Beneath Ceaseless Skies #85

by Ellsworth, Spencer

The last time I saw Frog another murdering knife passed between us, the last one I would bear.

  “I take you to me with blood and breast milk,” he said.

  “I take you to me with sinew and shadow,” I replied.

  His eyes were bloodshot, from hashish this time, but as always, even under the influence of his narcotics, his mind was clear. “I am taking the Sand-Eaters deep into the desert,” he said. “Await us in a year, south of the Eastern portals in the Ahlasi mountains.”

  I reached for my brother’s hand. I do not know why, but I wanted to feel his touch again.

  He pulled his hand away. It had been too many years since those cold nights in the manor. We had never touched since.

  I entered the khayif’s palace through tunnels dug by Sand-Eater sympathizers. I went to his room when he slept, stepping over the corpses of eunuch servants our other sympathizers had left dead. I slit his throat in his sleep.

  Then I did my work in his harem.

  I fled Kahbadam in disguise and waited for Frog for nearly a year, scavenging through the rough desert edge of the Ahlasi mountains. He never came. I heard rumors of slaughters, all the Sand-Eaters dead, and I also heard rumors of bands of assassins still buried deep in the desert, but I never learned.

  Each night, when I closed my eyes, I saw the children. So many of them, all innocent of the world that used them.

  Like a cheated man, I was found by these monks and their house of healing. And like a coward, I confessed.

  * * *

  The man returns the next morning with a small scrap of parchment, bearing half-formed characters. He hands the parchment to me. “Read.”

  Malah, it reads, and Dah. I never learned, until I was an adult, that other children called their parents names like this. “A child’s writing?”

  “My daughter’s,” he says. “It is all I have left of her.” He smiles faintly, his leathery brown cheeks dimpling.

  “She died in the war?”

  “Aye. I was a village sayir, godborne guardian of a small group of humans that had lived in the same place since the founding of the earth. The local governors had lost too many Kora, and they hired a coterie of northern horsemen to ‘protect’ our village.” He raised his hands to the air, a gesture of prayer. “The horsemen stole our food. They raped our women. They burned the Sanctuary where my wife and daughter hid.”

  It would be foolish of me to say I am sorry, so I merely hand back the parchment.

  He won’t take it. “No, no, I want you to hold it a little longer.” He smiles again, looking almost like the Flare who had been Scorpion. “I slew the man who led the horse-people. A lucky crossbow shot. He fell from his horse spitting and cursing my name. Do you know what I did? It may not surprise you.” He is clasping his hands together, wringing them. “I asked why. I cried to the heavens, why?”

  His voice does not shake, as if he has committed this speech to memory. “Salvation lies in the Aspects of the Thousand: the first, justice; the second, mercy. I had always practiced mercy. I could not see how anyone else would not. My people—my wife—begged him to spare their lives, right until they could beg no longer.”

  There are silent tears on his cheeks. I look away.

  “You did not kill my daughter,” he says, misinterpreting my movement. “It was simply a horse-lord, doing as horse-lords do. But the question of why has remained in my mind. Why would a man do such unthinkable things?”

  I look back at him. He is staring out the window, at the unblinking vista of brown hills and sunlight.

  “I see now how a man comes to do the unthinkable.” He lifts the parchment to the light coming through the window. “I have here two stories. One story tells me of a woman who finally came to understand the truth: that she had to become the ideal of justice in order to make a perfect world. She went on to make that world, a victorious ending. The other....” He smiles for the first time this day. “The other is about a girl who was beaten, tormented, and abandoned, and how the woman made herself into a monster to forget the girl. But the girl wouldn’t die.”

  “I was not a Sand-Eater for my father, or for Frog,” I say. “I saw the itansha dead. I knew I did justice when I slew the khayif.”

  “But you are sorry for the children,” he says. He leans closer. “You didn’t kill them all.”

  I freeze. My great secret. My death, if anyone knows.

  “I know you too well now, Roach.”

  Words are lead in my mouth. “You must not say a word. I truly will kill you if you do.” I whisper. “I killed many of them, you know. Dozens. And then....”

  “And then?”

  My knife had clattered to the bloody floor, dropped from a shaking, useless hand. I had wept for my own weakness. “I pruned their memories from their sha. They all think they were in service to a minor prince who was killed by Sand-Eaters a month before. I took them....” I swallow. “The women are courtesans and concubines. The children, highborn slaves or pages or soldiers. No one will suspect they are the khayif’s heirs.” My voice was hoarse. “You will not find them.”

  He waits, as if for more.

  I consider killing him. It would only take a moment. A finger through the eye. My hands, around his neck, choking him into silence. The secret is worth my life. It is all I have left—that I destroyed the khayifate at least, if not fulfilled my last mission.

  The moment passes. I know I cannot kill this man.

  He leans over and draws a knife from his belt. It is a simple little knife. Steel, not korastone, with a curved blade like a crescent moon.

  “Mercy is a foolish trait,” he says. “To spare someone who has every reason to die. Who can understand that? It is not a rule by which empires live, or assassins. I believe it is a special kind of madness.” He hesitates. “Your father was right to fear your tendency for mercy. I cannot kill a woman who sorrows even for unforgiveable sins. I cannot kill a woman who still has mercy in her soul.”

  “How can you spare me?”

  “I believe—”

  The words tear out of me. “I have committed unforgiveable sins. I have failed, I have failed my—” I stop. I bite back my tongue and feel my eyes grow hot. I have failed my father.

  What madness is this? What sins do I truly weep for?

  I do not trust myself to speak for a moment, until I can force back whatever damning words would have emerged, the echoes of those I had shed for the Flare. “Though I have felled an empire for it, I have not learned the meaning of faith.”

  The silence goes on in that bright room. He looks down at the crescent knife. “Justice must have some meaning, even when tempered by mercy.” He gives me the knife. “You decide your justice.”

  * * *

  I am walking this morning, walking again toward the wilderness where I could lose myself. The once-remote, rocky mountains are close now. I come to their very feet before I stop. The knife is heavy in my hand.

  The roaches gather at my feet. I drop the knife there. It breaks the crust of the earth and sinks in, as if trying to take a final victim.

  The roaches carry it off. I send messages along the lines of their sha, instructing them to throw it into a deep, dark place.

  The monks are hoeing in the garden when I approach. The man is with them. I wait at the edge of the garden, and one of the monks asks, “Can I help you?”

  “I would like to study with you.” I meet the man’s eyes, and for the first time, I feel truly free. “Teach me to heal.”

  My father was right to fear. Mercy did kill Roach of the Sand-Eaters.

  Copyright © 2011 Spencer Ellsworth

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  Spencer Ellsworth wrote his first novel at seven years old and never recovered. He lives in Bellingham , WA, where he writes and edits; the former won the PARSEC Contest in 2009 and has been published in Brain Harvest and Intergalactic Medicine Show; the latter includes slush reading and copyedits galore. He has also worked in wilderness survival, special ed
ucation, and at a literary agency. He is married to fantasy artist Chrissy Ellsworth and is the proud father of Adia and Samwise Ellsworth. He lives at spencerellsworth.blogspot.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT, HER FIELD-GENERAL, AND THEIR WOUNDS

  by Seth Dickinson

  Baru Cormorant’s wound swallows half her world. She sorts her existence left and right, so that she can forget the proper things by turning.

  When she takes up residence in the Elided Keep she orders the long room where she will hold court rearranged. All the blades go on the south wall, cleaned of gore; and all the worn heraldry of the Pyre dukes, trampled on the day she deserted them. Even the battle standards Tain Hu took for her at the Low Rail, though it pains her to look on them.

  In the center of the arrangement she hangs her own war standard, the torn coin-and-comet pennant that rallied her Dukes on the day the rebellion began, on the day it ended, and on all the days between. The tear is new, and she thinks it fitting.

  ”Leave it unsewn,” she commands her servants. They are the Throne’s spies to the last man and woman, but they obey. As they should; she will be a member of the Throne soon enough, wound or no. Just one more test.

  You are not half-blinded, the physicians told her. It is not so simple as that.

  Just one more test.

  She clothes the north wall, across from the standards and blades, with the papers of her old profession. Accounts, audits, inked on sheepskin palimpsest and marbled cream paper. The trusty chained purse she wore in her rounds. And a pristine royal seal taken from the governor’s house in Wei Szlatcha, capital of Pyre, where the Throne’s man first gave her the notion to rebel.

  The wound runs deeper than that, the physicians said, and touched Baru’s temple, where the maul had taken her helm and unhorsed her.

  When she stands at the east end of the hall the right side of her world, the wounded side, is the north, and so she can only understand the south: the heraldry and broken steel of rebellion. But when she sits in the high seat in the west, facing the other way, the right side of her world is the south and she can only comprehend the north, where she has hung all the trappings of loyalty.

  You are not blind to your right, the physicians murmured. Not blind in your eye, at least. The wound runs deep into the brain. You have lost half your world. You no longer understand it exists.

  When she sits in the west she is Baru Cormorant, provincial accountant to the royal treasury: a station she betrayed. When she stands in the east and the bannered south wall is her universe, she is Baru Fisher, who roused the duchies of Pyre in rebellion and then, as planned, sold them to the Throne.

  A traitor either way.

  Draw a clock, the physicians ordered. And she drew a perfectly ordinary clock for them.

  You have drawn all twelve hours crowded between six and midnight, they told her. Are you hungry?

  She told them she was. They gave her a plate of veal and she cleaned it too quickly. More, she said. I am weak.

  You have only eaten the left half of the plate, they told her, and turned the empty plate half a turn. Somehow it was full again. Do you see?

  It seemed, even then, to be a thing she deserved.

  * * *

  We will send one final test of loyalty, the Throne wrote. A ship with red sails will bear it to you.

  She dares the battlements: not the seaward wall but the stonework that looks over the estuary beneath the Elided Keep. Here in the south the sky is steel and lamplight and it always threatens rain. By old habit, Baru Cormorant the accountant’s habit, she tabulates the birds that attend to the keep: a census of grebes, petrels, frigatebirds, wading jacana.

  “Are you an educated man?” she asks her stripling concubine. “You must be. The Throne does educate its spies, doesn’t it?”

  “My lady?” he says. His acting is impeccable, his slate skin flawless, his build an acrobat’s. Whoever sent him made a calculating choice; almost the right choice. Not quite.

  She turns to face him. The estuary and the birds sweep off to her right and she loses them, even the calls, even the sound of surf. “Do you know the Hierarchic Qualm?” she says. “Tell me you know the Hierarchic Qualm, boy.”

  The battlement drops into the outer yard half a meter behind him. He takes a nervous step forward. “Of course I know the Qualm,” he says. “‘The sword kills, but it is the arm that moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder, then? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath, and only does its duty, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.’”

  She waves him off. “Good enough.” She glances back toward the estuary, drawn to make another count of the birds, and only remembers the boy again when he steps around to her left, his eyes cast down.

  “Does the Qualm console you, my lady?” he asks.

  She watches a jacana as it walks on leaves. “What grief would I need consoled?”

  The concubine edges closer, wrapping himself in his arms as if suddenly conscious of the sea wind. “It is said that you raised all of Pyre in rebellion,” he says to the stone below, “but that you were false. It is said the Throne commanded you to rebel, so that it might draw out sedition and crush it.”

  She laughs into the wind, touched by the boy’s pretended naiveté. “It would be a cunning stroke, wouldn’t it? To gather all that discontent under the banner of a rebel bureaucrat: Baru Fisher, fat with theft from the royal purse. To light all the kindling strewn by thirty years of rule, to gather the fire, to draw it high. And then—and then—”

  The boy looks at her with wide eyes, pretending anticipation, pretending that this is not a test—a way to look for her wounds.

  “And then, in one stroke, to snuff that fire out,” she says, remembering that last night, the screams in the dark. “To send a message: we had you from the start. Baru Fisher was ours. Your beloved champion was ours. Your rebellion was ours. The next rebellion will be ours; and the next; and the next. The Throne controls all. You will accept our religion, our taxes, our programs of relocation. The Throne controls all.”

  “A cunning stroke,” the boy agrees, still speaking to the stone. “But, my lady, it is said that one cannot bind a nation without binding oneself. To betray them, to lead them for two years knowing that you would betray them, must have wounded you—”

  She takes him by the throat and smashes him up against the parapet. He is taller but slighter; and though she is a commonborn accountant she has lived two years as Baru Fisher, armored and armed, daughter of a blacksmith and a huntress and a shield-bearer.

  “What do you mean to suggest, little watcher?” she hisses. “That I came to love my comrades, grey-bearded Xate Olake and the duchess Tain Hu? That I wept when I delivered up their armies in the night? That I weep still, and look to old philosophy for comfort?”

  The boy paws at her wrist. She leans in to speak softly. “Do you claim there is treason in my heart?”

  “No, my lady,” he chokes. He lets his hands dangle helpless, though he must have been schooled to fight. “No. No. You were loyal all along, and never wavered. They meant nothing to you. I beg your forgiveness.”

  She drops him to the stone. “I am blameless,” she says. “I was an instrument. I feel no remorse.”

  “My lady.” The boy lifts his slender chin and bares his throat. “I have overstepped.”

  Baru kneels to take his throat between gloved fingers, as the etiquette of transgression permits. His eyes are very wide and very brown and she thinks of the duchess Tain Hu. He breathes in quick frightened little gasps, and licks his lips, and closes Tain Hu’s eyes.

  Baru looks at the concubine’s parted lips, smells the anise he swallowed to freshen his breath, and sees the other test. She has never taken the boy to bed.

  Clever boy, she thinks, to offer yourself as a test. I should kiss you, shouldn’t I? You and your masters think you’ve found a hold on m
e. But I could break that hold if I just leaned a little closer. If I looked into Tain Hu’s eyes and made use of you.

  She leaves him sprawled against the parapet and turns to the estuary, so that he falls on her right and vanishes from awareness. She knows he is still there, of course; she is not touched. But she cannot make herself know it, cannot make herself grasp that he still exists. Her mind insists that he has been snatched away, drawn off-stage.

  Beyond the circling petrels, there is a red sail on the horizon.

  One final test of loyalty, the Throne wrote.

  “Boy,” she says, hoping that he has not fled. “Go rouse my retinue. I will meet them at the docks.”

  * * *

  Baru watches the sea plead with the stone as the red-sailed ship makes harbor. At intervals her chamberlain takes her by the arm and turns her to face the Elided Keep, to remind her it exists.

  “I remember,” she tells him. “It is hard to forget those walls.” But each glance gives her a secret start. When she faces the sea, the keep falls to her right, and try as she might she loses it.

  I am maimed, she thinks. I will fail this test. It will all have been for nothing.

  And then, mutinously: if I pass, will it then have been for something?

  The red-sailed ship puts down a boat. She beckons for a spyglass and examines its passengers. Oarsmen. Marines. A figure cloaked in black wool, bound wrists to ankles. And the man with hair the color of rowan fruit who once, years past, came to her on behalf of the Throne and asked her to rebel.

  The boat comes ashore. The man with the rowan hair wades from surf to stone, smiling warmly, right hand raised in greeting. “Baru Cormorant,” he calls over the high protests of the sea birds. “Your ordeal is near its end. The duchies of Pyre are at peace. I sailed from Wei Szlatcha, your capital, and the Throne’s banners flew unchallenged.”

  She keeps her left side open to him as if readying to duel. “What word is there of grey-bearded Xate Olake, Duke of Wei Szlatcha, master of my spies?” she asks, cool, cold, her eyes held still.