Beneath Ceaseless Skies #67

by Brennan, Marie

  Talon did laugh, a short, disbelieving bark. “Which only goes to show you’re even crazier than I am. Girl, whether it’s me breaking you or you breaking yourself, there are better ways to learn. And better people to help you than this useless piece of dung.” He jerked his thumb at Leksen, whom Kerestel had just hauled to his feet.

  Leksen’s face was a mask of terror, and not, Sen thought, just for the fate that awaited him when he got back to the compound. When Talon seized him by the scruff of the neck, he almost seemed glad to go.

  Taking the horse’s bridle in one hand, Kerestel fell in beside Sen. He still walked with that odd, half-sideways air, torn between staring at her and looking absolutely anywhere else. The words burst out of him in a strangled, disbelieving whisper. “You were dead.”

  Against her will, Sen’s hand rose to rub her neck. Skin, muscle, and bone all answered smoothly, with no sign of damage. “You were seeing things.”

  Kerestel made a noise like he’d just choked on his own tongue.

  “He only stunned me,” Sen said. “Like Rolier did. Remember? When I got up, he was gone, so I staggered around a bit, and then when I saw him riding away I jumped him.”

  No jumping had been necessary. He’d hauled so hard on the reins at the sight of her that his horse had reared, throwing him to the ground. From there, it had been the Dance, muscles and bone and blood, perfection.

  Because she knew now, beyond the slightest doubt, that the Warrior hadn’t abandoned her.

  The hideous, incomprehensible crack; then nothing. Then waking in the cold, damp leaves, and the soul-deep understanding that the impossible had just happened. A miracle, unasked-for, beyond her ability to explain. The Warrior had brought her back.

  Kerestel was right.

  She would never admit it, and she’d deny it if Leksen said anything, too. This was too personal, too profound to be shared with others. What she’d done to deserve it, she couldn’t begin to guess; her decision to devote herself to the Warrior couldn’t have been enough. Could it?

  She’d thought, briefly, that maybe she’d been revived just to be a spirit of vengeance against Leksen. But he was in custody, and she was still standing; Sen doubted she’d drop dead again once the Grandmaster decided how to punish him.

  Maybe it was just to be a Hunter. A second chance at what she’d almost thrown away, in her blind, overzealous stupidity. Death seemed to have blown all the cobwebs and madness out of her brain, leaving her aware of just how far down the path of insanity she’d traveled since coming to Silverfire, and how close it had brought her to real failure. That didn’t seem like the kind of thing the Warrior would reward someone for.

  Unless all of that pain did count as a blood-offering. If so, Sen hoped she never had to make a similar one again.

  “I thought I was seeing a mirage,” Kerestel said, shaking his head, staring at the shadowed ground beneath his feet. “You couldn’t possibly be real.”

  Sen hesitated, the long habit of isolation staying her hand. Then she kicked herself mentally. A second chance, remember? However it you earned it, don’t waste it.

  She reached out and pinched Kerestel’s arm.

  “Hey!” The horse almost pulled free at his exclamation, and Talon glanced back to see if everything was all right. Sen waved a reassurance. Kerestel demanded, “What was that for?”

  “To prove I’m real.”

  He stared again, but at least this time he was looking at her like she was a person, and not—well, a miracle. The sooner he forgot about that, the better.

  “I’m told I have to rest,” she said to him. Kerestel snorted, with jerk of his chin toward Leksen that seemed to question that necessity. Their fight certainly hadn’t counted as rest. Sen knew the witch was right, though—and as it seemed Talon didn’t really hate her, maybe she could afford to take that advice. “When I’m back on my feet... I don’t suppose you’d be my sparring partner again?”

  The question seemed to interrupt some dawning thought of his, as if a puzzle he’d been worrying at for ages had fallen into something like its proper shape. Eyebrows rising, Kerestel asked, “Don’t you ever take a break?”

  “Not really, no.”

  He shook his head—but in disbelief, not refusal. Whatever the others think of me, Sen thought, he, at least, is a friend.

  For the rest... the witch’s healing, and her red hair, and the rumors that might yet slip out about Leksen, all would make her life harder. She was prepared to accept that, though. It couldn’t be as hard as what she’d gone through already.

  Not when she knew the Warrior found her worthy.

  Kerestel doesn’t understand. It isn’t a burden; it’s my purpose. Dancing the Warrior, in whatever form I can. From now until the day my soul goes into the Void, I live to serve her.

  Copyright Copyright © 2011 Marie Brennan

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  Marie Brennan is the author of the Onyx Court series of London-based historical faerie fantasies: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and the upcoming With Fate Conspire. “Dancing the Warrior” is a prequel to her novels Warrior and Witch. Her stories have appeared multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including two set in the world of the Onyx Court novels, and “Driftwood” in BCS #14, which also appears in the BCS anthology The Best of BCS, Year One. She has published more than thirty short stories in venues such as On Spec, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the acclaimed anthology series Clockwork Phoenix. More information can be found on her website: www.swantower.com.

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  MEMORIES OF HER

  by Greg Linklater

  My hand is seamed with quartz and gravel. It used to have folds of skin a witch could trace. No fingernails now, only the squares I scratched with a rusty blade for some reason I’ve long since forgotten.

  I kneel in the jungle. Snakes slither between my stone toes, thinking me nothing more than an outcrop, a relic; maybe they’re right to think that. There’s not much left of me these days.

  I watch fires ripple in the clearing. Men crouch, honing weapons, unspooling magical blooms and charges and other arcane things that speak to some deeper part of me. Imperial Trading Company men, for the most part, joined by a smattering of the Half-God’s zealots.

  These latter ones, I see their frozen faces and golden eyes as they watch the Company men hoot and holler, throwing up straw dummies to tear them down again with the latest piece of tech devised by the Company’s research division. They drag a pig from the supply wagons and burst it with projectiles from a shoulder-mounted weapon which spits in a human HUT! They impress themselves with these displays.

  Any morale they have they owe to the Half-God’s rampant propaganda machine. I know this because I am told. I appreciate the irony.

  These men whoop and prance in their immaculate blue uniforms. They laugh. The sound fascinates me; you don’t hear it in the Chemist’s camp. You just don’t. But they are all too green, too wet. There is no such thing as a veteran, not out here. The equation is simple: you come up against the Chemist and you die.

  Or you end up like me.

  I take one hand in the other and unscrew it. Inside my hollow wrist is a padded pocket. A mantis scuttles out, tethered to me by a chain as fine as hair but stronger than anything I could name. It scurries up my arm, across my cheek and props on the tip of my nose.

  “Time now,” it clicks. “You go.”

  Orders straight from the Chemist.

  I unclip the chain and lift the mantis to a nearby tree.

  “Wait here.”

  It clicks again, scrubs its mandibles with a hooked limb. I don’t have a name for it. I called it Peter once, but it seemed to dislike that so I never tried again. I think it’s like me, a convert, although I couldn’t say for sure. Captain Collis assigned me to it a few months
back, conveying its superior rank in no uncertain terms. My first instinct was to crush it, just to see what would happen, but those kind of impulses are bleeding away, becoming easier to ignore every day. Soon there won’t be anything left, which I suppose is the whole point.

  I count almost fifty men around camp. The Company men thrum with magical tech. At least twenty of them are heavy infantry, and five of the zealots unmistakably Core Disciples, maybe even two of those fully-fledged Seed Gods. Cities have fallen to less manpower than this.

  When I’m done, they dangle from trees, smear the walls of their tents, lie smoldering in fires that throw up an acrid tang to send the penned animals wild.

  I splash to the creek and slop water over me to wash the blood away, otherwise the flies will come crawling. A severed leg floats past me, heading south, heading home, where the memories are dying slowly and me too far gone to miss them.

  * * *

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Who?”

  “I think you know who I mean.”

  “No,” I say. “Who?”

  “Come now. Let’s not waste time on this little charade again.”

  “I honestly have no idea who you’re talking about.”

  An academic sigh. Parental disappointment. “Do you honestly believe there is anything to be gained by withholding? It only retards the process, and I can assure you there is nothing you should want more than a smooth, seamless transition.”

  I have seen what happens to discards, those who fight the process. They are lead to the base of the mountain, where the Chemist is building something I have neither the capacity nor the inclination to understand. But I have ventured close enough to learn that stone can scream.

  The psychiatrist flicks lint from his lapel. The spherical room bulges around us, a slit of jungle visible through a door-like opening in this bubble between worlds. Oversized dragonflies tick against the glass sleeve of a solitary lamp.

  “Think of the memories as impurities in your blood,” he says. “And think of this room as a sweat-box. When you convey the memories to me they are drawn to your skin like sweat, then washed away.” He claps his hands. “And you are clean! So.” He drops his pen to the pad on his knee. “Tell me about her.”

  He calls it withholding. The truth is, I just can’t recall enough about her. Maybe I’ve already said too much in this confessional and the important parts have already been stripped away. I can’t remember. Of course I can’t. If you give these trained interrogators enough to grip they’ll tear the whole memory out from the roots. But I recall a closed eye, a sleepy smile, and my lips pressed to the warm, sweet-oil pocket of skin between brow and hairline, and I know that is something worth holding onto.

  The psychiatrist frowns. Behind him is a photograph of dumpy dour relatives with flat faces. He must have brought it all the way from home. He flips between the pages of recall I’ve offered up today. “Your progress is slowing. This will not do.”

  He tears the pages from his notebook, folds them, secures them with a tin clip.

  “Everything has a purpose here,” he says, tossing my memories in a box along with hundreds of other bound notes. “Everything is replaceable. You would do well to remember that.”

  When I step back out into the jungle the line of animates extends away through the trees. I see a hundred creatures like me, waiting for a chance to purge every last drop.

  * * *

  There are quarries beyond the rim of the camp, great concavities in the hillside where the stone is cut and crushed and molded into shape. Between confessionals I either fight in the jungle or I work here alongside hordes of other animates, all of us tearing down chunks of the very thing we are now.

  The jungle has become an abattoir; the Company and the Half-God combine to send endless tides of soldiers north against the Chemist, and those not killed end up here in camp, remaining physically human for as long as it takes to source good stone and invoke the powers.

  The appetite for stone is so insatiable that rich veins of gold are ripped down and tossed in a pile which grows daily, untouched. If ever the empire hoped to understand what the Chemist is truly doing out here, that discard pile of unimaginable wealth is proof they never will.

  * * *

  “Tell me about the first time you performed,” the psychiatrist says (not the same one, a different one—this is later that night; the lights burn continuously in the confessional).

  “Performed?”

  “Um....” He consults his colleague’s notes. “Ah, yes, at the Clarevonne. I understand you were a keen student of drama, and enrolled there before the war. So, tell me about your first performance.”

  The idea of me being some kind of aspiring thespian is long gone, but I can picture the incident he mentions. “It was terrible. I dressed in these baggy clown pants my mother gave me. I don’t know where she got them. I wore a giant red tie with white polka-dots, and I pranced around on stage like a chicken.” The memory squirms, fighting. “We decided to end the performance by throwing pies at each other. I don’t think the audience knew what to make of that. We ruined the stage curtains, these lovely velvet drapes, and got in a lot of trouble for that.”

  “Good, good.” His pen scratches across the page. “When you say your mother gave you those pants to wear, do you remember anything else about her?”

  All I have is the faintest notion of her clinging to the memory of those ridiculous pants. Then nothing, just a placeholder for the concept of motherhood. That too begins to fade. “I’ve already spoken at length about her.”

  “Hmm, yes, yes, it appears you have.” He taps his lips. “What else can you tell me?”

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Anything at all.”

  “I can’t remember anything else.”

  “Alright.” He consults his notes again and sees something that makes him brace himself. “Alright, now what about her?” He leans forward, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Some other woman, I believe. What can you tell me about her?”

  “Who?”

  * * *

  By waiting outside the confessional bubble long enough I see one of the mechanical pygmies come out with a box full of notes. Notes about me, among others. I follow the creature through the jungle to the decrepit remains of the town called Jasper. Snaggle-toothed streets missing cobbles, vine-choked bricks and mortar crumbling slowly back into the earth.

  The little steel marionette clumps down a set of stairs to a cellar door. I wait behind a segment of wall, listening to the plink plink plink of its footsteps fade. When it returns to the sunlight it no longer has the box.

  I squeeze down the steps, my shoulders gouging plaster from the walls. The door is reinforced steel with no handle. I drum. Some kind of magic grease covers it. I try to drive my fist through it and only succeed in powdering two of my fingers.

  * * *

  We all sleep hunkered down in the jungle. Us animates, I mean. The rest of the men dream in bunk beds stacked inside barrack-bubbles, while the Chemist and his inner circle share a private complex hanging from the edge of reality like a crooked thumb. This is why the Company never finds him, with their scatter-gun shelling. The entrance to his quarters is reinforced by hex on hex, and this world has no claim on anything that lies beyond that.

  The rest of us sleep standing up, like horses. A stranger might think himself come across acres of termite mounds spread through the jungle. You can tell the newer converts by the fact they talk in their sleep. It’s their humanity bubbling away. Early on there is just so much of it to vent. They spend all day recounting everything they remember, everything they know, and at night it all blows away in clouds of turquoise spores. It’s beautiful to see.

  Tonight I don’t sleep, just stand there thinking about that door.

  She lives beyond there. All I have is a closed eye, my lips on her skin. Over and over. They kept me in solitary for my first two weeks here to soften me up. Total darkness. I retained a shred of sanity
by plucking a button from my shirt and tossing it away, then scrabbling on hands and knees to find it again, over and over and over.

  The shelling starts sometime during the night. Arcs of orange, whistling, followed by cataclysmic roars and spectral fire tearing through the jungle. Birds and lizards vaporize in puffs of dust, while the trees are left untouched. The Chemist and his men are safely ensconced where the shelling can’t reach them. But in the morning I come across a smoking pair of boots draped in trousers, a button shirt and a sweat-stained cap. A book lies in the dirt.

  Such mishaps are not uncommon.

  * * *

  “Tell me something.”

  “I noticed my left wrist was loose last night, so I unscrewed it and found an insect inside.”

  “You mean your navigator? You’ve had that since the beginning.”

  “But I don’t remember ever seeing it before.”

  “Well, I can assure you it is standard issue. Nothing to be alarmed about, in itself, however in perusing your file I see no reason for knowledge of your navigator to be missing. Hmm. This is troubling.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, animates who withhold for too long have been known to develop a form of dementia. They forget things they should know.”

  “Isn’t the whole point of this to forget?”

  “No. The point is to have the memories bled, like a poison from the brain. This form of dementia locks them away. They become... inaccessible.” The psychiatrist with the friendly face writes something in his notes. “Do you often find yourself confused as to where you are?”

  “I get déjà vu all the time.”

  “That is normal, all part of the process. I mean confusion as to your purpose, what we are doing here.”

  “How would I know?”

  He steeples his fingers. “Focus on the One True Purpose. Work back from there, identifying and scrutinizing each facet of your existence here. If at any point you find yourself at a dead-end, unable to continue, return to me immediately.”

  He tries to reassure me with a smile. I see his eyes tick down to his notes, his smile tighten, and I know I’ve been told this before.