Beneath Ceaseless Skies #183

by Richard Parks

  Jhor put his hands on his hips. “Okay, fine.” Then he brightened: “Now, tell me about the copper and iron. Why did they tingle when we put them in wine?”

  Arzey clapped his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Well, there are a few interesting ideas...”

  * * *

  They ate by the fire in the center of the village. Jhor’s mother had made them a curry of yellow spices and fried cheese with disks of soft bread.

  “What did you boys do today?” she asked between mouthfuls.

  Jhor answered, “I perfected a lens series, mixed a new fertilizer, and I think I came up with some good theories about the flow of metal essence!” He could be very aloof, but with his mother, Jhor smiled often.

  She said, “That all sounds very good and much too clever. But I’m glad you’re being productive.” Jhor nodded and scooped up more cheese with a chunk of bread.

  “Your son is very intelligent,” said Arzey. “Capable of greatness.”

  His mother beamed proudly, and he slipped into a trance to hide the things he felt inside.

  * * *

  The workshop was bustle of vials and glass racks, levers, pulleys, thin lenses, and all sorts whirring contraptions. The boy had been busy with his work. Arzey exhaled slowly. Such a waste.

  “Today I give you your final lesson,” he said.

  He produced the silver flask and placed it on the workshop bench. It landed with a thwack, and Jhor flinched.

  “It’s not a lesson in reagents, metallics, light, or medicine.” He gathered his robes about him. “It is a lesson of identity.”

  “Identity?” Jhor laughed uneasily. “As in, mathematical identity?”

  “Metaphysical identity. Yours. This is going to be difficult to understand, but I’ve been trying to prepare you for just that. To help you cope. It’s the kindest thing I could do.” Arzey uncapped the flask and smelled the contents, placing it back on the workbench. “Your soul’s name is Garza, and deep down, you are a breaker of wheels.”

  “I know.” Garza had moved to the entrance of the workshop, his hand ready on a heavy lever. “I remembered three months ago.”

  He pulled.

  Even with all his training Arzey couldn’t leap out from under the weighted net. He quieted his panic and observed:

  The net was made of copper wire, meshed together in crosshatch. Bulb weights were regularly spaced on the grid, made of a very crude lead. One of the bulbs had landed on his knee and his bones were most likely broken. Shining metal lines snaked their way into the hidden attic, and there was no easy way to worm out.

  Garza moved to another lever and slammed it down.

  It was as if pain itself was a living thing that crawled down those wires and jumped into Arzey’s flesh. His body shook and shuddered uncontrollably even as his mind floated placid. If his knee wasn’t broken before, it surely was now. The convulsions against the press of a weight had caused the leg to jut at an odd angle.

  Garza lifted the lever and it stopped.

  “Copper in wine is well and good, but I’ve found that the best configuration is gold and hadannum in boiled vitriol.” He pointed up at the ceiling. “I have cells and cells of the stuff up there. Interesting discovery: their efficacy is additive.”

  Garza pulled down the lever for another long pulse and then lifted it back up.

  “The most important lesson, really, is what it tells us about the fundamentals of this world. The essence of metal flows down those wires, but what is it, exactly?” The lever came down again, and Arzey’s robe caught fire. “Pain. Pure pain.” Another pull. “Inside metal, maybe even inside stone, if I can find the proper solvent. At the very core of matter itself.”

  Garza put out the fire with a bucket of wastewater from a bench of salts and fluids. Arzey slowly slipped his hand under a lead bulb while Garza wasn’t looking and rolled it into his palm. With all of his strength he threw the net aside—but there was too much mesh. He was still covered.

  “Don’t try to escape.”

  Arzey strained against the weight. “Why are you doing this?”

  Garza stopped. “You’ve put me on the wheel more times than I can count, and you’re honestly asking me why I’m doing this?” He crouched down to look Arzey in the eye. “I have decades and decades of death ringing in my head. You understand? I’m trying to teach you exactly how that feels. I know you probably just go into your monkish meditation, but it does me good to see you shudder.”

  He stood and gave the lever another pull.

  Arzey gasped as he regained control of his breathing: “I did my Task as was needed. You are a danger to everyone around you. You should drink from the flask.”

  “You know what the worst thing about you is?” He crouched down again. “In all the years you’ve been sent to end me, you never asked why. You never waited for me to wake up, never just asked, ‘Oi, Garza? Why? Surely you aren’t just mad?’”

  “There is nothing that can excuse erasing a life.”

  Garza shook his head, “See? Even now. You can’t see anything besides your Task.”

  Arzey struggled to look up from under the weight of the steaming net. “Why?” His body shook from the effort. “I’m asking you now: why?”

  “Every time you’re killed you go back to the Field.” Garza shook his head at Arzey’s puzzled expression. “No, not ‘the Field’ as in this place where you live. The actual Field. Silver wheat. White sun. Constant, constant happiness. A place so perfect that pain doesn’t exist.”

  Arzey lay silent.

  “You only spend a short time there, and then it’s back to the wheel. Back here. But it’s there.” Garza’s eyes were manic. “It’s out there, and I just want to know what it is. It’s where we come from—is there any greater question?”

  Arzey raised his head. “Pehaps: how can we make this world just as happy?”

  Garza shook his head, disbelieving. “There’s no arguing with you. And I’ve had enough of seeing you convulse.” He spun a wheel, and the copper net folded up into the ceiling. “This is the situation. Someone is going to end up killing me. Someone, somewhere.”

  Arzey turned over on his back, finally able to breathe.

  “I know the usual tactics aren’t going to work with you, monk. So I’m asking you plainly: who do you want gone? Some innocent bystander? Or you?” Garza shoved the handle of a knife into Arzey’s hand.

  There had to be some way to subdue him. Arzey glanced around, but he realized that mobility was severely hampered with a broken leg. Several of his muscles failed to properly respond, as well. The metallic essence had damaged many things.

  “Don’t think, monk, just do.” Garza took the silver flask and poured out some of its contents. He filled a few vials with dark liquids, mixed them in a pitcher of water, and put them inside with the honeyed poison. He shook it like a tavern keep and forced open Arzey’s mouth to pour it down his throat. “Remember, I’m smarter than you. In about five minutes, you’re going to fall into a very deep sleep and I’ll be long gone. And someone’s going to spin off the wheel for all time.”

  Arzey felt a creeping hand working through his innards.

  “That’s how much time you have. Are you going to use that knife, or will someone else?” The feel of cold needles pricked the inside of Arzey’s bones. “You know, don’t think I haven’t noticed that telescope you wear around your neck. Sentimental, maybe?” Garza leaned above him. “That belonged to Laran. Maybe after you go to sleep I’ll go look for her.”

  Arzey’s head snapped up.

  “Oh?” Garza smiled. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe some of the usual tactics are going to work.” The world grew hazy, and Arzey could feel his lids begin to droop. “You’ll be out for a day or so. Enough time for me to get on a boat and disappear. I wonder where Laran is, nowadays. It’ll be a huge loss for the world after she’s gone, you know.”

  A complex mixture of nausea, a lives-long exhaustion, and the sensation of a sleeping limb swept across his body.r />
  “I wonder what techniques I might use? She may be too aloof to threaten a loved one with. Maybe torture? Or maybe—”

  Arzey slit Garza’s throat as cleanly and painlessly as possible, and the Provoker smiled almost as if in gratitude.

  The two bodies fell into their respective slumbers.

  * * *

  For the first time in all of his lives, Arzey saw Pilae cry. She and the others lit the thousand flaming kilns in the Funerary and passed around the begging bowl. It was made of simple stone with a long handle and an iron bottom, but inside was a heap of gold.

  “A thousand kilns for a thousand sacrifices,” said Mosa, as he passed the bowl to Turan. Turan held the bowl over a flame and repeated the phrase, passing it on to the next monk and the next. It made its rounds over long hours until it came to Pilae, who held it inside the final oven.

  “A thousand kilns for a thousand sacrifices, and now a golden end.”

  They marched in procession towards the field of crooked columns—each built of one stone for every life a monk spent in service to the Task. Arzey’s column towered a storey up, and the monks required ladders to climb to its peak.

  Pilae repeated, “And now a golden end,” and all the monks chanted. She swirled the fluid gold in its bowl before pouring it on top of the pinnacle stone, capping it forever.

  The School of Murder was unofficial and untrained. There were no principles and no preordained steps. It was simply accepted among the monks that when there was no other recourse, it was allowable to give up one’s soul to save another.

  Only five other gold-tipped pillars shone from their places in the field.

  Legends, all.

  Pilae crushed him close and spoke into his ear. “What will you do now?”

  He patted her softly on the back. “Travel. But I will come to rest here when it is time.”

  She nodded silently and wiped her face clean of tears.

  “We’ll keep your grave close.”

  * * *

  Arzey was accustomed to meditating or training on long voyages, but now he simply sat and watched. The sea was a beautiful thing. At times it would foam and chop into hard-angled waves, at others it would roll softly like dunes of sand. On windless days it would turn to glass, gold when the sun was low and deep blue when it was high. At night the waters could come alive with creatures that shone like the planets and stars, a mirror to the expanse in the sky.

  His first stop was Pirrhos, the place he’d left behind in his seventh life to take up the Task for the first time after his death. His family was no longer there, of course. But the mountain was. The fountains, too. And Gian’s Library was finally finished: a gleaming thing of white marble and silver spars, filled with more texts and stories than anyone could possibly count.

  He slept at a guesthouse and read for a month before setting off again for Avina, where he’d helped his father pick grapes at the start of his ninth life. It was the wine capital of the Field, and Arzey had not partaken in many hundreds of years. The sommeliers of the city guided him through the worlds of taste and sensation step by step. First with the sweet greens and iced whites, and later with the dry dark reds and boiled purples. From simple alcohols to more complex tinctures: truffled, wooded, and oiled concoctions that pulled you through other worlds and other times. Arzey stayed for a while, tasting visions of the Great Wheel and the space between spokes that were his many lives.

  His third voyage was aboard an ocean-trawler on a heading for faraway Hadanna. Its route was purposefully meandering, he was told, so that the on-board seeker could collect as many samples of unique sea creatures as possible.

  “That’s quite a tarnish you’ve built up on that spyglass, there.”

  The man was slim and pale, with an easy lean and a face that was used to winking. He held out his hand, and Arzey gave him the now-black telescope, a matte hole in the sunlight. They walked belowdecks as he spoke:

  “This is what you do,” he said, swiping a fistful of butter from the galley. “You get some fat, any fat’ll do—” He danced into a pantry and scooped up a small vial of dust. “And you get your lye. The rougher the stuff, the better.” He took a hard sponge and wiped the butter and lye onto the black surface of the scope, stopping once to pour an oilskin of salt water onto the mix before rubbing vigorously.

  “Give it a good rub, and,” his voice strained, “And there you have it. Clean as a slade’s tooth and twice as shiny.” Then came a look of recognition. “Wait, where did you get this?”

  Arzey cocked his head. “It was a gift from someone very dear to me. Why?”

  The man smiled: “I invented it.”

  * * *

  The two struck a deal for the second time: Laran would have the curious monk’s help in collecting and studying the glowing stars of the deep sea, and Arzey would have free passage to all the homes he’d left behind in his past lives.

  “I never thought I’d see you again. Not after...” Laran trailed off and let the heavy silence of a soul destroyed by Garza weigh in the air. “Not after our hypothesis was proven wrong.”

  “Neither did I. I was going to go looking for you, someday. But it seems you’ve found me instead.”

  “Almost a little too lucky.” It had been almost two lifetimes. For Arzey they had passed in single-minded dedication, but Laran must’ve lived full lives, rich with invention, and adventure, and love. “I’d have to do the mathematics, but the likelihood of us meeting by chance is near nil.”

  Arzey quoted, “‘With an infinity of lives, anything that can happen will happen.’“

  Laran grabbed his hand. “Oh I know that. I’m just saying it’s lucky that it’s happened to us.”

  He smiled and silently agreed. “So,” he said, looking out over the larboard rail. “Where do we go next?”

  Laran’s teeth flashed. “Well, this is hardly dictatorship, you know. Where would you like to go?”

  * * *

  After sampling every kind of sweet in Hadanna they took an overland route to the outskirts of Dumma. The cabin had all but crumbled, but the stone observatory was still standing strong. The gigantic telescope angled up at the heavens, and the lenses were as clear as the sky.

  Laran brushed the dust off the desk and took a seat at the viewer. He called Arzey over and showed him the sight: a distant spiral of bright stellar cream that hung enormous in the night.

  “Circles in circles in circles,” he said. “Wheels spinning on wheels, forever.” Laran ran his hand through Arzey’s hair. “I have to say that I very much like spinning with you.”

  Arzey chuckled as he stared, awestruck.

  “What was it you said that night? On the scaffold of the first tower. You were being greedy.”

  “Hm. I’m not sure.”

  “Just one person. ‘For this life and seven more.’” Laran poked him in the chest, waiting with expectant eyes.

  Arzey smiled weakly, knowing this would be the last lie he would ever have to tell.

  “For this life, and seven more.”

  Copyright © 2015 Naim Kabir

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Naim Kabir is a novice who was lucky enough to get noticed: by Clarkesworld, The Journal of Unlikely Stories, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies; “On the Origin of Song,” his first BCS story and first published text story, was named to the 2013 Locus Recommended Reading List and reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2014, ed. Rich Horton. If you’re feeling generous with your time, you can follow him on Facebook, on Twitter, or at his site at KabirCreates.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE SONS OF VINCENTE

  by I.L. Heisler

  Before it hardens, stone boils. In the mountains where I was born, it flows through rocky veins, oozes like blood from the earth’s wounds, and erupts from great gashes. We fled there, to a cave of hardened lava.

  “You will be safe,” my mother said. “Men fear this mountain.”

  I was
a mere hatchling, my snakes no more than worms wriggling on my scalp. I asked what ‘fear’ meant.

  Her serpents answered, for when she kissed me they coiled around mine, so tightly that she had to disentangle them with her fingers.

  “Stay ‘til I return,” she said.

  I had never been alone. I waited, eating mushrooms and ferns and making play by tossing pebbles at the bats overhead. An hour seemed a year; the afternoon, eternity. Thinking she had forgotten me, I left to find my way home.

  She lay in a quiet glade, sprawled between two petrified hounds, one crouched with its gums drawn back, the other halted mid-leap and lying on its side. Her body was unscathed, excepting her head, which was gone. All that remained of it was one snake, cut away by the sword and writhing in the grass. I remember the coolness of its scales as it died and the lingering warmth of my mother’s body when I curled up beside her.

  It might have been a day, or longer, when I woke to a hand pressing my face into the soil.

  “Do not look at me, boy.”

  Another man would have killed me. Piero, as I learned, never met a wounded beast he did not try to save. He pulled a sack over my head and took me to his home.

  I thrashed and wailed when he plucked the snakes from my scalp. But when the plucking was done, and he took the sack from my head and wrapped me in a blanket, crooning, I clung to him. For children in distress will be monsters, but unlike true monsters they are quick to forgive.

  I grew up in the cabin Piero shared with his other foundlings—a wounded goshawk, a crippled fox, and countless abandoned fledglings he would nurse until their wings gave them flight. My serpents did not grow back. I was like any boy, unusual only for my baldness and an odd affection for snakes, which would not strike at me or flee but twined around my arms and wormed into my pockets. To feed them I trapped mice, placing crumbs in a narrow-necked jug against which I would lean a twig so my victims might climb to the lip and drop in.