Beneath Ceaseless Skies #179

by Therese Arkenberg

  Issue #179 • Aug. 6, 2015

  “The Grace of Turning Back,” by Therese Arkenberg

  “The Exile of the Eldest Son of the Family Ysanne,” by Kendra Leigh Speedling

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE GRACE OF TURNING BACK

  by Therese Arkenberg

  The Tynesi merchants, who traded everything from the silver rice of Timru and perfume leaves from Simrandu to chips of ivory off the Keld’s temples, had a term for a particular sort of improvidence: to throw money, time, or strength into seeing to completion a bargain they had already got the worse end of. It’s all After-Bad, they’d say.

  A useful phrase. Aniver vaguely remembered his clearheaded pleasure at first learning it.

  That pleasure blossoming within his soul had been sacrificed to fuel a magelight to chase away Semira’s nightmares as they approached the edge of the world. It hadn’t meant much to him, had not made up more than a candlelight’s worth of his being, but Aniver was down to the dregs of his power now. And he was draining those dregs, perhaps After-Bad, but he didn’t think they would do much good where he was going.

  They had no road to follow anymore; instead, they trudged over trackless hills where jagged spears of rock rent the thin soil. As they came down the far side of one, one misplaced foot sent Aniver and Semira stumbling into each other, uprooting half the spindly grass on the slope as its tufts tangled around their heels. Semira laughed, and Aniver tried to join her, but it turned to coughing instead. She thumped his back as they waited for the dust to clear.

  It didn’t.

  It was more than dust, it was haze; it was shadow permeable to vision, but not light, darkness they could see through. Only nothing was there to see, except darkness.

  “Does any of this look... familiar?” Semira asked.

  Aniver shook his head; at least they could distinguish each other. “The last time, I was dying,” he pointed out.

  “That’s how most people come to the Kingdom of the Dead.”

  He wished she hadn’t named it. Which made him a coward, but then so was everyone when it came to this. The Queen Herself feared death. Though not everyone took the twists and turns Aniver had attempted—he’d tested death in Simrandu; and they’d come to Simrandu by way of cursed, Storm-racked Arisbat, which they’d reached after a long pursuit that had begun in the Tindalo pass. And before that, he and Semira had faced the Queen of Yesterday, and before Her lost Damartis submerged beneath the Glass-Clear Sea. All those lesser horrors, to put off this.

  Aniver stood, brushing dust from his jacket. Kahzakutri couldn’t be used to receiving men into Her realm who looked their best; perhaps it would throw Her off.

  “I think I’m expected,” he said.

  “Does that ease the way for us?”

  “I’m permitting myself to hope.”

  Hope was nourishment for the soul; of course he encouraged it.

  Semira smiled weakly at him, and together they strode forward. Between one step and the next, they reached the borderland.

  The gray wastes they had crossed before were only a warning, the sign before a threshold. Beyond the trackless hills was shadow, and beyond the shadow, the world vanished. And the darkness in its place was hungry.

  It swallowed him, whole. Without knowing where he was, without being anywhere, Aniver found himself disappearing. Lost without perspective or proportion, without sense or logic.

  “This feels... somewhat familiar.” He spoke without knowing whether Semira could hear him. If she could, he wanted to comfort her.

  There was something like a sensation, then; something like falling.

  Forward, slowly.

  Then down and very fast.

  The Northern edge of the world was both accessed and guarded by the Great North Road. To walk it took twelve years of focused preparation, and one misplaced step would send the walker plummeting—much like this, Aniver supposed. In the South the world ended at an ocean, azure waves slowly becoming thinner, heavier, darker. The world’s eastern border was the River of Rebirth, teeming with the new souls that crawled up onto its banks: an exhilarating, frightful and uncertain sight.

  Kahzakutri’s realm was also bordered by a river.

  It splashed around him as he landed, although it wasn’t water. As it closed over his head, Aniver felt his clothing soak in the liquid (he still had the clothes he had come here wearing, and the body), but at least it didn’t permeate his flesh.

  He thrashed until he broke the surface with his head and shoulders. He heard Semira sputtering beside him.

  “Don’t drink any of it!” he shouted. “It’s either Alteration or Unmaking!”

  Those two together, plus the River that made Growth, created Time; a few drops too many of Unmaking had passed over Nurathaipolis and destroyed it. Semira’s sputtering quieted, although he heard her snort to clear her nose and then breathe heavily through it.

  The not-water was agitated, but he couldn’t sense a current. Yet, if it was Unmaking— He remembered the ice of its anti-substance that formed the Tenebrous Throne. If it was Unmaking, it might already be too late for them. But it meant they had come close.

  “Head for shore,” he told Semira.

  “Funnily,” she gasped, her arms paddling to keep her above the surface, “I’d had the same idea. I think it’s this way.”

  She, having been raised around Timru harbor in a family of captains and sailors, swam better than and soon outpaced him. Dark waves churned in her wake, twisting to one side, and he began to reconsider the lack of a current. Yet all he could do was swim after her and hope to catch up.

  He found the shore first.

  Touching something more unyielding than liquid, he grasped it and pulled himself up. He lay gasping in air that stank of nothing. Only when the lids of Aniver’s eyes fluttered did he realize they had closed. Before he could doubt the wisdom of it, he opened them.

  His first impression was darkness, but that was only a translation. Nor was there any source of light. But it wasn’t a hungry darkness, didn’t want to draw him anywhere or devour him, and he could sense in it, almost as if he could see. The river surged at his feet, and instinctively he stepped further up the uneven bank of hard-packed, dustlike stuff that simply couldn’t bother to be flat.

  He looked across the river and saw...

  Whatever they were, they weren’t living. They teemed in the thousands, the millions. They stood shoulder to shoulder, or perhaps even shoulder in shoulder. Transparent, like mist, like crystal. As gray light caught their faces, they glittered like tears or diamonds. Like diamonds, they were precious. These uniquely shaped, painstakingly formed, lifelong works: these treasured, dead, immortal souls.

  If the dead were not beautiful, it was because they were gems in a poor setting. And the setting was very poor. Its tarnish lingered along their edges. And they were so transparent—they could be seen, grasped as a wondrous whole, but their details were impossible to make out.

  Not so Semira, where she stood among them—a violence of color, defiantly opaque. She wrung unwater from her braid and tossed it over her shoulder. Her fingers rubbed her eyesockets, he assumed to clear more drops from her eyelashes. Only then did she look around.

  Aniver waved desperately from the opposite shore.

  “Oh, don’t worry about her,” a voice said in the silence above him. “The Dead are good company.”

  His shoulders stiffened as the speaker made a sound like a parody of laughter.

  “Well, they’re harmless, at least. And don’t fear the river, either. This is Alteration, no
t Unmaking. And I think making this journey would have changed you anyway.”

  He turned around. Kahzakutri reclined, seemingly at ease on the solid nothingness of the Tenebrous Throne overlooking the riverbank. As he stepped before Her, Her gaze flicked over him from head to foot. “Aniver,” She said at last. “Of Nurathaipolis-That-Was.”

  “Your memory is very good, Majesty.”

  “I have nothing to do but remember.” She pursed Her lips. “You were nearer dead when I last saw you.”

  In light of how She’d spoken of the dead, he wasn’t sure whether She meant that as a compliment or insult. Aniver bowed graciously anyway, just at the honor of being addressed.

  “They are not all as unhappy as you might think,” She continued. “Memory preoccupies many of us. And dreams. We can do that more easily now; our minds, such as they are, prove clearer... less distracted. Free of everything that plagues us in life. Here, we are as whole as we can ever be.” She snorted.

  He followed Her gesture as She pointed across the river. At first he thought She meant Semira, but then he saw the figure beside her. Less... faded than the others, Aniver thought. Dead, perhaps, but not—mortal.

  The being was armored, dark-skinned, with a cap of thick shining black hair. He could not make out its face. Graceful, it stood slighter than he was yet taller than Semira—and bore four black wings curving from its straight shoulders. A Grace. He’d never seen one before.

  “Cassiel,” Kahzakutri said, “Grace of the Death of Kings.”

  Aniver frowned. “There are no kings anymore.”

  “No, not on your side of the world. Cassiel is a very accomplished Grace.”

  “Was, surely, your Majesty?”

  Now Kahzakutri scowled, and Aniver realized it was a mistake to attempt courtier’s flattery. The fact that he had no skill at it only made it more insulting.

  “No, Aniver,” She murmured. “Is. Cassiel had the chance—as all Graces do, when their time is done—to be reborn as something new, a more relevant power. Enzukai of the First Fires became Haveia of the Hearths. Cassiel could take other Deaths... but no more Kings. And so Cassiel chose to remain here, with the last king.” Her pointing finger drifted to another figure, one of the transparent dead.

  Aniver frowned, pondering. It was a habit of his—the habit of a wizard, breaking facts and implications down to their essence. And it was essences he noticed here. Enzukai-Haveia remained a Grace of fires. Identities shifted, yet remained essentially themselves. He, too, had a core—one unfaltering aspect, which even in all his sorcery and experience had not altered and had not been sacrificed. Nurathaipolis. His home.

  The last time he stood before Kahakutri, he had been dying, and She had known his thoughts as her own, as She knew everything the dead knew. Now he was hidden from Her.

  He wondered if She, too, had a core that remained.

  “Your Majesty, would you encourage that? A spent Grace’s return to the land of the living?”

  “For a time. All things return to me in the end.” Her gaze, and the deathly cold blade of Her attention, pricked him. “I should warn you, however—Graces are not buildings and streets. Is this some disguised plea for me to restore the Polean cities?”

  Aniver looked past Kahzakutri to Semira. She’d risen to her feet and now was pacing, looking up at her companions. When she turned—not towards Aniver himself, but in the direction of Cassiel—he saw her face light up with wonder.

  Relief encouraged him. “Your Majesty, why would you refuse to restore the Polean Cities to their rightful state in Time? Why permit them to languish in premature decay when you know that regardless, everything within them will come to you in the end? Your Majesty, why not be generous? You are so much more than mortal—why not be patient?”

  “I’m no more than mortal. I am dead.”

  Despite Her bitter words, She looked at him with something other than cool regard or disgust at his impertinence. She was almost wary.

  Aniver voiced again his hard-won discovery. The last time he had spoken of it She had thrown him from her realm. He didn’t think that would be possible now. “Not dead, your Majesty. Your transformation kept you from dying utterly—you became Queen, not a corpse. But you are dying. Always dying.” He had also lain dying, not so long before; he stepped close, lowering his voice even though there was no one else to hear. “What do you want, as death approaches?”

  She snorted. “Do you propose to give it to me?”

  “Wouldn’t it... interest you, if I could?”

  It will unmake you as surely as if you swam in my river, She had said. I may perpetually be dying, but you will forever be even more nothing than the dead.

  Only that knowledge—that he was lost already—had given him the courage to ask the question. And even She looked taken aback by it. Her dark eyes widened, and the bones beneath Her gray skin seemed suddenly more prominent.

  She all but spat, “I want to live!”

  “But you know you cannot have that,” Aniver said. “Past some line—some borderland—there is no power strong enough to return the dying to life. There is no cure for a death rattle. No end—” he bowed “—to ultimate mortality. But what else?”

  Kahzakutri shook her head. “Riddles bore me. They’re pretentious.”

  “I don’t presume to riddle, your Maj—”

  “And yet you do presume.”

  “Yes. I presume that you and I are, or have been... similar. That what you wanted, I also wanted, not so long ago. After our... previous audience.”

  “You wanted to live.”

  “Yes, your Majesty, desperately. And I was fortunate enough to be able to. But... if not that... I wanted life, your Majesty. Any of it. If not for me, for others.”

  He glanced again at Semira, and at Cassiel, who remained in death for the sake of a king. “No one loves the living like the dying.”

  “A singular love indeed. We envy to the point of detesting them.”

  “There are many I might prefer to see the gift of life less squandered on,” he admitted dryly. Now that he had impeached Her inviolable dignity, it seemed easier to see past the immensity of the Queen of the Dead—even to tease Her. “You mustn’t think me a philanthropist.”

  “No.” Her lips quirked in a gray smile. “I have seen your thoughts. There has been love in you, yes, but less and less as time passed by.”

  There had been less and less of everything in him as time passed by. He had lost some things to love, and lost love itself. Cut family and friends from his soul as he cut all else, making his sacrifices. In the end, as he lay dying, he had wanted to live not so much for the sake of life—too much of its savor had been given away—but because he knew that only while living would he have the chance to regain any of his soul, to love and learn again, to experience anything, know anything. He had wanted to live so that he could be alive.

  He had no hope of that now. And any philanthropy left in him was only because he wanted to see his task through. After-Bad or not. “You have also seen my hatred, your Majesty. My anger, my defiance. Of loss, of death—”

  Her nostrils flared—not with breath, surely.

  “How much we love life, when we’re dying,” Aniver said. “How much we would do to turn death back.”

  “If I hate loss so much,” Kahzakutri said, “Then your arguments cannot convince me—look what you would have me give up.”

  He suspected that letting Unmaking’s blight remain over the Polean Cities gave Her no real pleasure. Frankly, he was unsure if any dead thing gave Her pleasure. But restoring them from decay would be admitting an exception to Her rule, and that might pain her worse.

  “That’s too bad,” Aniver said, “because you know I will not stop arguing. Not even in death.”

  Her smile returned, and might have spread a little wider.

  “If I do die without seeing the Polean Cities restored,” he told Her, “I will never be silent about it. And while I live, I will never stop seeking a way to save the
m.”

  She shook Her head at his last words. “How much you will give, though. If you save them.”

  “Yes.” The word cracked like thawing ice on his lips.

  “I warned you,” said the Queen of the Dead.

  She had. This was what he had feared, more than death—what had left him dragging his steps all this long journey.

  What would it take to bring back Nurathaipolis-That-Was and her sisters?

  “And you know,” Kahzakutri said, “all this rot and dust that chokes the Polean Cities will return sooner or later. In time.”

  “Surely that only makes it more important to evade the inevitable while we can.”

  “You’re a fool, Aniver.”

  His eyes stung, though not at what She said. “Yes. I am. Perhaps I’ll learn better... in time.”

  For a moment, Kahzakutri’s expression seemed to soften into something gentler than bitterness, but no brighter. “I don’t think you’ll have the chance.” Then She stood beside him, and four stonelike fingers circled his wrist. Almost gently. “I have an idea for what might clear away the Unmaking that stains your precious Cities—and yes, I will test it—but it requires fuel I cannot offer. Only a living soul... “

  “I understand, your Majesty. Thank you.”

  They approached the river. “And anyway, the shape of this particular construct would be beyond my nature.”

  “What is it?” Aniver asked.

  “We are going to build a Grace.”

  * * *

  Semira watched Aniver hold audience with the Queen of the Dead, nerving herself to cross the river to them.

  It was not dread of gray Kahzakutri that held her back so much as the oddly comforting presence of her companions on this side. The crystalline ghosts who whispered kindnesses to her, assuring her the river of Alteration would do no harm; that as a living spirit she would not be imprisoned here long. That when her time came to return, she would find it was not so terrible as it seemed. All these old souls, with their cargoes and memories of life, shared them out sweetly. Stories were whispered in her ears, so thick with detail they were hard to keep track of, spoken so gently they were hard to hear. She’d be sorry to leave them.