Beneath Ceaseless SKies #49

by Cashier, Erin

  My smile faded away to nothing. The fluttering of his heart, heard for just a moment when he had pressed my ear to his chest, echoed in my mind. It was wrong.

  * * *

  For the next few days, that was our routine; meals together, then I shut myself in his library while he did his work. At night, we sat and played the old games we’d known in childhood: cards, rooks and crows, castle siege, all while studiously avoiding breathing a word of our experiences of the last ten years. He laughed and smiled as if nothing had changed, and I did my best to echo his expressions.

  It was difficult to pretend, when I would notice him looking fixedly at my cursed eye, or when he asked me about the words I knew, or the stories. And his books, when I began to truly explore his collection, filled me with dread: the Book of Autumn, the Book of Winter, the Book of Changes. All familiar, all treasured by the Order.

  Worse, much worse, was a copy of the Book of Swords, its cover made of leather dyed to look like fresh blood. It contained stories of wars, plagues, massacres, madness; all the bloodiest tales that a life could play out. I had looked in it once in the monastery, one quiet night when I was young and just beginning to explore the place. It had given me nightmares.

  “Why do you have this, Esmerand?” I asked, when he came to get me for lunch that afternoon. I held the book up with just the tips of my fingers, like it was poisonous spider. “Nothing good comes of this. You can’t use these, and you shouldn’t need such a thing.” I dropped the book on a chair, no longer wanting to even touch it.

  Esmerand stood in the doorway, his face gone pale and still. “Don’t you remember? None of these were his, but Dad had a little library, when we were children. And he owned the Book of Swords as well. He kept it hidden in his room, but I found it.”

  I shook my head, covering my eyes for a moment. I remembered so little of my parents, so little of anything from that long ago. I knew we had owned books, and I knew it was strange that my father would know how to read, and that he would teach my brother.

  Esmerand picked up the book and put it carefully back into its place on the shelf. “I thought you knew, or at least realized. You look so much like Dad now when your hair gets untidy, with that eye.” He smiled slightly. “Well, without the beard.”

  “I don’t remember. But if it’s true, how could I forget such a thing?”

  “You were young, Safir. Don’t be so hard on yourself. And it wasn’t as if Mum or Dad spoke of it. I tried, you know, when I applied to the Order. I couldn’t find out which monastery he’d come from. I don’t even know why he chose to leave it all behind and let himself die like a peasant, from a summer fever.” He sounded bewildered and hurt, as if our father had somehow betrayed us both.

  I looked down at my hands. There were so many more questions that came with this revelation that I couldn’t answer: why had Dad let himself die, let Mum die as well, when he could have fixed it all with a few words? Why had he taught Esmerand to read, if he’d despised his own power enough to leave the Order? And so on, more than I could contain in my head, more than I wanted to even think of.

  As if he could hear my thoughts, Esmerand reached out to touch the spines of his books, running his fingers across them. “I think that’s why he taught me my letters. He must have known that he passed his strengths on to me. And he even told me, before you were born, that the stories were life, and death, and power.

  “That’s why I taught you. I knew you wouldn’t grow up to be empty-headed and foolish. I thought, whatever he had given up, together we could reclaim.” He gave me a brief, bright smile, achingly like those of the sunny days over a decade ago. “It will make more sense, once you’ve seen my progress. Shall I show you my work?”

  I didn’t want to, because I could already grasp the shape of what I would see. The strange beat of his heart had told me that much. I wanted our pale lie of family life to continue, as if it would become real if I just tried to believe it hard enough. The truth that I had already heard and seen gave me no choice. “Yes,” I said.

  Where the main hall would have been in a normal house was his laboratory, and that was where he took me. It was light and airy, with tall windows on every wall. And it was filled with cages. Things howled and whined and moaned, their shapes unrecognizable. At the front of each cage there was a bit of card.

  The card on the nearest cage had ‘shattered sun’ written on it in green ink. The thing inside had been a fox, once, but its fur had melted away and its limbs were twisted with magic and pain. Tears pricked at my eyes. “Why? How could you?”

  “It’s how the Order learned, in the beginning.”

  I thought of what Bashya had told me, about how the magic had once been different; I didn’t know if I believed it, but was surprised to find that I hoped it was true. “Then they were wrong to have done it.” Pairing stolen words with pain; they’d built an Order of it, a whole society made from stories of suffering.

  “Wrong? This is what Father learned. And I suppose this is what you learned as well.” He stuck one finger through the bars of a cage, stroking the deformed creature within on the head. It shrank away from him with a wet, snuffling whimper.

  “But don’t you see? He left it behind, Esmerand. He escaped. He married. He—”

  “Oh, and look at all the good it did him! An early grave on a dirt farm, his children starving or sold. How easy for him, to have something that he could give up, and how easy for you. Yet here you stand, disparaging me for wanting just a sliver of that for myself.” He laughed bitterly. “You were always so brave, as a child. Now look at you.”

  “I had no choice!” I took an unsteady step back, hands clutching at my stomach. “And then I left. I left, Esmerand. I left just like Dad did. I know what they built and what they made. I don’t want it!”

  His face crumpled with grief and rage “Then you’re wasting it. All I ever wanted, everything that’s mine by right, and you’re wasting it!”

  “All I ever wanted was my brother.”

  He grabbed my sleeve. “Then listen to your brother, Safir, and do as I say!”

  “You can’t make me! There are other stories!” I lunged forward, shoving him with all my might. Surprised, he went sprawling, his cloak and skirts splaying out to reveal legs that were no longer altogether human, their skin warped and waxy.

  That sight was all the confirmation I needed. I backed away from him until I ran into one of the tables, setting the deformed creatures caged on it shrieking and whimpering. I shook my head, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But you don’t have to walk this path, Esmerand.”

  Rustling and shuffling; the sounds of him regaining his feet. “And what would you suggest?” he asked, his tone mocking. “They won’t teach me. You won’t teach me. So I truly have no one left but myself.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.” I thought of Bashya again, of the strange, almost frightening image he’d painted of a world unlike everything I had known. “The Destani, Esmerand. I traveled with them, and... they told me there was a different way.” I opened my eyes; it was easier to look at him now that his self-inflicted deformities were hidden. “We could find them, ask them. We could try to learn a new way, together.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, and for those few heartbeats I let myself hope. Then he laughed, short and sharp. “So you’ve not only abandoned everything you’ve learned, you found the most notorious liars in the world to pin your hopes on.” Again, that awful laugh. “I really was wrong about you.”

  “They weren’t lying,” I said. “I’m not a foolish little girl any longer, brother. I can hear the sour sound a lie makes. If you’d just come with me, I know you’d see it. I know you’d understand.” Perhaps if he left behind the books, the tormented animals, whatever had poisoned his mind would lose his grip. It was a mad idea, but it was also the only one that I had.

  “I have too much to do to go on your wild sheep chase, Safir,” he said. “Leave if you like. I’m won’t s
top you.”

  “I won’t go without you.”

  “Then I suppose you won’t be going anywhere. Go back to your books then. And stay out of my laboratory if you’re not going to help me.”

  “No. I won’t.” I looked around, at the sad, twisted animals. For them, the damage was too great; death would be the only mercy. “It isn’t too late to seek out a different path. For both of us.”

  “You don’t seem to be listening to what I’ve said.”

  “And you haven’t been listening to me either. You said you wanted me to teach you. I won’t—can’t. But I can help you still. Come with me.”

  His only answer was to turn his back. He moved toward another set of cages, taking up one of the cards and considering it.

  “I could make you come with me,” I said, desperation welling up like acid from my belly.

  He spared a glance over his shoulder. “I doubt that. I’m still your older brother.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “I’ve grown up,” he said. He turned back to the cage. “You apparently haven’t. Though I think your fancies weren’t half as wild when you were little.”

  The casual dismissal more than stung; it was as humiliating as if he’d slapped me. My desperation turned inward to anger; Esmerand was not only the god-like older brother who had abandoned me, but now he had shown himself to be every man wearing the robes of the Order who had treated me as an inconsequential plaything.

  Anger summoned up the words I knew best, from the Book of Autumn that I’d so faithfully copied on to blank pages and in to my own blood. “In the golden afternoon the cold wind wakes, prowling from the mountains, sweeping all before it and taking breath away. Across the battlefield, to the call of the trumpets, the leashed hound at the general’s side....”

  I watched Esmerand turn, his eyes going wide before they were overtaken by the all too familiar glassy look that I’d seen in the mirror during my days in the monastery. Slowly, he dropped to his knees, though one hand still clutched at the table, as if he could pull himself back from the net I was weaving.

  I paused for a moment, swallowing back the words. “You’ll come with me, Esmerand. For your own good. You don’t have a choice. I’ll continue if I must.”

  He breathed heavily, finally letting go of the table, resting his hands on the ground. “Show me more, Safir. That’s it. That’s the power I want.” He smiled, and it was a terrible sight.

  I shrank away. “No! No, Esmerand. That’s not what I meant. Come along. Please, Brother. Come along.”

  He shook his head to clear it, using the table to lever himself back to his feet. “Show me more!”

  I couldn’t convince him; I couldn’t force him without becoming what I most despised. I had no choices left. I caught up a glass beaker from the table. “I’ll tear this place to pieces.” I hadn’t actually meant to smash the glass, but the trembling of my hands was so bad that I dropped it, and it shattered across the floor.

  Esmerand stared at the mess, then snarled at me. “You’d better not do that again.”

  “Or what?” I demanded, my voice shaking as badly as my hands. “You’ll stop me? I think I already proved that I’m stronger than you.” Something between tears and laughter bubbled up in my chest. I swept my arm across the table; more glass tumbled to the floor.

  Esmerand started toward me. I barked out three words from the Book of Summer; a wall of fire roared in to life between us. “Maybe you were right, Esmerand. Maybe we were meant for greater things than this. But I won’t become them, and I won’t let you become them either.”

  He tried to reach through the flames, perhaps thinking they were illusions or ordinary fire. I shouted a warning, but too late. He screamed and lurched back, clutching at his hand, its skin bubbling with blisters.

  “Get out, you fool!” I shouted at him. “Leave!”

  His face was sickly pale, shining with sweat, but he straightened to his full height. The flames reflected in his eyes. “I will have this.”

  “But not today.” My eyes stung; if there were tears, the heat dried them before they could fall. “Go!” I shouted another few words, driving the flames toward him. He was forced back, even as I could see him trying to memorize every detail of what I said, what I did.

  I didn’t know what else to do; I drove him back again and again, sending the flames before me until he was forced out onto the threshold of his own house. The air was almost too hot to breathe, but still he lingered, as close to the fire as he dared. “Get out!” I screamed at him again.

  “I was wrong,” he said. “You have changed. How fitting, that we’ve both managed to become the same thing.”

  “You’re still wrong,” I said. “And I’ve made my choice.” I didn’t know if it was right or wrong, but I had made it. “I love you, Esmerand.”

  So quietly, I almost couldn’t hear it over the hungry crackle of the flames, he said, “And I love you. Maybe some day, I’ll forgive you.”

  I turned my back on him then; strands of my hair sizzled and curled in the heat. I focused down the hall, to where the half-ruined laboratory still stood, and began: “The sun beat down on the land, burning all to dust but the lone wanderer, the Sun’s child, his sword clutched tight at his side....”

  I didn’t stop until the room blazed with so much flame that I couldn’t bear to look at it any longer, as if burning away the experiments and the books in the library upstairs would burn away the impurities in my brother’s soul—and in my own.

  I dismissed the fire behind me with the wave of a hand, and walked down the massive stone steps. All around the house, windows sizzled, popped, shattered in the heat. The inferno I had created in the laboratory roared like a living thing. Esmerand was nowhere to be seen. I did not look for him. I loved him, and hated him; he was my brother.

  Perhaps with his laboratory gone, he would start anew. I tried to find a flicker of hope in my heart; there was none. I knew already that he would not find a different way—I had shown him what lay at the end of the path paved with swords, and he had reached through fire to grasp at it.

  * * *

  Months later, I found Bashya again, and Pellé, and little Venia, now not so little. I joined the caravan, only until I would reach my destination, though I never gave that place a name. That made Bashya smile.

  Every place we went, I found a girl or woman, perhaps two, perhaps three, and I taught them the power of stories and how to read. I never told my own stories, but I taught them to tell their own. Esmerand had been right about one thing; as the stories changed, so did the world. And on the darkest foundations, they told stories of hope, and I looked down the long road to the day when those tales would undo the pain of the world.

  Copyright © 2010 Rachael Acks

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  Rachael Acks is a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She lives in Westminster with her long-suffering husband and two cute but evil cats. This is her maiden voyage into the land of professionally published fiction. Because she is under the impression that people care a great deal about her opinions, she also has a blog: http://geo-geek.blogspot.com.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  COVER ART

  “Spring Sunset,” by Andreas Rocha

  Andreas Rocha lives in Lisbon, Portugal, with his wife. He studied architecture, but after college his main occupation veered from architecture towards digital painting, something he had done during college as a hobby. He has been working freelance for three years now, doing conceptual and finished illustrations, matte paintings, and 3D architectural visualizations. See more of his work, including a movie version of “Spring Sunset,” at www.andreasrocha.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2010 Firkin Press

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