Beneath Ceaseless Skies #149

by Vylar Kaftan

  Blue lightning crackled the air. The first storm winds battered my face, heralding the hurricane. I pleaded with the tar. Help me. What connection do we share?

  Your truth is inked inside your bones, murmured the tar pit. Your heritage is written in every morsel of your flesh, passed through your father and your father’s father. I am your past, your present, your future.

  What could it mean? I strove to understand. What was inscribed deep within my body? In that moment the answer came to me, as if the tar reflected the truth in a looking-glass. The tar knew my bones because I did indeed have a brother, deep within the tar. We shared a bond written in every sinew of our muscles, each section of skin, and the hollows of each bone.

  My twin.

  Winds lashed across my face. Rain sheeted down like floodwaters. Distant cypresses bowed to the ground. My twin! The poor boy was likely stolen at birth and sacrificed in the tar pit. The necromancer needed no other sons; he held the one living, and one buried, which together could plumb the depths of the tar’s power.

  Armed with this knowledge, perhaps I could defeat him.

  Thus the necromancer used my life-force, linked inextricably to my twin’s tar-bound bones, to raise the greatest hurricane ever known on the isle of Surthenon. The storm’s malevolent eye swept over the coast and assaulted the wetlands. Water poured from the sky, thick as plated armor. Wind struck the startled birds, throwing them against trees, where they died like mice. The storm blasted everything flat, like an alligator slithering over reeds. My strength did not deplete; rather, I invigorated with each moment. But I lacked control. I was not the assassin, but the poisoned knife. Through me Ghraik would destroy my world.

  I begged of the tar pit, Help me, for you need not this man who commands you.

  I have no need of any man.

  He does not understand you the way I do, I told it. Read the message inked inside my bones. You and I understand each other.

  You understand nothing. I do as I please, and none will stop me.

  Helpless, my soul distorted under the unyielding pressure. A million red-hot nails drove through my extremities. A thousand arms sprouted from my soul as if a monster birthed its young. My awareness spanned the island, and my grotesque magical hands trawled the ocean seeking the White Ships.

  I discovered the fleet racing towards the northern shores. Against my will, I lifted the ships like so many flower petals and scattered them into the hurricane. Their sacred planks splintered like matchsticks. I screamed inside—but my actions were not my own. Through me Ghraik banished the wrecked White Ships to the ends of the seventeen seas; only the choppy ocean remained, noxious beneath my tainted hands.

  My hopes disintegrated with the White Ships. My efforts to destroy the fiend had ruined me. My kingdom, my family—all lay waste under his rule. My desolation swallowed me, consumed me like endless tar, until nothing remained but my white-hot rage. Through despair, the blade of my wrath transformed to a searing needle. I possessed the will of the gods, for I had nothing left to lose.

  Thus I wrestled Ghraik for my soul. We grappled, our spirits locked in opposition, linked by a thousand contacts each more intimate than the last. I knew Ghraik and every foul deed he’d committed—and he knew my conviction of the last fifteen years. We battled each other, and our magical exertions ignited our world. Fire swept the open courtyard. Cypresses blazed, and swampwater burned. The tar’s surface burst into blue flames—its power incensed, like a sleeping bobcat pestered by flies.

  I begged of the tar: Stop this. Please. I will give you all you desire.

  I do not know what moved the tar to respond. Perhaps I held more sway than I thought; perhaps it had merely grown weary with me. A swell came over us, deeper than the ocean floor, of magic stronger than time itself. Roaring deafened my ears, and the mire shuddered. My innards twisted like wrung-out clothing.

  Slowly the tar’s surface broke. One by one appeared skeletal creatures, dripping tar from their pitch-black bones. All manner of dead deformities gathered on the sticky surface, as if it were solid. Dogs and snakes, alligators and birds—the dark skeletons shook themselves, and howled a cacophony of unearthly sounds.

  But more skeletons came—all of them black as sin, black as nightfall. Here were the children. Ah, the condemned boys, many still broken in pieces! And their handless sisters, clutching their wrist-bones to their empty eye sockets. They wailed in unison; their battlecry could empty a man’s bowels. I could not scream as the army amassed, for the necromancer and I wrestled for control of my soul. I could not seek my brother among them, for I fought for my salvation; he had to be among them, but I did not know.

  With a wild shout, the undead battalion burst forth upon the necromancer. He could not ward so many. Ensnared by my efforts, he collapsed under the bony swarm, which crushed him underfoot like an afterthought.

  This onslaught spread through the courtyard and into the fortress, but others still came: now behemoths, twice the size of a house, with four enormous legs and sword-like tusks. These beasts rampaged outwards, stomping the flaming swamp under their cadaverous feet. They trampled Ghraik into a watery pudding, then bellowed and stampeded to the wetlands beyond.

  But the tar was not finished. The greatest of beasts were yet to come. Like titanic alligators they were, these skeletal juggernauts—eight times a house’s size, erupting from the depths. Rain tore through their open bodies like a storm through unfinished shelters. The juggernauts lumbered through the ruined fortress into the flaming swamp, destroying all in their wake. With them I knew the tar had divulged its last secrets. I struggled against my magical bonds, longing to reach Ghraik’s mangled flesh and seal my promise. Without a final blow, I feared he might survive his grievous injuries.

  But before I could free myself, an army of severed hands scuttled forth from the tar, like giant skeletal ants. They stripped his flesh like ravenous carrion-eaters, heedless of his screams. They pulverized his organs, then crushed his bones into dust. This they scattered to the wind, removing every last trace of Ghraik from the island’s soil. Then the hands shattered, piling their broken joints beneath the damaged throne.

  I know not how I came back to earth, though later I guessed the necromancer’s magic died with him. I know not how long I lay there, senseless, while the skeletons ravaged the island. In time they must have collapsed, for I found them everywhere, heaped atop the island’s ashes, where they had annihilated all they encountered.

  Nothing remained. I wandered the island naked, needing no sleep, no food, no warmth. All villages were razed, and I could not locate my mother. Nothing lived on this island; no fauna, no flora, nor even the tiniest insect remained in the wasteland once called Surthenon.

  Thus I returned to the tar pit for solace, and ascended the sandstone throne of this ruined kingdom. And here I have remained to this day, alone with my tortured thoughts and the tattered remnants of my soul. I cannot leave the tar pit. Nothing else sates my hollowness.

  I abide on my ashen island and await the resurrection of the White Ships, which I think shall never happen. I pray for my salvation, which I never expect to find. Time passes, or it does not; I can scarcely tell. Truly, as I feared, the necromancer could not die. He needs no body to haunt me. He attends every day of my ceaseless existence; he cradles me in his loathsome arms, the heir to his legacy.

  Copyright © 2014 Vylar Kaftan

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Vylar Kaftan writes speculative fiction of all genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream. She’s published stories in places such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, and Lightspeed. She founded a new SF/F convention in San Francisco called FOGcon (fogcon.org). Recently, she won the 2013 Nebula for her novella “The Weight of the Sunrise.” She lives with her husband Shannon in northern California and blogs at www.vylarkaftan.net.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  SILVER AND SEAWEED

  by Greg Linklater<
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  He draped a tentacle over her tiny shoulders and leaned in close, turning the shark side of his face towards her, as he did whenever he was about to tell her to do something. That dead black eye swiveled. “Time for your medicine,” he said, offering the tumbler full of tarry essence. He stank of fish and seaweed left too long in the sun. “No arguments this time.” He opened his mouth to show her the rows of triangular teeth on that side. Maybe a smile, maybe not.

  The submerged hull creaked around them. She heard anchors dropping, chains clanking, and the distant groan of whales. She took the tumbler. The fresh webbing between her tiny fingers stretched as she gripped the glass. He loomed over her.

  She studied the poison, the essence. Scales and residue of fish-guts floated in it. He kept a complicated chart scratched into the top of their lone wooden table with a knife, although how he kept track of time underwater she had no idea. Rows of boxes, rows of crosses, a smiling face in every seventh one (a smiling face; the irony), and whenever they hit one of them he would call her over to his briny tub, have her wait while he produced a metal lock box that he would open with one of a pair of keys he kept buried in a fold of gelatinous flesh under his arm, inside what may have been a gill of some kind that opened like an infected eye. He would unlock the box and she would see the stoppered bottles of the stuff lined up inside the padded interior, the bodies of small mashed fish floating in the liquid. He would take out the tumbler, wash it in the briny slop that supported his lower half, fill it to the top from one of the bottles, then hand it to her with an unspoken threat wrapped in a smile.

  She swallowed the contents in one gulp. It slid thickly down her windpipe and she gagged. He massaged her back gently, taking care around the budding fins and tender patches of scale. The essence grabbed her from the inside, pulled open her veins and raced to her brain. She could feel the transmutation always now, a dull ache in her bones, as the essence turned her on a wheel away from what she had been toward what he wanted her to become.

  “My girl,” he said, sighing as he took the tumbler from her and returned it to its case. He locked the box and slid it back under his tub and returned the key to its secret pocket. “You make your father proud.”

  Only he wasn’t her father.

  Or at least she had her suspicions. The truth of it lay somewhere in the past beyond reach, and with every moment she spent in this place with him, swallowing his poison and doing what he needed her to do, his claim became more and more true. Soon it would win out entirely, and there’d be nothing else left.

  “Can you swim?” he said. The withered shark side of his face was turned away now, leaving her the almost-handsome half that he still had to scrap with a razorblade to keep from becoming overgrown.

  She nodded.

  “Good. Then out you go. You know what we need.”

  “Air, food, and the sparkly stuff.” Sparkly stuff; that’s what he called it.

  “The most important of all,” he said. “Don’t come back empty-handed again.”

  She wanted to hate him, but he was all she knew, and he probably actually was her father like he said, so how could she hate him? She pecked him on the cheek, the good one, and padded down the steady slope of the floor to where water cut the submerged hull across the diagonal. She unhooked three old glass balloons, each one full of bad breath and dead air, and took her tri-pronged spear from its rack.

  “Be safe,” he called out as she plunged into the water.

  He said that every time now, ever since the accident; not the first one, the truly catastrophic one that he’d only told her about, but the second one, more an inconvenience once his wounds had healed, and why he needed her more than ever.

  * * *

  The ocean outside was dark and full of sediment.

  She kicked clear of the open hatch now home to a colony of eels. A kelp forest swayed in the current. She followed a shaft of sunlight up, up, up to the liquid silver surface, where the air smelled sweet and she heard gulls calling and the groan and clank of ships anchored at the nearby port. The city beyond bristled with smoke and steam and distant noise, a cesspit even without his embellishments at the sheer moral decay to be found there, the place he called Pelagar.

  On those rare occasions her errands took her into the city she felt intensely uncomfortable, even with her growing number of visible mutations concealed as best she could. That world was no place for her, not now, and as she navigated those labyrinthine alleys and choked markets she found herself longing for her underwater home.

  Gasbray, the bespectacled merchant and craftsman she sometimes called on for new glass balloons or other magical trinkets, had tried to tempt her to stay for warm mint tea and chocolate jellies, maybe even some sweet liquor to ease her rasping cough.

  “It’s nothing,” she would say. She knew it was the transformation, her lungs becoming less tolerant of the lower pressure topside, her gills drying out. But she couldn’t say that, not even to Gasbray (who probably knew more about any of this than her so-called father), because he might stop her from going back. At least, she had the sense he might try.

  “He can’t be trusted,” the man who called himself her father had said. “He may look friendly and nice, a generous uncle, but he’s a snake. His family were known informants during the Shadow Nights,” he continued, forgetting none of this meant anything to her. “So keep your business with him brief, understood?”

  But Gasbray was only trying to be kind. Once, he even asked, “So how is your father? Doing well?”

  She wasn’t sure what he did or did not know about her father’s situation (her father was never generous with details), so she shrugged uncomfortably and said he was fine. Gasbray looked about to say something more, then thought better of it and smiled. “Give him my regards.” She noticed a sudden bitterness to him. “Tell him our friends have agreed to his terms: a reduced price in return for the trade.” Almost a challenge, skirting the edge of something dangerous.

  Price? The terms had already been agreed, so far as she knew. And trade? What trade? Her father had explained his whole plan to undo the damage done to him, but this was new to her.

  When she’d relayed the conversation to her father he’d flown into a rage, lurching from his tub and lashing the table across the room with one of his tentacles. “What else did he say to you?”

  “Nothing,” she said, cowering.

  “I don’t want you talking to him anymore, do you understand? Not a word. You write your order down and hand it to him. No more talking.”

  The next time, when Gasbray finished engraving a fresh glass balloon and raised his magnifying lens atop his head and said, “Tell your father there could be some complications. Disputes over allotments and such between the guilds,” she had almost walked away. Almost. Instead, she said, “He doesn’t like me talking to you.”

  Gasbray had frowned, perplexed. “Why ever not?”

  “Maybe he’s worried about what you will tell me.”

  “What I will tell you? But hasn’t he explained it all to you already?” There it was again, that slyness.

  “Explained what?”

  “Our arrangement.”

  “Of course he has.”

  “Really? And you are onboard with all this?”

  “I....” Were they talking about the same thing? He seemed to know more than her, when he should have known less.

  He grew angry at her blank expression. “Blasted coward,” he muttered, but not to her. He twisted out his cigarillo on the sole of his boot. “You tell him to come see me, at our usual meeting place.”

  This had been before the second accident, when her father could still venture out. When she conveyed Gasbray’s instructions, her father had stormed from their home, dragging his bulk off through the water to the meeting place. She had followed at a discrete distance and popped up a hundred yards away, where the night could hide her. Her father sprawled on the wet sand beyond the reach of the lights from the promenade, arguing furiously with Gasbr
ay, who himself was throwing his arms about in a manner very unlike his usual reserved self. Their words didn’t carry, just their intonation, and when she’d seen enough she had returned home. No sense in getting caught for nothing.

  When her father returned he carried a sack of fresh bottles filled with essence. He placed them in his lock box, and when she lingered near him he slapped her with his one hand.

  “Gasbray is not your friend. You cannot trust him.”

  After that, Gasbray was cool towards her, more distant, more professional. Every visit seemed to be her first, as he slid forward with a “Yes, may I help you?” Whatever her father had said had been taken on board, and whatever Gasbray might have told her before was now lost to her.

  She had thought she understood the nature of it all, but now she wasn’t so sure, and she resented Gasbray for making her question without daring to give her the answers.

  * * *

  She swam to the end of the great breakwater and tethered the old glass balloons to a rusty iron bolt sunk in a half-submerged rock. She held each one and ran her finger over the complex pattern Gasbray had scratched into their surfaces, every cross-hatch, dot, and swirl marked with a tiny number beside it to signify the correct order. As she completed each pattern it flashed gold and the balloon began to hiss, first expelling the trapped fumes through invisible pores before drawing in fresh air the same way and compressing it tighter and tighter. Once full, a balloon contained enough air to keep them breathing in their home for days.

  She left the balloons floating there to fill while she plunged down with her spear. The fresh gills just below her throat meant she could stay under for minutes at a time, and soon she had a string of squid, pig-jackets, even a crackling eel. She was now near the cliff, so she tucked her catch under a rock, rose to the surface for one last deep breath (the gills helped, but a lungful of air still made a difference), then dropped over the edge, heading down towards pitch blackness just to test herself, as she did every day. She had never seen the bottom; ears popping, joints screaming, she always pushed as far as she could but it was never enough. Not without further mutation, or “enhancement” as he called it.