She has been asking herself that. She did not think beyond the act, beyond attaching Sikata’s soul to a puppet. It seemed the logical sequence at the time, the right action to take upon discovering Sikata’s fate. She came back for Sikata; Sikata was missing, and so Melishem restored her. “I wanted to see you again,” she says, faltering. “I have met monarchs who wish unending wealth, generals who wish victory everlasting, scholars who seek godhood, golden fish who seek dragon heft and dragon horns. My wish is not so much.”
“The modesty of your wish doesn’t disguise its selfishness.” But Sikata’s voice is flat, tired. She holds out her bowl and Melishem refills it. “Take up my post.”
“No.” When Sikata goes and the effigy is empty once more, Melishem will leave and return to wandering until she finds something that can kill her—but this she does not say. The simplicity of that prospect soothes her.
“Then we will do it the old way. The proper way.” She leans close and holds Melishem’s face in her hands. Her palms are smooth, without life- and fate-lines, her nails the complex black of sable pelt. “Fight me. Win and you’ll get what you want. Lose and you will pledge to defend the city of your birth and mine, as long as you are able.”
What I want is impossible. What I want is to make you food and hear what you have to say about it, what I want is... “Very well,” Melishem murmurs. Her voice is as frictionless as amber, no more cracks. “The way it’s always been between us.” A syntax of blade and bullet, riposte and pivot, that purest form of dialogue.
* * *
Dawn comes, as it tends to, in gradations of blue. From periwinkle to cobalt to indigo, day sleets across the horizon as night loosens its jade-dark grip. No one makes a spectacle of the match: there is no distribution of cold sugared milk and venom-sweet wine, no pageantry of moon-dusted and glass-painted youth making dance and music.
The few surviving children keep to the shadows. They have the look of starvation, ragged and stunted; enemy weapons targeted the young first, even before they targeted combatants. Melishem tries to spot Sikata’s offspring, Sikata’s spouse. But it is not as though they have chiseled her name onto their brows, worn the grief of losing her at their throats and in the bend of their elbows; it is not as though they have felt obligated to step up and introduce themselves. Melishem cannot find them, and does not ask.
The field prepared for them is blank and smooth as new canvas, the air still and perfumed with anticipation.
On the other side Sikata has dressed for combat, sleek shell and a mask that hides her face from the audience, giving them only an enameled façade. No identity. Half the spectators’ benches are frosted over, the other half crimson with sourceless heat. Remnant of the battle-wrack that brought Talyut’s fortune so low.
They meet in the middle, within a circle that has hosted a hundred thousand matches like this, generations of tournaments. Melishem recalls, faintly, a girl who came up to her back then—furiously blushing—to offer her a knot of lunar lotuses. No one offers her flowers now, and no one announces her.
“Under the gaze of She Who Devours,” Melishem begins the ritual words, in the absence of a master of ceremonies.
Perhaps behind the enamel Sikata smiles, sardonic. She cups her hands in prayer and bows her head. “Within the fire of her breath, incandescent with the apocrypha of a thousand suns.”
“May she witness us and find us worthy.”
“May she witness us,” Sikata murmurs, “and find us worthy.”
Day deepens into afternoon, sinks into evening. Neither duelist tires, but their audience does, and so they conclude at a draw, to be resumed the next morning: give the few children their bedtime, give the exhausted adults their meals.
“You can’t just defend forever,” Sikata says as they return to the governor’s palace.
Melishem says, without meeting Sikata’s eye, “Let me repair your body.”
Match two: Melishem puts on the same enameled mask as Sikata’s, the same chitin-shell over her limbs and torso. Even down to the rippling patterns and hue it is identical. They are not far apart in height, in build, long of calves and sinuous of spine. Seeing this, Sikata gives pause, but she doesn’t comment or inquire.
To watching Talyut, they are as reflections: a single person fighting her simulacrum. Neither gains advantage over the other. As evening plummets into dusk, still the match does not conclude, and they stop once more so weary mortal heads may rest.
“You are not fighting me fairly and truly,” Sikata says as they make their way into the palace kitchen.
Melishem says, looking past Sikata’s gaze, “Let me prepare you dinner.”
“This is not a game.”
“It is not,” Melishem agrees. “For a battle so decisive you must have more to impose on me. What do you want, Sikata, separate from your office?”
“What do I—” Sikata barks out a locust laugh. “What I want doesn’t matter. My friend, my stranger friend, I am dead. All that’s left to me is to fulfill duty unfinished.”
“I’ve met too many restless ghosts to believe that death washes away all desires like a hot spring bath.”
Her age-mate nearly smiles. “How you strip away the glamor of the afterlife. I want what anyone who widowed her wife wants. But that’s trivial, in the face of Talyut’s fate.”
Nothing that’s important to Sikata is trivial to Melishem, but that is another truth she leaves unspoken.
* * *
Match three: each soul that lives and breathes in Talyut congregates to watch, every elder and child, every half-real spirit and shrine sprite.
Sikata strikes first, with the full strength of her effigy frame—and fast, for as Melishem parries her sliver-blade, an octagon bullet is ricocheting for her shadow, scintillant and fissive. Melishem exhales, and a quartet of paper wasps flit out of her lips, intercepting the bullet-shards. She spins to find Sikata behind her, catches and deflects a blow that would have bisected her spine.
All these happen faster than their spectators can distinguish. To them it is a mirage, of ghosts at war, of a poem performed in the language of penumbra. Silhouette and corona, wraith and radiance.
The end comes when dusk, untethered from the last dregs of day, plunges into night.
One duelist falls to the rimed ground, enamel cracking hard on ice. The other stands watch as her opponent convulses around a bullet’s exit in her midsection. Stands watch as her opponent’s substance sloughs off in layers; crumples as paper in fire, curling back into itself until nothing remains save black snowdrift and burnt insects.
The victor gathers that snowdrift in her hands. Puts her mask’s lips to the black substance; an exhalation and it scatters, caught by an updraft of wind.
Their audience is silent, held hostage by uncertainty: for who won, after all, and what does her triumph entail? The gate-guard moves, as though to call out for what may or may not be his sister, but draws back and fades into the crowd—his courage is not up to the test.
A woman braves forward. Her children trail close behind her, absolute in their trust of their mother. She moves at a march; she smells of loam and hothouses, and black dirt is caked under her nails, as though she’s recently come away from her labor and did not have time to wash. Unselfconscious of this she stops before the duelist. A head shorter, she has to reach on tiptoes for the mask.
The duelist does not resist.
When the mask falls away, this is beneath: a precise, sculpted face. Enormous eyes, sharp nose. The lips are made red and full, the cheeks gaunt but flushed with exertion and life, skin an earthen brown. It is a face arresting in its utter symmetry. It is beautiful; it is beloved.
There is a trill of laughter, a kiss as the woman greets her resurrected wife. There is applause as Talyut’s citizens greet their champion’s return. Cold sugared milk is brought forth and the governor’s pantry is emptied, a banquet for all. The dancers, though weak from long rationing, nevertheless find in themselves the strength to perform. Flowers ar
e given to the champion, and her path is sprinkled with perfume and chamomile.
“You are home,” the wife whispers, their first words exchanged as the celebration concludes.
“I am,” says the duelist, her head crowned by moths and her footprints crosshatched with black dust.
At the city’s apex, the empty grave grows heavy, filling once more with weapons polished to star-gleam and oiled serpent-sleek.
Copyright © 2016 Benjanun Sriduangkaew
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Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and year’s best collections. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.
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COVER ART
“High Above the Savannah,” by Martin Ende
Martin Ende is a self-taught artist from Germany who began in pencil drawings and moved to digital mediums in 2011. He worked as a concept artist in small game projects such as Liberico from Enraged Entertainment, as well as doing illustrations for some tank restoration projects. View more of his art at maddendd.deviantart.com and www.mad-and-nice.de.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
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