Beneath Ceaseless Skies #232

by Scott Andrews

  Was her mother there? Was she watching? There were figures on the rocks, the cliffs that ringed the entrance to the bay. Figures in white, the color of mourning. A dozen of them, three dozen—the whole village it seemed, climbing, standing, lifting something in their arms—baskets.

  They lifted the lids of the baskets, and birds flew out. Not the opal-bellied singers of the forest but the delicate white birds of the shore. Dozens. Hundreds. Flying up, stretching wingtips toward the free open air, calling out in raucous condemnation. Flooding the sky. They wheeled and wailed, and the whole village called to her from the cliffs.

  Come home to us, they called. Come home.

  “They never even watched me go,” the sailor said, but it was too old a wound for sorrow.

  She watched until the island vanished; watched until the last bird vanished, too, and the sea turned dull and gray.

  * * *

  She was in bed again, recovering, in the small room above Jarad’s workshop where she lived. They roomed alone, ate alone, wandered the gray halls alone; they were too uncertain of their fates for friendships.

  The seizures this time had been short but brutal. She had very nearly not survived. Two left.

  “What is my next assignment?” she asked, voice raw as reef-dragged flesh.

  “No more assignments but one,” Jarad said. “You’ve finished your training. You need only make your Mastery.”

  She scowled. How could she have thrown herself so thoroughly into the poison-tamer’s arts, so thoroughly neglected her scent-maker’s studies, and still reached Mastery in the latter before she survived her final poison?

  “It’s your talent,” Jarad said, as if he knew what question she wanted to ask.

  “It’s useless,” she said. “If I become a Master scent-maker, I’ll be stuck here forever. I will never see the court.”

  “You don’t want to see the court,” Jarad said. “It’s more comfortable but far more restricted. You would not go poling down the waterways or wander the museums. You would not attend the dances, except to prowl the edge and ‘sense the drinks of fops, the soups of debauched heiresses. You would never leave your room except to ‘sense. You would be poisoned a hundred times.”

  “I have already been poisoned a hundred times.”

  “You would never see your golden shores,” Jarad said. “Never.”

  “What does it matter?” Sarai demanded. “Why do you care which cage I lock myself in?”

  “Because I cannot abide loneliness,” Jarad said, and rose. “Or the waste of true talent.” He left her to her weakness.

  Sarai did not ask for her Mastery. She did not even think of the task, or what Jarad might choose for her. She focused on poisons. She had two left, only two, but these were the worst of all. She would not be asked to consume tarsnake venom, gillem oil, or maddarek—even the very best poison-tamer could not survive their ravages, only delay them, and a ‘tamer would be no use to the queen if they were too busy keeping themselves alive to see to her.

  Still, the poisons were deadly enough. Varash powder killed slowly; the key was to burn through it quickly, three days and nights of horror instead of the three months it took for the poison to unweave the body. It was one thing to survive by lengthening and lessening the body’s suffering; another to intensify it so extremely and yet maintain the focused will necessary to continue for three full days.

  Bellman’s Sigh was the nearest to the deadly three that could be ingested and still purged from the body. Only hours to kill, sometimes minutes if the heart or lungs were weak. It could not be survived alone, and in this the poison-tamer proved they could work in tandem with a partner, trading off seamlessly when they must rest, when they must sleep. A single second of failure would cause irreparable damage, such that even with the poison purged, the body would fail within the year.

  It was customary for one’s teacher to be the poison-tamer’s partner, but Jarad would not do it for her, even if he had the skill. And so Sarai went to the ‘tamers on the island one by one, accepting their refusals with bowed head and no argument.

  There was one more. Nissa, who had stood at the queen’s shoulder for twenty years before an assassin ended her career—not by poison but with a blade, slid toward the queen’s spine and only Nissa close enough to stop it. She had seized it, turned it, sheathed it in her own thin frame. She lived, in pain. Spasms that came on without warning. Not often; quite rarely, in fact, but even an instant’s inattention could cost the queen her life, and so she had sent Nissa away.

  Nissa had been young the day the snake reared up and bit the girl who would be called the thrice-dead queen; on that day she began her work, but now she was old, and older still for grief. She was not like the rest of them, seized from fields and villages and distant cities. The court had been her home.

  Sarai found her as she often did at the southern bluffs, wrapped head to toe in gray silk seven times as fine as any the others wore.

  “I know why you’re here,” Nissa said. “Jarad told me you’d come. He told the others, too, and told them not to help you, but I will, if you wish it. If you’ll risk it.”

  “It takes only two days,” Sarai said. “You’ve lasted months without the spasms, before.”

  “And sometimes only hours,” Nissa said.

  “I’ll risk it, happily,” Sarai assured her.

  “Did you see the ship that came yesterday?” Nissa asked.

  Sarai hesitated, not because she didn’t know how to answer but because she didn’t know why the question had been asked. Ships came, ships left. They brought supplies, brought food since Felas grew none of its own; they took away the goods the essence-eaters crafted, scents and gems and weapons. Sometimes they took a student away, one who’d achieved the poison-tamer’s Mastery. Or one who’d failed, who like the boy she’d comforted in the night would be sent home at last, with only Sarai’s herbs to keep the scent of rot at bay.

  “I saw it,” she said at last.

  “It brought news,” Nissa said. “The Principalities are displeased with the queen’s trade agreements. They tire of sending holds stuffed with gold and goods for a few small crates of red-bark and oud wood, abalone and ambergris. Not when they have so recently owned the source of such goods.”

  She was talking about Sarai’s home. Sarai had never really thought about how valuable it was, that little island. The only place the red-bark grew. Host to stands of oud-wood trees. The home of the largest abalone with their prized shells. The island called by some Whale-Caller, since they came so often and left their ambergris upon the shore.

  “What will they do?” I asked.

  “They might war,” Nissa said. “But it is more complex than that. They give the names of goods, but what they mean is—as long as only one of us can own it, one of us will be angry.” She smiled thinly. “The queen means to burn it. When all is ashes, there’s no need for war. Though it’s more for spite than peace she wants it done, I’d guess.”

  “What?” As dull and startled as a seabird’s cry.

  “There are other sources for oud-wood and abalone and ambergris,” Nissa said with a shrug. “Not as good, of course. And the red-bark would be lost, but what good is it for anything but rich ladies’ perfumes?”

  Sarai couldn’t answer, couldn’t think. Gone the golden sands, the red-bark trees, the opal-bellied birds. Gray instead—ash-gray, ash over everything, choking the lungs and coating the skin.

  “I need to begin,” Sarai said. “The poison, I need— It needs to be today, now.”

  “There’s still the Varash,” Nissa said. “And you will need to recover from that before the Bellman’s Sigh.”

  “Three days. One to recover,” Sarai said.

  “You need more than that,” Nissa said.

  “I don’t,” Sarai insisted.

  Nissa stared at her levelly. “And to what end? When you are Master, you will be presented to the queen. Do you mean to poison her, with her ‘tamers at her side? Or put a knife in her?
Have you ever used a knife to cut into a living thing?”

  “Yes,” Sarai said, thinking of the rats and birds and toads she’d vivisected, to watch the way they died as poison rotted them inside out or tightened their veins to threads.

  “One that could resist you?” Nissa asked, and Sarai’s mouth closed. “Have you ever concealed a weapon? Have you ever looked a man in the eye before you killed him? Hm. No, child, not a knife. But perhaps you’ll find a way.”

  “If I can only meet her,” Sarai said. The rest, she would fill in.

  Nissa nodded. “I’ll help you, I already told you that. But if you do intend to use the access you win to kill the queen, perhaps you could refrain from telling me. She is my sister, after all.”

  * * *

  Sarai left Nissa on the bluffs. Nissa was only so casual because she did not believe Sarai could harm the queen. But no one had believed Sarai could come this far. She was not the best, but she was the most determined, and she would do what she must.

  She returned to her chamber, where Jarad waited. “Nissa has agreed to help,” she said.

  “How fortunate for you,” he said without expression, and indicated a slip of paper on the table at her bedside. “Should you change your mind about killing yourself, your Mastery awaits.” He left. Sarai tossed the slip of paper onto the floor. She went to her shelf, where she had already placed the Varash pill. There was no point, on an island full of essence-eaters, in trying to kill one another with poison, and anyone careless enough to ingest it by accident was better off dead; she need only ask, and she had been supplied with it.

  She swallowed it dry and sat to wait for the pain to begin.

  She was aware, from time to time, of a cool cloth on her brow and a dry, soft voice, but when she woke on the third day, Jarad was gone. She was dressed in clean clothes, her skin was washed with citrus-scented water, and her hair had been brushed and braided. There was a vial on the table beside her bed, and a slip of paper. She took one in each hand. The left: the poison. The court. Perhaps a chance to save her home; perhaps a chance to return to it.

  Perhaps a certain death.

  This is not your talent, Jarad’s voice whispered, but she shut her heart to it. She crumpled the paper in her palm, made to toss it away.

  Then stopped. She would look, at least, and then she could say her choice was made eyes open.

  The name at the top stilled her heartbeat for half a second. The queen. A scent for the thrice-slain queen. If she liked it, Sarai would have her Mastery; if she did not—well, scent-makers were not killed by their failures, or for them, so readily as the rest. She would have another chance, in a year, that was all. It was the safe path. The coward’s path.

  This is your talent.

  She would not fail the scent-maker’s test, she knew that. She had fierce hope and belief when it came to the poison, but she was not fool enough to call it certainty. But what good was certainty, when it was toward such a useless end? To craft luxuries, amusements? Scents to spice a kiss or a dance, to cover up the stench of wounds, to give stale air the illusion of fresh breezes.

  To summon memory. To conjure distant places. To stir passion.

  She had once made a girl burst into tears, suddenly wrenched back home by a single jasmine-muddled breath. She had started a love affair, and ended one. She knew the people here from days and years of trading stories like scraps of cloth, grown more faded and made more precious by every pair of hands that touched them. She could distill in a single scent the long thread of their lives or a single instant.

  The righthand path: to make life brighter, but not for her. For her, always the gray.

  The lefthand path: to chance death for freedom. Perhaps, to save her home.

  She shut her eyes. Opened them.

  Come home to us, her mother said, and she went to find Nissa.

  “You’ll still need a way to kill him, even if you survive,” Nissa said, when Sarai told her what she’d chosen. “There are ways to kill at a touch. Poisons that seep through the skin.”

  “The poison-tamers would ‘sense any poison,” Sarai said. Every poison had its distinct essence; she could feel them buzzing in the supply room down the hall, where they were kept, their malice clear. Just as she had felt the ambergris, just as she felt the wind-salt-earth of the red-bark she kept in a sachet above her bed. No harmful substance would be allowed within fifty steps of the queen.

  “We are only speaking hypothetically, of course,” Nissa said. “But theoretically, you have learned a great deal of poison, but you have also learned a great deal else. How to mask a scent, how to alter it. How to disguise one thing as another, how to balance something noxious into blandness, how to make the unremarkable exotic.”

  “You’re speaking of scents, not poisons.”

  “I’m speaking of essence,” Nissa said. “Have you never noticed how your scents alter the essence as well as the physical perception of a substance?”

  Sarai stared at the waves. “Why would you tell me this? She is your sister.”

  “Sweet can be transformed into bitter. Love can be transformed into hate,” Nissa said. “I had a home once, too. My sister turned it to ash.”

  “Was she always the way she is now?” Sarai asked. She had trouble imagining the queen as a real person. Sitting next to the queen’s sister, seeing the lines of her face, she had to acknowledge it.

  “Of course not. But one can only live stewing in the fear of death deferred for so long before one starts to rot,” Nissa said.

  “What was it like with her, before?” Sarai asked.

  “Is that what you want to hear?”

  Sarai considered. “No,” she said at last. “Not exactly.”

  “Then what do you need to know?”

  “Everything,” Sarai said.

  When Nissa was done, long after the sun set and stole the barest hint of color from the rock, she clicked her tongue against her teeth. “There’s one more thing you need to know,” she said. “You need to know if you can truly do it. Kill someone. Be killed in turn. They’ll know it was you. You might be able to conceal the poison long enough for it to do its harm, but even if the queen dies they’ll guess the source, and they’ll kill you.”

  “At least I’ll get to see the court,” Sarai said. She imagined she could see the spot of crimson at the edge of the horizon. It was too dark, of course, but she had stared at it so many times it appeared like an after-image in her vision.

  Nissa spat. “You will at that.”

  At dawn they would begin. Sarai could not sleep. She would suffer, she would survive. She would create the poison that could kill the queen, and when Sarai touched the queen’s skin to prove herself by ‘taming the poison in the queen’s veins, she’d pass along a new poison. A masked poison. She thought she knew how to do it. Which poison to use, which essences to blend with it to make it ‘sense harmless.

  The queen would die, and Sarai would die.

  But first, she had to live.

  She stared at the vial. Bellman’s Sigh. One ‘tamer in twenty earned Mastery. Most gave up before it, accepted lesser tasks on the island, other Masteries. Or died.

  A knock on the door signaled Jarad’s entry.

  “Come to argue me out of it?” she said.

  He sighed. “No. I came to sit with you. One way or another, I lose you in a few days. I’d like a little time with you while I can have it.”

  She looked up at him, surprised. She was hardly his first student. Not even the first he’d lost.

  “But you are my favorite,” he said, as if he knew what she was thinking. “And you are the best.”

  “Not at poison-taming,” she said.

  “No,” he agreed.

  “You think I’ll die.”

  “Yes.”

  “It would be worth it.”

  “It would help no one. Least of all your kin,” he said, and when he said it she thought he hid himself within the echo of that last word. “Please, Sarai. It is not you
r talent,” he said, and said no more.

  It is not your talent.

  She set her jaw. It was true; she could not let it be true.

  She held the red-bark sachet to her nose. She saw golden sand, heard her mother calling her home. Saw ash and smelled charred wood.

  You’ll never go home.

  She let the halves of her hope fall away from one another. Jarad was right. It was not her talent. She would fail. She could not go home.

  She took up the slip of paper, on which was written the queen’s name.

  This is your talent.

  She could not go home. But perhaps she could save it.

  * * *

  The day the someday queen had felt the tarsnake’s bite, she was walking with her sister along a disused path, the scent of lemongrass twining around them. They did not see the man by the river until they were quite close, did not think he could be anything but a laborer until they were steps away. And the young girl who would someday be queen did not think, until the man turned and flung the snake, that anyone might fail to love her.

  The someday queen’s sister, ten minutes younger but already less loved, killed the snake with a rock. The palace guards killed the man. The queen’s sister clutched her close and quelled the poison, and the soldiers carried her home. They wrapped her in linen cloth, and her sister lay beside her, hugging her long, bare arms around her body. The queen’s sister smelled of spices and the loamy earth by the river. The not-yet queen’s physicians packed her wound with compresses, sharp and medicinal, full of herbs the poisoned girl could not name. The queen’s sister whispered stories to her, reminding her of the salt-tang scent of their summer home, of the flowers that grew on the hillsides there. Of every place she had felt safe.

  The queen’s sister did not sleep for days. That day and for twenty years after, she kept her sister alive with her craft and her devotion. And when the assassin’s blade robbed her of her usefulness, the queen kissed her brow once and sent her away.

  Other moments, other stories—the death of an advisor, the lilies in the blood-choked water of her first war. Nissa told Sarai them all; she had been at her sister’s side every day, nearly every hour, keeping her alive and watching her wither. Sarai picked among them. Salt-tang, honeysuckle: the scents of bliss. The day that destroyed it: lemongrass and loam, linen and spice. The scent of the husband she loved and who betrayed her: bergamot and amber.