Beneath Ceaseless Skies #204

by E. Catherine Tobler

  She puts the weapons, retrieved from the shrine, in Sikata’s lap. “Do you remember these? Touch them. Handle them.”

  The corpse does, and when it does so with the grace and familiarity Melishem expects, she nods in satisfaction. “Come with me. We will practice.”

  They have the run of the governor’s mansion. For sparring, Melishem has chosen the auditorium where state banquets were held, now cleared of all furniture and accoutrements of wealth. It was where Sikata was sworn in, though Melishem didn’t stay for the ceremony. She doesn’t remember why not. In retrospect it seems immeasurably rude.

  The auditorium is insulated from Talyut by silence and murals of alien skies, convolutions of black singularities in opposition, ziggurat moons and candlewick suns. Melishem enjoys it: the hall reminds her of the places she has killed, attired in the solitude of its carcass and beautiful in its ruin. Stasis and inertia draw her as few other attributes do. “Was it like this, in God’s mouth?” she wonders aloud. “In her sacred belly? Or is the afterlife, as they say, full of the suns and stars she swallowed?”

  Sikata looks at her, frowning slightly. “I owe fealty to her domain, stranger. I may not impart her mysteries to the living. And you are living, are you not, despite your accoutrements and alterations?”

  Melishem starts. She did not expect Sikata to speak, let alone express sapience; the soul is meant to sleep until Melishem wakes it by revealing who it was in life. Perhaps her procedure was flawed or perhaps Sikata’s will is simply that strong. “Say your name.”

  “My—” Sikata looks down at her hands, at the weapons that fit so easily between her fingers. “They will come to me. I was... I was... a city. No, that’s not right. I represented a city? I governed one? No, that’s not it either.” A gravid hesitation. “I had a family, I’m sure of that; I was married, with children. Are you my wife?”

  It tempts Melishem to say yes: to mold Sikata into what she wants, reinvent their history and so recast their future. Had she known what the wife looks like, she could even take on that appearance. “I am—was—not your wife. Not even close to it.” She plucks the countless possibility-lines that radiate from Talyut’s core; she makes them sing. “For now, I want to see you fight.”

  They bloom out of the marble ground, ghost aggregates splitting into razor limbs and limpid eyes, the phantoms of battlefields past. Civil wars have rent Talyut in those dark times before God and her justice. Before the duels. The memories of those soldiers rise now, circling Sikata. To them there is only foe.

  Sikata’s reaction is economically precise. Slashes that amputate. Shots that terminate hearts. In a moment all that remains are bisected ghost mouths gibbering forgotten words, sliced arteries pumping phantom pain, and fragmented medallions denoting ranks long out of use. To any human eye this is flawless performance. To Melishem, it is merely adequate: too slow, too many openings.

  As Sikata is—as Sikata was at the time of her demise—she would be no match for Melishem.

  An unwelcome revelation, but one Melishem already suspected and has prepared for. She dismisses the phantom carcasses. On her part Sikata has sheathed her blade and holstered her gun, looking bemused at the dissolving carnage, at what she has done. “I was a fighter,” she says, voice unmoored. “Except for what reason, in what cause? Combat isn’t its own justification.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. It is a tool to be wielded for worthier ends, a crude means to achieve and realize that which is abstract and elegant and noble. Without a cause violence is simply brute, an animal response.”

  “It’s a useful tool,” Melishem says. “Don’t you wish to hone it? To best your own skills, to exceed yourself as you are now. I promise that a cause awaits you, withering in your absence, and that you left behind a fight unfinished.”

  Sikata peers at the wall, but it is opaque and allows no room on its surface for her reflection. “If that is true, then what you offer me is a great gift available to few: to come back from God’s mouth and redeem oneself from what must have been ignoble defeat. What, stranger, is your price?”

  Such certainty that there must be one, Melishem marvels. “Your presence and return are their own justification.” It is not an untruth. “All I ask is that you apply your body to the blade and the gun, and your will to recall.”

  Her dead age-mate studies her, gray skin lustrous and poreless in this light, almost more artwork than a living thing—but then, she is not alive anymore. “There’s a hunger in you. For all your puissance you are starved for something. If only I discover what that is then I will know all, I will turn it in you and you’ll unlatch beautifully like a door.”

  Melishem tries to remember if Sikata has always been like this, or if the afterlife has altered her elements: hardened her character, made her simultaneously more frank and secretive, but as with much else the details crumble and fall through her fingers like sand. So she simply orients herself toward her goal, this single course and single endpoint.

  On her part Sikata spars against the phantoms with cold efficiency, as though she is aware of the briefness of her facsimile body. Melishem supposes it is a natural thing to assume: that there is not just a price but also a deadline, that she is brought back for a specific purpose rather than given another chance to live out domestic bliss. Melishem raises phantoms more and more substantial, war-veterans drunk with battle thirst, arachnids armed with predator cunning and human malice. Each falls to Sikata, who excels in leaps and masters her techniques in bounds.

  “If you are not my wife,” Sikata says as she dusts off arachnid ethers from her blade, “then what does she look like? Her name, her smell, her favorite dishes. Does she cook, does she smell like saffron and sunlight; does she drink from cowrie cups or erhu-glasses? Is she tall so I must climb her like a tree when we kiss? Tell me. Tell me.”

  It occurs to Melishem she should have asked someone. She does not know. When she left they were both too young to wed (not too young to fight), and Sikata had not yet shown interest of that sort. “I cannot say.” The wife would be numinous, she thinks, and they would have met when Sikata was sparring, or maybe at an orchard. Sikata likes growing things, fruits, the earth itself beautiful to Sikata: rain like magic, wet mud like jewels. The wife has to be, Melishem decides, a gardener. Black dirt under nails, smelling emerald as sunlight.

  Sikata’s mouth tightens but she does not press, believing perhaps that answers must be earned. She meets the next phantoms in concentrated fury. Entire battalions crumple and meet their second deaths. The weight of a thousand sieges burn up and wither before Sikata’s might. She does not tire or rest—the body Melishem gave her knows neither hunger nor thirst, and feel no more fatigue than any corpse would.

  “If you won’t speak of my wife,” Sikata says as she shakes free of a god-beast’s wilting cilia, “then tell me of my office. Its stature, its height, its essential temperament. Did it demand violence, did it require grace and justice? Did it demand wisdom in the application of force, or was it content with base impulse? What was I in this office and did I shape it to me, or the other way around? Tell me. Tell me.”

  The office. To Melishem it never carried its own meaning; it was merely adjunct and appendage to the fate-line binding her to Sikata, a symbol of their lives side by side, their parallel existences. A symbol that Sikata and she were equal in arms. “Your office was duty and piety.” Her thought snags on the gate-guard as she tries to assemble what champion signifies. “Your office was hope.”

  “That is less than what I wanted to know, but it will do. My thanks, stranger.”

  And a knot in Melishem loosens, after all. She feels a stranger to herself, light on her feet, a traveler fated to wander always—but whose destination comes upon her suddenly and seizes her in its jaw, an ecstasy of homecoming.

  * * *

  Melishem measures out the time remaining to Sikata carefully, calculating and recalculating until she has it down within the hour: when Sikata’s body will slow, wind d
own, and surrender her spirit. God’s domain calls back its own—no amount of power in the world can contest the pull of divine gravity, the umbilicus of God’s hunger. Still she considers whether she can build another frame, repeat the summons, and extend Sikata’s time on mortal soil indefinitely.

  On burnt paper she pins the anatomy of Sikata’s span; in jars and nets of sluggish time she simulates and experiments. She finds that while she could repeat the process, she would—literally—repeat the rest; she can pluck Sikata’s spirit forth again, from the point after her death but before this summoning. What she gets would be a simulacrum, an image copied from a certain moment that will know nothing of what has transpired since. The next iteration might ask different questions, might not say My thanks, stranger in a way that eases the pressure inside Melishem. There is no constant. Sikata-in-fugue is a variable without limits.

  Melishem cooks for them both. Out of everything that has frayed and worn to thin rags in her recall, it is this that she has held onto: the heat and sizzle of sunflower oil in the pan, the bite of fish sauce on a bed of jasmine rice, the rich chili-and-herb pastes.

  Each time she would set the table between training sessions, Sikata would say, “I don’t need to eat,” but the dead duelist nevertheless would taste, comment on the flavors, finish the dishes. Sometimes she’d say, “This is saturated with fat and it would be the death of my heart, had I one still pumping” or “So hot! So beautiful to eat, it reminds me...” But she would trail off.

  They drink plain water or the occasional treat of coconut milk thinned by ice cubes, mildly sugared, tasting of an easier and wealthier time.

  At the end of one meal, Sikata turns to Melishem and says, “One last question, stranger. When you brought me back, was it for love or duty? Was it my office that paid for you or my wife, or was it simply your own purpose?”

  Melishem puts her spoon and fork together, prim. A matter of decorum. She’s been raised for decorum, for propriety; that much stays intrinsic in her bones. “Does it matter? Does the intent affect the result?”

  “When the result is human—” Sikata holds up a wrist, bloodless and varnished by the afterlife, and lets it fall: acknowledging the irony of human when she’s not entirely that. “When the result is human, when the heart moves the course of history, intent is aim and fire. It may not meet the mark perfectly, may not be total, but motive is the animating force.”

  “I don’t know whether you are quite wise or quite naïve.” Melishem sips. Coconut milk today, still glittering with thaw, miniature icebergs sloshing in the cup. “I work at no one’s behest but my own.”

  “That does not answer whether you act in love or selfishness.”

  “I can think of few passions more selfish than love.”

  To that Sikata says, after a moment, “Give me the most difficult beast of what you have. The supreme, final challenge. If I don’t know myself entire, still I know my skill. I am ready.”

  Melishem does not dispute.

  In the auditorium, she draws on wars past and future, pulling not on individual combatants but on the accumulated fury: the will behind a trigger pulled, the force behind a blade swung, the snap at which a neck is proven nothing more than fragile stem holding fruit—ripe for the picking to bare hands. Those instants spiked by adrenaline and massacre, by self-preservation and will to kill. Desperation or calculation, the beginning of a successful strike or the last dregs of a scattered retreat, Melishem distills them all.

  What she conjures is space creased and warped into kaleidoscope. It takes up most of the hall, blotting out the reality of the murals, eroding the furniture to insubstance. Ground and ceiling fade out likewise, leaving the kaleidoscope, Melishem, and Sikata existentially underscored—hyperreal.

  “You won’t be fighting an enemy or even a multitude of enemies.” Melishem staggers, catches herself. This feat has taxed even her, drained the comet’s core she has taken into her: a power source with which she has replaced the frail organ of her heart. “You’ll be fighting the war imperative itself, the impulse to strike and shatter, the fever-thirst to bite down and rip.”

  “Have you fought such a thing yourself?”

  Melishem gazes at the kaleidoscope’s boundaries; she is seized momentarily by the sense of being in two places at once, then and now. She was still breakable bones and mutable flesh when she challenged something like this to hone herself. “Yes.”

  “Then so will I.”

  Sikata stretches her hands. The warp of space reaches back to her, winding up her arms, her shoulders. All colors, as beautiful as a duelist’s pennant, silken grace. It opens in a gash; it engulfs her whole.

  * * *

  A number of days pass.

  Melishem leaves the palace to visit the empty place that holds Sikata’s grave. She kneels and sips at potentiates to replenish the comet’s core, converting entropic emanations into life’s blood. She thinks of the words she could have said but did not, the answer to effigy-Sikata’s final question. I love you, that is why I brought you back, that is why I’ve made you my goal. Your name kept me human while I had myself vivisected and my arteries injected with secrets so I might wring miracles out of blank ether. I do not love you as a sister, I do not desire to be your wife, but I love you to an ache. No duty can move me as love has.

  Each dawn, she cooks a meal for two, makes the flavors the most intense she can, the aromas so mouthwatering and sweet-savory that connoisseurs might cross continents to taste. She garnishes meat with turmeric and lemongrass, holy basil and sinful saffron. Rice blooms in pots, swelling bruise-purple and lush yellow. Cicada peppers rub red-green wings, making incessant song atop dishes. The meal she brings to the auditorium, where she sits and waits, eating alone.

  A gate-guard tries to meet her, but she refuses him audience. The governor sends word requesting her presence; this she also ignores. She does speak to a few market vendors, trading foreign alloy bars for spices she can’t find in the palace pantry, for fresh eggs.

  She hears, when it happens, the creaking stutter of reality in protest.

  Melishem comes to the auditorium in time to see her conjuring dissolve. The kaleidoscope cracks in a glissando of spent cartridges, dogged by the basso-profundo thump of exhausted shells. When the last echo and tattered light have burned out, there is Sikata: chunks have been bitten out of her body, crescent holes have been shot through her leaving void-punctures where her substance has been negated.

  Her eyes in contrast are whole and calm. “Stranger, I saw you within. Your past, or your future. A blizzard rages, there is fertile land behind you; you are fighting season itself, your back against taloned pyres.”

  “I’ve made you steamed cake,” Melishem says. “It’s still hot.”

  Sikata kneels, uncovers the steamer basket, and inhales. She breaks off a generous chunk, puts it in her mouth. “How gorgeous.” Tears bead and flow, though her expression remains serene as if her eyes are merely expelling liquid. The way pores perspire, a biological function beyond either sentiment or control. She eats, eats, finishes—not a brown crumb is left. “I don’t know what it is about that place you sent me to. It incited a prodigious thirst, for all that I’m unliving.”

  Melishem pours a bowl of jasmine-scented water. She’s out of coconut milk. When the bowl is empty too, she says, “Sikata Lantern-of-God, champion to Tessellated Talyut, appointed by strength and divine mandate.”

  Sikata is unresponsive and then, after a full minute, “Yes.”

  “Yes?” Melishem blinks. She expected a stronger reaction. The dead return to themselves more harshly than this.

  “You called me thus, in that place of battle. Or will call me, one day. And so I regained myself, my past, my family.” Sikata holds up her hands, looking at the poreless gray that substitutes skin, its ceramic finish. “I will not want them to see me like this. You... you I don’t recognize, even now. I should. But—”

  The hour where secrets fall away like shed armor. So much easier to remain
a stranger. She steadies herself, steadies her voice. “Melishem. I’m Melishem.”

  This time, a pause. It coils tight, tighter. Sikata’s effigy face has drawn taut, devoid of expression or dimension. A thin mask over her doll’s skull. “Melishem.” A mouthful of air held carefully, then pushed out through teeth. “Where have you been? What did you do to yourself?”

  “I’ve ranged the breadth of the Occident, fought and crushed their heathen warriors. I hunted demons that were deserts, foxes that were islands, ghosts that were forests.” Absently she soothes the moths poking out of her joints; they have become agitated, drawn by the brightness leaking through the holes in Sikata. “I flensed myself of all that I didn’t need.”

  “Where were you when Talyut most needed you?”

  Melishem starts, catches herself recoiling. “Talyut has long made clear I am not required.”

  “Is that what it is?” Sikata makes a choked noise. “I asked them to appoint us both, but I was too young then and barely proven; the priests did not listen. And now... I’ve purchased Talyut a year. After that, there’s no one ready to replace me. You brought me back too soon. I won’t be there for the next duel.”

  Said as though Sikata, too, knows how much time she has remaining. Perhaps even now God’s stomach is calling to her. Melishem pours another bowl of water and sips, slow, drop by drop. “The dead have seen inside God, and through her the vision of existence transmutes forever to fanged grace.”

  “Thus we the dead may not serve as champion.” Another sound underscored by insect buzz, countless chitinous limbs toiling inside the effigy body to give it animation. “How well you speak the scripture, even after all this time. What is it then that you want?”