Transcendent 2

by Bogi Takács

  “I have two children,” the Emperor told me the next day. “They are likely grown by now. Or maybe, if you say time moves more slowly in here, they are already dead. Perhaps I can see their children, if I return.”

  I moved another stone across his checkered board, and captured two of his pieces. I suspected he let me. Or maybe he just did not care. Time moved differently in this room, but he was no less old because of it. Years weren’t always measured in time.

  “Why do you stay?” I asked. “If you can put anyone outside this chamber into stasis with your words, why don’t you just put them all into stasis and leave?”

  He looked up at me with steady eyes. “I have tried. More times than I wish to count, I escaped into the tunnels, but the priests know when I leave. They know when anyone leaves. They know the tunnels better than I do, and they catch me quickly. When I speak to defend myself, they hum and aren’t affected by it. Their humming addled my brains for days after, though they made sure I did my duty to speak.”

  The priests could hum to counteract the Emperor’s words? Could I hum to counteract their humming?

  I didn’t know the tunnels this deep in the Hallows. But if there were two of us, and one of us a trained acolyte with a sense for the sounds and winds of cross-corridors, maybe we would have a chance.

  If I could hum to stop an incursion from another world, maybe I could hum to make an incursion of my own.

  “What if I could get you home?” I asked.

  For a moment his face shone with naked hope. But he shook his head.

  “I know my speaking keeps others alive. I have resigned myself to that task.”

  “But what if the priests have only taken the easiest way to fuel the magic of the city above, because they could?”

  He glared at me. Then he rose and retreated to a cushion in the corner, picking up a book he couldn’t read.

  We spent the next days as we had before, with one alteration. When it was nearing time for one of his speaking cycles, I sat and faced the wall and started speaking instead. I spoke a story-rhyme I had learned as a child, about the wisp-men who came out of the sea. The rhythm wasn’t quite right in his language, but it worked well enough. He sat and watched me the whole hour, his mouth a straight line.

  When the priests came that night, they said nothing. And so we began to alternate the duty.

  “I can teach others your language,” I said. “If I do that, you won’t have to stay.”

  “What others?” he asked bitterly. “The only ones who come here are the priests, and those who want me to fix the ones I put into stasis.”

  “We’ll ask the priests—”

  “No,” he said. “They are not on our side.”

  “If we leave, they will have to learn.” They could not have kept watch over the Lost Emperor for so many years and not have learned something of his language. They had to have a plan for if he finally escaped, or if he died. “They’ll take over the murmurs.”

  Hope flickered in his eyes and did not burn out so quickly.

  In the times between speaking the murmurs, we began to talk through his memories of when he’d first arrived. We reconstructed the route the priests had used to bring him here from the caves. It was all hypothetical, we told ourselves.

  Then, without any spoken agreement, we began to eat less as we stored up food. The priests brought two plates now, one for the Emperor and one for me.

  One day, just before our sleep cycle, we left.

  We carried cold-lights plundered from the chamber, bobbing blue-white ellipses on the walls of the deep tunnels. We did not speak. Though I had grown acclimated to his language, I didn’t know what our words would do to each other outside the stasis chamber, or even if I could hum them away.

  We moved quickly and did not sleep, and when we paused to rest or eat, it was with quick efficiency. My sense of direction was honed from years of silence in this living tomb. I followed it with reference to the Emperor’s memories, and we only once heard the rustle of the priests’ footsteps from a cross-corridor. We slipped into a crevice and covered our cold-lights until they passed.

  After hours or maybe a day, our cold-lights began to dim. I had never seen a cold-light dim before. Was it because we had stopped the murmurs? We hadn’t been away that long. Was even the Emperor’s absence from his chamber enough to dim the lights in the city above? How long until the rot seeped into the crops again, and the river ran low? How long until the seas became thick with the algae that made the fish too poisonous to eat? I tried not to think about it. I wouldn’t be away that long, I hoped.

  But once the tunnels had turned from cool cut stone to damp natural cave walls, the Emperor touched my arm. Yes, that formation was as he had described it. We picked up our paces.

  And then, finally, the Emperor made a wordless exclamation and rushed us through a narrow passage. We broke out into a cavernous space, lit with streaks of light from above. Sunlight. The cavern was dank, but with a promise of sea air.

  The Emperor shouted, “Here!” and it echoed around us.

  I tensed, waiting for his word to fell him, or me, but he flashed a grin so wide he hardly looked like the same man.

  “Yes,” I said, in his language. Again, nothing happened. Maybe a month ago I would have fallen stiff at the sound of my own words, but the Emperor’s language was starting to feel more natural to me than my own.

  The Emperor dashed to one side of the cave, skidding to a stop near a stone slab. “It was here.” He turned to me, then looked past me and stiffened.

  A group of priests stepped out from behind a large rock formation. They had wraps over their ears, and carried spears and knives and rope.

  They’d known we’d come. Of course they’d known we’d come here. How could we not have considered that, or that there was another way into the cave than the way we’d come? We’d been too eager, too willing to try, and the trip through the tunnels had been too easy.

  I darted to the Emperor, and he gripped my arm as if to steady himself. He was too pale in the raw rays of sunlight.

  “Whatever you’re going to do,” he said in a low pant, “do it now.”

  I clasped my hands together, and shut out what might happen if this did not work. I let go of my focus on the cavern around me, and the priests, and the Emperor. I formed the scene he’d described to me in my mind: a man in a carriage, dressed in fine but ordinary business wear, traveling a stretch of road that held nothing in particular. The horses’ hooves struck packed dirt, the carriage springs creaked. Outside, grass continued for a ways until it stopped, and the cliff dropped down to the sea. The driver clicked his tongue at the horses, and began an off-tune whistle.

  I listened to the whistle, and began to hum along.

  Outside of myself, I watched a different scene entirely. The priests advanced on where I stood with the Emperor, spears outstretched.

  “Stop!” the Emperor shouted to the priests. Some of them cringed, the word affecting them even through the wraps on their ears. But it only slowed them down.

  Still, the Emperor saw his power over them and pressed his advantage. He poured out a torrent of words. He was good at this. Nonsense words mostly, or sentences strung together in a loose, manic storyline. Something about a hunt chased to the sea, and the whitecaps rolling in to steal the catch, and a fishmonger’s wife…

  The priests braced themselves as if against a crippling gale and continued to advance.

  My hum gained rhythm. I found harmony to the music of the Emperor’s words, and spoke words of my own. I wove in the poems and rhymes that I had learned as a child. The second rhythm shuddered the priests. Our words together quivered the air, and the air between the Emperor and myself began to ripple. The Emperor saw it and stopped speaking to stare.

  “No, keep going, keep going,” I said, not breaking the rhythm of my sing-song hum. And then, “Can you repeat the rhymes with me?” I said one quickly, then again, and he nodded and said it with me. We chanted, the words falli
ng into a strange and echoing dance. The air between us formed rings like a stone dropped into a pond, rolling outward until we could hardly see one another.

  Colors began to bleed through, and my muscles clenched in the long-learned reflex. I wanted to hum them away, to protect against them. Instead, I tuned to them. The sound of these colors was not so different from the rhythm of the words I was speaking, and I adjusted my pitch and rhythm to match.

  The Emperor stopped speaking. He was only a blur of a shape through the translucent ripples, but I knew he was looking within them.

  I raised my hands and spoke to push the sounds toward the Emperor. My breath almost caught as I realized in that one moment what I was doing, letting go of my only ally, someone I would call a friend.

  “Oh…” I heard him gasp. It was a word of wonder. I had found the right frequencies. I pushed them over him until the ripples enfolded him. And then I slowed my rhythm, pausing between words, and gradually letting them fade away.

  The colors ebbed, the ripples grew more shallow, and then dissipated. The Emperor was gone.

  Tears stung my eyes, and I stared at the place where he’d just been, the sounds of my sing-song still echoing in my heart.

  Rough hands seized me. Fire exploded in my head, and then there was nothing.

  It was long days in the Emperor’s chamber, despite the priests’ frantic gestures and threats, despite the danger to the city above, before I could bring myself to speak the Emperor’s words again. Before I could not hurt as much at the lack of his presence here. Before I could remember that my duty was to the city, and not to the priests.

  Then I sat in the Emperor’s chamber and spoke. I read aloud from the books on the table, translating as I wove the words. This had been my plan since I’d first pressed the Emperor to leave. He had a family to go back to, even if generations late. I had no one, so I would protect the city above. But I hadn’t understood how hard it would be. I was alone, where once I had not been alone.

  After a time, it was no longer the Emperor’s chamber. It was my own.

  One day, days or weeks later, the curtains rustled and a figure stepped through. I stopped speaking and stared. Dew.

  Their black hair was tied up in a knot, green eyes sparking with life.

  My face crumpled as I tried to understand this.

  Dew looked around them, their eyes widening at the opulence of the chamber. I had grown used to it, and only now noticed it again.

  Dew gestured. You are…the Lost Emperor?

  I gave a startled laugh. “You can speak here, Dew. It is safe.”

  Dew’s brows knit, and they picked their way across the strewn cushions to sit across the table from me. The checkered board and stones were arrayed on the surface, and Dew inspected them, briefly touching one stone before pulling their hand away.

  They looked up at me. Swallowed. And I saw the courage it took for them to say, “Safe?”

  Dew flinched, but when nothing happened, they sank back, putting their face in their hands.

  I dropped the book I’d been reading from and scrambled around the table to sit beside them.

  “What happened?” I asked. “How are you awake—” How were they alive?

  They swiped at tears. Their voice came thin and hesitant, because it had not been used in years. “When the murmurs stopped, the magic faded. I…thawed.” They shuddered, and I wrapped my arm around them. Dew was warm, and smelled like the dew of morning grass.

  “A few others thawed, too,” they went on. “But not the ones who’ve been in the Chamber of Broken Vows for years.”

  I pulled back. “But it’s been weeks.” Weeks in my time—months outside this chamber?

  “I had to recover,” Dew said. “The priests only now told me that you were here.” They looked around again, frowning at the chamber. “That is you, making the murmurs?”

  I nodded.

  “And…where is the Lost Emperor?”

  I looked down. I didn’t want to think about him. I had been successfully not thinking about him while I spoke the murmurs. But the checkered board sat on the table in front of me, the stones arrayed across it, waiting. “He went home.”

  Dew nodded, accepting this. Trusting me. “That was when the murmurs stopped. Thank you.”

  That was when I’d stopped the murmurs. No one had told me what damage I’d caused in the city above with my days of silence, though I knew from the priests’ desperation there had been damage.

  I closed my eyes. But I hadn’t known this would happen. If Dew had somehow come back to me, maybe my choices had not been a mistake. Not as big of a mistake, at least.

  I curled my hand around theirs.

  “But you can’t go back,” I said. “The priests won’t let you leave now. And I can’t leave.”

  Dew closed their hand around mine. “I know.” They looked into my eyes. “I know, Sky. Teach me these words, as the Lost Emperor taught you. I will stay with you. We will keep the murmurs and the city alive together.”

  My breath caught. The Emperor hadn’t had a choice in staying here, but this was the path I had chosen. I had given up any thought of a life above first to save Dew, and then to keep the city thriving. Then, I’d thought I’d always be alone.

  But I did not want Dew to be trapped here, too.

  Dew kissed me, a sweetness I’d never thought I’d feel again. “My choice, Sky,” they said. “This is my choice to stay.”

  They pulled back, a wry smile tugging at their lips. “You scared the priests. They don’t want the murmurs to stop again. They will send down more to learn; I’m a new sort of acolyte. We will be the ones who keep the murmurs alive.”

  My throat was tight but I nodded. I had lost the Lost Emperor, but here was Dew, returned to me again. I traced my fingers over their face in growing wonder at this miracle.

  I was still confined here, but the air was different in a place where you were not alone. Where you were with someone you loved.

  I kissed Dew back, murmuring the word for love into their mouth. Dew shuddered at the sound of my new language, as I once had, and then kissed it back to me.

  The Nothing Spots

  Where Nobody Wants to Stay

  • Julian K. Jarboe •

  The veil is thin immediately outside the Salmon P. Chase Municipal Junior High School. A dense perimeter of flowering thorns grows two feet out from the exterior walls, and between the plants and the bricks is a zone dense with magical energy. Especially suggestible students and teachers can sense it, the stunted or abused into rupture, the intuitive, those in a state of spiritual drift. Like all liminal spaces, this one can be elusive, and sometimes it’s hungry, draws you near and lures you in. It gives, and it takes away.

  The school building is newly renovated and the grounds heavily trimmed. It’s the drippy-snot-nose part of March in 2002, and the students file outside in assigned pairs because Mike Johnson—obviously—left a bomb threat on a stall in the yellow-wing boy’s bathroom, but the teachers are officially telling the students there’s a fire drill. They have to be sensitive to the handful of earnestines who take every Sharpie pentagram and locker room firecracker stash at face value. The other four-hundred or so children know that this, like the “rabid dog” lock-downs, is entirely about someone and something else.

  Jamie is the only student who has ever experienced the aftermath of public violence, and he wanders away from the crowd with AJ, leaving their assigned buddies to buoy in place with one another. AJ is sure a teacher can see them sneaking off into the bushes, in their ski coats and L.L. Bean super-sized monogrammed reflector-tape backpacks, the clacking multitude of novelty keychains on the zip pull, but nobody stops them. AJ is used to anticipating trouble, even though he’s with Jamie, and adults let Jamie do anything he wants now.

  Out of view, the boys crouch over the buried treasures of their hiding place, Tupperware and pencil boxes stuffed full of contraband from the strip mall on the edge of town. The underpass and the mall parking gara
ge are both reachable directly through a portal from the junior high school bushes. The portals present themselves when beckoned, but seem to possess a will of their own and something like a sense of humor—once they tried to get to the train station and it deposited them on the tracks with just enough time to dodge the approaching train.

  Jamie believes this will is a reflection of his and AJ’s subconscious. AJ is not so sure anything that powerful could come from them.

  Jamie pops open one of their boxes and pulls out a king-size candy bar they shoplifted last weekend. He twists it in half and they lean against the wall, gnashing at the toffee and the nougat. When they finish, Jamie takes a deep breath, adjusts the crotch of his jeans, and turns to lean onto AJ, pressing his erection against AJ’s hips.

  “Do you feel that?” he says, and smirks.

  “Yeah,” AJ responds, and licks the milk chocolate off his hand.

  Jamie kisses AJ with tongue, smears of candy still on his lips and stuck in his braces, and rocks his hips on AJ’s in a performed and disembodied way, going through the motions with no regard for what might feel good. AJ coughs into the kiss, and Jamie takes it for a moan of pleasure and fishes his hands up under AJ’s shirt to fondle his breasts.

  AJ’s had sizable tits since fifth grade, the only thing about him, he’s certain, which earns him some kind of use value for others, an idea so loudly and consistently reinforced by the lust, envy, and scorn of others that his dysphoria around having them at all won’t surface consciously for another decade. In 2016, when AJ wakes up from his top surgery, his first thought will be, “Well, now I’ll have to rely on charm alone.”

  For now, AJ thinks, they keep Jamie interested, and it mostly feels good. They’re achingly heavy, and Jamie grabs them like he’s catching a ball, squeezes, pushes them up toward AJ’s chin. This is the way every boy will ever touch them, like he can’t believe his good luck but needs to relocate them skyward like a button-mash code to unlock some next-level fondling. It’s sloppy, but a welcome relief from gravity, and it’s so easy to just stand there and allow it to happen.