When he picked himself up, he saw that a narrow gap had appeared in the front of the temple, stretching from floor to ceiling. It was barely wide enough for him to squeeze through, which he did as quickly as possible, lest it close again.
Inside, the temple was open to the sky—all he could see was a narrow corridor no wider than the gap he had squeezed through, ending a few yards down in a turn to the right. The next passage was slightly wider, but it only lasted a short way before splitting to the right and left. The boy ran his finger along the maze-like pattern traced on the walls and knew he was inside yet another labyrinth.
He breathed deep and clenched his fists to keep from despairing. Perhaps this was all there was within the temple. Perhaps he would find his mother lost here, wandering the corridors.
Something was wrong with the sky here. It had been sunset when he entered, but it now looked blue and cloudless, bright as midday but with no visible sun. The narrow stone walls were much too tall to see over—for all he knew they went on forever.
Then he heard a sound from up ahead and caught a glimpse of a boot heel disappearing behind a turn. He took off running. He turned a corner, only to see the same boot heel disappearing again further on. He followed the stranger in this way for longer than he could say, running until his breath came in ragged gasps. He shouted for the man to wait, and seemed to grow no closer no matter how fast he ran. When he had all but given up hope, he rounded a corner to see a tall man in an officer’s half-cloak and epaulets facing a dead end. The man stood completely still, as if he were contemplating the wall and its pattern.
Slowly, the man turned to face him, and the boy beheld his aristocratic Nahala features, the face still youthful but with old and haunted eyes. The boy also saw the ragged, bloody hole in the medal-decked chest. It seemed to cause the man no pain or worry. Instead, when he laid eyes on the boy, he stood transfixed for a moment, then tears leaked out from the corners of his weary eyes.
“No,” he said. “Don’t tell me it has claimed you too.”
Then the boy knew; the same way he simply knew things in dreams.
“Do not tell me how you died,” his father said. “I cannot bear it. The hope of your birth was all that sustained me on the battle lines. When your mother’s faith bound my spirit here, the thought of your freedom was all that brought me joy.”
“I’m alive,” the boy said. “I spoke the word of opening, and came here hoping to free my mother.”
Then his father caught him up in both arms, and embraced him tight, and the boy felt warm despite the coldness of his father’s limbs. He told his father of everything since his mother was sealed within the temple. How the Orphan Master had brought him to the house of lost boys—boys who had grown up knowing nothing but hunger and dark alleyways and had despised him for the signs of mother-love he still bore. They would have killed him before long, he knew, if Eneas the painter had not needed another apprentice and if his nimble fingers had not tied the best brushes. He told his father of the word, and Master Martyce, and everything that had followed.
“My own boy a Speaker.” His father spoke these words with a mix of pride and something else, which the boy hoped was not disgust or fear. “I wish I could have seen it.”
As they walked the temple corridors, his father told him stories too. “If I had lived through that blasted war, everything would have been different. I would have taken your mother from this hopeless cult and found a home for us far from Axa, from Nahal and Erestia, where we could simply be as we were. I had never met anyone like her, so free, so uncaring of the weight of tradition. Back then even her worship of a god whose name my parents only spoke in curses was somehow a mark of freedom—a chance to choose our own way. I had renounced all gods in my heart, but tradition still bound me to the Burning Orchid order, like my father before me.
“I was not so fortunate, growing up in surrender. The Viceroy’s snake of an advisor, the Trade Company man, found those within our order whose hearts were false and bribed them to engineer a debt of honor to turn us into soldiers for our enemies. I fought as I was commanded to, and the Burning Orchid never fight with less than all their heart. In the silk wars I faced the exiled prince of Axa himself. I cut down his bodyguards and demanded he face me sword to sword. The last thing I saw was his sneer of disgust as he shot me down with his Rukh-pistol.”
The passageways of the maze went on and on as they talked. The boy was now thoroughly lost, and his father seemed to have no idea of where he was going.
“Now my soul is trapped here, at the periphery of the temple. Every time I think I have found the way, I lose it again. I have searched for your mother for years.”
“I have the true language,” the boy said with more confidence than he felt. He called his mother’s name, hoping it would work as a true word, leading them to her. It did nothing that he could see. He wracked his brain, looking for a word for finding what was lost. He had rushed blind into the heart of madness.
“Balan will use the truth against you,” his father said. “He has two mouths, one which you see, and one which you do not, and from these he speaks both truth and lies together.”
When they reached another dead end, the boy spoke the word of opening again. When the word and sign did nothing, he cursed and beat his fist against the wall.
“There may be another way,” his father said. “The fragment of power that brought you here is not enough to penetrate to the temple’s sanctum, but I’ve heard that the same energy is contained in the bones of Speakers themselves. You are a conduit for the otherworld. You can open the way.”
“That is forbidden,” the boy said. He didn’t know this. Martyce had never mentioned it. There had been some references in the Speaker books he’d read to ‘cursed bone pluckers,’ and ‘ghul-Speakers,’ but nothing else. Still, the very idea felt wrong.
“You have already risked much in coming here,” said his father. “It will take more, my son. I am sorry.”
He was right—he had already come so far. It couldn’t be for nothing.
The boy faced the blank wall again, holding up the littlest finger on his left hand. He hoped he did not have to sever it first. He tried the word and sign again, this time thinking of his finger and the bone inside it, offering it, willing it as part of what he did, as he had with the ancient knucklebone.
Something was different. As he spoke the words he lost a sense of the finger as his—he could feel it, but it no longer seemed a part of him. It was a thing, a growth on the end of his hand to be discarded—yet he felt its pain. Thick tendrils of purple smoke began to rise from the finger. It was excruciating, like burning and tearing, fire and ice all at once. It was far worse than any lash or beating he had ever endured. His eyes watered, and he almost blacked out from the pain.
When he opened his eyes, the finger was gone, the flesh sealed over it as if it had never been. Then the wall bucked and groaned, and a hairline crack appeared in its surface. Light came pouring out through it—a strange sort of light the boy could not describe.
“Yes,” said his father. “It is opening. You must give more.”
“Where does this lead?”
“To the heart of Balan’s temple. To your mother.”
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it. We are close. You must give more.”
The boy looked at his missing finger, and at the narrow crack, and at the strange, unearthly light that seeped through it, like the lights he had read sailors describe sometimes rising from the depths of the sea at night.
“No,” he said.
His father whirled on him. On his face was despair, and a bitter, helpless rage. Below this the wound on his chest was changing, opening wider, showing teeth in a smile—a smile the boy knew from his books.
“Do not stop,” both mouths spoke as one. “Open the way for me.”
He ran. Tears streamed down his face, and he pushed his burning lungs and aching legs beyond what they could bear. He dared not look ba
ck, or even stop long enough to guess which way he had come. Nothing in the labyrinth was familiar. For all he knew, the walls moved when his back was turned, and any corner he rounded could bring him back to that horrible smile.
The passageways he ran down grew narrower and narrower, until somehow ahead of him he saw the little opening he had squeezed through. He raced for it, pushing his already ailing body to its limit. The walls were drawing closer together. If he did not move fast they would crush him flat. The edges of the walls brushed his shoulders now, and he ran sideways like a crab, throwing himself for the opening.
He landed face-down in the street. The temple behind him had sealed shut, without even a crack remaining. The boy had lost a shoe in his dive for freedom—the only reminder of his passing in Balan’s temple, and the only change he had wrought besides his missing finger.
* * *
The boy expected judgment to fall on him any moment—Martyce waiting for him at the house with the Viceroy’s guard, or with some ghastly spirits called to serve Speaker justice, name hounds or a hungry thought, or something worse.
Instead, he found a cold hearth and an empty cage. His master should have been alerted when he broke the wards on the cage, should have raced home as soon as he’d been able, but no one had set foot in the house since the boy had left.
He had no strength to flee, or even to kindle a new fire, so he gathered his blankets and lay down on his little cot and slept.
When he woke, for a blissful moment he thought it was another normal day, and he would rise to cook his master’s breakfast. Then he felt the ghostly ache of his little finger, which continued to pain him even in its absence, and everything returned to him. Outside the firstday bells were ringing. He’d been in the Heart of Balan four days.
He made a fire in the hearth using flint and steel, not words, and fetched water by hand from the well. He knew that he should flee for his life, but he saw no point in running when Martyce could send spirits to track him down. He held no fear of torture after what he had seen in Balan’s Heart.
Hours passed, yet Martyce made no sign of returning. Likely he never would. People went to the Viceroy’s palace every day and never came back. Whether he had died in loyal service or been executed for some imagined treason hardly mattered. He was gone, and the boy was once again alone.
Something in the boy’s heart longed for punishment. The power he had clung to as relief had proved hopeless. He could strive for more, live life as Martyce had, obsessed with a goal he may never achieve. He could turn his back on the world and end his own life. Or he could do something different. Beneath his pillow was the wire-hair brush he’d stolen from his old master what felt like so long ago. He had never forgotten it.
He painted, but not with pigments and brushes as Eneas had. He looked for the words and signs, and they came to him easily—far more easily than any others had. He etched colors into the wall with word and gesture, using his art to bring the shapes in his head directly into the world. The results were crude attempts—half-recognized faces rising from a sea of line and color: his mother, his father, Martyce and Gelera, the lizard in the cage; fire and water and wind and the feelings they gave rise to in him.
He covered the walls of the cottage, and when there were no more walls left to cover, he packed his few belongings, and some few of his master’s books, and he left.
It was not real comfort. The pictures were only lies in line and color. Yet something in them was more true than the words of the true language. This was Balan’s smile, but he had claimed it for his own, and one day he would return.
Copyright © 2013 Nick Scorza
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Nick Scorza was born in Seattle, grew up in Washington, DC, lived for a while in the Czech Republic, and now resides in Astoria, Queens. He writes both spec-fic and what's usually called 'literary fiction.' Stories of his can be found in Something Wicked, Hobart, and Dogwood.
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COVER ART
“The FrostValley,” by Jorge Jacinto
Jorge Jacinto is a twenty-three year old digital artist from Portugal. His work has been featured as a workshop in ImagineFX magazine. View his concept art and commissions in his gallery at deviantArt.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2013 Firkin Press
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