Beneath Ceaseless Skies #190

by Mike Allen

  Issue #190 • Jan. 7, 2016

  “Longsleeves,” by Mike Allen

  “The Mama Mmiri,” by Walter Dinjos

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  LONGSLEEVES

  by Mike Allen

  Don’t do this, she said.

  There’s nothing for it, lovely one. A shame you won’t be so lovely once we’re done.

  * * *

  Merav drifted between white hot pain and blissful shock until a voice lifted her to consciousness, its timbre akin to creek water rushing over rocks.

  Her mouth burned as if she’d kissed a boiling kettle. The world smelled of blood and char. Branches partitioned the haze above her, dangling fruit with red, shivering skin.

  “I can help you,” the voice said.

  A slender man leaned over her, his shoulders too broad and too knotted with muscle for his tall frame. As she stared, dazed, through the mask of agony fused to her face, she pieced together that she still lay in the ruins of the cabin where Uethorn’s men had dragged her, deep in Dium Forest. Light shone through holes in the rotted ceiling.

  The branches she perceived were in fact antlers, sprouting from the head of the man studying her. Four round, bloody objects hung in those antlers, spasms contorting their surfaces.

  She remembered Uethorn’s armsmen in their reeking leather. The blade heated by the torch. She touched fingers to her mouth, cried out at the pain that touch triggered, made a thousandfold worse when she flexed her jaw.

  When her vision unblurred, the shapes on the straw beside her resolved into a gruesome stack: four leather-armored bodies, the stumps of their necks seeping.

  “They pay still for their transgression in Olderra’s wood,” the antlered man said.

  Even through the pain, she knew that name, whispered in Calcharra with the tones of awe reserved for floods and earth tremors. The stories: that Olderra’s wrath once inflicted a year of saltwater rain on the ancient city. That she had rearranged stars to spell a message. That the last House to cross her, countless years ago, had been consumed in their manse by fire so hot it blinded all who witnessed it.

  The man leaned close, and Merav discovered he had the face of a stag, long snout and tawny hide, though the dark beads of his eyes turned forward, human-like, beneath a blunt browridge. When he spoke he revealed incisors like ivory petals and two long rows of molars in his lower jaw. “I’ll take you to Olderra now.”

  She started to scramble away and fell back with a croak.

  “I understand your fear,” the creature said. “You’re hers now. You were hers when your blood touched the soil. There’s nothing for it.” Hearing him repeat the words of Uethorn’s men as his strong arms gathered her for a cradle carry, she screamed, only to faint from the pain.

  Her sight fluttered through the fugue that followed, witnessing high shrubs, mottled leaves, a wolf pack scattering into shadows.

  Sometime later her bearer paused and shivered, the tremors in his oak-solid muscle stirring her awake. A pale serpent drifted across the trees ahead—a ghostly banner winding between the trunks. A second one soon joined it, weaving closer in the same sinuous way.

  The antlered man shouted, though Merav didn’t understand his fear. Was this not the witch Olderra come to claim his burden?

  The long white limbs whipped in a frenzy above as he ran. The sudden jostle opened wounds clotted shut, driving her back from consciousness.

  * * *

  When she regained her senses she lay on a table. A dry husk of a face floated above her, brown as a chestnut, shriveled as a dried apple. Lips pursed in a starburst of wrinkles. You are almost mended. The mouth didn’t move to shape the words.

  Ochre eyes flicked to one side. Help her up.

  The antlered man leaned in, offered a thick-knuckled hand that Merav didn’t want to take.

  She lifted her head. The pain was gone. She touched her jaw, jerked her fingers away from coarse, misshapen flesh.

  Above her a vertical tunnel spiraled into darkness, its walls like the underside of peeled bark.

  A wooden platform drifted into view, hovering in mid-air, no means of support visible. Startled, Merav scanned the chamber, discovered more shelves and trays of various sizes suspended all around the table, stacked with vials, jars, bottles, books and other objects not immediately identifiable.

  She turned to the wrinkled face, named its owner. “Olderra.”

  The witch’s smile creased her cheeks. “That is a name I use, yes.”

  That this tiny woman stood at the heart of so many tales of woe and terror—Merav wanted to laugh, to wake safe in her bed and cackle at her own folly.

  The deer-headed man’s hand remained extended. Merav told the witch, “I don’t want him touching me!”

  His expression and posture didn’t change.

  The witch reached up as one of the shelves floated toward her fingers. She snatched a small pouch from the shelf without looking, shook it between forefinger and thumb, rattling its contents.

  Merav sat up. “What is that?”

  “I’ve not quite finished you yet,” the witch said. She flicked the opened pouch at Merav’s face. A puff of darkness billowed into wrestling foxes made of smoke. Merav recoiled—

  And blinked, the apparition gone. Olderra curled the pouch into her palm, shook her hand as if as she’d gotten it wet. The shelves started to retreat.

  Merav touched her jaw again, felt skin and bone and hair where none should have been. “What have you done?”

  “What I could,” Olderra said. “What had to be done.” She inclined her leathery face toward the antlered man. “Show her.”

  The shelves were attaching themselves to the walls in a series of clicks and scrapes. “Show me what?” Merav demanded, but Olderra was gone.

  The antlered man stood by an exit, a crude arch bitten out of the spongy bark walls. He bowed his head and stepped through. Merav looked for another way out of the roughly cylindrical room; found none, other than a forbidding climb up the detachable shelves and into darkness.

  Her bare feet touched warm earth. She no longer wore the skirt, corset, or undergarments she’d had on when Uethorn’s men abducted her from Rosepike Market. Her clothes had been replaced with a tunic and breeches of identical brown. She shuddered as she stood, wondering who had done that.

  Beyond the arch lay a chamber shaped exactly like the one she’d just left, with an identical bark-tunnel ceiling—except there were no shelves on the walls. The air changed from dry to dank. A pool in the center of the floor brushed the room in wavering light.

  Across from her, the antlered man pointed at the water. “Best you look.”

  The reflective surface permitted no glimpse of the pool’s depths. The creature staring back at her possessed her eyes but wore the rust-pelt mask of a fox.

  She opened her mouth, and the fox mirrored her, exposing a narrow tongue, incisors like curved needles. She curled her lip. The fox’s muzzle wrinkled in a snarl.

  “What...?” She couldn’t finish the question. Her voice sounded no different.

  The antlered man’s mouth curled. “Milady healed you.”

  “What have you done?” she shouted. The fox-woman in the pool flashed her fangs. “Change me back!”

  Behind her, Olderra spoke. “You were already changed. This healing is the best I can offer.”

  So often her father had shouted her down and worse, when anger moved her to speak. She had a swift, sharp tongue that resisted all containment and had learned to counter his physical savagery with verbal jabs that left scars of their own, she was certain. Yet at this moment, though
the rage came, words did not. The brute snarl that issued from her throat shamed her.

  The old woman peered up at her, impassive. “Hitch your cart to that anger, you’re about to have need of it. Hundeil?”

  The antlered man sighed. “I feel them, milady.”

  Behind Merav’s eyes a searing urge took hold, an itch deep in her skull that craved scratching. Though nothing about the chamber altered, she noticed shadows moving around her, noises seeping through the walls, harsh male voices and a girl weeping, a stench of heated copper.

  “Again, our peace is broken,” Olderra growled.

  Hundeil flared his nostrils, clenched and unclenched his fists. “Open the way.”

  “You’ll have company this time,” she said, and laughed at his snort of protest. “You have no more choice than she does.”

  Merav found that she lusted to open a belly with claws, to crush a throat between her teeth.

  “So be it,” Hundeil said. “The way.”

  The arch no longer led to the chamber of shelves but out into the night. Rain spattered at the threshold but didn’t cross.

  As Hundeil’s form blocked the muted moonlight, panic rose in Merav. She could not have said why, but she craved first blood. She had to reach the prey before Hundeil.

  She plunged into the drizzle after him.

  They emerged by the ancient cottage where Uethorn’s thugs had marred her face. Even through the storm, rot fouled the air. She registered fleetingly that Olderra’s home was nowhere to be seen.

  Three horses stood outside the cottage threshold, eyes flaring to expose the whites as they fixed on her and Hundeil. A lump of flesh lay crumpled by the front hooves of the closest horse. Blood drained into the soil from the fallen body. Through the soles of her feet Merav sensed how the earth thrummed with the transfer of precious energy.

  Torchlight flickered inside the cottage. A man raised his voice in alarm—prey giving away its place.

  Merav didn’t understand the covenants of Olderra’s forest, but she knew they had been broken, the offenders’ lives forfeit. Hundeil circled to a side window and reached through the way a bear grabs fish from a river. A man screamed. The window was wide enough to pull the screeching prey’s head through but not his shoulders. Hundeil gripped the man by the hair, bending his neck backward over the sill.

  The horses bolted as Merav leapt over the bleeding body and through the front door. With a shout, a bull of a man charged toward her, swinging his torch like a club. Her response took no thought. She caught his wrist and dragged him off balance. He stumbled into the wall. The leather and chainmail he wore gave her easy purchase as she sprang onto his back and bit at the base of his neck. He howled as her teeth hooked his spine. She clamped and twisted, thrilled at the sensation of cartilage separating, bone breaking.

  Iron seared her side.

  She tore loose from her prey. Another armsman faced her, and though the torch had guttered out she could still perceive his scarred and bearded face. The knife he had stabbed her with glinted, no blood on its blade. The burning stripe across her flank faded. Behind the armsman lay the stack of headless bodies Hundeil had left when he had retrieved her for Olderra. Their soft parts teemed with insects.

  Merav yearned to lunge, but the man kept the knife before him. That iron blade had burned where it touched her.

  The man gagged. Merav shrank back, not comprehending—it looked as if a tree had reached through the cottage door and snagged him around the neck. Then Hundeil stepped fully inside and straightened. The armsman lifted from the floor, neck hooked in the upper reaches of Hundeil’s antlers.

  Hundeil shook his head once. The armsman’s spine snapped. Though his body went limp, his mouth continued to move.

  Merav’s attention whipped back to her own kill. She clawed at his head until she tore it from his shoulders. As he stared up at her, terrified, his mouth working silently, she recognized him. Jintien. A sergeant of House Lohmar, leader of her father’s personal guard. She had enjoyed Jintien’s company. He had a broad, kind face, stretched often by a gap-toothed grin.

  Without understanding why, she hooked Jintien’s head to her belt. The head disappeared, but she still felt its weight against her hip. It felt right. It felt just.

  “We tend to the wounded one now,” Hundeil rumbled. Two new heads had joined the ghastly fruit suspended in his antlers. “She still has blood left.”

  “As I did,” Merav said. With this prey—the men, her father’s men—vanquished, her hunger for blood slid away.

  “Yes,” said Hundeil. “This is the way of the forest. If it’s her fate to live, Olderra will heal her.”

  “As she did for me,” Merav said. Then made a leap. “And for you.”

  He left the cottage without acknowledging her words.

  Outside, the rain had thinned to mist. Hundeil scooped the dying girl from the muck, and as her head lolled, Merav recognized her, too. Kaediya. Two years younger than Merav, one of Uethorn’s grandnieces. They had crossed paths at three of the four harvest banquets Merav’s father had made her attend the previous fall. Scions of rival houses, she and Kaediya had exchanged no more than diffident pleasantries at each occasion.

  Mud plastered Kaediya’s raven-black hair across her long face. Her already pale skin had been bled to white. Her wide mouth hung open. Her wound wasn’t visible, but the flow of her life rolled out like a tide.

  Questions swirled in Merav’s mind—why had she and Kaediya been brought to this place, marked for slow murder?

  A moan rose over the patter of the storm and the rustling of the leaves. Hundeil’s scent soured with fear.

  He ran, Kaediya clenched in his arms. Merav followed his lead without knowing why, but she soon enough spied the cause of his flight.

  She remembered a serpentine length of white cloth, seen in delirium as Hundeil bore her to Olderra’s lair. She now learned what the object was: a sleeve.

  The hooded figure flowed toward them from the shadows, the white robe shrouding its emaciated form bright against the overcast night. It floated with arms outstretched, the sleeves of its raiment outstretched to either side, longer than human arms could possibly be.

  When Merav was only five she had traveled with her mother and father and eldest sister to the keep of Dreygim, far to the south of Calcharra—one of the few memories Merav had of her full family, before they lost Mother and Sister both to the yellow pox. The prince of Dreygim kept reptiles in immense cages, their scaly visages a fixture in Merav’s nightmares for months afterward, serpents who could swallow a man whole. These sleeves were longer than those serpents, waving slowly as if trailed through water.

  The figure lifted its hood and moaned again, as a grave exhaling rage.

  Hundeil quickened his sprint. Merav hesitated, and without appearing to gather speed, the figure halved the distance between them. The sleeves extended between the tree trunks like slow chameleon tongues, sinuous white arms curving together to embrace her.

  Merav tore her gaze from the fluttering white and bolted.

  Never before had she run with such speed or such fear, caroming off trees, tearing through brush, ripping loose the roots that hooked her feet, stumbling again and again until she caught up to Hundeil. Both were wheezing with exhaustion when they reached the gnarled behemoth of a tree that proved to be Olderra’s dwelling. Its bark parted like curtains to admit them.

  Merav doubled over, gasping, pulse pounding in her chest and sinuses. Inside the hollowed-out tree trunk, the interior had changed yet again, a hearth improbably embedded in the wood opposite the entrance. In the chamber’s center stood a round table ringed by benches, set with three bowls.

  Olderra pointed through the arch behind them, now opening into the room of floating shelves. Hundeil carried Kaediya there. “Put her on the table,” Merav heard Olderra say from the other room, even though the witch was still hunched by the hearth fire, dipping a ladle into a kettle hung from a spit. Merav peered through to see a second Olderra
at Hundeil’s elbow as he placed the girl’s body on the medicine table and shelves detached from the walls.

  Hundeil returned to the dining hall and the arch behind him stretched shut. He sat as Olderra used the ladle to fill the bowl before him. A smell of mutton and spicy roots overwhelmed Merav. Her stomach growled.

  Hundeil took up a spoon and supped. “Wonderful, milady,” he said, as if he hadn’t just run miles carrying a body while a long-sleeved specter pursued.

  The witch filled Merav’s bowl. Merav remained standing, despite her hunger. A slight frown made not-so-slight creases on Olderra’s brow. “Have some. You’ve earned it.”

  The more Merav became aware of it, the more the invisible weight at her hip disturbed her. The weight of Jintien’s head. A new part of her, a piece of her psyche that hadn’t existed before she woke up on Olderra’s table, insisted that this new accessory provided comfort, that its presence was right and just, but that part did not rule her, no matter how persistently it snapped its jaws.

  She was a beast now. A monster, like the thugs from Uethorn House who had mutilated her, like this murderous antlered man and the awful witch who was his master. And her master now. The death of gentle Jintien was on all of their hands.

  Gentle Jintien, who had spilled a harmless girl’s blood. Merav couldn’t fathom why he would do that. Had her father ordered it?

  The question gave strength to her repulsion. “Take it from me,” she said. “His head. Take it, I don’t want it.”

  Olderra regarded her with bushy eyebrows raised. “The price is paid. The bounty rightfully belongs to you.”

  “I don’t understand any of this and I refuse. Jintien was kind to me.”

  “Not to the child on my table.”

  “Then give what’s left of him to her, once she’s half-monster like me.”

  Hundeil flinched. Olderra’s glower intensified. “You cannot make a gift of your trophy, especially not to her,” she said as the arch in the wall reopened. “But I will do as you wish. I will take it from you.”

  Merav followed her into a chamber that shared the same tunnel-ceiling they all did, filled with rows of freestanding wooden racks not unlike the bookcases in the library at Garthand Palace. Tall glass jars crowded the racks.