Beneath Ceaseless Skies #229

by Rose Lemberg

  Ranra’s companion did not wake despite our speech. There was something out of the ordinary in the way the stranger slept—an absence, as if he could or would not wake. The rug beneath him bore an embroidery of stylized roses. It was stained with blood,; perhaps his own, though I doubted it.

  “He does not wake,” I said.

  “No. I am speaking.”

  The air above her head trembled and danced. I perceived her deepnames, three—like mine, but different. Three single-syllables. The Warlord’s Triangle, the world’s most dangerous configuration, known to shatter its bearers’ minds—but Ranra did not feel broken to me. Just alone—even though her ward was right there. Alone, like me, even though I had courtiers, and students, and even a guardian.

  “I would invite you to my palace underhill,” I said on an impulse. “Hear more of your story.”

  “But you do not invite him. Everyone is afraid.”

  “I am not afraid.”

  Indeed I felt no fear, just a certain darkening of air, a curling of my mood like the tendrils of salt on the waves of a shore I never had sought. The desert had always been enough.

  “I would welcome your welcome if you would extend it to him, ruler of Che Mazri and the keeper of her star,” Ranra said, “for among the twelve triumphant stars that Bird had brought for us to live and thrive, some have gone out.”

  A premonition crept into me, shook me like a tremor of old age. Beyond my body, somewhere to the east, the lacelike tendrils of my star waved softly. I felt no prohibition from it—but as in me, curiosity, and a certain detached air of one playing hard at indifference.

  “You are both welcome, but please explain to your ward the rules of guestright here.”

  “He does not know that I accompany him.”

  “Then how could you reach an agreement, obtain his consent...?”

  I felt a great run of fire from the east, coming—coming closer. Ranra lifted her arms and brought them down. Gusts of cold vapor descended upon the body of her sleeping companion and hid them both from view. For a moment I felt the mighty sea winds, heard the creaking of a ship in motion, smelled the indescribable odor of salt water—then the desert reasserted itself.

  A tremor grew into a roaring funnel of sand. Out of that whirlwind leaped a great lion, fire-maned, its jaws agape with rage. Nihitu had caught up with me.

  * * *

  A thousand years had passed since Laaguti Birdwing and her companions found shelter in the islands of the west. Forgetting the laws and customs of Niyaz, they learned the geometry of deepnames from those wise and exuberant people who guarded the Star of the Tides. That star was one of the last to fall from Bird’s burning tail, having hung closest to the Orphan. And though it fell and was caught, the Star of the Tides had no use for its new homeland. It slept restlessly, speaking to no-one, not even to its own people who kept it.

  The spitfire star was anchored undersea, with the islands above it, held in place by the effort of many named strong. The wiser these people grew, the more effort was required to nurture the star under its wave. They founded new disciplines, invented many configurations of deepnames undreamed-of by those who lived on solid ground. The islanders grew prosperous from this knowledge. They built houses of singing coral to praise Bird and gave the most honor to those who held the most magic, though in this attitude they were not unique. The Niyazi rebels had long since married among them, leaving as memory only a few words of their native speech submerged in the language of the isles.

  Among those people there was a ruler whose might was tempered by wisdom: Ranra Kekeri. She bore the Royal House, a three-deepname configuration of one, one, and two syllables, long considered the most stable and benevolent in the land. She rose to power when young and retained it, guiding her people in the accomplishment of her will. The islands overran with gardens, the air grew heavy with odors of quince and persimmon, and the intricate coral towers rose so high as to rival those of Keshet. And yet, the Star of the Tides grew ever more uneasy in its slumber. The tremors in the ground grew heavy, the mountain range shook and spat fire into the darkening sky.

  And so it became Ranra’s ambition to resolve this imbalance once and for all, through a working of great magical innovation which became known as Ranra’s Unbalancing.

  * * *

  And now the bone ornaments unravel themselves

  Nihitu’s lion paced where Ranra had stood just moments ago. She sniffed at the ground where the sleeping stranger had lain, shifted the sands with one paw, disgorging discolored bits of bone that looked nothing like the fine combs and hair-rings which had, just moments earlier, adorned his hair. The lion circled me, her eyes aglow, then breathed out.

  Blinded by the heat that pressed upon me from above, I did not see the transformation. I could have if I chose to—extended my magic, learned secrets not mine, made jest of ancient agreements that bound our peoples together in respect unbroken and unspoken. I did nothing until the heat dissipated and Nihitu the person stood before me. The rage that propelled her to wake from sleep that I had whispered into her, to run through the dreaming wilds after me, had drained away.

  “What was that?” Horror mingled in her throat with wariness. “What was that?”

  “A guardian from far-off seas, a spirit of seafoam that wanders the earth and means us no ill.”

  I do not know what made me decide to trust Ranra, except that I wanted to trust her. From afar, the gossamer tendrils of my star waved at me, acknowledging my yearning. Even great powers grow weary of loneliness and seek solace among their kind; and if the sibling stars cry out to each other from underneath the earth, then why not old rulers?

  “No, not that,” Nihitu said, and her face contorted. “The disturbance—something in the dreaming wilds above. A presence. Not Loroli. No dreamway ambassadors from other lands have announced themselves... and it was not some monstrous menace from the entangled beyond, that I would recognize—no, it was something difficult, strange...”

  I sighed. “The guardian protected the criminal, who was asleep when we spoke—could it have been him?”

  “He’s a nameway, like you. What would he do so high in dreaming wilds, above the shallow dreams of your kind? Impossible.”

  She eyed me warily and said no more on our way back to Che Mazri. I expected to be reprimanded, would welcome it even. My old guardian would call me a frivolous child who’d thought it an adventure to be bitten by snakes and pecked by vultures, or worse yet—to trail them triumphantly home; but the voice of my old friend has been stilled by death. Nihitu did not know me or trust me. And I had, like a frivolous child or one very old, escaped her care.

  I should have apologized to Nihitu, but I did not, and silence trailed behind us as we traveled.

  Children share their toys with each other, I thought, lovers embrace under the canopy of the sand-studded sky; drums call out to drums across the great desert; siblings speak in dreams; birds learn human words and converse with their keepers. Even the great powers of the earth get lonely and seek the discourse of their kind; then why not old rulers, why not even ghosts?

  For three days in Che Mazri I kept my own counsel, closeted away even from my best advanced students Urwaru and Marvushi e Garazd. I opened books of magical geometry and closed them unread, unrolled ancient scrolls from Keshet, only to smell the dust of the desert roads they had traveled and roll them back again. I asked artists to paint serpents and winged scorpions for a new tile, but no design pleased me. It was three full days before the city rang with a tremor, sweet like drums and cymbals in my bones.

  * * *

  An architect of seafoam and spitfire

  He came, he came through winding streets of dust and liongrass, above the stone roads, past the mudhouses with their grates of reed and carved arinha wood. Standing barefoot on the tiles of Starhill, I felt his progress towards the heart of Che Mazri, to me—unfolding, before my eyes, through my city’s exhalation, through its nerve and sinew born of the desert and all its secr
ets.

  He traveled floating through mid-air on the same bloodstained and rose-embroidered carpet I had seen under him in the desert. His mind, enfolded in a stronghold of uncountable deepnames, felt cold—and yet, deep inside it, brief but intense flashes of light beckoned me with a strange fascination. I saw the people of my city, named strong and those lacking deepnames, pour out to the streets to watch and shudder, as attracted and apprehensive as I was.

  I could not see his body from this distance—just his might, flexible and yet at the same time rigid, as if an architecture of steel had acquired will and desire. I stared until my eyes blurred into queasiness. I could not feel a trace of Ranra in the uproar.

  Retainers and students came to take me away into the palace, but I breathed calmness into their lungs and steered them to leave. Alone and in a contemplative frame of mind I walked down to the gate of desert bone.

  There, Nihitu waited. She did not speak to me, pretended not to hear me. When I tried to shift her with my power, a vision was revealed to me—four guardians with bodies of women and heads of lions, flush with the power of the dreaming wilds. Each spoke in turn the words that Nihitu refused to speak.

  You are a ruler. No one dares oppose you when like a child you dodge your keepers—

  to be bitten by snakes and pecked by vultures, then trail them triumphantly home—

  violating ancient agreements made between your people and mine, agreements that weren’t made to keep us prisoners to each other—

  but to safeguard the twin stars which we nurture and to which we are bound.

  And in the vision, Nihitu spoke last. “You cannot shift me. I will do my duty.”

  Shamed and yet defiant, I averted my gaze from the vision and waited, clothed in my protective stronghold of deepnames and invisible to all but Nihitu, until the stranger floated up Starhill and stopped at last just outside the gate. The carpet drifted higher until his gaze was level with mine.

  His face had features not unlike Ranra’s but more pronounced—a large nose and deepset brown eyes with that peculiar tilt. He looked only slightly older than twenty, nothing more than a youth, but shadows had grooved themselves into his skin and placed him beyond age. He wore his long hair braided in a crown and embellished with gray roses, the likes of which had never sprouted in the sands; among the shadow of their living petals, deepnames glinted.

  I tried to look closer at this configuration. It was most definitely not the Warlord’s Triangle, but what I saw I could not quite discern.

  The stranger inclined his head slightly to me, clearly oblivious to my cloaking of invisibility. “I am known as the Raker,” he said in Burrashti. His speech was accented but clear, with no hesitation or self-consciousness one often cannot resist in a language not one’s own.

  “I am the sovereign of these sands,” I replied, “the Old Royal of Che Mazri and the keeper of her star. What brings you to my house?”

  He turned his head this way and that, looking for my house like every traveler before him. I smiled, expecting confusion—but his gaze turned slightly down and beyond me, where the palace walls lie sunken in the ground, and then deeper, beyond my woven wards. I felt the outer tendrils of my star shiver under his gaze.

  He said, “Not everything must always be revealed.”

  A shiver ran through me, not unlike the shiver of my star’s tendrils. I felt light-hearted, reckless, as I had not for dozens of years, as if tiny stars coursed in my blood and sparkled with danger and heat. Oh youth, I thought. Not everything must always be revealed, you say, and yet my very presence loosens secrets, spills them from unwary hearts like wind into the sands. And once I bid you enter within these buried walls, you should not deem your secrets safe from my regard.

  Nihitu hissed behind me in the language of the Loroli. “Do not offer guestright to this criminal, Ruler of the Sands.”

  I spoke back in the same language. “I have already offered.”

  The stranger, oblivious to the meaning of our words, raised his eyebrows in inquiry.

  “To have offered without consulting with me is to have broken the laws that bind our people,” Nihitu said. “I will recount this to the Great Lion.”

  I frowned and turned away from Nihitu, to face the stranger again. The old Loroli guardian was my closest friend, but even if she were still alive I would have turned away from her now, to feel the desert course through my veins once more with the exhilaration and recklessness of youth.

  I spoke to the Raker. “I will reveal it to you.”

  His mouth twisted into a sneer. I felt his gaze upon me as I opened for him the gates of the earth and led him deep into Starhill, where cymbals and tambourines adorned his passing and the rarest of carpets and the most bejeweled of cushions were spread out for feasting, and where young people flocked to him like velvet blackwing butterflies to flame.

  * * *

  Move the third: what knowledge do you seek of me

  In Keshet they tell that most ancient story of how the Starcounter followed Bird north into the sands of Burri; and there Bird’s eleven stars tumbled to the ground to become the eleven wells of Che Mazri.

  But I, the ruler of Che Mazri, know better than the storytellers of Keshet: for there is but one star here, and one there has always been since that first Birdcoming. But it was indeed here that she danced, here above the great Burri desert. She swooped where the guardians gathered, those from all peoples who journeyed from over the world to make music to guide and greet her coming. The goddess danced to this music, and as the eleven stars fell, the guardians danced with the goddess and caught them.

  Long after the guardians left with their stars, the goddess still danced with the twelfth star in her tail. Below her, Ladder waited. He made no music. Like a hunting grai he stood motionless, watching Bird’s struggle in rapt and devouring silence, until the last star tumbled down into his waiting hands.

  The star that Ladder caught was called the Orphan, black and viscous like the treacherous tar sand. In Ladder’s hands the twelfth star smoldered and blistered with the weight of Bird’s own doubt, the darkest of her thoughts, with despair that hangs inescapable and complete before the morning sun’s first striation across the desert sky.

  So burdened, Ladder walked away, and as he walked he sang that song he had refused to Bird, a song he imbued with the power to conceal his path so none would follow him but those who heard that music. He walked a ways to the east until he stood, at last, in a place no different from any other.

  There the desert parted for him, birthing of itself a ring of stones and then another, until a court of sandstone terraces arrayed itself around him. And where he stomped on the ground a circular trapdoor was revealed, hammered of sky-metal and incised with ancient symbols. There, beneath this trapdoor, under the Ladder’s great court, the Star of Assassins now lives.

  It is the Star of Suicides, for souls of suicides feed it; and it is said that at night Ladder lights a candle and sings to summon those who would train in his school. It is whispered sometimes that his pupils, those who hear the music, are themselves would-be suicides or those whom Bird disdained for crimes inadvertent but so terrible as to weigh the soul with oozing tar and send it reeling to Ladder’s court. These youths he trains to kill and to feed the souls of those so killed to his ever-hungry, viscous star.

  And it is said that the Orphan, disdained by its siblings, keeps grudges. There is no greater prize for it than the souls of the other great keepers of the stars who are its siblings. Among those starkeepers, no soul is more precious to it than the soul of the one who has of old ruled the sands from the City of Eleven Wells; for while the other guardians had departed with their stars, this ruler stayed there hidden with the Hillstar in their hands and witnessed Ladder’s secret.

  * * *

  In the honeycomb library

  Long after the laughter and screams of the revelers faded into a dusk of silence, I paced restlessly upon the dark-tiled floors of my library. My advanced student, Urwar
u, arranged for me tomes from the Southern academies and notebooks from the West and from the North, written in scripts I’d learned in long centuries of my life. I thanked Urwaru for her help and sent her away, for I did not want anyone to be a witness to my research.

  There are three ways for a starkeeper to die. To pass onto the wings of Bird and be carried by her aloft like ordinary souls is a fate seldom chosen by us; how much better in final weariness to reach out to the deepname-woven body of one’s star, to be absorbed and held until it is time for a rebirth.

  The third way to die is to be slain.

  With a sigh, I closed my mind to that fear. Instead, I unwound my scrolls to seek out the name of Ranra Kekeri and immersed myself in all the stories of her fall. Here was one starkeeper who had nothing to fear from Ladder’s assassins; for her spitfire star was dead, submerged and becalmed at last by the wave.

  I sighed and rolled the scrolls back into their snake-leather casings. I did not know if I would leave or simply pace again upon the nighttime tiles, but I was stopped in my tracks by a person in the same salt-stained korob, an apparition that floated through the beehive walls to halt before me. Her silver-black hair was braided and belted to her body with leather under-arm belts, as is formal in the seafaring west.

  I inclined my head to her in greeting. “Welcome, Ranra,” I said. “I was not sure if you had entered my walls.”

  “I have no love for your guardian.”

  “Because she hates your ward?”

  “So are our loyalties declared,” said Ranra, “for all we might chafe against them.”

  “Why did he come here?” I asked. “What does he seek?”

  “I have guided him here.”

  “Against his will?”

  Ranra shrugged. “Without his knowledge, rather. Not everything must always be revealed.”

  I shuddered. Certainly not, and I myself revealed and hid so many things—and yet, to guide one’s ward to travel so far and so perilously, and without his will, felt to me like a betrayal.

  “He is a great-great-great-grandchild of mine,” Ranra said, as if to justify her actions, but that did not ease my mind.