Beneath Ceaseless Skies #183

by Richard Parks

  I know how your wife died. A healing went wrong. She could not do it. The patient snapped and killed her.”

  “Yes,” I say simply. On this very floor, on these very wooden boards that drank her blood. “And I, let me see, I was to attempt to heal Dedéi, but it would be too much for me. So I kill Dedéi, and you kill me in grief, because I harmed a sick child. That’s what you were going to tell everyone.”

  He grins, a twisted thing. “Oh, better. You attempt to heal her but fail and damage her worse instead, like your wife with that man. Dedéi snaps and kills you, but the damage has been done. She dies at home a few days later.”

  I nod. I see it all too well.

  “Of course, if that does not work, there’s always what you described.”

  “And then my lord floods the river, and you get your little war.”

  I breathe and breathe into my deepnames. The subtle weave expands around Brentann.

  “You’d kill your own grandchild for a Bird-forsaken, useless, unneeded war.”

  “You... you weakling! What do you know of men? What do you know of men’s desires? Of glory, conquest, healthy offspring to carry on one’s name? That girl was useless. Who would miss her? My son, my only son, refused to see—always looking for a cure, always hoping... with Dedéi gone, he’ll finally have a real child. My family will recover. Now, the war—”

  I call on my three-syllable and take a step forward.

  When the message arrived from my son, I grieved. I still do. He took a five-syllable and completed his configuration. Three, four, five—the Healer’s Trapeze, perfect for mind-healing. But every healing contains within it its dissolution. The power of the Healer’s Trapeze contains within it the reverse, the power to unhinge and break another’s mind. My son—my child, my fledgling, my Taem, he has committed that crime.

  Is it a crime to stop a crime? How do we know? To what degree can we truly know the full extent and impact of our actions?

  I do not want to force my will upon the world.

  Lulled by the subtle vibrations of my long names, Brentann looks confused, unsure as to what’s going on. I take the last step forward, and stretch up my arms, and put my hands on the sides of his head.

  “Just as I do not heal without consent, I will not use my deepnames to break you.”

  “Coward,” he mutters. The buzz of my magic pushes him gently to his knees. Years ago, on this very floor, my wife’s killer knelt for me, and I extended my deepnames in a healing.

  My hands on the sides of Brentann’s head are firm as I look at the warps and imperfections I could have healed if he let me. There are issues here, yes, but when I look at his mind, I see a person strong and agile and decisive, resourceful and self-assured. I could have helped him, but he refused. His mind is his own, and he is at home in it. There’s nothing in his mind to tell me he’s incapable of choice. He made a choice. If I were to heal him, would he make a different one?

  Perhaps. Perhaps not. But he has not consented to a healing.

  I take a breath and fill his mind with images of the war. My own memories—the fear, the screaming, the cold. People running. People dying, people dear to me and strangers. Healings, always healings. My lord has sheltered me. My memories are not nearly harsh enough.

  I flood Brentann with memories of every soldier I have healed, the battlefield a thousand times, dozens of battlefields, severed arms flying and blood and fecal stench and fire and explosions and falling and falling and flesh torn out in a fountain, pain beyond knowing, falling onto a still-quivering body of a friend, a shower of meat and guts where—

  I do not look too closely when I heal, but I look now. It is my choice, my responsibility. Brentann screams as his mind warps under the weight of borrowed nightmares, sleepless nights without respite, screaming, screaming, screaming, screaming screaming—

  Slowly, I withdraw. I remove the memories one by one, pull them out like a used thread from a stitched wound. I take my time. I do not heal. I put everything back exactly the way I found it.

  When I remove my hands from his head, Brentann has shat himself.

  “I have not warped your mind,” I say. “I have not healed you.”

  He looks at me. His eyes are white with fear. He will not have the memories. In a few hours the last traces of what I’ve done to him will wear off, but he will remember this moment. This feeling.

  “The war,” I say. “The war is an abomination.”

  He topples face forward onto the floorboards.

  * * *

  I step over Brentann’s unconscious body and exit the healing room. I cannot stay here. My body is abuzz with the power I have channeled, with the actions I committed.

  I walk into the golden sunset air. I walk and walk, aimlessly, but I know my feet will carry me north, following the smell of the rotting seaweed in the river.

  Every action carries within it a crime waiting to spring forward. A mortal wound gapes from every healing. Within every defensive act lies an attack, a perversion greater than any good that may come from it. All my life I wanted to avoid. I wanted to be still. I wanted to do nothing. My lord would carry those burdens for me. Make the decisions. Commit the crimes. I would submit to him and float.

  Breath by breath I draw on my deepnames to conceal myself from the world.

  I am nothing. I am a weakling, a coward, a ragi. I act, and I act badly. It is a lie to think I have not changed Brentann. He will remember. He will fear—fear me more than he hates and fears my lord.

  It is a lie to think I have not changed Dedéi. They are alive, and will remain alive, as long as they don’t fall from any more vines.

  I harmed another. Did I save another?

  My healings come undone. Everything unravels. My hopes for the children. My hopes for the world. Even the great work that I poured into the land.

  I shouldn’t have acted today, or in the past. I should never have asked my lord to accept me into his service.

  I feel, from afar, an inhalation, a swelling of someone’s very great power about to burst free.

  My lord’s wards. Brentann has rattled them. My lord will come to protect me.

  He falls in love with everything that moves, Brentann said. But that is simply incorrect. He only falls for people of very great power. His first lover was the Old Royal, that wise sovereign of the sands who knows more about deepnames and the land’s naming lore than all the northern mages put together. And then my lord loved Anda, the only one who could face him in battle, and prevail. And he loves me.

  A mind cannot hold more than three deepnames. Yet I forever hear rumors that Ranravan has more.

  The weave I have constructed will not be enough to conceal me from him. He will find me, and I cannot face him right now. Cannot face anyone.

  Breath by ragged breath, my power heaves. I remove myself from the world. There is an absence where I walk, an emptiness invisible to all. I am nothing. I should never have acted, just or unjust, necessary or unnecessary—because there is an emptiness in me, a wasteland greater than the Burri desert.

  I walk where my feet take me. Towards Katríu River. Towards the bridge.

  From afar, I can see a great roiling of power swallow the upper city. A cloud of mist and lightning devours the spires and roofs of upper Katríu, erases houses, bridges, roads. When I look to the north I see nothing except my lord’s power, unleashed and swallowing the distance between us. Would he have been in time to save me, if Brentann had prevailed? I do not know if it matters to my lord right now, if anything even exists for him except the rage and the overwhelming need to destroy.

  The cloud of his power rolls down through the streets now, it envelops the buildings, drowns the roads, smothers the lights. I do not know what will be left behind, I do not know if any people will remain. From my cocoon of emptiness I sense no life—nothing at all, except my master’s power—and it expands and expands, like Bird’s wings drawn across the far horizon. For him the goddess is never a finch, never anything small—no, i
t is vast, a mythical harptail of desert tales, a bird of storm blue and sunset that envelops the world in her wings.

  By the time I step on the bridge, the land has been devoured into a gray, lightning-rich mist. I stand in it, enveloped, floating, unable to see or hear anything else. Even the bridge beneath my feet is gone.

  My lord has filled the whole world with himself, with the echoes and waves of his presence—and what he did not touch is me. He found me.

  The vastness encloses me securely, completely, but it does not press.

  He’s taken the world away. There is no ground, no sky, nothing to lean on. Just him. Always and forever, it has always been him.

  He wraps his arms of flesh around my body, and the feeling of dense mist begins to fade. We are beneath a starry sky, upon the bridge.

  “Tell me what happened,” he says. “Please.”

  I do, in fits and starts, until the last words stumble out of me. We stand together, silent, wrapped around each other, until the mist recedes, until the emptiness slides off me and into the river.

  From the shelter of his arms I see that the city is back, with its people and noise and its stench and its lights. I look around, towards upper Katríu, and down into the water, but I do not see destruction. I do not see any changes at all.

  He laughs. “I think I’m getting the hang of this, Parét. I learned from you, and put things back the way I found them.”

  I press my face into his shoulder. I have no words for anything. The world, or Bird, or what we have created, what we’ve done. I have been wrong to blame my son for acting. I have been wrong to act. But now there’ll be no war.

  “There’ll be no war,” he says, and the tightness of his embrace reasserts me, just me, a person in the world. Just another person with a warped grid, a person with regrets and choices, with memories of pain and joy, like all the other people who lived a life.

  My master speaks. “You’ve done enough, and more than enough, Parét. Let us go home.”

  “I am already home.”

  I lift my listless arms to hug him back.

  Copyright © 2015 Rose Lemberg

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Rose Lemberg is a queer immigrant from Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Interfictions, Uncanny, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction anthology, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other venues. Rose co-edits Stone Telling, a magazine of boundary-crossing poetry, with Shweta Narayan. She has edited Here, We Cross, an anthology of queer and genderfluid speculative poetry from Stone Telling (Stone Bird Press), and The Moment of Change, an anthology of feminist speculative poetry (Aqueduct Press). She is currently editing a new fiction anthology, An Alphabet of Embers. You can find Rose at roselemberg.net and @roselemberg, including links to her page on Patreon, where she posts about Birdverse, the world in which her BCS stories and others take place.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE FOUR SCHOOLS

  by Naim Kabir

  I.

  The school of Despair can blacken the soul, but a special problem requires a special tool. And if Arzey’s problem was anything at all, it was most certainly special: a precocious girl with big dreams who went by the birthname of Nurya.

  She was thirteen years old, and ever since she was little she could bend fortune to her favor. Just the small things: she’d always win the draw to go with her father into Hadanna proper, or find coins and treasures buried in the forest snow. She was rarely bitten by a darter during wades into the river, and she’d never been sick a day in her life.

  Her sisters taught her how to take advantage early on. At nine she was drawing crowds and winning big bags of money at the dice tables and the coin-wheels. By ten she was dominating the vice houses of the city’s center. When the pit wranglers came after her, she always slipped away without a trace. Never a mark on her. At twelve she’d built enough of a fortune for her mother to hire builders and erect a manor at the edge of their village.

  And that’s when the Monastery of the Task found her.

  Arzey sucked in the winter air and recalled the principles of Despair.

  First, determine necessity.

  He had watched the girl for many months to learn of her character. If she’d had indomitable integrity and compassion, he could have simply drawn from the school of Truth. He could tell her bluntly that her soulname was Garza, that she was a breaker of wheels in a past life, and that she would cause so much loss if she were allowed to live to her remembering. Then he could let her solve herself.

  But she was a rogue of a girl, with loose interpretations of what was good and what was right. The school of Truth would not do. Despair was a necessary measure.

  The second principle: gather information. Learn all you can despite what you remember from past lives. This was the first time Arzey had travelled to Hadanna in his current skin. He remembered that a caste system used to be in place a hundred years ago, but he’d learned that all lifelong vocations were now chosen by a kind of lottery. This drawing occurred on the day a child turned thirteen, whether or not they had endured their remembering.

  The city-center was also much larger than when he’d been here last; it could take a full day to roam from one end to the other where the central span was longest. The buildings were taller, too, and shelled in lovely green stone he’d never seen before.

  These gleanings were kept in a thick leatherbound journal on a hide belt. He wore it across his chest over the simple gray robes of the monastery, only partly obscured by a long scratchy beard. He’d read it for hours before completing the third principle of Despair:

  Find or create a shatter point.

  Just yesterday the critical moment had come and gone. Hadanna’s administrators had set off for Nurya’s house to deliver the Fates of Labor. The ritual was a grand one, involving incense smoke and diagrams chalked into the floor. The magistrate would loose a box of bones across the etched angles and read out the child’s new lifelong duty.

  Arzey decided that he would be the magistrate that day. The black robes and red sash were easy enough to come by, but the ceremonial bone chest and the paperwood incense were a little more difficult. There were no convincing imitations at the markets of Nurya’s village, and there was no time to venture into Hadanna proper.

  The simplest solution was to steal them from the magistrate himself. In the moonless morning of Nurya’s thirteenth turnday, Arzey snuck into the administration’s travelling camp and slipped out, his old bones creaking under the weight of the box and a bundle of fragrant wood. This had a dual purpose: now he had all the trappings of a government official, and the true official would be delayed until the crucial items were returned.

  By noon Arzey reached the manor at the edge of the village and knocked on the front door. Nurya’s mother answered, glancing once at his red and black finery and hurriedly welcoming him inside.

  “Nurya! The magistrate has come!”

  She bounced down the stairs without a care in the world, crossing her arms and flaring her hip. A normal child would’ve been nervous, but Nurya—this most recent skin of Garza the Provoker, he reminded himself—was unshakable. She’d never lost a game of luck in her life, and Arzey was certain that she never would.

  Which was why he removed the element of luck entirely. He drew out all the chalk diagrams and burned incense until the salon smelled of charred sugar, and then with great pomp and magnanimity he emptied the box of bones onto the floor.

  He pretended to count how many landed where and made notes of their locations before drawing up his voluminous robes and breathing in deep.

  “You, Nurya of Mohanna, ward of Hadanna,” recited Arzey, peering deep into her eyes. They were bright and hopeful. He knew she wanted to become artisan and work with gold and iron. “Daughter of Augray and Sarona, whose soul’s name is yet unknown.” Arzey took some small delight in this dramatic play-acting, but it gave him no pleasure to crush her
dreams so thoroughly.

  “It is decreed that you will work the fields and feed the city-state of Hadanna until the next life takes you, and not a year less.”

  The girl’s mouth dropped for a moment, and then her brow dug into an angry ditch and her lip pulled into a snarl.

  “Roll again!” she demanded. Arzey silently turned and began sweeping the bones back into the chest, his face blank. “Roll again!” she yelled, thumping on his back. Her mother restrained her in a tight hug from behind and kissed her repeatedly on the head.

  “It’ll be alright, my baby, it’s okay, it’ll be fine, it’ll...”

  Arzey finished cleaning and gave the Hadanna farewell, a shallow bow with his neck craned far to the left.

  “Roll again!” Nurya was crying now. “Please, maa, tell him to roll again, please.” She looked at him with big liquid eyes, “Please, sir, sir magistrate, please roll again, this is my—please...”

  Arzey looked down at her with a sigh and said, “This is the way. The Fates of Labor have been cast. You will be a good farmer.” And just like that, a shatter point in this girl’s life cracked into existence.

  Arzey’s breath came out in clouds in the cold air. The fourth and final principle of Despair was upon him: shatter the problem and allow it to self-solve.

  Nurya ran away from home and escaped into the forest. Bad season to try and leave without a trace: even with all the luck in the world you could never keep your boots from leaving tracks in the snow.

  Arzey wrapped his shawl tighter around his neck and trekked ponderously through the fresh foot of powder, picking out the footsteps of his quarry as he went. The black columns of tree trunks rose up around him, making the landscape resemble a traditional Theid woodcut: all bold lines and minimal coloration. Perhaps one day he’d return to sear this scene into a block of white pine, but not today. He bottled his awe for a later time and continued with his Task.

  The journey was a silent one. There was the occasional crackle of breaking deadfall and the muffled thump of it falling in snow, but the only constant was the crunch of ice under Arzey’s boots.