Beneath Ceaseless Skies #171

by Spencer Ellsworth

  She would kill them, and she would go back, and the mission would be complete, and she would forget her mistake. This was the blade; there was no need for balance here.

  Her good arm was throbbing from the wound, so she switched her knife to her lesser hand and raised it, looking down at the mother and child.

  And then it fell from her fingers.

  One choice yet remained.

  The assassin sat upon the sand, and drew out her pendant, and spoke the words inscribed on it. They were written in a language few could speak, and none dared. The tongue of air and fire. From old books, bound in human skin, from an older time than this empire, or the empire before it.

  The assassin called out the forbidden words, the summoning words, in the language of flame in the darkness, wind in the dark of night.

  They came.

  The spirits of air and fire rose from the ground, shining in the sun, their seven-fingered hands wavering like tongues of flame. Their sharp teeth were black as coals, their eyes the blue of the heart of flame.

  They surrounded the assassin and the mother and child in a circle. Their words rippled through the flame, burned the assassin’s heart.

  You have called us. You are the first in millennia.

  “I wish to make a bargain,” she whispered. “Take them across the expanse of sand, and go to the east.”

  What is the bargain?

  The assassin laughed. “What do you wish?” The words felt hot on her tongue, a language only of exchange, of dark deeds for dark words.

  The spirits spoke, their words rushing like flame. We wish for your world. We wish to burn, to burn the forests, to burn the cities, to burn the people.

  “That is no fair bargain for three lives.” She staggered to her feet.

  Give us three to burn, then.

  The assassin considered her subordinates, her enemies. She considered the palaces of kings and emperors, who had burned her people. She considered herself.

  Perhaps it was the heat, or the pain, but she spoke of nothing she had considered.

  “The justice in the hearts of my assassins. The hatred in the hearts of the rulers. The fear...” She wavered. “The fear of mercy.”

  The head of the creatures flickered, quavered. We do not want that!

  “Then you will burn nothing. There will be no ash.” She wavered on her feet, forced herself to stay standing. “This is no small burn. You will eat minds, eat souls, as they accuse us of doing.”

  They railed and snorted. You have summoned us for foolishness.

  “I know,” she said, and realized that those were the last words she had in her.

  She fell to the sand, lay cold in it, and heard the spirits speak, the hissing, popping, deep-throated roar of flame as it ate wood. She heard them and almost she understood. Almost. To burn at all is to burn enough, one said. And her soul will burn brightly.

  A smile touched the assassin’s lips.

  * * *

  Shadows, shifting black whispers of fire. She thought she saw stars far above, heard strange music coming from the east. The mother and the child swept away, on the wind toward the east, saved. Seven-fingered hands closed around her body.

  The assassin writhed, and thought she had died.

  She saw herself, as the Gods had made her, her soul-branches intertwined and linked, as perfect as a spun tapestry of calligraphy. The creatures of air and fire gathered around her soul. Their flame touched the edges of that tapestry, caught threads, bright with licking red tongues.

  They took the justice from her, the hatred, and finally the fear. Threads of her soul broke away, embers floating into the Gods’ great space, each one losing its light, its heat, and becoming cold, grains fluttering like sand through the air.

  The assassin woke in the sand alone. No, not alone. All around her, glass jars of a thousand shapes: bulbs, onions, flower petals, thorns. Each one glowing with a red light.

  This was the bargain. And she knew.

  The mother and child were safe in the East, now. But the assassin’s mission was not yet done. She would take the creatures of air and fire, bottled up in these glasses, to the cities. She would take them to lords. To assassins of other stripes. Perhaps even to her own order. And they would be a weapon, to turn blood to water, swords to coins, to eat the minds of the mind-eaters.

  For each act of war has, at its heart, an act of mercy.

  Copyright © 2015 Spencer Ellsworth

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Spencer Ellsworth wrote his first novel at seven years old and never recovered. He lives in Bellingham , WA, where he writes and edits; the former won the PARSEC Contest in 2009 and has been published in Brain Harvest and Intergalactic Medicine Show; the latter includes slush reading and copyedits galore. He has also worked in wilderness survival, special education, and at a literary agency. He is married to fantasy artist Chrissy Ellsworth and is the proud father of Adia and Samwise Ellsworth. He lives at spencerellsworth.blogspot.com.

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  SINSEERLY A FRIEND & YR. OBED’T

  by Thomas M. Waldroon

  I.

  Mr. Stutley Northup is not a magistrate. Why, he’s not even a lawyer. But if people are free to come to him with their controversies, he is just as free to offer his opinion; and if they choose to act on it, well, that’s their own lookout. Little Hope, Pennsylvania, is not the sort of place to go about your business expecting not to have it talked about. If someone goes to see “Old Stuck-Up,” it must be because that business is a stubborn one. And urgent, too.

  Mr. James E. (for Ezeziel, although he believes that only his parents and perhaps some nameless county clerk know that) Chambers rides the Freeport Road south from the lake, on past the jog it takes at the shingle mill at the creekside, way on past Enoch Parmenter’s place, past the Tarr farm, over fields and hills and wooded slopes, to just over the township line into Greenfield.

  He follows the road that Judah Colt cut forty-some years ago towards the end of the previous century, said to be the first road since the French army abandoned the region. From the cabin he built with his own hands—abandoned in 1804 but still called Colt’s Station whether a church, store, tavern, or even, in the winter of 1821, a schoolhouse—it runs due north to the lake at Freeport. Winters, some folks still log the ridge, skid their haul to Little Hope, and, come the spring floods, lash together a raft and float it down French Creek past Amity and on into the Allegheny River, and past the confluences of the Clarion and Kiskaminentas, all the way to Pittsburgh, or farther, even (...Saint Louis! ...New Orleans!).

  Old Northup’s place, now: isolated, sure, but his own. No, he tells anyone who asks, he’s not lonely, he’s got his books to lend him human warmth; a few cows, a hired man or two as they might be needed; he does well enough for himself nowadays. Niece of his stops by to look after him, good girl too, not like—well, there’s no call to name names.

  Once he’s all properly seated and settled and served with refreshment, Chambers asks: What think you of the Canadian Republic and its likely fate? I hear tell that MacKenzie has lately fled to Navy Island, in the Niagara, and the British have seized and fired an American ship conveying supplies to them there.

  Northup says: Don’t let’s beat around the bush, Chambers, tell me what you come here for.

  Not to be hurried along, as befits the inherent dignity of the new Justice of the Peace for Harbor Creek Township, just this year appointed by Governor Ritner himself, and so young, too—J. E. Chambers takes his time with a few more sips of Northup’s locally famous boiled milk coffee. He suspects Northup ekes it out with roasted acorns. The old man watches him amiably enough, despite his tone.

  Chambers, when he’s good and ready, says: You remember the Dusseau brothers.

  Course I do. Pair of fools. French, too.

  And their great sea serpent...?

  Northup laughs bitterly.

  You know of it then, Chambers presses.

>   Know of it? I saw it! Mind you don’t be smashing the crockery, Chambers.

  James Chambers has set his cup down so abruptly that it threatens to shatter the saucer.

  Northup says, Can’t afford to be replacing it all the time. Come from England, you know.

  Chambers says, So sorry.

  He mops up the spilled coffee with his spare handkerchief.

  He goes on: But how could you have seen it? They said it must have died.

  They lied. French, you know.

  Well, then, what did they see there?

  Probably it was just like they said.

  Chambers regards the old man gravely. He slips his fingers into a pocket of his tobacco-brown coat and withdraws a paper packet. This he unfolds slowly and studies carefully. He looks up at Northup again, then back at his papers. He clears his throat.

  He reads out: There is great excitement among the French inhabitants along the lake shore in North East Township over the reported discovery of a marine monster by two French fishermen named Dusseau. It was between twenty and thirty feet long and shaped like a sturgeon, but it had arms which it tossed wildly in the air.

  He looks up: That was the Phoenix and Reflector. Last May. Local paper, you know. Gossip fills a column up as well as truth does.

  Northup shrugs.

  Chambers places this scrap of paper on the table and studies the next one.

  He says: Now this is one of the New York papers. Last June, I believe.

  He reads: Special from Presque-Isle, Pennsylvania. The French settlers along the lake shore, in North East Township, Erie County, a few miles east of here, were surprised and amazed on May Twelfth over the appearance of an unknown fish of mammoth size. Two brothers named Dusseau, both fishermen, were returning from the fishing grounds, when they discovered a phosphorescent mass upon the beach. It was late in the evening, but they succeeded in making their boat fast to the shore, and, upon examination, discovered a lake monster writhing in agony.

  Northup remarks: Amazing what gets printed these days.

  Chambers keeps reading: The brothers say that it was like a large sturgeon in shape, but that it had long arms, which it threw wildly in the air. While they were watching it, the great fish apparently died, and the Dusseau boys, badly frightened, hurried away for aid. When they returned with ropes the fish had disappeared. In its dying efforts it had succeeded in tumbling into the lake and had been carried away by the waves. The marks left by its wild thrashings on the muddy shore indicate that the serpent was between twenty and thirty feet in length. Several scales as large as silver dollars which were cast off were picked up.

  Chambers places this on the table atop the first. I have more, he says.

  Northup sighs, shakes his head. He says: Not wild thrashings in the mud. Writing. And not scales, Chambers. Eggs.

  * * *

  II.

  His father, born Stukely Northup but renamed Stutley by a regimental clerk’s error and an officious paymaster’s refusal to admit it (You want your pay? Then you’re Stutley! Stutley!), had named his son after the error to confound the new government’s record-keepers. The war had done more than rename him; it had left him feeling hollowed out, uncertain of most things, and with a frail left arm. Discharged in January 1777 at Trenton, New Jersey, he’d made his way back through the bitter winter to a Rhode Island, a wife and young child, that he hardly recognized, not because they had changed but because they had not.

  On May Fourteen, 1780, a fine spring Sunday in Little Rest, R.I., he was hailed in the street by a young woman strangely togged out, all in black, mannish and vaguely Quaker, and cloaked in a long black gown, like a preacher’s, tied at the throat with a flowing white cravat. She was riding a white horse and sporting a preposterous hat of white beaver with a flat crown and broad brim, tied down with a purple kerchief. Friend, she called to him, dost love thy neighbor?

  Thinking of all the men he had so recently shot at, not in anger but out of righteous principle, he answered: No.

  Dost love God? she asked.

  That was a harder question. The strange woman urged her horse closer with a nudge of her knees and a clucking of her tongue. She asked again, bending down towards him, gazing into his face, her own framed by waves of mahogany curls held in check by her kerchief, her eyes alight: Dost love God?

  No, he admitted.

  Come, she said, follow me, and I shall teach thee how.

  She straightened up, patted her horse’s flank. It ambled away, its hooves clop-clop-clopping on the hardened mud, and she did not look back.

  Jemima Wilkinson had been born in Rhode Island, of Quaker parents, in 1758; had contracted typhus during the British blockade of Providence in 1776; had died there; and two days later she had risen again, from ecstasies and visions of heaven, with a new name: the Publick Universall Friend. Stutley (formerly Stukely) had never had much traffic with Quakers, but he saw in her something that he himself lacked and needed; she was possessed of a stout commonsense and a visionary charism, of compassion and a biting wit; and as for having died and risen again, well, he did not believe her, exactly, in so many words—he might say that he accepted her testimony. He abandoned his errands and duties (whatever they may have been) and turned his path towards hers.

  * * *

  III.

  Four Mile Creek originates in Greenfield Township and enters the lake after a course of about eight miles. The most striking feature of these lakeshore streams is the deep channels they cut in their passage from the high ground inland to the level of Lake Erie, and which are often the only route down from the lake’s treacherous shale bluffs to its narrow stony strand. These ravines, or gulfs as they’re called there, are most profound along Four and Six Mile Creeks, where they have worn a course from 100 to 150 feet deep, providing picturesque scenery for those who enjoy such diversions, and also, for many others, freedom from spying eyes.

  Someone has cut crude steps into the steepest parts of the path down the gulf’s slope. Now two men—one tall and gaunt, head-to-foot in rusty black, clean-shaven, grizzled hair matted to his scalp with sweat but spiking out where he’s rubbed at it; the other rounded in well-fed curves, his brown checked suit impeccable (or it was, before they started down this infernal track), his thick brown hair sleek with Macassar, his brown beard fashionably full—stumble and veer like a slapstick duo (ho there! hold on! give us a hand! et cetera) until, reaching bottom, they huff and puff for a minute and catch their breath.

  Then Northup says: Lend a hand now, will you?

  As they haul the brush and tree limbs from off a rowboat pulled up onto the stony margin, Chambers asks: Is this your boat?

  Northup says, I spend a deal of time on the water, like many a dairy farmer.

  Chambers coughs.

  Northup says, There’s a canoe nearby, too. Proposing to conduct a boat census, are you? Want to stay on the right side of the law.

  As do we all, Chambers says.

  And it came to pass, Northup says, in those days, that there went out a decree from John Ezeziel, that all the boats should be counted.

  Chambers says: As a duly appointed officer of the law, a magistrate in fact, it is my duty, my bounden duty, and a duty that I intend to uphold, sworn as I am, in the law, to pursue any and all....

  But this peroration peters out, like a mountain stream flowing out across a desert waste. He keeps his silence while Northup busies himself with oars and buckets and other paraphernalia. Eventually, he asks: Whatever became of that hired man of yours, the Negro?

  Amos, you mean?

  Chambers shrugs. He says, I don’t recall the name, if I ever knew it.

  Northup shakes his head. Called away by family duties, he says. Promised to send his cousin in the spring. Pretty soon, I expect, come to think of it. Off we go now, heft her up, watch your step.

  They half carry, half drag the boat into the water. It rocks and scrapes as they clamber in, Chambers taking care to keep his glossy boots out of the mud. Now, the
issue arises, which is to be the more honored in our time: age or dignity? Age wins out (also ownership), and Chambers bends his back to the oars while Northup, kneeling in the bow, fends the boat off submerged rocks with his heavy walking stick.

  The watercourse is treacherous along this stretch, but the boat was hidden only a little way upstream from the lake, and soon the water is flowing deeper and faster. Chambers ships the oars and the boat runs freely along the gulf and then out from between the beetling scarps rounded like the shoulders of some giant asleep on the lakeshore. The boat slows in the lake’s stiller waters and he takes up the oars again. It’s hard work, and after a while of stretching and pulling, stretching and pulling, he pauses to steady his heaving breath. Northup is still kneeling in the bow, gazing off into the blank and hazy distance.

  Chambers half turns and speaks over his shoulder to him: Rumor has it—

  Northup snaps: Rumor’s a fickle bitch.

  Chambers turns back, waits a bit, then tries again:

  Rumor has it that strange happenings are afoot around the lake. Fishermen have seen monstrous great snakes, and their boats have been attacked, and their catch often bear extraordinary teeth marks. Bathers have been harried and bitten by unseen molesters in the water. Not to mention the numberless reports of floating lights, and voices and other noises in the night, and mysterious comings and goings of invisible ships, and unexplainable prodigies of the water. Stationary waterspouts, as just one example. And worse, much worse. The Dusseau affair is the least of it. You simply cannot imagine what crosses the desk of an ordinary Justice of the Peace every day! Why, only this morning a body washed ashore.

  Northup turns and sits heavily on the bench athwart the gunwales.

  He says: A body? First I heard of it. Whose body?