by Wren Wallis
The two Sons regard her uncertainly. Only boys, Almas thinks. Only lost boys.
“Olek,” says a voice behind Almas. It’s the one with his arm in a sling, the Wolf’s own. “Do as she directs.”
The bearlike boy nods dumbly. He sets his bewildered gaze on Almas and waits for her command.
“So,” she says, draws another deep breath and nods once. “Follow me, then.”
Copyright © 2017 Wren Wallis
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Wren Wallis lives in eastern Massachusetts with her husband and daughter. She is a 2016 graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, and her short fiction has appeared previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies as well as in Daily Science Fiction, Lackington’s, and the Alliteration Ink anthology No Shit, There I Was. She can be found on Twitter as @invisibleinkie and online at wrenwallis.com.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
TWO BODIES IN BASTING STITCH
by Allison Jamieson-Lucy
When Sere Gulliarme is dragged into the city, the canal-mud still clinging to her standard-issue boots, the police do not bother to support her legs. The officers hold her by one wrist and one elbow; the lower half of her body scrapes across the bricks. It hurts, of course. Sere could, if she wished, stand, but she refuses to walk for them.
She struggles in quick bursts, twisting her hips and making the police around her stumble, unbalanced. The man holding her elbow falls, cracking one knee on the red bricks. His new posture brings his face close enough for her to feel the motion of his breath. Sere gathers blood on her tongue to spit in his eye, thinks better of it, and swallows.
She sports a gash at the back of her skull; Sere can feel blood-wet wool all down her spine, seeping into her fine grey coat.
Sere Gulliarme is brought into custody for treason against the state in the week of her forty-eighth birthday, eight months after she fled her position as Deputy Commissioner, but it is the youth in her pain-set face that unsettles those who had searched for her. She was not meant to be life-laced with anyone. They cannot execute her if she can prove the lacing.
She drops her head back and stares, expressionless, at the men and women hauling her across the red brick of the square.
* * *
Sere had tried to say goodbye.
In the fireplace lay the ashes of a letter that urged her to flee immediately. It had arrived by runner, handed to Sere by an out-of-breath girl with road-dust all up the front of her skirt.
The letter was from Jeska White. Make goddamn haste, for they come after you with deadly intention, it said. Please take care, it ended.
She sat half-dressed on a stool, pistol heavy in her lap, waiting for Tashet to come home. Sere waited until it was past dinner, aching to leave for the safety of the narrow canal-borough in the south of the city, where the river split, brackish, into man-made channels, but she remained unwilling to simply vanish. Tashet sometimes stayed late in her workshop, wrist-deep in rare metals and small, carefully labeled vials of royal blood.
Sere dressed herself and filled a bowl with sharp cheese, halved apples, and currants, then tucked it under her arm and crossed the square with quick, measured steps. No one stopped Deputy Commissioner Sere Guillarme.
Tashet was bent, riveted, over one of her experiments, focused enough that she thanked Sere for the food without asking what it contained. “This’s delicate,” she said, letting Sere lean in close but hovering her hands protectively over the brazier. “I’ll be done in half an hour,” Tashet added, when Sere did not back out of the room to leave her in peace. Tashet’s ability to judge time while in her workshop was limited, and Sere knew she would be up all night, fussing over this piece of magic.
Tashet’s laboratory was an intimidating place, split by towering shelves into semi-private bays where the high alchemists plied their art. Occasionally something banged, making dark glass bottles rattle musically. In the next bay two alchemists were arguing over what color a solution was; was it closer to silver or black? Sere wished Tashet had just come home tonight, where she could speak freely.
Sere wouldn’t be able to send letters. Diligent, loyal Tashet would never fathom that anyone was reading her mail and would take no precautions. Sere couldn’t explain what would happen to them both if she didn’t leave.
“I have to go,” Sere said. Tashet just nodded, dragging her notes out from beneath a pile of rusted forceps and thumbing through them briskly. Sere was at a loss for how to proceed, so she organized a corner of Tashet’s workbench, putting vials in a line, then in numerical order the way Tashet liked. “I have to leave for a little while, but I don’t want you to worry. You won’t worry, will you?”
“I always worry, dearest,” Tashet said. She put down her notes and sighed. “Are you going to be late on my account? I can tell you seem more anxious than usual.”
“I’m never anxious,” Sere said. “Be safe,” she managed, and fled.
By the time Sere had exited the top quarter of the city with its grand square and hall of alchemists, she had convinced herself that Tashet knew it was goodbye. She had to have known.
* * *
The rules of life-lacing are simple and romantic: you will live twice as long, and you will die together.
They strip her down to her undershirt and shut her in a room that’s had all the furniture dragged out of it. The floor is rough with tracks of splinters where the movers were careless. Sere resents the theft of her coat and boots, despite the sticky crust of mud and blood that had already ruined them.
She wishes for the heavy weight of her dress pistol at her hip, but the gun is at the bottom of a canal, thrown by Jeska in a fit of symbolic destruction. They would have taken it from her anyway.
A summons comes, and they give Sere a rough skirt of blue muslin. She wonders if they mean to vilify her, dressing her in the colors of the revolution, but she recognizes the look on the face of the guard who brings it to her and thinks it is pity. It is the style of skirt the women wear inland. When he opens his mouth to speak with a continental lilt, she knows he is trying to make her look like home.
The courtroom has fashionable narrow windows fitted with sparkling leaded glass. Across the continent, windows like these keep out the cold. Here they trap the spring humidity until the carved wooden benches shine with damp. Sere sits on the hard chair they give her and waits while the familiar cadence of sentencing hits her ears. They can kill her, even while she wears her connection to an innocent life on her too-young face. She will need proof, in paperwork she does not have. They laced in secret, like stupid young lovers. Still, when the clerk of the court asks mildly if there are any compounding factors, she says, “I am life-laced.”
Her response is not totally unexpected. “State the name of your partner,” the clerk says. He is interested in her answer, not immune to the judicial rumor-mill, and fails to keep the interest out of his tone.
“High Alchemist Tashet Venkata,” Sere says. The name, despite formal trappings, feels good around her teeth, like slipping her hands into a well-worn pair of gloves.
They do not believe her, and the mood in the room darkens. The clerk’s face falls. Sere is struck wondering what has happened to Tashet that no one remembers the cleanly dressed policewoman who frequented the High Alchemist’s workshop. She folds her hands together to keep them from pressing the surprisingly small cut at the base of her hairline, and wonders if the change is in herself.
* * *
Tashet does not come to the almshouse for eight days. Sere spends the time standing at the window in her little bare room, watching the line of flags that fly over the courthouse, red and green and gold. They are all blazoned with the hare and the tower and the vine, in colors more vibrant than anything out in the canals.
The citizen’s resistance chose blue and grey, the color of sunrise over still water. She had gone to them only to hide, carrying with her a small collection of bureaucratic treasons. She had always wanted to come home aga
in.
Tashet had not told Sere how lacing made everything sharper, brighter, and more enduring. Moments that were once fleeting now run like syrup across her skin; she can feel every snap of the brilliant flags as if they brushed against her face. The flags haven’t changed in eight months, although Sere feels they should have, if only to contrast the unchanging rule.
Across the continent the royal triumvirate sits a life-long term on the Braided Throne. Laced together since birth, their rule could last three lifetimes. Sere had watched the regime stagnate, year by year, as they were blinded by the slow pass of time and the false vitality of the world seen through lace.
Sere had planned the changing of the police guard so there would be a small gap, enough for one woman with a long-nosed rifle to slip into the parade square.
She had watched from Tashet’s workroom. The whole affair was choreographed in every step, a holiday pageant for the public to see one of their three leaders, face and body still young after so many years of rule.
Sere was excused from marching in the parade herself at the last minute to go over paperwork. It was disastrous, to not be in public, to have no eyes on her at this critical moment, but she could do nothing. She counted the steps of the guards, watched her orchestrated gap open and close.
The gunshot at the parade was loud, but the bullet had twisted, striking one of the beautiful ceremonial guard-pairs, dropping them both with one wound.
That day, Tashet had asked to see Sere’s writing case. For ink, she said.
Sere, harried in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, scrambling to understand what this failure meant for her position and her cause, had been unable to think of an excuse to refuse her.
In her writing case she kept damning letters unburnt while she penned responses. But Tashet said nothing, and no arrest summons came. Sere thought Tashet’s silence was proof that her life-laced had always known and quietly forgiven her from the start.
Two days after the parade, still in the frenzy of the investigation into the shooting, Sere tore herself free and went down to sit by the canal. She missed briefings. Her absence would yawn like an accusation, but the agony of anticipation drove her out to the outskirts of the city. It had all gone wrong, but the consequences had yet to fall upon her head.
Jeska found her. He looked sober and tired, his face gaining wrinkles while Sere’s lost them.
The sun hung askance in the mid-afternoon sky and it was hot. Humidity rose off of the canals like a wet cloak. Jeska dangled his fingers in the water, teasing the catfish.
“You look awful,” Sere said. Jeska smiled and flicked water at her ankles.
“Thanks, turncoat. Same to—” Jeska said, but when he looked at her to finish his thought he stopped. Something dawned on him in perfect horror. Sere watched it march across his face like a phalanx of bayonetters.
“You look good,” Jeska finished. He took his hand out of the water and dried it on his trousers, holding his breath, lips pursed as he tried to frame a question in his mind. “Sere, uh, right. This is rude but I’ve got to know. How old are you? It takes a long time to get to be deputy police commissioner, and you look—”
“Stop, Jeska, I’m life-laced, you deduced it.”
“Fuck,” Jeska said. “Of all the stupid things—to who? And why? You’re a cop so why—”
“I love her,” Sere said, interrupting him.
Jeska sighed, bitter and tired. “Then why’d you get mixed up with us?”
“You know why. Because there was a massacre. Because a boy had a ball and a stick, and he wasn’t dangerous, and we killed him anyway,” Sere said. She felt defeated.
“Of all the selfless, selfish things,” Jeska said wonderingly. “At least they can’t execute the life-laced.”
Sere shook her head, and Jeska understood. “You don’t have papers,” he said, like a lead weight. “Because you’re both women.”
There were special dispensations for unconventional lacings, rarely gifted.
“She can’t die for this,” Sere said, hugging her elbows to her chest. It had all gone so wrong.
“Oh no, Sere,” Jeska said, his voice thick with pity and rebuke. “We’ll get you out,” he promised. “I swear we’ll get you out. We’ll save her.”
Sere discovered, too late, that after the parade Tashet had needed to write a list of ingredients to begin anew the tincture that would infiltrate one life into another and replace the guard-pair that had fallen. Tashet’s apprentice knocked over her inkwell. Tashet had reached into Sere’s writing case, fetched out a spare inkpot, and read no seditious letters.
* * *
Sere tells herself it takes Tashet eight days to come see her because the alchemy has always come first. Tashet makes miracles by sewing souls together, and it takes her entire attention. Sere has watched Tashet disregard food, drink, and company; it is not a stretch to imagine her ignoring a pile of official memos slipped under her door out of distraction, not malice. Sere knows, deep in her heart where it stings with guilt, that it takes Tashet eight days to come see her because she is hurting.
When Tashet arrives it is with a burn on her wrist from where she was careless pouring hot oil, the skin angry red and silvered underneath with magic.
The almshouse guard, unfriendly from boredom with her post, does not trust Sere to be alone with Tashet. She stands outside the door, pistol drawn and loaded, listening to every word they say. She doesn’t believe the lacing, doesn’t know Tashet is as safe with Sere as she is in her own company. Sere isn’t the sort whose despair runs to self-destruction.
When Tashet walks in, Sere takes a half step toward her, drawn in like silk that remembers rubbing against a glass rod. But Tashet is frozen, her red and gold shirt uncomfortably vibrant in the pale room. Sere falls back on her heels, skin singing, wanting to press her palms against Tashet’s cheeks and kiss her temples, her mouth. For the first time, certain that Tashet does not want her to.
“Tashet,” Sere says, and Tashet winces like Sere has struck her. So she says, “Beloved—”, her voice catching on the sentiment, but Tashet flinches from that as well, her face turning from reluctance to anger.
“Stop it!” Tashet says, making a small chopping gesture with both hands. “Don’t act like that, like you’re still allowed, don’t.” She trembles as if she is about to scream, or cry.
It burns like dust in Sere’s eyes to hear Tashet take her name back, to keep for herself. “I couldn’t write,” she says, because it is true.
Tashet’s patience, endless for alchemy and strictly rationed for all other trials, does not suffer this, and she does not bother to be kind to Sere’s heart. “What! No, I don’t think so, you take off into the canals like a criminal, and you apologize for not sending letters? They could have found your body in the canal or shot on the islands of the delta, or hung in some other city square for treason. They would have found my corpse in my workroom on the same day! I spend eight months waiting for my next moment to be my last and you’re sorry you couldn’t write? Sorry that you didn’t have a chance to explain yourself? I can’t believe you.”
“You can fix it. Tell them about us. They’ll believe you, even without papers,” Sere says, too reasonable, too calm, not begging.
“They won’t,” Tashet says. She is so certain. “They won’t believe me. But I’m going to fix it. I can, I can if I just undo the lacing.”
“No, no,” is all Sere can say. It is close to begging. To destroy the bond between life-laced is supposed to be impossible. They have been poured together, like alcohol and cream. They cannot be unmixed. But Tashet is a brilliant and unflinching alchemist, trusted by the royal family to lace their ceremonial guards together. If she says she can distill them apart again, Sere believes her.
Tashet draws a ragged breath and cries, “I don’t want to die with you!”
The pain that falls into Sere’s heart is like drinking a gallon of salt water—immediate, cold, and sickening. She wraps her hand around her own
wrist and tightens her grip until she can feel the bones grinding together.
“I didn’t want any of this,” Tashet says, her voice so small it’s hard to hear. “God forgive me, I didn’t. I can’t make these choices.”
Sere can’t look at Tashet, so she turns her face to the window and the lines of flagpoles that crown the capitol. She stares into the brightness until her eyes feel rough and dry.
* * *
Sere is not allowed to write letters, although she drafts them in her head. Mainly she aches to contact the dissident force still hidden in the canals, so they might learn from her mistakes. To plain-faced Ynma, a warning about the clever mirrors that send sunlight into shadowy corners of the parade grounds, even well past noontime. For Aeril, who runs the supply lines, Sere imagines letter after letter telling him to hold his life-laced partner close, not to let him use the southeastern gate to get into the city, where the guard has changed and the police have heavy boots.
To Jeska, she has a jumble of apologies, indictments, and self-pity.
She remembers when she first read one of his editorials and recognized herself in his writing: scar-cheeked, stiffened by fear of empathy, the humanized enemy. It had been a bracing gift to see herself from the outside. He had sketched her as a winnable target; someone who didn’t need to change to become an ally, simply the opportunity to break her old loyalties.
They were that opportunity, he wrote.
So it was with a clear head that Sere had walked, plain-clothed, to the cramped row house where the citizen’s resistance was meeting. The woman who opened the door was wary, her posture such that Sere could see the outline of a gun clearly beneath her skirt. If she meant to intimidate, she was up against all of the bluster Sere could draw from two decades of clawing her way up the police ranks.
Sere drew herself up to her full height in her heeled boots—the one part of her uniform she had not wanted to surrender, for they rooted her to the ground—and then receded. She wasn’t here to make arrests.