“Yes.”
He sucked on his lips, wincing. “Saved?”
“Yes.”
“Tern?” Youthful hope came into his face. “Hider?”
“I—I don’t know.”
His face sagged; then he caught a glimpse of his own hand on my shoulder, and he turned it back and forth, horrified. He raised the hand to his cheeks, feeling the hundred cracks in the skin and the jowls under the chin.
“How long?” he whined.
I swallowed. “I think, maybe two hundred years.”
“Gone,” He said. “All gone, all dead.” He looked down at the ground. “Useless, pointless.”
I put both my hands on my chest. “I’m Scuffer,” I said.
He coughed, then coughed harder, deeper, sitting down on the ground. “A child,” he wheezed.
“Who are you?”
He stared as if the question made no sense. Then he said, “Hare.”
“I’m going to get you some water,” I said. “Will you stay?”
He looked me in the eyes. “Nowhere to go.”
It took a while to find a stream, but I filled my flask and brought it to Hare. He emptied it in one draught.
“Hare,” I said to him. “Will you go with me to Badger Stone?”
He thumped the book with his hand. “All dead. Desolation. Nothing.”
I put my hand on his arm. “There is a whole village there,” I said, but I knew what he meant.
“Tern!” he wailed, and put his face in his hands.
“Hare,” I said. He sobbed into his fingers. “Hare, please listen.”
He shook his head. I grabbed him by the shoulder of his ragged clothes, by the bones that felt like they would burst both skin and fabric. “Listen! There’s a girl, and she’s been bitten by the serk.”
“Doomed,” he moaned. “Dead, mad, doomed.”
“No, listen. Hare, you’re alive. You’re not—” I wanted to say You’re not mad, but the words wouldn’t come. “You’re not a killer. Maybe we can save Dipper. Maybe she can live. Please—” The tears came down my face, and I could not control my voice. “Please. I have to. She. . .” I choked.
He put his hand on my chest, then on his own. “You want to turn her into this?”
It took me a few moments before I could speak. “I want to try. I want to try. Please, Hare.”
He shook his head. “Fool,” he said. Then he stood up. “We will try.”
I did feel like a fool; I was clinging to a wish of a hope of a chance. But it was all I had.
It took even longer to return to the village than it had taken to leave it. Hare was weak and could not move quickly, and there was nothing to eat but a few wild mushrooms and onions. Every few hours his panic would overtake him, and he would begin to climb back up the mountains. Each time I approached him with my arms open and pleaded softly. Each time he relented, his wish to help me just barely winning the battle over his fear. A man who could fight his own demons over and over again, when every instinct told him to flee, must have an indomitable will.
When finally we arrived, it took all my pleading to get him to walk into the village; it frightened him more than I did. I had to get down on my knees and beg.
Dipper was still alive. Her parents were alive too, although she had already killed our friend Climber by the time my father raised the alarm. Together the villagers had surrounded Dipper and locked her in her own house.
My own departure, it seemed, was what had stayed their hands. Marmot had reasoned that the book, which had protected me from Dipper, had urged me to go north. The book and I were both pieces of this puzzle, he had argued, both somehow connected to Dipper, and “We should not take an action we can’t undo until we know how the puzzle fits together.”
I think that he just could not bring himself to countenance the killing of a child, no matter how deadly. In fact, had I followed the book’s commands and executed Hare, it would have done nothing for Dipper at all. But here we were.
Marmot was fascinated by Hare. Once he understood who Hare was, he scrutinized him with that strange gaze sorcerers have. “A third-stage serker!” he whispered. “A sleeping sequence that lasted two centuries! And he performed it on himself!”
Then he looked up. “The patterns are discernable,” he said. “They’re much simpler than what we see in a late serker.”
“Monodirectional adjacent helices,” muttered Hare.
Marmot’s jaw dropped. “Uh—yes. Yes, exactly.”
“Don’t hurt me.”
“Not for the world.” Marmot looked at me. “There’s nothing you can do for a late serker. But this is something more familiar. I might be able to figure out how to untangle it.”
While Marmot tried to work out the contours of his spell, I tried to see Dipper—but the house was locked tight with neighbors guarding all sides of the place, night and day. They had to open the door to feed her, and I saw her wild black hair. She saw me too and called to me.
“Scuffer.” Her voice was musical and coaxing, not like Dipper at all. “Scuffer, I need to see you.” The door closed, and I felt its click in my chest.
I would have stayed outside her prison all day, watching and waiting, wanting to plead for forgiveness and wishing she had killed me. But Marmot came and led me away, saying he needed my help with Hare. As always with Marmot, there was more in his mind than in his mouth; I might have gone mad myself, dwelling on Dipper’s fate and my own guilt.
It took Marmot a day’s laborious concentration, his hands and lips moving, his eyes staring into Hare’s scalp, sweat pouring down his cheeks. I sat before Hare the whole time, holding his hands. He shuddered from time to time, his fear sometimes overmastering him, but each time I squeezed his hands and told him he was the bravest man I’d ever heard of.
When the process was complete, Hare turned his face—his sober, sharp, haunted face, utterly different from what he was before—on Marmot’s exhausted eyes. “Thank you, Sorcerer. We both need to sleep.”
I spent the days of Hare’s recovery in a near-hysteria of impatience, pacing outside Dipper’s house whenever anyone would let me. My parents, Weasel, and Marmot tried to keep me occupied, but I could not let it be. Hare’s cure, miraculous though it was, had not saved Dipper, and I still did not know whether that was possible. And I had not yet realized what I myself needed to do.
Hare quickly regained most of the skills of sorcery he had had as a young man, although he told us, flatly and without concern, that he would not live more than another five years.
“You can slow down aging with the sleeping sequence, but two hundred years is still two hundred years. My heart has only so many beats in it.”
He had been Marmot’s age when news of the Plateau Army reached Badger Stone. He had left secretly, leaving the beautiful book for Tern, his intended bride, hoping she would keep it as a relic. How it wound up in my grandfather’s hands we could not guess.
Seeing how the potential in Dipper’s brain had changed in the days since she had been bitten, and comparing it with Hare’s, Marmot and Hare believed that the transition to the third stage required “merely” one century, not two. Although Marmot could not weave a sleeping sequence that would last so long, Hare could; he did it gently, softly, like man blessing his children.
We set Dipper in a newly-built hut of stone and wood, checked every day by a friend or member of the family. Most days, I do it myself. When she wakes, Marmot’s apprentice, or his apprentice’s apprentice, or whatever sorcerer we have by then, should be able to untangle the cords in her mind and restore her to herself.
And Hare taught the long sleeping sequence to Marmot, so that he can pass it on, so no serker ever need be killed again.
* * *
I am sixteen as I join her.
Once I had my Naming Day, I took the right to decide my own fate. I told the sorcerers that I wished to sleep beside Dipper, to join her exile in the future. When she rises, in body a middle-aged woman but in mind still a girl of thirteen, confuse
d and mad with fear, she will not be alone. I owe it to her, and more.
My parents and Weasel were distraught, and Marmot tried to talk me out of it. But Hare just smiled and told me I was a good lad.
Now I sit in Dipper’s hut, looking down at her sweet sleeping face, her black hair combed sedately over her shoulders, remembering her excitable voice when she was really Dipper, and I wait for Hare and Marmot to give me my heart’s desire.
We will awaken together in a strange world, older and exiled from all that we know, as Hare was. We don’t have his courage; affection will have to do.
Copyright © 2012 Kenneth Schneyer
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Kenneth Schneyer claims never to have been an actor, a corporate lawyer, a dishwasher, or a college professor, but he lies a lot. His stories have appeared in Analog, Clockwork Phoenix 3, Daily Science Fiction, GUD, and elsewhere, and one of them has been translated into Russian. Born in Detroit, he now lives in Rhode Island with one singer, one dancer, one actor, and something striped and fanged that he sometimes glimpses out of the corner of his eye. Visit him online at ken-schneyer.livejournal.com..
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COVER ART
“Remember,” by Zsófia Tuska
Zsófia Tuska is a Hungarian graphic designer and art student, specializing in concept arts, photomanipulations, and advertisements. Her favorite themes are the legends, mythology (especially the Celtic and Norse mythology), and fantasy/science fiction. She is freelancer but is interesting in work in a studio or ad agency. View more of her artwork at DeviantArt.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.
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