The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year One

by Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  “You shouldn’t make him mad.”

  “What, he’ll curse us? Bah.”

  “He’s a powerful man.”

  “Who lives in a cabin in the woods two long days from the city. I’ll take my chances.” The larger man clucks at the horses, and the wagon starts off.

  “I wonder what he needs the jar for?” asks the first.

  And the answer of the second, if it is an answer at all, is cut off by distance.

  ~ ~ ~

  I return to find Maria, curled up upon the floor.

  Did he? Was—he? I look around the room, and then I look again to her.

  She smiles at me wanly. “I tripped, Alrun. It’s my own fault.” She pushes herself up against the rough wood planks, and then gasps in sudden pain. Her hand curls into her chest like the head of a baby bird, before she opens it to inspect a fingertip.

  “A splinter.” She holds it out to show me. I make a motion to take it from her with my remaining whole hand, and she nods.

  The splinter is long enough to be one of my absent fingers, and it takes two tries to pull it free. A drop of blood wells up in its path.

  “My mother used to kiss my cuts.” She stares at her own blood idly, remembering home or food or what I do not know. I walk forward and raise my hands up to her finger, my one hand whole, the other missing all but its thumb.

  She proffers her wound to me, and I pretend to kiss it, with lips that I do not have. I can feel the blood stain the wood of my face, leaching into the dry pores, filling the cracks and crevices with her.

  “You’re a good friend, Alrun,” she says, when I release her finger back to her. She stares at the white dot of her missing skin and picks me up, cradling me gently. Realization seeps into me just as her blood did. She—she is a good friend, too. I wish I had lips now, for the first time, to tell her that.

  “I left a mark on you.” Maria frowns at me, and it stabs me in a way that I have never felt before. She licks her thumb and smudges it fiercely across my face. “He’ll be mad at me, you know.”

  Why would he anger? I have marks enough upon me. I am a creature of sticks and twine, and pieces of me will not stop falling off.

  “I took his key. While he slept. Tonight, Alrun, I’m going to break into the pantry.”

  I shake my head. Would that I’d been given lips, with which to kiss and with which to warn—

  “I’ve got to, Alrun. I’ll die soon, without more than bread crusts to live upon.”

  I shake my head more, and more, and more, till it is in danger of spinning off, and I gesture with my hands. I tug at her skirt and would pin it to the floor were I able.

  She holds me up, and kisses me softly with lips both cracked and dry. “I love you Alrun. I wanted you to know that.”

  “Homunculus!” the Alchemist calls, and I feel the compulsion inside me to go to him, even though I want nothing less. “Into your jar!”

  Maria sets me down upon the ground. “Go to him. Remember that I love you.”

  This, the Alchemist cannot compel me to forget. Nothing can.

  I climb into the jar and it feels small it a way it never has before.

  ~ ~ ~

  I watch the Alchemist toil for hours, preparing for another invocation of Chemia. He grinds and he mixes, he pours and he boils, dancing around the hissing arrangements of glass tubes and burbling molten metals he orchestrates for himself.

  “Come to the hearth, little man,” the Alchemist says, and I do as I am told. He takes me up and tosses me into the glass jar I have visited each of these nights, not the larger one that the prince shipped in before.

  He arrays himself before me, him and all his tools. Piles of powders, red, white, and black, a brass cauldron of liquid green, and last but not least, cupped in his palm, a pinch of something yellow.

  With his free hand, he picks up a stick, grabs fire from the furnace behind him, and lights the nearest pile. Black smoke rises and invades my lidless jar.

  “Crow,” he commands. And like every other time he has told me to do something in my semblance of a life, I do as I am told.

  I know.

  The sticks I am comprised of bend and snap. They fold in upon me, pulling together behind my back, and I am covered in a wave of smoke, no, these, these things—they are feathers. Hundreds of tiny feathers grow. The place I have instead of lips lengthens and a beak emerges, still seamed shut, but I can see it there, between my eyes, until this changes too, and I am limited to seeing only things on opposite sides of my head. A dish of liquid mercury, to my far right. And tongs, to my left.

  He lights the pile of white and a cloud erupts.

  “Swan,” he commands.

  The black feathers recede, and white ones take their place. My arms lengthen as does my neck—soon the jar is too small for me, and I am pressed against it, trapped inside.

  I sorrow.

  The Alchemist pours the liquid green down upon me. Where it touches me, it burns. “Peacock,” he commands. My neck shrinks in length, but my tailfeathers grow and grow and grow. I am a creature of verdant green and striking purple. My heart soars with all the colors I possess.

  I hope.

  And now the final powder is lit, a burgundy as fine as ground blood.

  “Pelican,” he commands, and my tail disappears. Instead, my beak grows to an enormous length. I fold inside the jar, head bowed as if in prayer, until my beak pierces my own chest.

  I bleed.

  At last he reaches forward with his cupped hand. He sprinkles the yellow that he holds there down upon me. It fills my nose and covers my eyes.

  “Phoenix,” he commands. A surge of power runs through me. I am smaller now, but this jar cannot contain me. I am the size of the earth, I am the potential of all things bound into one, and just when it seems my heart cannot swell any larger—

  The Alchemist reaches in with his tongs, quick as lightning. He yanks off one of my feathers, and I see that it is burning, like he holds not a feather but a flame. He plunges it into the mercury bath beside the jar and it sizzles, releasing noxious smoke.

  And then the fire, my fire, seen at first only as an abstract in the feather that he held—it reaches me. I wish for lips anew, with which to scream and beg and plead. For a creature of wood, there is no worse fate than fire. My life, my hopes, my dreams, are all consumed in pain.

  After a life of being told to forget, I now know what it is like to be forgotten.

  I will myself to remember, even as I feel myself turn to ash. I will remember this feeling. I will remember all of them.

  I realize that I am alive, really, truly, alive—just as I realize that I am dying.

  ~ ~ ~

  My jar shakes, opens, and I am released from it.

  “Bring the girl here,” the Alchemist commands, taking up his mortar and pestle again. The larger jar is set upon the empty hearth. I know that I wanted to remember things. What were they, and why?

  “Bring the girl here,” the Alchemist repeats. He looks up to stare at me. “And, last night—forget.”

  The intention to follow his command flutters in my chest, only—I do not feel half so bound to him as I once was. And instead of the urge to forget, my will to remember redoubles. Memories, not dreams, but what I think are memories, rush back to me. Searing pain, but before that—life. I was alive. I think I am alive, still.

  I walk across his desk and see a small yellow feather. I know what happened was real—the feather proves it. The Prince’s price can be paid and we will grow fat on its commission, and then—but this feather is small. I walk past it as though I did not see it, off on the Alchemist’s mission. But I know that it is not what the prince wants—he wants big feathers, from a larger bird, and there is only one reason why we have had these little girls with us for so long.

  The doorways of my mind open up and everything that I was told to forget wells forward. The times when they were trapped, half of bird, half of flesh, cawing his defeat until the Alchemist threw them, whole, into the
furnace. The times that progress was made, only to have them fight so hard they broke the jars, because they’d been made of stronger stuff, not half-starved like my Maria. The times that they’d died before any of the transformations occurred, coughing out their lungs from fumes, or swelling, green and bloated, from ill-mixed acids.

  All of their deaths return to me, everything I’ve ever done or didn’t do, every decision by action or inaction I have made, landing like a flock of birds inside my mind.

  I am alive now. Memories are my price.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Alrun,” Maria says, after I wake her. She clutches at her stomach and shakes her head. “Alrun, I’m so tired. I don’t feel well today.”

  I ignore this and grab Maria’s nearest hand with my remaining good one, and try to draw her up from her bed. Snow is piled high outside, I can see icicles hanging from the roof, and yet—I have to get her away from here.

  I cannot stand to have him pluck her sweet fingers away, one by one, to burn her over and over.

  “Alrun—is he asleep? I stayed up all last night, after I ate dried pork and cheese. And now I’ve got a stomach ache. He’ll beat me for sure, but if I return the key, maybe he won’t realize it for a day or two.”

  He’s not asleep. He’s grinding powders in the next room to transform you into a phoenix. He’s going to make you burn. I shake my head, in answer and dismay.

  “Can you return the key for me? Maybe then he won’t be so mad. He’s never mad at you.”

  I hold up my hand that should have no fingers, just a stumped palm, as evidence of his anger. But I see that now that my fingers are returned to me and only my thumb is gone. I flex them in amazement. Maria, however, has no will to count. She takes my gesture as a sign of the effort I cannot make. “I could tie it to your back, perhaps?”

  I can see it in her face now, so clearly. How and why had I missed it before? Her cheeks are pale, her eyes sunken in, and the line between the bruises he’s given her and the ones she’s gained from lack of food—even I who am so recently born can see the death in her. I would tear my heart out and offer it to her, were it meat enough to save her life. But—now I know. There is a way.

  I take the key from her and loop it about my shoulder, tucking it beneath my arm. And then I gesture for her to follow.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Alchemist picks her up and folds her into the jar. It is a tight fit—had he not starved her for so long, I do not think she would have made it. She lifts a hand in protest and fear sparks inside her eyes before she sees me. I put my finger to where lips would be if I had them, and silently she nods.

  He calls out their names, one by one. Crow, Swan, Peacock, Pelican.

  It is different with her than it was with me. She’s flesh through and through. She has lips.

  She cries. She screams.

  The Alchemist waits for a moment. This might be the only time I’ve ever seen him afraid.

  “Phoenix,” he commands, and she changes. Plumage bursts from her like an opening flower, yellow feathers streaking out and down. Her strength is returned to her—she screams now not with pain, but with power. The world is hers to set alight. The Alchemist takes up his tongs.

  I run forward, unshouldering the metal pantry key, and hit it against the glass as hard as I can. She bites at him with her beak from inside the jar.

  “Homunculus! Stop it!”

  I strike and strike and strike again. He swats at me, knocking me back, and she still fights, until the jar teeters, tips, and falls with a crash of glass. Where the broken glass touches her it melts away, rolling off of her like tears. She streaks upwards in flight, through the rafters. Her fire catches on timbers and wood begins to split. Sparks shower down, landing atop papers. Years of research turns to ash, and smoke fills the room.

  She is free. As am I. I run beneath the door and to the rat-hole, leaving the burning cabin behind.

  ~ ~ ~

  I think I know where I will find her. It takes me a long time to walk there on my own. I am light enough to walk atop even the freshest snow, but it is almost dawn when the distance is covered. And she is there, my Maria, in the clearing, just as I knew she would be.

  She lies on dry earth now, scorched from where she fell, like a comet to the ground. Beneath her shift she is whole and plump, like ripe fruit, and she sleeps.

  I walk up to her face and touch along the line of her full lips, and she smiles in her dreams before waking.

  “Alrun—are we free?”

  I nod. I think we are. She picks me up. “I feel much better now. What happened?” She looks down at herself and then around. The early snow is melting. We can walk to the main road and wait for a rider to pass. I’ve been there. I know where to go.

  “I wish I knew what happened,” she says, cradling me. “I wish you could tell me.”

  I shake my head. Even if I had lips, I would not utter a word.

  ~ ~ ~

  I think the Alchemist lived. I think some days he tries to call me back to him still, because I can feel his will flutter in my chest. But there’s a different feeling there now as well—my own volition.

  So I serve another master now. I serve my Maria, by choice.

  And she never asks me to forget.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Erin Cashier is a nurse at a burn ward in the Bay Area. Her fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future XXIV and is forthcoming in Shimmer Magazine.

  THE MANSION OF BONES

  Richard Parks

  THE TWO GHOSTS APPEARED with the rising of the moon. At first they were nothing but mist, each hovering over the pile of stones on either side of the path that marked where the gate towers of the Fujiwara compound had once stood. Large sections of crumbling wall remained, but the gate itself had long since fallen.

  So much of the atmosphere of sadness and misery of this place filled the senses that one might easily make the fatal mistake of overlooking the ghosts entirely, if one—unlike me—wasn’t expecting them. Beyond the opening I could see the grassy mounds that contained the ghosts’ handiwork—piles of broken, moldering human bones. They were sobering reminders of how easily Kenji and I could join them.

  At such times I was all too keenly aware that I had not had a drink in over a week. I waited for the ghosts to finish their manifestation while Kenji, blissfully ignorant, waited on me, but I would not be rushed. Only now, with the two wretched spirits before me, did I finally understand the full extent of my mission here. Even so, I did not yet see what path I would need to take to complete that mission, and our lives were in the balance.

  “Don’t you feel it?” I asked. “The unrelenting sadness of this place? It sinks into my bones like the cold of winter.”

  “Lord Yamada, you’re a moody sort in the best of times, and I know you don’t like ghosts,” Kenji the scruffy priest said. “I’ll exorcise them if you wish, but you’ll have to hold the lantern.”

  I sighed. “First, no one asked you to do so. Second, you charge exorbitant rates for such services. Third. . .tell me again why you’ve insisted on accompanying me? I didn’t believe your story about wanting to see the countryside, you know.”

  Kenji smiled a rueful smile. “If you must know, matters are a bit unsettled for me in the Capital at this time. Therefore I felt it prudent to make this journey with you.”

  “You could contain the abundance of my surprise in the husk of one grain of rice, with room to spare. Who was she?”

  Kenji looked at the moon. “The wife of a minor palace official. You wouldn’t know her.”

  “Neither should you.” I thought of saying more on the subject, but dismissed the idea. It was pointless to scold Kenji. He was what he was, and even a reprobate monk with both the appetites and the piety of a stray cat had his uses. “I hope you brought your prayer beads. We may yet need them.”

  “So I surmised. What have you led me to?”

  I started to remind Kenji that I had led nowhere; he had simply followed. I did not, since that reminder
was pointless too. We were three days from the Capital along the southern road toward Nara, safely through the bandit town of Uji, and now outside a ruined compound that, I was reliably informed, had once belonged to the former provincial governor, Fujiwara no En. “Former” as in nearly one hundred years previous to the rein of the current Emperor Reiza.

  “My client insists there is an object somewhere in this compound that once belonged to her family. I have been engaged to reclaim it. That is all you need know.”

  “So your client is a Fujiwara. And the ghosts?”

  “Rumor, but a very consistent one, which fortunately I believed. Now please be quiet for a little while.”

  There’s not much you can tell about a ghost if its preferred manifestation is little more than a vapor, but I was given to understand that these two normally presented themselves in a more substantial form. After a few more moments, it was plain to me—and especially Kenji—that this was the case.

  “They’re women!”

  I sighed. “Your morality may be suspect, but your eyes are still good.”

  The figures were still vapor from the knees down, but from the knees up, they had the appearance of two very pretty young women with long black hair and cold, dark eyes. There was menace and suspicion in those eyes, but also a sadness almost beyond bearing. Now I knew the source of the melancholy I had felt the moment I came near to this place. I had seen ghosts times beyond counting, but I found that I could not look into these pitiful faces for very long.

  They were clearly aware of our presence, but they said nothing, merely hovering over the twin sets of ruins, watching us.

  “The Chinese say that ‘to make love to a spirit is to know the ultimate pleasure,’” Kenji said a little wistfully.

  “They also say that to love a ghost is to die. Is that a price you’re willing to pay?”

  Kenji sighed again. “Such is the nature of the bargain that one wouldn’t know the correct answer to that question until it was too late. Still, they are lovely.”

  “Were, Kenji. They are dead and have been for most of the past hundred years. And unless you want to join them, stay where you are, keep quiet, and leave this next bit to me.”