said she loved her friend, and once he believed that, there really wasn’t much else to consider.

  Jack pressed both his palms flat against the wall and tried to summon the same rumbling voice within himself. You do know me, he thought to the stones. You do remember. You just need a reminder. Poke around all you like until you find what you need, but once you do you’d better start behaving yourself!

  The castle took him at his word: the skin of his palms melted into the stone so that he couldn’t have separated himself if he’d tried, and suddenly he could feel all the minerals in his body—calcium in his bones, iron in his blood, bits of other things he couldn’t identify—and his ribcage felt as if it were made of marble and breathing might crack it, but he breathed anyway, and he almost thought he could feel his veins branching out into the walls and the floors and the ceiling and his own blood pumping through all of it, and he could follow it from his own heart to the castle’s, where Auberon twitched and whimpered in pain and the waxy, translucent something spread across his side, spreading so slowly the movement itself was invisible but he could sense it, could sense the man’s pain and couldn’t do anything to stop it, and he cried out—

  “Jack!” Greta screeched in his ear and tugged at his shoulder, but he could barely hear her, and he couldn’t let go.

  Let her in, he thought to himself. Let us in. He needs us. We can help.

  But we are helping!

  Yes, we are, but we’re only helping to keep him safe until she comes. We’ve kept him safe and we’ve found her, and now we need to let her in so she can do her part. Our job is done; we can sleep now.

  But what if she’s false?

  She isn’t.

  But how do we know?

  We know. And they did, all the different parts of the Jack-castle, and the invisible door swung open beside him.

  “Go,” Jack croaked. His voice felt like sharp rocks and stone dust, and Greta hesitated, but only for a moment—”Go!” Jack shouted, and she was off into the passage faster than a hare running from the dogs.

  Jack waite
d several heartbeats before he tried gingerly to pull his hands from the wall. He had expected them to be stuck, but they came away easily. His palms were raw, though, and covered in blood, and he watched as his two bloody hand-prints sank into the stone and disappeared. He didn’t want to think about what that meant.

  He couldn’t think how to wrap his hands when both were so badly injured, so he just crossed his arms, pressed his palms against his sides, and—as he stumbled in just before the door swung shut—hoped for the best.

  * * *

  The first wave hit Jack when he was about halfway down the passage and could no longer hear Greta’s footsteps ahead of him: groping his way gingerly in the dark, between one step and the next, he suddenly felt the full weight of his body; his stomach churned with hunger; he remembered designing this passage and walking through it after it was built, checking it for the last time. And he remembered when his hands were smaller and chubbier and he could just barely grip the wooden blocks that he placed one on another to build castles and houses and towers almost as tall as he was. He remembered the smell of Nancy’s hair, and the way it felt to kiss her, and the mixture of love and fear and pride that filled her eyes and her voice when she looked at his plans for a castle—this castle—and said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever designed.

  All at once, all between one step and the next. He stumbled a few steps, but by the time the next wave hit him his feet were steady under him again, and it hit him just as hard but he recovered faster. Another few steps, another wave of memory, and he didn’t stumble at all, even though his body and mind raced to keep up with all the parts of him that were suddenly no longer missing.

  The passage surprised him by ending, dumping him out without warning into a bright, open chamber. He stopped short, dazzled by the sudden light, but even before his eyes and mind adjusted he heard voices, all familiar (though only one was human), and as the room and the stooped, shaggy figures before him came into focus, so did their words.

  “I’m telling you it was an accident but I can fix it, you have to let me—”

  “—don’t know how you broke in, but—”

  “—doesn’t matter, you shouldn’t be here—”

  “—please! You don’t understand—”

  “Listen to her!” Jack croaked, surprised at how the sound grew in the space between him and them, amplified by the stones.

  Some of them stopped speaking; all of them turned, and a whispering chorus of “What now?”s and “Is that...?”s slithered back to him under the clacking and huffing and pouncing of the more anxious and blustery bears.

  Another wave. Jack braced himself and wondered what the bears must think, what Greta must think, but then it had passed and he said again, “Listen to her.”

  One of the bears stepped toward Jack and rose up on its hind legs to study him; he thought it might be one of the ones that had turned him into a scarecrow, but it had been a long time and his brain was addled enough that he couldn’t be sure. He met its gaze as best he could, though, and waited for it to speak.

  “You broke in,” it said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Another wave, mostly memories of Nancy, but it only slowed him for a second and then he said, “Because she loves him. Because maybe she can do what you can’t. Besides, I don’t think this castle is quite the same anymore; I think it’s just a stone building like any other, now, so you’d better let her do what she can before Bernadette finds you.”

  The bears started muttering and huffing among themselves, and Jack heard Bernadette’s name and his own more than once, but behind them he could see Greta slipping away toward the hallway. Jack’s heart jumped into his throat, and he let himself fall to the ground. More of the bears came toward him, curious or concerned, and that was good—it gave Greta a head start. More importantly, though, it put his palms against the floor, and this time he went straight to the castle’s heart, opening doors along the way.

  Greta almost missed the first door, Jack saw through the castle, and he cried out in spite of himself. He didn’t think he said anything articulate, but it was difficult to be sure, and anyway it hardly mattered: the bears had already realized she’d gone. Greta stopped, though, and doubled back, and Jack did his best to close doors behind her. But of course, the bears knew exactly where they were going and she didn’t.

  They caught up to her at last just as she ran into the last room. Greta saw the young man on the bed and stopped short; she tried to say something, but the words caught in her throat. What little sound she made seemed to wake the young man on the bed, though, and as he stirred, the bears hung back as if to wait and see what he would do.

  Greta stepped forward slowly, waiting after each step, but Jack thought the young man looked too weak to raise himself even enough to sit up, so Greta just kept step, step, stepping until she stood at the side of the bed and the young man could see her. “Oh, love...” she breathed, face tight with pain, as she reached one hand toward the waxy shell that covered half his chest now.

  The young man clacked his jaw and swatted at her; Greta flinched, but after a second she moved her hand closer again. This time the young man bellowed—an angry, pulsing sound Jack wouldn’t have thought a human throat could produce—and threw himself at her. He might be weak, but he still weighed more than Greta, and he surprised her enough to knock them both to the ground.

  “Sweetheart,” Greta cried as he struggled with her, “please—I’m sorry, but it’s killing you, you have to— let me—” Greta tried to get at his chest, but the closer she got the harder he fought her, until finally she found an opening and pulled at the waxy growth.

  The young man screamed in pain and shoved her so hard that she fell away from him. The bears started forward, but Greta shouted, “Look, it’s coming off!” and they paused. “You have to let me finish,” she added, though whether she was talking to the young man or the bears Jack could not guess; for a few seconds the only movement was the rise and fall of Greta’s chest and of the young man’s, both of them breathing heavily.

  Then one bear stepped forward. “I will help you,” it said. Greta nodded warily, but the bear circled around until it could hold down the young man’s hands. It leaned down to lick his face; the young man clacked and blew at him and struggled to get free, until another bear came and held down his feet, moaning something that might have been “Auberon.”

  Greta crawled back over to the young man, who glared hate at her, but she just reached around and pulled at the wax she’d already loosened from his skin. He screamed, and Greta winced, but the bears held him still and Greta kept on pulling. The wax clung to his skin and it took a few long minutes to remove it. “Hush, you big baby,” Greta whispered fiercely at one point; the bears looked up—startled, perhaps, though Jack didn’t know enough about bear society to tell if they’d been surprised by human eccentricity or bear-like behavior—but Greta didn’t seem to notice. All her attention was focused on pulling at the wax and making sure it didn’t just reattach somewhere else.

  At long last Greta gave one final tug and fell backwards onto the floor with a thud. The young man’s scream cut off abruptly and he sagged between the two bears. The one who held his hands bent down and crooned something to him; the other let go, and the young man rolled over, and then suddenly he too was a bear.

  Greta blinked, but she didn’t seem surprised. She did, however, sit very, very still, eyes fixed on the bear she had just saved.

  The bear spoke first. “What did you do to me?” he grunted.

  “I can’t—” Greta gestured to her throat; one of the other bears, the first one to help her, leaned over and breathed on her neck. “Oh...” she said, eyes wide. “Auberon, I—” She frowned and sat up straighter.

  “Master Builder?” Someone was speaking to Jack—to his body—and he lost his hold on the castle. “Master Builder?” the bear repeated, but it was difficult to hear over the sudden pounding in his ears, and his vision was
strangely blurry, and he thought he heard someone ask if he was all right before he fell into endless nothing.

  * * *

  Jack woke once, long enough to swallow some broth, and then fell back into nothingness; when he woke again he found himself in bed and the early winter sun stretching, pale and thin, from a narrow window to the edge of his blankets. He tried slowly to sit up and found that, aside from being a bit stiff, he could move perfectly well; even his bandaged hands didn’t complain when he put weight on them.

  A sudden movement by the wall caught his attention; Greta rose to her feet and put a book down on her chair. “You’re awake,” she said, smiling. “I was starting to worry.”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, “it’s been, what, the better part of a year since I’ve slept? Figure I was due for a good nap.”

  Greta laughed, and it sounded like music to him, but even as he smiled he felt a hollow space in the middle of his ribcage.

  “Were you two able to... sort things out?” he asked as he got slowly out of bed and found himself shivering at the sudden chill of the air.

  “We’re working on it.” Greta pointed to a massive wooden wardrobe in one corner of the room. “There should be plenty of warm clothes in there.”

  “Inter-species relationships frowned upon in bear society?” Jack asked as he looked through the wardrobe’s contents and recognized his own clothes.

  “That, plus a lot of magic and politics nobody had explained to me before. I knew Auberon could become human, but nobody told me I needed to watch out for rival magicians masquerading as servants offering candles. Or that promising not to speak of something could be magically binding.”

  Jack’s hand went automatically to his favorite shirt, favorite trousers. Arms full, he turned around again—and saw Greta frowning slightly in his direction. “What is it?” he asked.