Beneath Ceaseless Skies #189

by David Tallerman

  He would wait one more day, he decided, and let the rumormongers distort the facts of the Ixar’s departure beyond all semblance of reality, before he returned to the House of Dusk.

  They wouldn’t ask him for the truth, and he would not volunteer it.

  Copyright © 2015 David Tallerman

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  David Tallerman is the author of the comic fantasy novels Giant Thief, Crown Thief, and Prince Thief, the graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science, and The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, a collection of pulp-styled horror and dark fantasy fiction. His short fantasy, science fiction, crime, and horror stories have appeared in or are due in around seventy markets, including Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies; his genre-bending debut novella Patchwerk is due from Tor.com in early 2016. David can be found online at davidtallerman.co.uk.

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  SO STRANGE THE TREES

  by James Lecky

  Love, as the poets have observed, can strike any one at any time. A glance, a word, the aroma of an exotic perfume, and the gates of the heart can be thrown open where previously they had been firmly shut.

  Thus it was with Gunter Alquen, Presiding Officer—or Karteltrager, to use his correct title—of the Place of Blades in the vaunted city of PameGlorias.

  He had not been seeking to fall in love on that particular morning. Indeed his principal thoughts, as he walked down the Allee Carnap in the company of his comrade Alois Engarten, were of breakfast. The day had been a taxing one, although only a few hours had passed since dawn, and he had already presided over no less than six affairs of honour, three of which had resulted in fatalities.

  “I thought the Major fought well,” Engarten said. “He had obviously studied his Cappa Fero and Destreza.”

  “And much good they did him,” Alquen replied. It was true that the Major’s technique had been impeccable—a glowing tribute to the ancient fencing masters whose teachings he had studied—but a well-judged thrust from his opponent had opened his femoral artery and he had bled to death in under a minute.

  Engarten nodded, recognising that his comrade had no wish to discuss the matter further.

  They made a curious pairing, Alquen and Engarten. Alquen was a small man, a shade over five feet in height, with disproportionately long limbs. His face was pleasant enough, although set in a permanently gloomy expression, distinguished only by the long dueling scars that decorated either cheek. Alois Engarten was a good fourteen inches taller, his handsome features complimented rather than spoiled by more his more discreet, though no less honourable, disfigurement.

  Both men wore russet cloaks over burgundy shirts and both carried sabres on their baldrics. But if Alquen’s clothing suggested the funereal and the mournful, Engarten was a paean to the joys of autumn.

  It was a puzzle to many in PameGlorias how these two gentlemen could be friends—the Dismal Dwarf and the Flâneur, as they were called behind their backs—since they appeared to have little in common other than the brotherhood of the sword. Nevertheless, friends and good comrades they were, even if one typically suffered from neck pain and the other from backache as a result of it.

  “Where shall we eat?” Engarten inquired after a short period of silence.

  “Somewhere quiet, I think.” Alquen said. His stomach grumbled, and he had little patience with the early morning hustle and bustle of the Allee Carnap. “Maimon’s, perhaps?”

  “An excellent choice, my friend.”

  They had just made the turn into Teten’s Lane when the clang of bells cut through the air, followed by a series of gruff commands: “Make way! Make way in Parasheeva’s name! Avert your eyes, damn you, avert your eyes!”

  The two friends peered down the Allee towards the source of both the bells and the ill-mannered order, noting how the crowd was parting like wheat before the scythe.

  Coming towards them in a stately procession was a group of green-gowned women, their faces veiled. The loud-mouthed vulgarian at their head was also female, as tall as Engarten but broad-shouldered and with hair the color and texture of moss. She, too, wore the Gown and Veil and swung a brace of heavy, tarnished brass bells left and right with more than enough gusto to crack the skull of anyone foolish enough to disobey her.

  “Parasheeva’s Blossoms.” Engarten said sourly. “A waste of womanhood.”

  “But then, by your standards, every woman who has not graced your bedchamber is a waste.” Alquen replied. His voice was almost a monotone, and Engarten found it impossible to tell if his companion spoke in jest or not.

  The procession drew level with them, and both men took a step backwards, lowering their heads. Worshippers or not, it was never wise to offend the dark gods of PameGlorias. However, a sudden impulse, which afterwards he was never fully able to explain, made Alquen glance upwards as the Blossoms passed. At the same moment, one of the women stumbled—hardly surprising since both her hands and feet were constrained by the ceremonial thorns of her order—and for an instant their eyes met.

  The fates, or the gods, must have been in a jovial mood that day. A puff of air—or the stumble itself, or perhaps a combination of the two—shifted the woman’s veil, briefly exposing her hazel eyes.

  And in that moment, Gunter Alquen was totally and irrevocably smitten.

  “Look away, damn you,” the tall woman barked again, and Alquen immediately obeyed. But the damage had been done, the poets vindicated: the Karteltrager of the Place of Blades had lost his heart.

  * * *

  “Did you see her, Engarten?”

  “I saw nothing but the toes of my boots,” Engarten replied. “And if you are wise, my friend, neither did you.”

  They sat in the cool damp surroundings of Maimon’s tavern, long their regular morning haunt as it was both unfashionable and cheap. Alquen had barely touched his breakfast of eggs and black bread, contenting himself with a glass of chilled hock instead, his appetite dulled somewhat by the power of the Blossom’s glance.

  “But she said so much to me.”

  “She said nothing,” Engarten said. “For your own sake forget about her. It was a look, an accident, nothing more. If it’s a woman you seek, I can introduce you to ten mistresses before the morning is out.”

  “I appreciate the offer, my friend, but I doubt I would feel comfortable in your cast-offs.”

  Engarten grimaced. He knew that his friend did not approve of his many dalliances and that he, perhaps uniquely among the citizens of PameGlorias, had kept himself pure for the wedding bed.

  “See sense, man,” Engarten told him. “This woman—whoever she may be—has promised herself to Parasheeva, and she would hardly be willing to break that promise for...” He hesitated, unsure what to say next.

  “For someone like me, you mean?”

  It was true that Gunter Alquen was hardly the most likely of beaus. His perpetually gloomy face, his habitually dismal moods, and his awkward yet somehow graceful frame hardly painted the typical portrait of a lover.

  “You are my brother-in-arms and my dearest friend, Gunter, I do not wish to see you make a fool of yourself. More than that, I have no wish to see you executed for sacrilege, even if that sacrilege is against Parasheeva.”

  The gods of PameGlorias were many and varied; their worship ranged from the faintly ridiculous to the obscene and fanatical, but each of them had one thing in common: they were jealous and dangerous deities. To provoke or defile them could result in only one outcome. It was not uncommon in the older quarters of the city to see the mutilated bodies of recusants lying on street corners, stiff with frost.

  That should have been enough to deter him, but it did not.

  “I must see her again,” he said. “I will see her again. Will you help me, Engarten?”

  Engarten sighed. “Since you are determined to follow this path, I feel I have little choice.”
/>
  “You are a true and good comrade, Elois,” Alquen said.

  “No,” Engarten replied, a wry smile upon his lips. “I am a romantic fool. But, apparently, so are you.”

  * * *

  The next day Gunter Alquen rose three hours before dawn, as was his custom. He practiced for one hour with the saber and one hour with the epee, then spent the rest of his time studying the scrolls that documented the morning’s scheduled duels.

  They were the usual mixture of cuckolded lovers, besmirched young officers, and hot-tempered bravos determined to show the world their prowess with a blade.

  In his years as Karteltrager of the Place of Blades—sometimes known as the Dueling Quad or, more pragmatically, Death’s Square—Alquen had seen hundreds of young and not-so-young lives curtailed in a flurry of steel. It was his profession and vocation to ensure that the duels were carried out in a prescribed fashion and, where possible, to attempt some compromise or reconciliation between the combatants.

  Moreover, he himself was without doubt one of the finest blades in the Shining City of PameGlorias. In his younger days, he had fought frequently in the Quad, and much blood had been spilled before the ruffians of the city had learned to hold their tongues in his presence.

  The world was entering its final epoch. The day would come, not so impossibly far into the future, when the sun would cease to shine and the sphere become a lifeless, frozen waste. Against such a future, what else could one do but cling to those things which eased and focused the mind—honour, duty, loyalty, faith. And, perhaps, even love.

  With his practice concluded and his business attended to, Alquen dressed for the day in a grey doublet and breeches, then donned his baldric and russet cloak.

  As he stepped from the door of his house and into the small courtyard a flash of color caught his attention.

  There, fastened to the outer handle of his door with a white ribbon, was a single red carnation, exquisite in the pale light of a slowly waking dawn. The flower had been freshly cut, and a droplet of crystal clear sap hung from its stalk like a tear.

  As an automatic response, his hand went to the hilt of his sword, then he shook his head and smiled slightly. A flower, even in PameGlorias, could hardly constitute danger, and he chided himself that his first reaction had been a violent one.

  He picked up the bloom and pressed it to his nose, breathing in its delicate perfume.

  “Flowers, Gunter? Most unlike you.”

  Alquen started at the sound of this voice.

  “It will be sonnets and tunes on the dulcimer next,” Engarten said as he entered the courtyard.

  “Hardly that,” Alquen replied, somewhat flustered. “You are about your business early today, my friend.”

  Engarten glanced up at the gradually brightening sky. “Perhaps a little.” Then he saw the look on Alquen’s face—like a child who has been apprehended in the very act of pulling the legs from a spider. “Forgive me,” he said, “I did not intend to embarrass you.”

  “This was left on my door,” Alquen told him, offering the flower.

  “And by an ardent admirer, if I am any judge.”

  “How so?”

  Engarten shook his head. “It amazes me, Master Karteltrager, that you have lived so long and learned so little.” He took the flower in his long, delicate fingers and held it up to the light. “A red carnation means admiration, an aching heart. Your good looks and winning ways have captured someone’s affections it would seem.”

  “Do not tease me, Engarten.”

  “I neither tease nor mock, my friend—although heaven help me, I wish I did. Think, man, whom might have sent this token?”

  Realization crept through Alquen as slowly as a northern dawn. “Parasheeva’s Blossom!”

  “Even she,” Engarten replied and made a circumspect. but potent, protective sign over his heart.

  Then, to Alois Engarten’s utter surprise, he heard a thing that he had never thought to hear before the sun grew cold.

  The joyous and heart-felt laughter of Gunter Alquen.

  * * *

  The grey morning passed in a blaze of steel and blood: five men died before Alquen and Engarten closed the heavy oak gates of the Dueling Quad for the day. But it seemed to Alquen that each carmine drop that fell to the cobblestones was a tacit reminder of the flower he had pinned to the interior of his cloak. And where once he had taken a keen professional interest in the tactics and techniques that the duelists employed, now he saw their combat as a distraction at best.

  For who cares about, or believes in, the power of death when there is the promise of love?

  “What now?” he asked Engarten as they sat in the familiar gloom of Maimon’s tavern, sipping hock. “Do I send her a token in return?”

  “Aye,” Engarten said reflectively. “Some ambrosia blossoms perhaps, to show that her feelings are reciprocated.”

  “Only that?”

  “You are too eager, my friend, and no woman appreciates an over-eager lover—the ambrosia will suffice for now.”

  “And how is it that you know so much of flowers and their lore?” Alquen asked.

  Engarten grinned and blushed only slightly. “I am a man who loves women,” he replied. “As such I have made it my business to know the many ways to gain their affections.”

  “Gain entrance to their bedchambers, you mean.”

  “Even so.”

  “I do not even know her name,” Alquen said, morose once more. “Or would wishing to do so make me seem too eager, in your opinion?”

  “One step at a time, my friend. Give me a coin.”

  Alquen reached into the purse at his waist and fished out a Golden Wheel.

  At the sight of it, Engarten arched an elegant eyebrow. “Have you nothing smaller?” he said. “A bronze or a brass, perhaps.”

  “Would you put so low a price on love, Alois?” Alquen said.

  “Touché, my friend. Touché, indeed.” He scanned the room until he spotted the urchin who had brought their drinks. “Mersh!” he called, and when the boy approached added sotto voce. “How would you like this?”

  Merch’s eyes grew wide and his gaze rested upon Alquen’s open purse for a covetous moment. “Who do you wish me to kill, sir?”

  Engarten shook his head in a blanket condemnation of modern youth. “Nothing so gauche,” he said, flipping the coin towards the lad. “I merely wish you to buy an ambrosia blossom and leave it upon the steps of the Parasheeva Temple—quickly and discreetly, mind you. And if anyone should ask, you do not know the gentlemen who commissioned this errand.”

  “What gentlemen?” Mersh said. He was a fair-haired youth, with the cunning look that marked the lower orders of PameGlorias. A year or two and he would be running with one of the youth gangs—the Scuttlers, the Patarines, the March Violets or even the Glamour Boys—but for now he was as good an emissary as they could wish.

  “Good lad, “ Engarten said with a smile. Then with the same smile added: “But if I find you have taken my coin and not carried out my orders then I will cut your ears off.”

  The boy vanished as quickly as the coin had.

  “And now what?” Alquen asked.

  “Now we wait for her to respond,” Engarten told him.

  * * *

  The night passed slowly for Gunter Alquen. Lying in his narrow bed he found sleep impossible. The shadows on the wall assumed a sinuous, sensual cast and the noise from the street—the whistles and hoots of the nocturnal gangs as they went about their business, or the sorcerous whispers that filled the night—seemed almost musical to his ears.

  And in his waking dreams he held the Blossom close, felt the satin texture of her skin, smelled the exquisite perfume of her hair, and saw the boundless promise of happiness in her fulvous eyes.

  When the morning came, as at last it was forced to, he chose to forego his usual sword practice—the first time he had done so in many years—and rushed instead to his front door.

  A purple geranium awaited
him. And upon the ribbon that fastened it to his door was written a single word in a delicate hand: ‘Labre’.

  He dressed quickly and hurried to Engarten’s manse on Plessner Street. A cold, heavy rain had begun to fall, washing away the flotsam of the night, and his dulled footsteps barely echoed through the narrow lanes. From time to time he saw dark figures slink away, repelled by the waking day—the last dregs of the nocturnal gangs, their weapons scabbarded until nightfall.

  As he crossed from Tula Lane into Ellice Place he became aware of footsteps behind him. Four men, he judged, their pace increasing to catch up with him. Not all the street gangs went to bed with the dawn, it seemed.

  “Hey!” a harsh voice called. The footsteps increased to a run. “I’m talking to you, Master Shortarse.”

  Alquen stopped and turned. Four bravos—young men barely out of their teens—drew up in front of him. Rainwater dripped from the wide brims of their hats, and their velvet cloaks had been thrown back to reveal that each held a long knife in his left hand and a hatchet in his right.

  “You are wasting your time, my friends,” Alquen said. “My purse is light this morning.”

  The tallest of the group sniggered. “That’s not what young Mersh told us.”

  “Shut your hole, Valentyne,” one of the others said. “Let’s just kill the little bastard and have done with it.”

  “You do not know me,” Alquen said. It was a warning of sorts.

  “We know you have Golden Wheels,” Valentyne said. “And we know that you’re the last man we’ll need to kill tonight.” His smile was yellow against the dark cosmetic on his lips.

  They were young, arrogant and vicious, too sure of their skills. They barely saw the blade that killed them, except perhaps as a blurred silver slash through the rain. Only Valentyne remained on his feet long enough to see Alquen shake the blood from his sword and carefully resheath it, then he toppled forward onto the flagstones, his life pouring out in a red flood that the rain quickly swept away.