The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  No one has tried to control Adersiun or his Everblades since.

  The silhouette of a tower looms against the light-suffused layer of clouds—sunlight reflecting off the nearby planet like a moon—clouds that crawl around the lower cliffs.

  The tower the visiting merchant stays in with Rynn.

  Jaycken stops at the doorway, where antigravity carts are piled against ancient stone, as out of place as frigate warships and medieval knights. The sarcophagi are gone.

  Mummies need to sleep inside at night?

  Jaycken glances around, taking a deep breath. Nothing is digitally locked here, only guarded, as it’s all so old. He pulls on a wooden door, which creaks open as if its hinges are breaking, then slips through an archway.

  Any light sleeper inside the tower would have heard that door.

  Inside the charged and heat-sealed perimeter, the air is as warm as a summer night. Footsteps scamper off in a room overhead.

  The inner chamber is cluttered with goods: pulsers, v-rims of all colors, alloy suits. Antigravity sleds, chairs, beds. Translucent stones with insects or small animals eternally entombed in their depths.

  Whimpering carries out from somewhere above.

  Jaycken creeps through three smaller, dark rooms, the night vision function on his v-rim activating. Everything is a shade of gray. He ascends a stairwell.

  At the top of the stairs is a room with a flickering candle on a sill. The two stone sarcophagi are aligned parallel on the floor.

  What are these things really used for?

  Footsteps now shuffle along on what sounds like the ground floor.

  A soft moan comes from within a sarcophagus. The granite lids seem like permanent fixtures, must weigh a ton each.

  Monsters? The dead?

  Jaycken’s hands shake as he inches forward. Another whimper carries through the granite, what could have been a deafening scream when it originated inside.

  He runs a hand across the coarse rock, wondering if he dare open it and release whatever secret the merchant is hiding.

  Does Rynn know what’s inside?

  Teschner wouldn’t approve of his method of investigation, but Jaycken would be as old as Slyth if he waits for the Frontiersmen to force their merchant friend to open them.

  Jaycken pushes against the rock.

  Nothing.

  He shoves as hard as he can. The lid rumbles as it slides a few millimeters.

  The voice or voices inside amplify, sounding like screams of terror.

  Jaycken braces against the granite with his palms, his feet digging into the ground. He heaves and heaves. The lid slides away bit by bit, rumbling and protesting. He glances back over his shoulder, in case those footsteps come up to stop him.

  No one at the doorway.

  He glances down into an open crack.

  Inside the sarcophagus is Rynn.

  What?

  She’s huddled into a ball, trembling and shaking, hugging herself, sobbing.

  Jaycken pushes the lid open and scoops her up in his arms. He lays her gently on the floor, her body limp, her one eye darting about as if she sees things in the darkness around them. Maybe she sees that beating sun everywhere now.

  A hot flush of anger rises up Jaycken’s face and forehead, awash in an undercurrent of sympathy. The merchant does this to her? Why?

  Rynn’s face flushes red, and veins start to throb at her temples as if she’s growing angry as well.

  So abruptly after her demeanor of debilitating fear?

  A volt of realization strikes.

  Is it me?

  Jaycken stops. How could he possibly be influencing Rynn, agitating her?

  Jaycken pushes harder with his anger, suppresses his sympathy, and unleashes his confidence. Heat grows inside him, uncomfortably warm, and rolls out across his skin like an underground nuclear detonation. He washes Rynn with the feeling.

  Rynn raises her head, and her eye clears and becomes aware, focused, confident, but most of all angry. Searching for her tormentor. She even manages a forced grin as her gaze meets Jaycken’s, and she grabs his hand and rises to her feet, her legs quivering.

  Jaycken smiles, but an ache shudders deep in his spine.

  My emotions. Did this event with the sarcophagus test me and advance my abilities? Did it bring me closer to Adersiun? I saved her from some mental trauma in moments …

  I am a Beguiler.

  Seeva

  Seeva’s head droops.

  Her depression, the traumatic state, reoccupies her mind, invading and toxic, threatening to derail her, to take her where it wants. She wanders aimlessly through the slums of the Pearl, Ori flapping by her side. Streams of brackish water wallow in gutters and reek of excrement, of food waste.

  She will never be able to punish the most wicked, the most powerful men. Will never be able to get Drumeth alone and relieve the galaxy of him. Such men are too well protected. Too wealthy to receive repercussions.

  Seeva’s been sleeping fourteen hours a day in her ship over the past week and a half—at least attempting to sleep, but this mostly consists of lying still, her mind running through wild thoughts and emotions. She needed to get out, just for the idea of breathing fresh air. Although the air is stale and carries the hint of a sickening, fake floral scent. The scent masks everything here that wishes to remain hidden, things the human mind wishes to forget.

  Women sit outside hovels in clothing that barely covers filthy skin. Men wander alone, eyeing each of the morsels dressed in human flesh. Gamblers, addicts, alcoholics, and thrill seekers of the nefarious kind travel here from everywhere in the galaxy to satisfy some visceral calling. Such appetites are never satiated for long, and there are so many men.

  No courtesans here, maybe the hookers’ quarter.

  Past the cross street, a cadaverous young woman sits in a metal-legged chair, a long dress hanging off her bones. She’s not even attempting to appeal to the men wandering around. She begs for marcs, for food.

  “Ori,” Seeva says, “take this to that frail woman.”

  Seeva gives Ori a swipe chip for an authorized marcs transfer and two bottles of vegan qwix meal—a fortified slurry that carries all the nutrients and calories needed for a day without the hassle of cooking, cleaning, or chewing. Seeva’s preferred sustenance.

  Ori swoops over. The woman gasps and jerks back. Ori places the objects on the ground at her feet and flies back to Seeva. The woman stares, her gaping mouth a scattering of remaining teeth.

  Seeva nods and walks on.

  What story hides within that woman’s mind and soul? Drugs? Violent men? Is it similar to her own?

  Seeva’s mind is a bore train again, plowing through a tunnel of night, herself a passenger forced to watch the storm of depression raging outside the windows—spirals of memories. She’s there at one of the weddings. The first wedding. With the dapper old man who found her cold, starving, and alone after the mother forced her out of the convent for kissing another woman, the man who brought her to his chateau and fed her. His twelve daughters and several sons from fifteen wives became her family, their pets and exotic animals her friends.

  Only two months into the arrangement, the eldest daughter was betrothed to five suitors, and on the girl’s wedding day, Seeva’s role as a sacrificial human was made plain.

  The attending women dressed Seeva, not in white or the color of the bridesmaids, but in black. A black dress that revealed more than it covered. While her new sister attended the ceremony and waited, dined, laughed, and sang, her father negotiated with the fathers of the suitors. And Seeva was sent out.

  One servant, a portly woman with misaligned pupils, guided Seeva to a door and stopped. The servant handed Seeva a red pill and a glass of water and told Seeva to take it for her own protection.

  “You give yourself to the suitors now,” the woman said as she watched Seeva swallow the pill.

  “What?” Seeva asked, dumbfounded.

  “You couldn’t possibly have thought t
hat with everything the father gives you, you don’t have to do anything in return. You have to play your part.”

  Seeva’s limbs started to tremble.

  “If you don’t comply,” the woman said, “the father will sell you to the pimps of the Pearl for the same purposes, but to a much harsher life. Or they will have you killed. You’re kept only for this purpose, to try out the men for his daughters. Warn the family if any of them are violent during sex, or of other issues they should know about before the father decides which groom will arrive for the ceremony and wed his daughter. They want an insight into the real man behind the suit before they bind their daughter and their family to him and his family. The suitors believe that you’re only a gift and will treat you accordingly. They don’t know your true purpose.”

  Her chaperone knocked at the waiting door, one that seemed to grow impossibly large before Seeva’s eyes.

  This can’t be true, can’t be happening.

  A young man waited inside, the top button of his shirt undone, his tie loose, hair sprouting from his chest like dark weeds. Sweat rode down his forehead.

  Seeva was ushered inside, and the woman shut the door behind her with a decisive thud.

  The young man immediately reached for the straps on her dress.

  Seeva resisted, fighting him off with fists and nails.

  “You’re supposed to give yourself willingly, not pretend this is rape.” The young man held a hand over the scratches on his cheek. “You’re a temptress, no?”

  Seeva’s hands shook as she tried the door—locked somehow. She could almost hear the heavy breathing of her lazy-eyed chaperone outside. She pounded on the door.

  What is happening? Why’d no one tell me what I was supposed to do for the family until now?

  “You give yourself to me.” The man advanced again, pressed her up against the door, and yanked the straps off her shoulders. He kissed the back of her neck.

  Fear rode from Seeva’s heart out into her trembling fingers and toes. She could only lean against the door in shock.

  He pulled her dress up, her undergarments down. He grabbed and squeezed, kissed her breasts, her buttocks, between her legs, everywhere but on the lips. Soon she was on the bed on her back. Tightness and pain stretched between her legs. One thrust later, he was spent and pushed away.

  “I was good, no?” He arched an eyebrow as he tucked in his shirt.

  Seeva remembers stumbling outside, the rest of the day’s encounters a blur.

  Over the years, when the master’s daughters were married, Seeva experienced it all: a perverted old man who wanted to pretend she was younger than she already was, a couple of men who hit her, a man who seemed to find her body revolting but stroked himself enough to get the job done in hopes of a favorable report to her father of his desire for male-female sex, and a few men who would not take advantage of her. She feared for her life but was too numb to fight back or run away, always too frightened of the unspoken threat of death. There was also so much kindness from the family, at least to her face: her own room, meals, clothes, companionship, conversation. More kindness than hurt, but the appalling acts she was expected to fulfill outweighed the luxuries.

  When the horrifying wedding of the seventh daughter, Bris—the daughter Seeva had grown closest to—arrived, Seeva would finally be revolted enough to run.

  One suitor at this particular wedding spoke to Seeva as if she were less than human during sex: how ugly and perverted her small body was, how stupid all women were but she was the dumbest he’d ever met, that her existence only amounted to a lousy fuck for men with power, insults that curled up inside her mind and nested there like parasitic larvae.

  Later, after Seeva reported the nature of the suitor’s demeaning comments to her foster father, another suitor walked down the aisle between lines of friends and family, beaming.

  Seeva saved her sweetest sister from the likes of that man even though Seeva knew he deceived Bris, courted her with chivalry. Bris preferred that man to any of the others.

  Bris wept when she saw her chosen groom but concealed her emotions behind her veil.

  The ceremony continued until the priest of the gods of the seasons asked for reasons not to wed them. Then the suitor who degraded Seeva, a young man wearing only a tank top, veins running up his arms like creeping vines, stormed in, pacing up and down the aisle red-faced, shouting that the bride was already carrying his child. Shouting that he should be the chosen suitor and how could the father of the bride be so blind. Shouting that they would all be sorry for this insult when he was the richest and most powerful man in the galaxy.

  The dapper father elbowed his way through, not toward the affronted suitor but to stand before his daughter. “Is this true, Bris?”

  Bris would not answer, not until her father yelled and ranted. Finally, she said, “No, I’m not pregnant, but I love him, not the man you sent me. Choose for me, Father, not for the family.”

  “This is an outrage!” The father of the chosen suitor jumped to his feet. “You promised a virgin daughter for my son!”

  Bris’s disgraced father grabbed her stomach in a claw grip, felt for a protruding bump, ripped his own tie from his neck, and garroted his daughter on the spot. Her face beat red. Her eyes became gaping white bowls. A horrid stillness and silence hovered over the ceremony as no one could look away.

  Seeva ran amidst the confusion and shock, seething in anger, entwined in disbelief.

  What the suitor claimed wasn’t true. Bris loved the disgraced suitor, but she wasn’t pregnant. They had not even engaged in sexual relations yet. Even if Bris hid it somehow in their own home, she would have admitted it to Seeva.

  Still, the suitor’s lie worked, got him what he wanted: a dead girl if someone else was going to have her. From then on, for years to come, the suitor continued to lie about so many things, twisting reality to his way of seeing the world, knowing he could shape people’s beliefs if he impregnated his accusations with enough emotion.

  Nearly every day since, Seeva wondered if she helped create the man the disgraced suitor became. Would he have grown so immoral, so corrupt if he was chosen for Bris? Would Bris still be alive? Perhaps mentally broken, perhaps physically abused, but probably alive.

  Then Seeva lived on the streets.

  Hunger and depression and a numbness to life set in after the rage subsided, then a fear for her own survival. Anyone who spoke to her knew what she was—a whore—and blamed her for her circumstances and situation, offered no aid, and treated her as if she would infect them. She grew rough and mean in order to deter being owned and avoided gang members and people in general. She stole a pulser one night and learned how to carry and fire it.

  During those dark times, Seeva often looked back fondly on the dynamics she’d been a part of. She missed the good, a family, and considered going back or finding another family she could work for, one that loved her like the last one. She imagined it would be better this time either way.

  Psychological trauma berated her with self-deprecating lies, which were reinforced by the people she met.

  Only the stray animals Seeva cared for and fed scraps to did not judge her, did not blame her for her life.

  Over the following months and years, no person ever came looking for Seeva, not even Athiera, her friend from the orphanage, no person unless they wanted to exploit her. Seeva eventually realized that the family did not truly love her either, that she was only a means to an end.

  Only the stray animals loved Seeva. They saved her. They started sleeping close to her, then curling up with her. Animals became her true family, and she would save them in return, save them for the rest of her life, no matter where she went.

  During this time, Quintanilla and Precht found Seeva sleeping with a stray bone hound, her arms draped across its neck, when they were visiting on Silvergarde duty. They approached her and asked if she would like to find a home on Silvergarden. After punching Quintanilla in the throat, an involuntary reaction, Seeva
said no.

  It took two years and nearly twenty visits of coaxing for Seeva to finally come visit Silvergarden, and only after she was allowed to take her menagerie of stray animals along with her. Soon, she made Silvergarden her home and volunteered for objectives and projects she could perform solo.

  The scenes in Seeva’s mind implode.

  A growl now lingers in a throat like a sputtering engine. Seeva feels pain, then fear pouring through the stale air around her, drawing her in. She feels ripples from the breaking surface of a nearby soul and looks up. She has wandered to another subdistrict: sprawling shed facilities everywhere, a stench of manure and urine, musky animals.

  Seeva walks outside the pavilions and looks in at meorse beasts with gray skin and curled horns, wondering what would happen if she freed them. The yellow-slitted eyes of standing reptiles watch her. She swallows, uneasy.

  Probably shouldn’t let them out.

  In the distance inside the pavilion: a cage holding a midnight blue cat. The beast is misshapen, tangled in purple rope, one leg wrenched behind its back, the others bound in knotted coils. One end of the rope protrudes from its mouth like the tongue of some amphibian meant to catch insects a hundred meters away.

  Seeva approaches. The cat hisses and snarls, saliva pendulating from its lips in strands as thick as the rope. It’s nauseated, tired. No one is around.

  Seeva slips her lithe frame between the bars of its cage.

  The cat flops about, growling.

  Seeva reaches out, pauses, and whispers to the beast. She tugs on the segment of rope entering its mouth. It’s held fast around teeth or around the base of its tongue—swallowed. She pats the cat, which is four times her size, on its drum-like head. It bares white sword teeth. Waist-high reeds of whiskers fan out. Seeva shoves a canister of qwix meal between its canines, wedging it into position.

  The cat yowls, shaking its head with a flopping of moist lips, now unable to close its jaw.