Beneath Ceaseless Skies #231

by Stephen Case

I can see the emissary weighing his choices against his responsibility. He might choose to speak the name of one of his traveling companions, but then he would be seen for a coward and a liar.

  Finally he nods, as though to himself, and sets his flinty face.

  He speaks a name.

  The sounds are foreign to me, guttural and sharp in a way that belies the smoothness with which he speaks our tongue. I can see her turning the name over in her mind, working silently through the syllables as though it is a house the rooms of which she is passing through for the first time. In a moment she knows it, and it is on her tongue.

  She speaks.

  The acoustics in the audience chamber, as I have said, are flawless. The sound of a body falling, of a skull striking stones with a hollow heaviness, echoes into the far reaches of the chamber.

  “A name given in turn,” she says, leveling her gaze at those who remain, whose foreign faces now wear expressions of awe. “Know mine now, and take it to your lord in the north. It is Death. I speak for this kingdom. It is under my protection. If he would have my friendship, remember this.”

  * * *

  “That was foolish,” she tells me later. We are on the balcony of our chambers, which look out over Tsud’s private gardens. The lawns, unkempt since his death, are a chaos of wildflowers.

  “You were wonderful,” I tell her. “The men—our men—looked at you with something like love.”

  “I may have begun a war.”

  “You sent a message.” My shaking fingers work at tearing a crusty loaf from the kitchens. She takes it from me and breaks it, then hands it back with cheese she slices from a wedge between us. “Perhaps, gods forbid, that messenger was the Bone King’s son or some other favorite. In either case, he has learned what he wanted to know—that you do indeed have the power you claim. And he has learned something more—that you will not be intimidated or controlled.”

  “I was so angry,” she says, staring out over the gardens. “Seeing that scroll. That list.”

  “I know. But most importantly, you sent a message to your kingdom. You spoke the words that may free you, that may transform this from a rule of expediency and fear to one of loyalty.”

  “I am no queen.”

  “You are.” I make my voice firm. “You are. You took the throne by your power, but you may hold it by your wisdom.”

  “By yours.”

  I wave her words away and chew the bread and cheese.

  Soon she will not need me. In my foolishness, I thought I could free her to slip away into the night, with the wish that she would whisper my name as she went and save me from the cost of my disloyalty to Tsud. But she had been Tsud’s weapon for so long, killing perfectly and unfailingly; where would she flee where she would not be hunted as a monster and murderer? None would trust her, and none could stay their hand at the chance of destroying or once again compelling such power. I realized when she came to the palace and killed Tsud that her path would be a longer, harder road. She would have no freedom not housed and hemmed by absolute power.

  But today there seems hope.

  “There will be another delegation of palace servants arriving soon,” I say. “The Walled Cities are sending the last of their tithe, and then the palace staff will be adequate. Nothing like it was under Tsud, but enough for our needs. Enough to administer an empire, more or less, and maintain a palace.”

  She shakes her head, her long hair bright as knives in the sunlight.

  “No. We will call for more.”

  I wait, the question written on my furrowed brow.

  “We need an army,” she says.

  * * *

  The day of my departure arrives more quickly than I feared.

  It is perhaps three weeks after our discussion on the balcony that I enter the central chambers where Tsud took council with his lords. His opulent lamp-stands have been taken away, and where before his throne stood draped in porphyry curtains and piled with cushions embroidered with trees and birds in silver thread, there is now simply a large round table. She has stripped the throne and placed it there along with perhaps twenty other chairs.

  It is no longer a place for supplicants to come before Tsud. It is a place for her to meet her counselors in preparation for war.

  I have news for her, related to receiving a new train of attendants from villages to the south, but she is not alone. I am momentarily taken aback, finding her there with her generals. I recognize Ekip, tall as a spear even seated, and the jagged face of Tlih. There is also, in the fur-robed uniform he wore under Tsud, Reggad the Unbreakable, her highest commander and one of the few surviving from Tsud’s service that are now in hers.

  But there are others whose names I do not know.

  I stand at the edge of the chamber, stricken. She has taken council with soldiers, with generals, whose names are unknown to me.

  They have not, for the moment, noticed me, their heads bent together over the maps spread before them.

  “Who are you?” I shout, approaching one with a white face and empty eye whom I have never seen before. “What is your name?”

  Silence falls. He regards me, confused, and looks toward her.

  She inclines her head.

  “I am Reidlos,” he says.

  “And you?” I whirl on another, my ruined knees crying in protest. “Who are you?”

  “I am—”

  “Lord Keeper,” she whispers. I ignore their confused, embarrassed stares. “Be at peace. These are trusted.”

  I look from face to face. When they look to her, there is neither fear nor hatred. She has unified them against a coming storm, the Bone King’s inevitable assault. She has found her place among them.

  I am no longer needed.

  * * *

  It is not despair that leads me to depart. This is the freedom I had hoped for her. She reigns now from a loyalty born of necessity and not terror.

  I no longer need remain. I no longer need hold the names in my mind. It would be impossible anyway. Each day, new companies stream to her banner. The palace is again filled; ranks of watchmen range its walls each evening. Pieces of Tsud’s broken armies find their way back to the capital. For now, their hatreds are buried. They speak of her words to the Bone King’s emissary. They look upon her with awe and even love.

  She belongs to them.

  There is one service left I can perhaps render. I gather my birds. I cannot take them all. Several I send north, to watch the passes. I keep my three most faithful, each as black of feather as her hair. One takes his accustomed place on my staff; the others perch on my shoulders.

  It feels good to walk with them again under open sky.

  I leave her a letter. There is nothing to say of what has passed between us. What feelings she may have harbored for me—a man broken and long beyond youth—must fade as she learns the responsibilities of her position. A prince from a powerful Khanate of the south, perhaps, would be a far more suitable consort.

  Not an old scribe.

  But the Monastery of the Grey Conclave provides a useful—and perhaps even legitimate—excuse for departure.

  Lady,

  I go to seek the walls of the Grey Conclave. They know me. My writings have earned me a place within their walls, though I have never claimed it. I go to do so now. Their libraries are vast, deeper even than these chambers of scrolls Tsud assembled. It may be that the Bone King’s name is buried therein. I will seek for you the weapon that may preserve peace and add years to your reign. Look for my birds.

  May your rule be long, and may it be just.

  It will have to be enough. I hope she reads the finality in it.

  * * *

  The roads are soaked by the rains of early autumn, and the trees are grey figures in mist. I had forgotten the season, locked as I was within the labyrinth of bureaucracy within the palace walls. It is good to walk the roads, and the route to the Monastery though long is well traveled. On my second day from the palace I pass a troop marching the opposite dir
ection, with several servants among them. It is clear they are the latest contingent promised from the villages to the south.

  I step to the side of the road, pausing among the waist-high thistles as they pass.

  “Hail Empress Deathspeaker,” calls one of the mounted soldiers as he nears. He moves his horse from the road to speak.

  “Hail,” I answer.

  “You are from the palace?”

  I have chosen to travel unaccompanied, and I left no notice among the guards of my departure.

  “I am.”

  “I thought it.” He dismounts. If the scars I wear shock him, he hides it well. “Have you seen the Empress?”

  “I have.”

  The rest of the company is passing. They are a motley procession, but well ordered.

  “What is she like?”

  It is difficult to decipher the expression in his eyes. I see eagerness there, certainly, the eagerness of a young man going into the service of a great lord.

  “She is Death,” I begin, slowly. “She is grace and shadow.”

  “They say she defies the Bone King.”

  That truth, at least, has spread far beyond the walls.

  I incline my head. “She will protect her people.”

  The young man nods. He is nondescript, as familiar as a thousand young adventure-seekers who came to the court of Tsud in its golden days.

  I ask him his name. “It is token of the realm. You must wear it on your arm and speak it as you go in and out of the palace. It is your oath of fealty.”

  “It is the power of death,” he murmurs.

  “Indeed.”

  I wait.

  “My name is Reklaw,” he says finally.

  “Your given name?”

  He nods. His eyes are on the departing company and the road toward the palace.

  “Be well, Reklaw,” I tell him, raising my hand in farewell.

  One of my birds croaks harshly from somewhere above us.

  * * *

  II.

  Lady,

  By now you will have realized my departure, and you will have found the letter I left for you in our chambers. Do not be angry. You will know, in time, that I am right in leaving. My services in the palace are no longer needed. I am proud of you. You will rule well.

  My thought when I left the palace was to travel to the Monastery of the Grey Conclave. The records they have, I had heard, extend even further than those Tsud gathered at the height of his power. It was possible, I thought, I might find information of service to you. I admit this was in part a justification for my departure. But here I remain your servant, and so I must break my silence and reveal what I have found.

  I knew the pathway well, though I had never followed it. By the waxing of the moon, I was in the foothills in which the Monastery lies. It sits at the top of one of the hills as though cupped in a hand, with vast grey-green walls larger even than those of the palace. The words that greeted my shout below the walls were guarded. Once they knew my name though, and saw my birds, the abbot himself lowered the rope ladder for me to ascend.

  There is something strange in the sloping of those hills, for what seems a city on a hill becomes in the ascent something larger and higher. This, they tell me, is an effect of that which I found in the caverns beneath the hill, the reason I write you now.

  * * *

  I had been laboring in the libraries for weeks, finding many things of interest but nothing of direct service to her, when the abbot came to me. He is impossibly old, with a body bent and broken as a tree that has seen a hundred freezes and thaws. Yet his face appears almost obscenely young, and his eyes bright and sharp. He has lived, so he says, longer than any of the abbots who lived before him, long enough that he recalls Tsud’s grandfather making a pilgrimage to the Monastery at the beginning of his reign. When he speaks, one must lean close to hear, but his words are clear and cogent.

  “These books,” he said when he found me, pointing with his staff to the rows of shelves that dwarf even the voluminous acres of Tsud’s library, “are shadows.”

  I told him I did not understand.

  “Follow me.”

  He led me from the library in which I was working through half a dozen courtyards until we stood at the center of the grove, seven ancient trees growing on seven even older graves. A velvet rope descended into the dry well. Beside the well an acolyte waited with a thick mantle of fur.

  “You will need that,” the abbot said, gesturing to the mantle.

  It was a warm evening. I slipped the mantle around my shoulders with some confusion.

  “You are not of our order,” the abbot said. The trees whispered around him with the voices of the dead. “But even here, your work under Tsud found admirers. And now you serve the Empress.” He paused. “The answers you seek are below, though you will not recognize them. If, in the morning, you wish to remain, we will teach you to read their patterning.”

  “Do I need a torch?” I asked, glancing into the mouth of the well. I could see nothing but the curved walls of stone descending.

  “You will not.”

  The abbot’s youthful face was impassive. He watched me patiently.

  Finally I shrugged, pulled the mantle tighter around my shoulders, and began a painful descent.

  * * *

  The Monastery is devoted to the keeping of books and records and arcane sciences the names of which have long been lost. I believed my writings from the years before you came to power would gain me passage within those halls, and in this I was not disappointed.

  Those halls—and plazas, courtyards, and libraries—are vast. Within the walls there are miles of corridors, and gardens, and murmuring fountains. It seems as though this place has endured a thousand years, though if the monks are to be believed it has been here much longer.

  In the center of the monastery there is a grove of seven trees. They are of a species I have never seen, tall and very old, and they grow in a loose semi-circle. The abbot says they were planted when the monastery itself was founded and they grow upon the graves of the seven brothers who survived of the original Grey Conclave and founded the monastery, in the years after the Wars of Breaking that are only a myth today. He says the bodies of those men had been taken up in branch and root and even now the leaves and wind at times conspire to speak in their voices.

  There is what appears to be a dry well at the center of the grove. I asked the abbot about it when I first arrived, but he said it was not yet time. I did not know what this meant.

  I searched those immense libraries for the Bone King’s name until the evening the abbot fetched me. It was then that I learned what lies beneath the grove at the monastery’s center, beneath the moldering bones of those ancient warrior-monks. Whether it was brought to this place by the survivors of the Grey Conclave at the time of the world’s Breaking, or whether they founded this monastery here because it already lay beneath this hill, not even the abbot could say. But it is this that will give us the answer to the riddle. It is this that will keep the Bone King’s cold armies from breaking down on us like a storm.

  * * *

  I had almost forgotten, in a city of old men, that I was a man more broken than most. My descent down the well’s shaft that was a painful reminder. My shoulders screamed in protest as I climbed. It was as though I was again on the rack in the dungeons of Tsud, though the burden was now only the weight of my own body.

  The descent was not far. I had passed only beyond the spill of light from above when I felt stones beneath my feet and saw a clear, bright light coming from somewhere just out of sight. I was standing in a small chamber at the center of which was a deep and narrow rift. The light rose up out of this. I found narrow steps carved into its side.

  The climb down those stairs was long. The light grew brighter around me, and there were reflected specks in the stones so that for a time it seemed I was descending down the milky road that is painted upon maps of the sky.

  As soon as I had begun the climb down
ward, the air had grown colder. Now I was grateful for the mantle and pulled its hood up around my ears. My breath came in clouds before my face, and the stones were so cold they burned.

  The steps finally ended at the floor of a vast chamber, the ceiling of which arching above might have been the very curve of the hill upon which the monastery sits. At the center of the chamber, burning like a city of lights, was the shard.

  It must be as large as the space of our chambers in the palace. It is a spar, a fragment, something that has been splintered off a larger sphere. It rests along its long edge in the frosty chamber beneath the hill like an immense broken sculpture. It looks, indeed, very much like a huge sliver of ice, slid down from one of the glaciers where they say the bones of giants are still sometimes visible in the snow.

  But it is luminous and more transparent than any ice I have ever seen, with ripples, bubbles, and cracks running through its interior.

  It is world-ice.

  * * *

  When I saw your face for the first time, there in the fortress of rain where Tsud kept you imprisoned, I thought I had never before known beauty. Now I know all beauty is reflection. The abbot was right: the books are only shadows.

  You have, perhaps in the markets when you were a child—or rather, you would have, had you been free—seen the women who weave coins into their hair and the hem of their gowns. They call in a singsong for passers-by to have futures read from a ball of crystal or a polished orb of ebony. These women know how to cunningly tailor what is said for the one who listens, but the germ of the belief is this: they can find knowledge in the centers of these crystals or stones where the light is lost in fractures, imperfections, and reflections.

  Those crystal spheres are false, surely, but I have seen their model. I have seen that piece to which they all are harkening.

  If, as our oldest annals claim, the world was once whole and is now truly broken, then—so the monks claim—one of the surviving fragments is preserved in the frozen chill beneath their monastery.

  I am weaving riddles for you. I am sorry. It is late, and my mind wanders with the wonder of what I have seen.

  The spar of the world-ice beneath the hill of the monastery is shot through with impurities, with planes of waving light, clouds of suspended opalescence, and tumors of fractures like angry lace. These impurities form a three-dimensional cartography within the ice.