The two remaining bandits faltered, then ran back up the slope after their fellows.
Cautiously, Tamalat approached Brio. He whirled and brought his sword up. Tamalat let her spinning cords shield her from the blade.
“I can’t let you live,” Brio said, circling her warily.
Tamalat turned so she continued to face him. “You always did like to dance the dance,” she said, hoping to distract him.
No luck. He launched into a flurry of attacks, driving her back. He’s serious, Tamalat thought blankly. He was trying to kill her.
She had to fight back, even if she was sure he would wear himself out soon. Her loyalty had limits. She wasn’t about to let him kill her just to make a point. She let the weights whip around the pivot of her hand and swing toward Brio’s head.
His eyes were curiously bright. He dropped the sword and stood unmoving.
It almost took a moment too long for Tamalat to realize what his game was. She jerked the cord to change its trajectory. Even so, the weight clipped Brio on the shoulder. He didn’t flinch, although it had to hurt.
Tamalat wrapped the cords around her wrist. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” she demanded.
She regretted the words the moment they passed her lips. From the look in his eyes, that was exactly what he was trying to accomplish. “Your soul,” she said in sudden understanding.
Brio inclined his head.
“How long—”
“As soon as you put that shirt on me.”
In other words, this whole time he had pretended his soul was still absent, all to provoke her into killing him. “But your shadow—?”
“You restored my connection to the shadow,” Brio said, “but it won’t leave Khenar.”
“Why not just kill yourself the normal way like a regular person?”
“I didn’t want you to have any regrets.”
Tamalat growled. “The priest knew this, didn’t she?”
“She probably guessed.”
Tamalat scooped up a handful of snow and stuffed it down the back of his shirt. Brio yelped and aimed a punch at her. She dodged that and entangled his legs with her own. They went down together. Brio sputtered. Tamalat made sure she wound up on top. She had no desire to catch pneumonia from rolling around in the snow.
Brio coughed. “I can’t say I didn’t—oof—deserve this.”
Tamalat looked down at him. “I think I’m going to shave you.”
“For gods’ sake, Tamalat, I can do that myself.”
“And give you an opportunity to slit your throat? I think not.” Tamalat drew her sharpest dagger and smiled at him.
Brio rolled his eyes. “Get on with it.”
Tamalat took a fiendish pleasure in the task. It was deeply satisfying to get rid of all that bristle, and she only nicked him twice. “There,” she said, brushing the beard’s remnants away. “You look almost human again.”
“If you’re done, you can get off now,” Brio said. “I smell snow coming, and we want to build some kind of shelter before the storm comes in.”
At least he was talking like a sane person now. “Build a shelter of what?” She eased off him. There weren’t many trees around here.
“Snow,” he said, growing more enthusiastic. He got up and brushed the snow off his clothes.
All right, maybe not so sane. “Snow?” Tamalat said. “How does snow keep you warm?”
“It’s just as insulating as anything else,” he said. “There’s a perfectly good hillside here. We could build an igloo.”
“A what?”
“It’s a—”
“Oh, I remember what it is,” Tamalat said crushingly. “This is from that dreadful book you read back in Tenuyat, isn’t it?”
“The principle’s perfectly—”
“The one that claimed there was a land where sheep grew from bushes? And that Harufai raiders ride giant ants?”
“It was probably an honest mistake.”
“Or the work of an inspired fabulist!” She flung her hands up. “What, someone mistook a camel for a giant ant? I don’t think so.”
Brio said, “We should at least try the igloo. The alternative is freezing out here.”
She groaned, but if he was thinking about survival that meant he wasn’t thinking about suicide, so she might as well play along. “Have you ever seen anyone build one?”
“No, but it’s a work of engineering. It should be possible to figure it out from the book’s directions and general principles.”
“All right,” Tamalat said, on the grounds that if she was involved, she could prevent Brio from burying himself in snow.
Brio spent the next half-hour muttering to himself as he searched for a suitable quarry of hard-packed snow. Then he spent another half-hour deciding where to site the igloo. Tamalat traipsed in his wake, shivering.
“I don’t suppose you keep an ice saw about your person?” Brio asked.
Tamalat gave him a look.
“It was worth finding out.” He tapped his fingers against his side, staring into the gray-ridden sky. “If I understand that book correctly, we’ll have to set the blocks at an angle—”
She had to pick the soldier-brat who’d been raised by army engineers. “What blocks?”
“The blocks we don’t have an ice saw to carve out of the snow,” Brio said. “I’d rather not ruin your daggers doing this, and we only have one miserable sword between the two of us. I might as well do the hacking. Meanwhile, you can start clearing out the igloo site. Remember that the entrance has to be lower than everything else.”
“Why?”
“Insulation.” In a burst of exasperation, he said, “I’m not going to let you stand here and freeze to death because you’re skeptical.”
Tamalat began clearing snow. If nothing else, the exertion would keep her warm, as long as she didn’t sweat too much. “I’m not skeptical out of caprice,” she protested. “If I were following instructions from some book that also happened to mention that there are three-headed people in Khenar, wouldn’t you object?”
“That would be absurd,” Brio said. “How would the body know which head’s desires to obey?”
He was missing the point.
“How much of the igloo’s construction principles do you remember?”
She scoffed. “I’m not the former engineer, and I don’t bother remembering things that are clearly absurd.”
“You’d put an igloo in the same category as giant ants?” Brio sighed. “All right. Look: if we’re only building for two, one of us will have to stand in the center and set the blocks properly, forming a dome. The other person is going to be on the outside lifting the blocks into place.”
“That had better be me,” Tamalat said. Brio looked thin and tired. She didn’t want him falling over. Besides, he was the one who understood how this igloo was supposed to work. If it did.
“All right.”
Tamalat resumed clearing snow. Brio hacked gamely at the snow, which was so hard it was almost ice.
“Let me take a turn,” Tamalat said.
“It’s not—”
“Brio, give me the sword.”
He handed it over.
Chopping packed snow was as tedious as Tamalat had expected it to be. She was developing blisters on her hands. It made her wonder if Brio had similar blisters, except he would never admit it. Besides, it didn’t change their situation. As absurd as it was, the igloo might be their best hope of surviving the coming storm. Already the rising wind stung her face.
At last, after switching off several more times, they had what Brio deemed to be enough blocks. “It’ll be approximately a half-sphere,” Brio said, “so the surface area—”
“I’ll trust that you did the calculations correctly in your head,” she said.
They worked on the first layer of blocks together, making sure to place them so they leaned inward, forming the basis of the dome’s curvature. Then Brio stepped inside so he could position the blocks as
Tamalat brought them to him.
“I hope you appreciate being sheltered from the wind,” Tamalat said to him, somewhat later.
Brio said, “Do you want to trade places?” The igloo’s wall was now thigh-height.
“And have you knock a hole in what we’ve built so far? I’d rather not.” Curiously, she was developing an attachment to the igloo. Maybe the idea wasn’t as peculiar as she’d thought. There was something attractive about using the very snow as a weapon against the cold.
Soon the wall was over his head. “Here’s the tricky part,” Brio said, his voice muffled by the igloo’s blocks. “We’re almost done, but we’re going to need a cap piece at the very top.”
She saw the problem. It would have to fit exactly.
“You’ll have to cut one of the blocks down to fit, and lift it over the wall to me,” he said. Obviously he couldn’t do it from within. “Make sure you don’t lean too far—”
“You make sure you don’t drop it.” Tamalat huffed and studied the igloo again. Leaning over the wall to put blocks in place was already awkward. The cap piece would be the most difficult.
Her blisters made the task of cutting agonizing. She couldn’t wait for the ordeal to be over with. She was trembling with exhaustion by the time she reached over the igloo with the cap piece, praying to all the gods she knew that she wouldn’t fall through and ruin their work. Brio reached up from underneath and guided the piece down.
“You can let go now,” Brio said. “We did it.”
The sky was dark; the half-moon cast a pearly sheen over the snow. Tamalat passed Brio the supplies through the entrance under the wall and waited impatiently while he set up the sleeping bags.
“Come on in,” Brio finally called from inside.
Tamalat tapped the block above the entrance. It held. Then she stepped down, ducked her head, and wriggled into the igloo. “It isn’t as cold,” she said.
Brio propped himself up on one elbow to smile sardonically at her. “Amazing what a difference it makes to get out of the wind.”
“I hadn’t expected there to be any light at all.”
“Snow isn’t opaque.”
“I mean, not that filtered moonlight is precisely bright. I suppose we should eat some of that dreadful barley hardtack?”
“If I’d known you hated it so, I would have bought more dried meat.”
“Someday,” Tamalat said, “we are going to stay somewhere with decent food. Soreive suffers from an excess of ascetics.” She frowned. “You’re shivering.”
“It’ll pass,” he said.
Tamalat cupped his hands in hers. “You know, your stoicism isn’t impressing anyone.” She kissed his fingertips.
Brio didn’t snatch his hands away. Instead, he went utterly still. “You must be tired—”
She looked at the roof. “Spare me. Do you want this or do you not?” At his hesitation, she added, “There’s one correct answer.”
Now he sounded amused: “What is this, an exam?”
“We aren’t playing a game of riddles,” she said, wondering how much instruction she was going to have to give him. She was sure he had been deprived as long as she had, but did men really forget how to play this particular game? “You’re supposed to—”
Brio kissed her on the mouth. And spent the next hours convincing her that he had not, in fact, forgotten, even as she convinced him that she wasn’t tired while the night enfolded them both in its shadow.
for Helen Keeble
Copyright © 2016 Yoon Ha Lee
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “The Bonedrake’s Penance” in BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2. His first novel, Ninefox Gambit, is forthcoming from Solaris Books in June 2016. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators. Visit him online at www.yoonhalee.com.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
LAWS OF NIGHT AND SILK
by Seth Dickinson
Kavian can pretend this girl is her daughter through drought and deluge, but the truth is the truth: Irasht is a weapon, and never any more.
It hurts enough to break even the charcoal heart of Kavian Catamount, and so she does a forbidden thing—she puts her arms around the girl Irasht who is not her daughter, kisses her brow, and whispers:
“I will protect you. Go.”
Then Kavian pushes Irasht onto the stone above the battle.
In the valley beneath them the Cteri, the people of the dams, the people of Kavian’s blood and heart, stand against the invader. The Efficate comes baying to drain five centuries of civilization into their own arid land.
So the word has come from Kavian’s masters, from the Paik Rede and warlord Absu:
You have had time enough to tame her. Go to the battle. Use the abnarch girl, the girl who is not your daughter.
Destroy the Efficate army.
Kavian cries the challenge.
“Men of the Efficate! Men of the owl!” Her wizardry carries the bellow down the valley, across the river, to shatter and rebound from the hills. “I am Kavian Catamount, sorcerer of the Paik Rede! I like to warm my hands on your brothers’ burning corpses!”
Fifty thousand enemy spearmen shudder in fear. They know her name.
But the battle today does not ride on Kavian’s fire.
The girl Irasht (who is not her daughter) stares at the battle-plain, wide-eyed, afraid, and puts her hands up to her ears. Kavian seizes her wrists, to keep her from blocking out the sound of war. Irasht claws and spits but does not cry.
Over Irasht’s hissing frenzy Kavian roars: “My hands are cold today!”
She hears the cry go up in the Efficate ranks, a word in their liquid tongue that means: abnarch, abnarch, she has brought an abnarch. And she sees their eyes on her, their faces lifted in horror and revulsion, at the girl Irasht, at what has been done to her.
You poor bastards, she thinks. I know exactly how you feel.
* * *
Kavian has been in pain for a very long time. There’s the pain she wears like a courting coat, a ballroom ensemble—the battle hurt that makes her growl and put her head down, determined to go on.
And there’s the other pain. The kind she lets out when drunk, hoping it’ll drown. The pain she reaches for when she tries to play the erhu (this requires her to be drunk, too). It’s a nameless pain, a sealed pain, catacombed in the low dark and growing strong.
The night she met Irasht, the night she went down into the catacombs to decant her daughter: that night belonged to the second pain.
In the Paik Rede’s summit halls, past the ceremonial pool where the herons fish, catacomb doors bear an inscription:
We make silk from the baby moth. We unspool all that it might become. This is a crime.
Silk is still beautiful. Silk is still necessary.
This is how an abnarch is made. This is the torment to which Kavian gave up her first and only born.
The wizards of the Paik Rede, dam-makers, high rulers of isu-Cter, seal a few of their infants into stone cells. They grow there, fed and watered by silent magic, for fifteen years. Alone. Untaught. Touched by no one.
And on nights like these their parents decant them for the war.
“Kavian. Stop.”
Warlord Absu wears black beneath a mantle of red, the colors of flesh and war. For a decade she has led the defense of the highlands. For a decade before that—well: Kavian was not born with sisters, but she has one. This loyalty is burnt into her. Absu is the pole where Kavian’s needle points.
“Lord of hosts,” Kavian murmurs. She’s nervous tonight, so she bows deep.
The warlord considers her in brief, silent reserve. “Tonight we will bind you to a terrible duty. The two mature abnarchs are our only hope.” Her eyes! Kavian remembers their ferocity, but nev
er remembers it. She is so intent: “You’re our finest. But one error could destroy us.”
“I will not be soft with her.” So much rides on the abnarch’s handler: victory, or cataclysm.
Absu’s golden eyes hold hers. “The war makes demands of us, and we serve. Remember that duty, when you want to grieve.” Her expression opens in the space between two blinks—a window of pain, or compassion. “What did you name her?”
“Heurian,” Kavian says.
A grave nod. Absu’s face is a map of battles past, and her eyes are a compass to all those yet to come. “A good name. Go.”
And then, as Kavian pushes against the granite doors, as the mechanisms of gear and counterweight begin to open, Absu warns her.
“You will find Fereyd Japur in the catacombs. He went ahead of you.”
Fereyd. The scar man, the plucked flower. Her only rival. Why send him ahead? Why is he in the dark with her buried daughter?
Kavian tries to breathe out her tension but it is a skittish frightened breed and it will not go.
* * *
She goes down into the catacombs where eight children wait in the empty dark for their appointed day. Where her daughter waits to be reborn and used.
Magic is bound by the laws a wizard carries. Day and night, air and gravity, the right place of highborn and low. The lay of words in language. The turn of the stars above high isu-Cter, the only civilization that has ever endured. All these are laws a wizard may know.
This is why the upstart Efficate produces so many wizards: it fills its children with the mantras of fraternity and republic. Their minds are limited, predictable—but like small gears, together they make a machine. This is why the Cteri wizards walk the world as heroes, noble-blooded and rare.
There are other ways to make a wizard. A child raised in a stone cell knows no laws. Only the dark.
Fereyd Japur waits for her in white silk ghostly beneath the false starlight of the gem-starred roof. He is tall and beautiful and his eyes are like a field surgery.
He was not always a great wizard. Not until he gave himself to the enemy, to be tortured, to learn the truest laws of pain.
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