Beneath Ceaseless Skies #85

by Ellsworth, Spencer

  They held me in my father’s house. Frog had those few Sand-Eaters with some healing skills tend me, until I could stand on my own and speak coherently, though they told me nothing until Frog came. My brother had actually grown thin, with haunted eyes, as opposed the fat thoughtful child he had been. “I thought it would be her,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” My voice was a nervous rasp.

  “Spider.” Frog fingered a flask at his hip nervously; his hallucinogen-laced milk, I was to learn, that he was now never without. “She was so angry when he left her here.”

  “Ursalim,” I said, faintly remembering.

  “The mission failed. The godborne killed him. The whole khayifate speaks of how our father’s skin flaps in the breeze, on a flagpole above the Great Sanctuary. All the old Sand-Eaters died with him, Roach. Lizard, Rat, Badger, Vulture.....”

  For a moment my vision coalesced, the lights turning it full of bright colors, and voices chattered in my ears, my own voices. My father, dead. My father, dead?

  It wasn’t true. My father was a god, an eternal Aspect like a pillar. “Find me Spider,” I said. “And Worm.”

  Worm was where he usually was—in his laboratory, a stinking room crowded with masses of books and beakers and the hanging eyes, tails, and hands of various creatures. He had five fires going at once, making the place hotter than the open desert at noon, though he didn’t seem to notice.

  He was a tiny man, completely hairless. He blinked a few times. It was his sole gesture. He never smiled, never tapped his temple or nodded like a northerner. He just blinked. “Roach. You are here.”

  “Frog found me.” It still felt strange to talk. “I need something from your black room.”

  Worm unlocked the small door. A high screech echoed from the other side; one of Worm’s little things. Worm looked at me and unleashed a flurry of blinks. “Wait.”

  He emerged a moment later with a close-knit mesh cage. The things in there looked like large ants, though no ant had such a large, barbed stinger. Through the mesh, I saw a brief flash of incandescent wings.

  “Two females,” he said. “The males keep dying.”

  “You have more?”

  “Eggs,” he said. “I have eggs. Old Man wanted to call them night-makers. This one is Amaradith. This one is Halaakha.”

  I burst out laughing. He had named them after the Prophets.

  Worm blinked furiously. “Their stings will make the victim mad. Nightmares. Blindness. Colors. I’ve not experienced it myself.” He sounded almost disappointed. “I have observed humans who were stung. This should do. Pray over them before you kill them. They are living creatures.”

  Spider was harder to find. I left the mountains with only the cage, a few knives, and a camel, seeking her in old haunts. There were colonies of itansha, hidden far from caravan routes, that the Sand-Eaters often resided in, as a kind of protection by reputation, but I did not find Spider in any of them. I checked the darker, more dangerous neighborhoods of Al-arancas, but there was no whisper of Spider.

  I finally found Spider in the first place we met—in Anticrae.

  She emerged from the back of the villa, into the front room where I had once waited, bleeding, listening to my father and her make love. She had changed—even rangier, thinner and too quick, like her namesake.

  “You aren’t in the catacombs today.”

  “Not today,” Spider said. “Why are you here?”

  “You know he’s not dead,” I said.

  Spider laughed, and then put a hand to the wall to steady herself. “I don’t know anything. I thought he would take me with him. I thought he knew that I would do anything for him, even sacrifice myself.”

  “Come now,” I said. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “What?” Spider pretended hurt. “You doubt my honesty?”

  “You didn’t love him.” I stepped forward. “Not like you love me.” I reached a hand out to take hers. “We are sisters, you and I, sisters in his strange love and hate.”

  “Sisters,” Spider said, and moved as if to embrace me. I pulled back, withdrawing her hand. I had offered the lie to Spider, and Spider had embraced it. It was clumsy, but Spider had grown clumsy in solitude.

  “What is it?” she asked as I drew away. Her pretend hurt was still plain. So many of the other Sand-Eaters—so many other godborne—would have fallen for it. “You said—”

  “Spider, why am I the only one who sees through you? We’re not sisters, and you never loved my father.”

  Spider looked at me and smiled a strange, hungry smile. Then I knew that I was seeing the true Spider, beneath a flurry of faked emotion, for my father, for me, a being more alien than Worm’s little creatures.

  “The only feeling you have,” I said, “is the feeling of little things struggling in your web.”

  “And here I thought you were as blinded by passion as your father.”

  “I am,” I said. “I know he’s alive, and I’m going to go get him, and I think you will find the business of doing so much more interesting than sitting around here doing... whatever you are doing.” I looked around the villa. “What are you doing?”

  “You’ll find out eventually,” Spider said. “For now, let’s say that I want to let you struggle in the web a little longer.”

  “I knew I could appeal to your emotions,” I said.

  We passed through the portals of Ursalim undetected. I had killed so many, and caused so much damage, but the godborne who filled this city and who trained here had no idea who we were. “They didn’t even ask about the cage,” Spider said, hefting the mesh-covered box that held Worm’s night-makers. From inside, the things hissed.

  “Plenty of men carry scorpions for fighting pits,” I said.

  “Very small fighting pits.”

  “What odds would you give a spider and a cockroach?”

  “Even,” she said.

  Ursalim rose around us, the holy city resplendent and shining in the afternoon sun. Minarets reached into the sky, gleaming with filaments of korastone carved into the shape of the Prophet’s words. Villas loomed over the streets, perfectly symmetrical, octagons and domed circles, glittering with the words of the Prophets. Even the paving stones we walked on bore the words of the Prophets.

  “We could burn this whole city,” Spider said. The vehemence in her voice was almost close to reality. Perhaps Spider had become a better actor on our trip south. “Find the Flares who are preparing to be burned out. Unleash these creatures on them. Imagine. Shattered streets. Warped korastone.” She licked her lips.

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said.

  “You aren’t your father’s daughter.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Everyone should have learned that by now.” I was weak, flawed with mercy, a coward, only doing this because I had to.

  We pushed through the immense market square and joined a new river of pilgrims funneling out of the market, rising up the steep steps that led to the high, cliff-perched Great Sanctuary and the adjoining school of the godborne.

  The stairs switched back and forth, vast wide things thronged with the white-robed pilgrims who had come from every corner of the Kingdom of Peace. Creamed-coffee skinned Amarites mingled with tall, obsidian-skinned men and women from the far south and fat-faced, narrow-eyed horsemen from the north, and even a few white-skinned yellow-haired northerners, their skins freckled like a pox from the Amarite sun. The slopes above us rose to craggy, ice-covered heights, the sacred mountains that marked Ursalim out from the rest of the plain.

  “How are you sure that he will be in the school?” Spider said.

  “Didn’t you study the layout of the school and the Sanctuary?” I said. “It’s built over caves, the dwellings of the first godborne in a time where they were feared and hunted by humans.”

  “I never cared much for history,” she said.

  We reached the top, and the Great Sanctuary. Minarets and domes surrounded it in circles, seven upon seven.
Canals, bearing the icy headwaters of the Salh river, flowed from the center off the massive square where a single black building rose, a perfect square carved with two gilded characters in korastone for Justice and Mercy: the tomb of the Prophet Amaradith, the Binder. Here the praying pilgrims rose and fell as one, a great wave.

  “That’s the school’s main entrance,” Spider said, pointing to a wide set of stairs to their left. “The front door is as good as any.” We veered away from the pilgrims and crossed the space to the school of the godborne

  The school was a maze; carved into the rock, it stretched across the cliffs above Ursalim for nearly a square mile above and below. I knew where I was going, though. I had memorized the layout. We took turn after turn, past classroom after classroom, until we reached the wide hall that led to the penitent’s quarters, deep in the mountain.

  “Hold.” Two Kora soldiers stepped from the sides of the entrance, spears at the ready. “Do not disturb the penitent, please.”

  I looked at Spider.

  It was so easy.

  The cage flew open and the things leaped, faster than the Kora could move their spears, and each one attached itself to one soldier’s face, stinging over and over. Both fell back. Their sha spun, blinding, throwing off different iterations by the dozens, hallucinating, imagining that fire was sweeping over them and scorching them to the bone.

  The main trunks of their sha were each marked by the thick hook of a Binding, and the madness bolted out from those hooks in bolts of spinning ilsha, striking the godborne throughout the building.

  The madness was like a wave washing over me, but it made no change. I knew such madness well. We knocked the soldiers aside and ran into the dark hall that led to the penitent’s quarters.

  The main room was small but ornate, stacked with gilded books and tapestries, korastone, scimitars and knives, no doubt kept here because of their value. There was a single door in the stone, the height of a small child.

  One qayir leaped from the corner, her white godborne eyes bright in black skin. She was the tallest woman I have ever seen, and rock-tough. She brandished a blade of her own. “No further, Sand-Eater,” she said.

  I stepped toward her. “I just want him back.”

  She lunged. I suppose she thought to run me through before I noticed. She should have been able to—she was strong, inflexible, freshly trained—but a quickness in my bones, a roach’s skittering, let me dodge her, dancing around until I could seize her hand and, with pressure in the right place, force her to drop the blade. A simple trick of weight and falling let me toss her to the ground.

  She looked up at my knife.

  “Tell me your name,” I said.

  “Baisa.”

  “Go,” I said, and lowered my knife. “Be merciful to the itansha.”

  “You are mad,” Spider said as the woman ran. She sounded fascinated.

  I tore into the penitent’s quarters. Spaced-out torches lit the carpeted stone tunnel, illuminating tapestries that had been awkwardly hung along the walls. I flung the tapestries aside.

  “There are other tunnels,” Spider said.

  “They would keep him close.” I tore aside one tapestry to reveal a tiny door, no bigger than a four-year-old child. “I suppose I will be squeezing through.” I took a torch and pressed myself into the tunnel.

  The tunnel ended in a pit of sand, and I shivered. It felt like the same sand that had once caught me in my death. My father was huddled against the wall. My father, and not my father. I could see his sha, a tiny thing of fear and madness.

  “Roach?” He looked up at the torch, his eyes blank and white in the light, blinking. “I knew you would come. I know it would be you. Frog is too afraid.”

  They had burned him out like a Flare. By their rules, no godborne could pronounce such a sentence upon another, not even upon an enemy. But they had.

  “You are here. You have the knife.” He crawled forward, his thin bones scraping across the stone. “Thank the Gods, thank the Aspects.” Had he been himself, he would have named the Thirteenth Prophet in the same breath. He did not. “Cut my throat. Give me the end I wished for.”

  “Father... how did they break you?”

  He clutched at her skirts. “I am sorry, Roach. I always knew you were the stronger. Prove it. Kill me.”

  It could have been that he was babbling madly. It could have been that he had, in this darkness, convinced himself of my strength. He had never believed me to be strong, but this was not the man who had been my father.

  “They know everything, Roach. They will find us. They knew I was coming. They have stolen every secret out of my sha—our location, our arts, our agents—”

  I finally understood. A blade in the hand of justice. It was never my choice. That had been my father’s mistake.

  “To kill you would be a mercy, Father,” I said.

  “Yes,” he blubbered. “Please.”

  “Mercy is not my way.”

  In the months to come, I would look out from my chambers and see my father begging like a dog. We kept him tied up in the courtyard of the Sand-Eaters, throat raw, hands scraping on the stone of the courtyard, begging for water.

  I knew that the man my father once was would have been proud of me, at last.

  * * *

  The man speaks hesitantly, as if gauging my mood. “How long did your father live?”

  “Months. He could have lived much longer. He was still a hardy man, even living off scraps. But someone put poison in his bread.”

  “Frog?” the man asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Certainly not Spider.”

  “Oh no, not Spider. No, she found it all far too interesting to end it early.”

  “And so you returned in victory,” he says. “Willing now to lead the Sand-Eaters.”

  “Frog begged me to be the Old Man with him. I was the figurehead he needed to train an army of recruits, new men to send on missions, new godborne, Jackals and Snakes and Lizards. But he was angry. Angrier still when he learned Spider and I were lovers—”

  “Her?” The man nearly drops the parchment. “How—Gods—how could you have fallen in love with her? How—and you both women?”

  I give him a half-smile. “She was never able to resist someone who struggled in her web.”

  “It has to be more than that,” he says.

  It was. I do not want to tell him, even if there is no point in holding off.

  * * *

  I lay next to her, my head pillowed on her breast. My father was muttering madly outside our tent. I shed a few tears for my wasted life, letting them water her skin.

  It had seemed as though that day would be the same as the rest; stop, camp, make a fire, throw our scraps to the thing who was once my father, go to sleep. But once inside the tent, our lovemaking had been quick, fierce, and not until the peak were we both surprised to find ourselves where we were.

  She stroked my hair. “Why cry? You have shown him that you are greater.”

  I knew I needed her. She was the only one who could drive away my father’s ghost, the ghost of what he had been. She was the only one who could see him as a man and not a god.

  * * *

  “Roach?” the man asks.

  The rice and pickled fruit on my table is now cold. “You should not waste such fine food on a damned woman,” I say.

  He tsks, a sound of annoyance that was the only hint of impatience he has ever shown. And then it happens. He holds up the notes he has made on my parchment. “Did you kill the Wise Khayif’s children?”

  Such an innocuous way to ask. “Yes, I did.”

  “All of them?”

  “His wives and their children were locked into their chambers. It took four hours to kill them all.”

  “Just you and your knife.”

  “I used my godborne talents to restrain their sha. They could have stopped me if they banded together, but they had lived shut-in lives, with little chance to ever defend themselves again
st anything but prying eyes.” I force myself to stare, white eyes to white eyes. “You could have piled the bodies to the ceiling.”

  He does not answer. I wait. I lean against the wall to bear my weight after a time, waiting while he sits, still as stone.

  Finally he stands. “Write whatever is left. Tomorrow I will judge you.”

  * * *

  Spider waited on the edge of the camp, black silks blowing around her in the wind. “I was afraid you’d leave without seeing me.”

  “Let’s get out of sight,” I said, and led her away from her place, across a tall sand dune to a cove of rocks. As soon as we were there, she pulled me close, wrapped her arms around me.

  “What is this?”

  “This is goodbye. Also worry.”

  Spider traced a finger down my face. After a moment, her hands ran down my back, and I flushed and responded, pulling her tight against me. She pulled the edge of my loose shirt down and bit my shoulder.

  From there, it was a mixture of pleasure and pain.

  Afterward, her cheeks, hot against my chest, curled with a smile. “It’s been a long time since I tried to seduce secrets out of anyone,” she said. “I thought I would try it tonight.”

  “What?”

  “I just want to know whether you’ve killed children before. Face to face, watching their eyes go dark as your blade slides in.”

  Now that I thought of it, no. I’d seen children fall at a distance, to fire and arrows only. “No.”

  “A secret! I caught you in my web.”

  “You’ve have me in your web for ages,” I said.

  She was quiet. When she spoke, it was a manner I recognized, a rare moment in which she seemed to feel what she was saying. “Be careful,” she said. “The children. It might break you.”

  “I am a blade in the hands of justice.” I traced a finger down her thin jaw.

  “My love, the hand that holds the blade is still your father’s.”

  I pushed her away from me. “I have become greater than he ever was, remember?”

  “Have you?” She smiled that dark smile. “Are you sure this is what I meant?”

  I didn’t answer, just as I hadn’t answered her when she found me in the desert.