Beneath Ceaseless Skies #15

by Butler, S. C. ; Ahmed, Saladin

  Issue #15 - Apr. 23, 2009

  “More Than Once Upon a Time,” by S.C. Butler

  “Where Virtue Lives,” by Saladin Ahmed

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  MORE THAN ONCE UPON A TIME

  by S.C. Butler

  Pebbles bounced into the vast gulf beyond her feet as Hubley skidded to a stop at the bottom of the Sun Road, deep within the Stoneways’ dark caves.

  “What was that?”

  One of the diggers she’d been trying to avoid looked straight at her. Heart pounding, Hubley stood completely still. Invisibility was an imperfect art at best, but the sorceress who’d brought her here—an elder version of herself who was who knew how many hundreds of years older — had taken great pains to explain that Hubley had to stay hidden from the rest of the company, no matter what. “No one would ever understand if they saw both of us at the same time,” she’d explained. Irritably Hubley wondered why she’d allowed her older self to talk her into this ridiculous situation in the first place. But no, she had to rush off the moment the prize was dangled before her eyes.

  Despite the skidding, her older self didn’t even glance her way. “A lizard,” she said to the two diggers. Then they all looked back up the tunnel as a man and a woman dashed breathlessly out of the dark to join them.

  “The sissit’ll be on us in a minute,” gasped the man. “We persuaded them to pause a bit back there, but we couldn’t stop them.”

  The woman peered over the edge of the road. “There’s a ledge about three feet down,” she said. “We can hold them off from there as long as our arrows and your magic last.”

  “Hopefully we’ll be out of here sooner than that.”

  The older Hubley kicked away the broken stone covering the road and pointed to an iron ring embedded in the rock.

  “There. You don’t think I led you into a trap, do you? Omarose, Canna, I’m not as strong as a Dwarf, but you two might be.”

  Omarose slung his bow over his shoulder and grabbed the ring with both hands. The muscles in his neck bulged, but nothing happened. Canna bent to help.

  “The door is ancient,” said the older Hubley. “Just like everything else in Vonn Kurr.”

  She looked like she might say more, but just then the sissit came howling down on them. Hubley still didn’t understand how the creatures had gotten past the wall she’d thrown up to stop them. Even if she hadn’t exerted her full power in the casting, it should still have been more than enough for sissit.

  Brandishing what looked like a Dwarf shield, the leader stopped a short bowshot from the party. Hubley slipped down to the ledge Canna had pointed out to make sure she was out of the way.

  “You give up!” the sissit leader called loudly. “You not scare us. I carry great emblem of Ydderri! I guard way to city and worm! We kill you sister! We kill you!”

  Hubley wondered what sister the creature was talking about. Then she had to duck as, quick and furtive, the sissit leader tossed a stone at her older self from the end of a hidden sling.

  “Flame!” answered the older Hubley simply, and raised her staff. A bolt of fire shot from each end into the crowd. Squeals of pain followed, and the smell of charred flesh.

  “It’s open!”

  Canna and Omarose heaved a round block of stone up out of the floor, exposing the tunnel beneath. A flight of arrows buzzed past, always dangerous even if the creatures were terrible shots because sissit shafts were generally poisoned, but none struck. Around her older self the air glimmered with a bluish light. Only magic could affect her now. Hubley knew the spell well. It was her favorite defense.

  “Down the shaft,” her older self shouted to the company. “All of you!”

  Canna and Omarose hesitated at the mouth of the hole.

  “Just sit on the edge and slide down,” she went on. “The passage is steep, but it’s safe.”

  Omarose went first. Then Canna took the diggers and tossed them in one after the other like two sacks of potatoes. More arrows splattered off the older Hubley’s magical shield as Canna stepped into the shaft. Raging at the thought their prey was going to get away, the sissit swept forward.

  The older Hubley threw up her arms. A blinding flash blew out from inside her cape, and the sissit tumbled backward. Only the leader, who’d been blown sideways behind his heavy shield, remained. It fell against the inside wall of the tunnel, its shield on the ground beside it. But, instead of scrambling after its protection, the sissit began flailing away at itself like a dog with fleas.

  “Blast him!” Hubley shouted, willing to show herself now that everyone else was gone. Kill the leader and the others would flee.

  But the elder Hubley only watched intently, as if she was far more fascinated than frightened.

  “Well, if you won’t do it,” Hubley said, “I will.”

  She began the incantation. Maybe this was why her older self had asked her to come along in the first place, to do what her older self couldn’t. Standing with its back to her, its hands and arms straining as if they held something in their thick-knuckled grasp, the sissit leader couldn’t have made a better target.

  “Fire,” she said.

  As if guided by deliberate malice, her older self stepped into the path of Hubley’s spell. There was a burst of fire and, where the older Hubley had been, now stood a column of white flame. For an awful moment Hubley saw herself frozen in the terrible brightness, a grim statue encased in a writhing cone. Then there was only the fire, her body consumed and gone.

  She’d just killed herself.

  Her heart went numb. Trembling, she took a step backward. But she’d forgotten where she was and, as her foot slipped out over the nothingness above the pit, she gave a last forlorn cry and fell.

  * * *

  2

  She’d been standing at the top of Tower Dale, wrapped in a warm cloak and looking south where the sharp crags of the Bavadars stretched the limits of the sky. Only recently had she mastered the Timespell, and she was trying to decide which unhappy moment in history she would go back to and fix first.

  A hand tapped her on the shoulder.

  She turned instantly and uttered a spell that should have blasted the intruder to dust. Instead she found herself staring at a gray haired sorceress whose eyes twinkled at the exact same level as her own.

  “Really, Hubley. You have to learn to be less rash. It only gets you in trouble.”

  Hubley fought back the urge to try another spell. “Who are you? How’d you get in here?”

  The strange sorceress laughed. “Oh, I know the wards on this place far better than you do,” she said. “Look at me. Carefully. Don’t you recognize me?”

  There was something familiar about the woman. The curve of her mouth, her light brown eyes. But Hubley couldn’t place her.

  “No. I’ve no idea who you are.”

  “I’m you.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “It is confusing.” The older woman nodded brightly. “I’m not that you, I’m this you. Oh dear. I’d forgotten how complicated this moment was. Think for a moment, Hubley. You know the Timespell.”

  Hubley refused to answer, still suspecting some sort of trick.

  The older woman went on anyway. “Of course you do. I know you know, after all. Well, I’m you, and I cast the Timespell to come back to talk to you because I need your help. It’s time you began to play your part.”

  “Prove it.”

  The older woman rolled up the sleeve of her cloak, exposing her left arm. Hubley noticed the thimbles on her little fingers. Despite the mottling of age, the other woman’s arm looked just like her own.<
br />
  “Touch my wrist,” she said.

  Hubley knew what the older woman wanted to show her. Slowly she put out her own hand and took the offered arm between her fingers. The slight swelling in the bone was there, and felt exactly as it felt on her own wrist. The childhood break had healed well, but not perfectly. Her wrist throbbed at the memory as the older woman pulled down her sleeve.

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Hubley said.

  “That’s what Mother said, too. But I don’t have the time to prove who I am to you the way I did to Mother. Well, actually, I do, but it won’t be necessary.”

  “Ha. You don’t see me believing you yet, do you?”

  “I think you’re going to want to come with me before you even believe I’m who I say I am.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  “You’ll see.”

  Pulling her cloak more closely about her throat, the older woman turned toward the stair.

  “Come. We have a lot to talk about. I put the kettle on as I came up through the pantry. It’s beautiful up here, but cold. Let’s have some of that Wistlewood tea we keep in the back of the bread box, and then we can discuss our arrangements. And I have a new way of casting that Stairtripper spell you webbed outside the Traveling Room I know you’ll appreciate.”

  Hubley found herself staring at the single gray braid hanging down the older woman’s back as she followed her downstairs. Was that what she looked like from behind? Self-consciously she reached back to feel her own still-brown braid. It certainly felt the same.

  In the pantry the older woman fetched the tea while Hubley took the cups and saucers down from the cupboard. As they busied themselves the cat came in, a tawny stretch of proud fur. It looked once at each woman, licked a paw, and looked at them again. Then it mewled at both and strutted away, tail stiff with disdain.

  If the old woman was her, it would certainly explain a lot. Maybe, if she really did know the Timespell....

  “So,” Hubley said when they’d taken their kettle and cups to the library, “if you really are me, why is it you’ve returned?”

  The older woman smiled and sipped her tea. Hubley drew back when she realized she was doing the exact same thing.

  “I need you to do something important.”

  “What?”

  “I need you to follow a party of adventurers to Vonn Kurr.”

  “Vonn Kurr’s a dangerous place. Why don’t you just do it yourself?”

  “I can’t.” Hubley recognized the way the older woman warmed her hands by rolling the cup gently between her palms. “I’ll be the one leading the party.”

  “Then what do you need me for?”

  “Because that’s what happens.”

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s what happens’?”

  “I’ve already been there.”

  Hubley frowned. “That’s hardly enough of a reason to persuade me to go running off with you.”

  “Believe me, when you’ve practiced the Timespell as long as I have, you’ll know that’s more than reason enough. But I do have another reason, just for you.”

  The older woman smiled again. Hubley was beginning to be annoyed by the condescension in that smile. It reminded her of her grandmother.

  “And your other reason is...?” she asked.

  “To go to the future. You’re going to come with me because this is your chance to break the natural boundaries of the Timespell. You know you won’t turn that opportunity down.”

  The full scope of the older woman’s offer came to Hubley in a rush. What the woman said was true. There was no way Hubley could turn down a chance to get to the future. The Timespell only worked according to the memory of the caster, or someone with the caster, and that limitation meant the caster could only go backward, not forward to some time she hadn’t yet been. But, once she was in the future, Hubley would be able to travel back and forth between that time and now. And all the years between.

  Her impatience disappeared. Or rather, it assumed a different form as she made up her mind in a rush.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  “Of course you will.”

  “Can you tell me how far we’re going?”

  The older woman shook her head. “In these matters, it’s always better to know less, rather than more. Then you don’t have to keep track of so many details.”

  * * *

  3

  She fell through the darkness. The wind whipped around her in a rising roar. She didn’t know how long she had before she hit bottom, but she’d need at least ten seconds to cast her emergency spell of return. She knew Vonn Kurr was deep; she hoped it would turn out to be deep enough. Raising her left hand, she removed the small silver thimble that covered the shortened tip of her little finger. Then she spoke a single word of power. There was a jar as time snapped...

  ...and she was lying on her back in the Traveling Room beneath her tower, back in her own time. Her finger itched where the last joint had reattached. It always took a day or two for flesh and bone to get reacquainted.

  For a long time she lay with her eyes closed and tried to recover from the shock of having just killed herself. It wasn’t that she blamed herself for what had happened. She was too practical for that. If anything, she blamed her older self for putting her into such an impossible situation in the first place.

  Eventually she drove the pillar of fire from her mind and began to think instead of what she could do to change what had happened. What was going to happen. What was the point of the Timespell if you couldn’t go back and undo whatever it was you didn’t want to occur? All she had to do was return to the future a few hours early and make sure the sissit remained on the other side of the wall she’d spelled. If they never found the party, then there would never be a fight at the edge of Vonn Kurr. And if there was no fight, then the elder Hubley wouldn’t die.

  She wasn’t quite sure what she’d do once she found the sissit, but she was sure she’d think of something.

  Just resolving to act made her feel better. She went back up to her tower and began the conjuration that would allow her to return to the time she’d just left. With no part of her in the future to act as a lodestone across the years and distance, the process would be more difficult, and take much longer, than her trip home. But the traveling would be just as sure.

  She made the necessary preparations, then spelled herself forward to the time when the company had last rested in a small chamber off the Sun Road. Omarose was on guard as she crept past, but she had turned herself invisible again, and made no sound. In the main passage she continued through the darkness, her fingertips brushing the inner wall, until she felt she was far enough away to show a light. She’d lose her invisibility in the casting, but she needed to be able to see.

  A simple thought, and a dim flame gleamed at the top of her staff. Its pale light showed the loway winding down into the depths of the earth. The Sun Road. The way from Grangore to Vonn Kurr, but it had been a long time since anyone but sissit had traveled here. The ruin of ancient Bryddin skill littered the passage; bits and pieces of old sculpture and elegant mosaic lay along the road in shattered fragments. Twisted brackets remained where once had shone the lamps of Uhle. Dwarven hands had carved this road in their search for the Sun, but those hands seemed to have long since disappeared. She wondered why.

  She found the mouth of the side passage where she was going to encounter the sissit in a few hours. This time she was able to push further into the tunnel, coming at length to a flight of stairs that descended steeply into the darkness. The air thickened; at the bottom, water sparkled on the walls in the pallid light. A fetid mist filled the air, oily, but not quite the smell of a bog. A bog, no matter how foul, possessed the stink of life. But this smell was metallic, an odor that brought to mind an image of rusted corpses dissolving in ancient pools.

  Unevenly, the passage continued its descent. Hubley found herself avoiding small but growing puddles whose dark water swallowed her light without ref
lection. Soon she had to stoop as she pushed forward, her cloaked arm held out to brush away tendrils of mold thick as squirrels’ tails that hung from the ceiling. The puddles deepened until no part of the floor was dry, and bubbled as her boots stirred them.

  The heavy vegetation gave way, and she found herself on one side of a large cavern. The water stretched in front of her to an uncertain distance; the walls vanished on either side. Above, the ceiling was lost in blackness. Not wanting to draw attention to the very tunnel she wanted the sissit to avoid, she doused her light.

  Nothing followed. No sound, no light, no breath of wind. Though she knew she was at the edge of a large cave, the pressing darkness felt solid as stone.

  The absence was broken by voices welling across the lake, the wheedling tone of sissit. How far away they were, she couldn’t tell. Her ears had been so sharpened by the long hours of silence she didn’t trust them. The voices could be on the far shore, or they could be in a rowboat twenty feet away.

  “You see it?” asked the first. “Big light by fishway?”

  A second voice snorted. “Of course. Everybody see it.”

  “You think that Glommer?”

  “Don’t know. What you think?”

  “I think Glommer come.”

  The second voice took on a cunning tone. “Maybe you go look. You see it, you go.”

  “I not go. You go.”

  “You see it, you go. Maybe you swim.”

  “I no swim. Glommer here.”

  “You do what Obahed say. I eat you else.”

  “You don’t eat me.” This was said without full confidence, as if the first speaker were aware of some possibility of the threat actually occurring. “Only Glommer eats.”

  “I eat too. Glommer say, ‘Obahed, eat that one,’ or ‘Obahed, eat this one,’ and I eat. Glommer say that all the time. I number one chief. I eat what I want.”

  “You just fat seeti. Glommer eat fat seeti. You swim.”

  The thock of something hollow and hard being hit by something just as hard but not hollow followed. A small splash echoed through the cavern. Then the first voice spluttered as it apparently flailed around in the water. “I see you, Obahed. You feed Glommer. I bring Teekee back and then whole tribe eat you!”