by Ken Scholes
I felt it whispering now in my pocket. It was a quiet voice, a still voice. A sure voice. Wear me, and the League will do your bidding. Wear me now, and take me off later. But wear me.
Could I? Put it on and take it off? I knew better. If that were the case, Ansylus would’ve laid aside his burden long ago. Once I wore it, no matter the power I wielded and how I did so, that Heart of Eylon would be mine until someone immune to it, someone like me, came and took it.
“I will not,” I said aloud. The wizard blinked, thinking I to him. He didn’t realize I was talking to that bit of a god in my pocket that had buggered me.
But in the wizard’s slow blink, the tent fell away and I stood in the forest once again. The little girl smiled. “I’m glad,” she said.
The wrongness of the forest raised the hair on my arms. Wrong not in a bad way but in a way that evoked fear and trembling nonetheless. The lines and light of it were...other than. “Who are you? Where did the wizard go? Where are we?”
“I am Taemyl. The wizard was never here. You are among the Trees of Pantheon.”
Orphaned thieves get little in the way of formal schooling, but I knew of Taemyl. And Pantheon. “You are Eylon’s daughter.” I looked around. The wood was quiet around us, though I suspected other eyes upon us, other ears to catch our words.
She nodded. “I am.”
“And you want your father’s heart?”
She nodded again. “I do. It was never meant for your kind.”
Your kind. Looking at her, it was easy to forget she wasn’t what than she seemed. But the more I studied this little girl, the less I trusted her. It was the eyes. They were too old and held no humanity within them. Still, it was her father’s heart, and I did not want it for my own. I found myself more and more wishing I’d listened to Ratzer about the unders.
I reached into my pocket and withdrew the necklace and its crystal amulet. I held it toward her and waited for her uplifted, empty hand to slide beneath mine. As it did, our eyes met and I shuddered.
Then I released the Heart of Eylon and felt the forest twist itself back into the Eldenwood I stood in, Ansyslus’s open grave still before me.
“Didn’t I do this already?” No one answered my rhetorical question. So I lifted the shovel once again to finish burying my dead, cursing the Pantheon and everyone in it as I did so.
* * *
“And so,” Gilga-Yar said in a low voice, “you gave it to her?”
His minion had re-appeared when I reached the edge of the Eldenwood for what, to me, seemed my second return trip. And for only the third time in fifteen years under contract, the Grand Old Demon brought me over to his plane to stand in in his sweltering office beneath the flames of Raya’s Consuming Veil. He sat behind his desk and avoided eye contact with me.
“Yes,” I answered. “I did. I believed you were dead and that the League intended banishment for me.”
He chuckled. “The gods cannot be trusted to deal plainly.”
Nor could the demons, I thought but did not say. Instead, I waited, my stomach churning from the heat and the heaviness of this dark, twisted place.
“Still, you could have put it on,” he said.
Now I met his eyes. “Is that what you intended with it?”
He smiled but didn’t answer. Instead, he repeated himself and matched the intensity of my level gaze. “You could have put it on.”
“No,” I said. “I could not.”
“Yes,” he said. “I see.” He started rummaging through the papers on his desk, and it was something about the way he did it that betrayed him. He found an old document and held it up. “Your contract,” he said. “I’ve decided to release you from it.”
“But I returned to you empty-handed.”
And the last time Gilga-Yar ever met my eyes, I realized that he’d intended it to be that way from the start. I didn’t know what price he’d exacted from the Pantheon, but for reasons of his own, he’d removed something dangerous from the world and curried favor with the old powers. “Yes,” he said. Then he smiled, his teeth sharp and glistening. “You have served me well.”
With a flick of his wrist, his office and its oppressive heat fell away as I found myself standing in the market of Pan Shao Crossing near the Danubii border. There was a pouch in my belt that I hadn’t seen before. I took it, opened it, and poured a handful of the diamonds into my hand.
He had served me well too, and, blessing him, I went first for the money-changer and then for the tavern.
I wanted the potato spirits, but the very idea of it was foreign in this forsaken corner of the world. So instead, I settled for fermented samaberry juice served as cold as the cellars in this place could make it, which wasn’t cold at all. I stood at the bar while I drank, and every part of me noticed the young man when he sidled up beside me.
He was beautiful, and my heart raced to look at him. His hair was golden and his eyes were bright and blue like skies after a desert storm. Even his smell caused my breath to catch, and when he smiled at me, I felt my hands shaking as they gripped at the edge of the bar.
“Thank you,” he said, “for giving me back my heart.”
The little girl was waiting for him by the door, and she waved to me and smiled as he bent to kiss me upon the forehead.
As he walked out into the desert sun, I waved back and wondered what I’d unleashed upon the world by bringing him back into it. And another part wondered whether or not it was entirely bad. Regardless, I hoped my life could be finished now with the likes gods and demons.
“To free agency,” I said to the barmaid who’d caught my eye earlier. She caught it even moreso now that my body was flushed and tingling from the love god’s presence. And she’d felt the effects of Eylon’s charms as well, I’d wager from the wideness in her eyes and the way her nostrils flared.
She smiled at me. “To free agency,” she said.
Copyright © 2015 Ken Scholes
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Ken Scholes is the author of four novels and over forty short stories. His fantasy series The Psalms of Isaak has been published internationally to critical acclaim and a scattering of awards. His short fiction has been collected into two volumes available from Fairwood Press. A third volume, Blue Yonders, Grateful Pies and Other Fanciful Feasts, releases in August 2015. Ken has a degree in History from Western Washington University. He is a native of the Pacific Northwest and makes his home in Saint Helens, Oregon, where he lives with his wife and twin daughters. You can learn more about Ken by visiting www.kenscholes.com.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
GRANDMOTHER-NAI-LEYLIT’S CLOTH OF WINDS
by Rose Lemberg
Grandmother kept her cloth of winds in the orange room, a storage chamber painted in fire and lit to a translucent glow by dozens of floating candlebulbs created by the older women’s magic. As a small child, I remember hiding between the legs of a polished pearwood commode, safe and stuffy-warm behind the ancient embroidered material that draped it, hiding—just to be sure—also behind the veil of my hair. Grandmother-nai-Leylit would come in always just before the afternoon meal, and her smell—saffron and skin and millet dough—spread through the room like perfume. Her shuffling steps rang for me a music more exalted and mysterious than the holy sounds of the dawnsong that drifted each morning from behind the white walls of the men’s inner quarter.
I would watch from the darkness of my veils as grandmother unlocked the walnut cupboard, one of many pieces of storage in the room. She would pull from it, her brown age-spotted hands shaking slightly, a basinewood box ribbed in razu ivory and guarded by nails of hammered iron. Gently, as if deep in prayer, she would lift the lid and pull from the box an invisible cloth.
Lacking the magic of deepnames myself, then and now, I could not see what she held, but I could hear a faint crinkling, a movement of small threads of air as they restlessly wound around each other. I watched grandmother bury her face in this cloth, inh
ale it, pull her kaftan sleeves up and trace the length of it along her bare lower arms, before with a sigh she would put it back.
A few years later my brother was born, and my mothers left again for a trading venture through the southern deserts. I did not see a trace of them nor hear any word before I grew too big to hide under the pearwood commode. Then a letter, torn and filthy, arrived from the south to say that my mothers were now staying in Zhaglit-Beyond-Walls, a place nobody in the quarter had heard of.
My brother Kimriel, now three, did not talk. With my mothers so far and the day of his entrance to the men’s inner quarter only a year away, we were growing more and more anxious. The scholars would not admit a wordless child, but all our teaching and cajoling led to nothing.
One day, grandmother-nai-Leylit brought us children openly into the orange room. Kimriel wailed and struggled in my arms, his face bewildered, eyes darting from one strongbox to another. I hoped, I prayed she’d let him touch the fabric made of wind. I wanted miracles, I wanted him to touch the cloth and break out in a torrent of blessed speech, in great sentences of Old Khana that only the scholars know. I wanted to shake the gatekeepers of the inner quarter, men bearded and veiled and unknown to me, to shout at them to let my Kimi in; I knew, I knew even if they refused to believe, that behind the white walls of the men’s domain there waited for him a greatness. He’d been named after the men’s god, the singer, Kimrí, Bird’s brother, and like the goddess Bird I yearned to shelter him under my wings from all that hurts, and then to send him triumphantly forth. But I did not know how to help him.
When grandmother-nai-Leylit opened the cupboard and the box and pulled out the cloth of winds, Kimi’s eyes focused on it. Even as a young child that had not yet taken magic he could see it, hinting at an aptitude greater than mine by far. Grandmother-nai-Leylit guided his hands to touch the cloth, but no great torrent of speech burst forth from Kimi’s mouth. It took me a moment to realize he’d fallen silent—not wailing, mumbling, or fidgeting even. His small fingers held tightly to what I could not see; a homecoming.
When Kimi turned four, the traditional age for a male child to depart the women’s quarters and pass through to the men’s domain, the scholars would not take him. Another four years they granted him, four years of reprieve during which he could begin to speak and gain acceptance to the men’s side of the quarter, where to learn his Birdseed letters and the deeds of holy artifice. I watched over him, watchful as Bird. Unnoticed by grandmothers and protected from the idle questions of other girls and women by the fierceness of my glare, Kimriel would spin around and around, his face gleeful, his arms spread wide as if he would fly.
My friend Gitit-nai-Lur took to following us to the courtyards nestled under the outer walls of the quarter. Outside these rough-hewn gray boulders lay the city of Niyaz, fabled with its trade and splendor, anointed in persimmon perfume. Everything about it frightened and enticed us—the Niyazi men oiled their beards and donned brightly colored garments; behind these walls they walked unveiled and spoke loudly. The women, radiant in billowing silk dresses and adorned in beads, were stripped of magic according to an age-old tradition. This deed, so repulsive and incomprehensible to us, was to them joyous, marking passage from childhood into adulthood. In time we’d step out of the quarter as grownups, as traders. We would venture into the city, and out of it, through the carved Desert Gate. But it was not yet our time.
In courtyards so close and yet so far from that world, we would watch Kimi’s grounded gyre; Gitit would mutter words in the trade tongues of the desert, which she was trying valiantly to learn. I’d help her sometimes. Languages came easily to me. Under the shadow of the walls we’d say spidersilk, basinewood, glass, honey crystal to each other in Maiva’at and Surun’ and Burrashti. In these words lived for us the dream of all what lay beyond the quarter, beyond even the city—the desert embroidered in heat, the people in their tents of leather strung with bells and globes of fireglass. We spoke of flatweave carpet, madder, garnet, globes of fireglass and of each other in that heat, protected by the benevolence of the ancient trade routes.
Kimi got used to my friend. Gitit learned to draw on her deepnames and send forth bubbles of multicolored air. Kimi would laugh when they landed on his fingers and winked out like tiny candlebulbs or fireflies.
Grandmother-nai-Leylit found it more and more difficult to walk. She made a spare set of keys for my other grandmother, grandmother-nai-Tammah. I would bring Kimriel to the orange room when he was inconsolable, and my other grandmother, tall and willowy under her shawls of spidersilk gauze, would pull the cloth of winds out of the casket for Kimi. The weave of the rustling winds calmed him. It made him happy. It made me happy with the kind of happiness that comes from wanting a person you love to be content in a hundred ways that have nothing to do with aspirations of propriety.
At eight, Kimriel could say a few words—sunset, box, no, fish; not nearly enough to pass into the scholars’ domain, locked now from him forever. We would no longer be allowed to call him after the men’s god, so the grandmothers took the name Kimriel away, together with his young child’s clothing. They named him my sister, Zohra, and dressed now her in garments appropriate for a girl. Though Kimi would not answer to Zohra, no longer did we have to worry about her fate beyond the men’s white walls, no longer would we struggle to teach her the words of scholars.
But the relief from that pressure had thrust me suddenly into the center of my grandmothers’ regard. In all those years of adolescence I had spent watching Birdlike over my sister, I had not taken a deepname, had not even thought about magic. Now, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, they insisted I should take a deepname if I wanted to be marriageable, and desirable as a partner in an oreg, a women’s trading group.
I shrugged it off. I had no aptitude for magic, could not sense it like Kimi or my friends. Marriage would happen as it would, and I could not care less whether some man behind the inner walls would be a master artificer or a floorsweep. I would see him a few times a year at most, in the perpetual semi-darkness of the ritual chambers; most of my time I would spend with my oreg, whether trading or at home.
And as for an oreg, well. Gitit-nai-Lur, that most beautiful girl with her dark lustrous skin and her eyes unpainted by kohl, had deepnames enough for both of us. An oreg was more than the deepnames held by its members.
But even though I had not succumbed to the soul’s darkness that comes to so many who yearn in vain for the mind’s power, I was growing restless. I wanted to venture beyond the quarter’s outer walls, beyond the city, to trade, but grandmother-nai-Tammah begged me to stay and help watch over my sister while grandmother-nai-Leylit grew more and more frail. Gitit-nai-Lur, with her two deepnames, received many offers from trading groups both new and established, but she stayed behind with me out of sheer stubbornness.
Later that year, grandmother-nai-Tammah constructed a rolling chair for grandmother-nai-Leylit. It was made of white metal and deepname-powered, though I could not see exactly how the light of deepnames operated it; it was a work of artifice and thus forbidden to women. Grandmother-nai-Leylit could steer it with her mind. It had annoyed me in the years past when grandmother-nai-Tammah would do those mannish things, but now I was heartened to think that she’d not asked for permission, for surely such would not have been granted.
A few months after that, grandmother-nai-Leylit could no longer steer the chair. I rolled her around in it, and she would lay her hand, wrinkled and calloused and warm, over mine; she smelled of cardamom and bitter medicine, and her once-bright eyes now showed a map of a country unknown that spread under the desert in spidersilk webs of red.
I’d wheel the chair into the orange room and open the box for my grandmother, pull the cloth of winds out for her—still invisible in my hands but heavy with the weight of unshed tears—and lay it against her cheek. She would tilt her head to her shoulder and sing quietly, in the language of the Surun’, a lullaby. She shouldn’t do so, but I had not the heart to
remind her of rules.
We all woke up that night, those of us with magic and those of us without. Kimi began to wail—fish, fish, fish, fish—I thought at first of how she couldn’t know that women are forbidden from song; and only then with a jolt, with the sinking in my stomach, I recognized the Surun’ melody. Wrapped in fear’s emptiness I listened hard for what only the strongest in magic are given to see, for the goddess coming.
Bird has many shapes—finch and eagle, sandpiper and turtledove—and yet she comes, they say, in a single visage for the soul’s final exhalation. I heard nothing, saw nothing, I swear. None of us were strong enough to see what shape she took for my grandmother—but an invisible wing, rough like calloused fingers, brushed my cheek as the goddess bore my grandmother’s soul aloft.
* * *
Grandmother-nai-Tammah and I had not been close before this death. She seemed too aloof, detached. She’d make frequent and not at all hushed supplications to Bird to allow her to be reborn a man, and sometimes I’d see her walk through the quarter in a man’s kaftan and veils, like a scholar who had found himself on the wrong side of the wall.
As a child, I was fascinated and frightened; as an adolescent I was angry that a grandmother of mine would taunt the laws this way. Now I followed grandmother-nai-Tammah around, making cup after cup of red tea for her or accepting the cups she brewed for me. In silence we sat and stared each into her own distance as we blew on the scalding water to cool. My thoughts from years past made me uncomfortable, uneasy for having judged an elder with whom I now shared this grief; and even if she wouldn’t share it, how could I judge what she wanted to be in her next life or how she felt now and yet bristle at the thought of my Kimi being judged?
Day after day we sat with our tea, while my sister played nearby in the orange room. Grandmother-nai-Tammah no longer locked the box. I wondered many times whether she wanted Kimi to damage or misplace the cloth of winds, but it did not happen.