by Yoon Ha Lee
...and Cathay’s foot twists to land on top of the golem’s head and then leap forward for the perch impossibly far away, body somersaulting, twisting as her hand shoots out and slams the gem down into its holder.
Breathing hard, heart like a trapped bird in her throat, Cathay bares her teeth at Mariposa in a grin.
* * *
The bus is striped aluminum and has three segments, like a silver snake. Its seats are plushed in blue and white with a pattern of ducks. The wires overhead clash and sing and shoot out sparks that surround the bus as it lumbers into motion.
Cathay says, “Where are we bound?”
“This is the #72 bus. Where do you think we are bound?”
There is only one stop of note on that route.
“We go to play rigoletto at the Gates of Dawn.”
Mariposa nods.
“Having had me risk pain, you now wish me to gamble with permanent exile?”
“Would you miss the city if such a fate came to you?” Mariposa asks. “Knowing you would no longer walk its streets, even after you died?”
Cathay shrugs. “There is Chaos everywhere. To be attached to a certain place is to display a certain predictability that I am, by nature, not disposed toward.”
“Yet you have lingered here for over a decade now.”
As they disembark the bus, Cathay searches for that green thread of interest in Mariposa’s eyes, but the sky overhead is unobliging in its pink and amber clouds, marshmallow fluffy, a light almost cloying in its sweetness.
The glass-marbled plaza before the gates murmurs with spans of pigeons in the early light, pecking at the handfuls of grain scattered by families waiting to say goodbye to loved ones.
Serendib is an exacting mistress. It has many exiles, forced out by politics, or illness, or curse, or any range of things including random chance.
“It is as good a place as any other,” she says, her voice as low as the pigeons’ chatter.
* * *
The rigoletto players gather in a crowd by themselves, within reach of the gates.
They dress richly, flaunt their wealth, so everyone will know they come here for the gamble, not what they stand to win, but the truth is, immense fortunes have been made this way. They wear great hats of velvet dyed in jewel-tones with feathers to match; only two hatmakers in Serendib make these hats, and both dress their children in first-water jewels from their profits. The lace hems of their sleeves drag in the dust.
They murmur among themselves as Cathay, virtually naked by their standards, steps up. But it is not unheard of for someone to come to play the game without the preamble of assembling the requisite wardrobe.
As long as they can prove they have an estate to gamble. For the loser of the game must depart through those tall gates, pearly as legended others, and never return to the city.
Cathay walks up and down the line, hands clasped lightly behind her back, as though inspecting a rank of troops. She glances back at Mariposa. There are a few feckless youths among the crowd, who look easy to defeat. But that’s not a victory worth evoking the green glimmer in Mariposa’s eyes, Cathay suspects.
But there is no point in picking out the fiercest to fall against.
She is a Chaos mage, after all. So she closes her eyes, spins like a dervish, and stops, finger outpointed. She opens her eyes, hoping she has managed to point at the crowd and not some foolish thing like a pigeon or statue.
But a line could be drawn along her finger, exiting the tip, and lodge solidly in a man’s chest. He is a sea captain, and dragon tattoos course along his brawny arms, circle the bald scalp revealed when he doffs his vermillion hat in acknowledgement.
They step to the side.
* * *
They match coins to see who will go first. Cathay wins. She knows that is not necessarily an advantage.
Her opponent is water magic, changeable and fickle. He may well have artifacts of power garnered during voyages. Those who sail or fly or wander with Serendib as home port range shores farther than her ken, even out to the great Darks where the gods dwell.
She sees no jewelry about him other than the gold hoop, a bit of wire really, twisted through his left ear. She would think it nothing but the left side is the heart side, and all enchantments are laid on that side of the body.
The predictable move would be fire, but she is a Chaos Mage. Therefore she laughs and uses fire after all. Being predictable is a choice like any other and one most people think a Chaos Mage will not engage in. Her curse has wings of fire, its beak steeped in anger and envy.
She has out-subtled herself. He is ready with a swarm of water-winged fish that swoop through the air like a murmuration of swallows, tearing her creature apart before they wheel and dive down towards her.
Her left sleeve sweeps up over her head. Gems glitter and spark, a shark of scintillations that eats the fish like the dark eating light, an eclipse of movement beautiful because it is deadly as well as graceful.
Less traditional than his fish would imply, he buffets her with waves of force pulled from the tides.
She slips aside again and again like a matador eluding a vast, cloudy bull.
When he pauses, straining to see her in the watery mist, she appears behind him and strings a necklace of scorpion green curses around his neck while plucking the earring from his ear.
He falls to the ground, choking. Cathay pockets the loop and walks back to Mariposa.
“There,” she says, voice light as a pigeon’s feather. “Safe to dwell in my little house in Serendib for yet another day.”
* * *
Mariposa’s smile is crooked and full of some untold joke. Her face comes close to Cathay’s. They search each other’s eyes.
Mariposa’s lids droop. She leans forward—and Cathay pulls away as though by counterweight, snatching her breath as though startled by the involuntary action of the move.
Mariposa’s lips purse.
“Games of chance,” she says. “Risking pain, risking home and fortune.”
“And what is left beyond that?” Cathay says. Her voice is half-challenging.
“For the person who would risk everything?” Mariposa says.
They both know what she means.
* * *
The pit is in the very center of Serendib. There are thousands of legends about it. It is covered with a simple open pavilion carved of sandstone, beige but of a remarkable fine grain. It has never weathered. There are no markings.
In the center of the pavilion a squat, eight-armed creature sits beside the pit, which is some ten feet across.
For a fee, this creature will lower a basket holding the payee into the pit for a certain depth, and then let it hang there for a quarter of an hour, and then draw it back up.
Three small creatures play flutes in the corner of the pavilion, and do so in shifts, so there is always a thin music in the air.
No one knows what happens during that quarter of an hour. Nine out of ten so lowered return dead. Some have peaceful faces or even smiles. Others have a froth of fear on their mouths, or have clawed their own eyes out, or tore their veins open on the basket’s rim. Some are transformed, into robots or statues or pillars of salt.
A few vanish from the basket.
A few, though, a handful, return better than unscathed, touched with golden luck or new and unknown powers or enlightened beyond all comprehension.
Cathay stands peering over the edge.
“It seems very deep indeed,” she observes, her tone mild.
“Is the gamble too large?” Mariposa asks.
Cathay shrugs, counting coins to the creature. This is all part of the universe’s randomness. If she’s lucky, Cathay can ride it like a dragon. Come out with the ability to talk to animals or angels. Shoot flames from her fingertips.
If she’s not...
Well, that will be a different matter.
* * *
The basket goes down. The creatures pipe. Mariposa sits cross-legged on the
ground and the green in her eyes threatens to overcome the rest. Her fingers wind around each other, anxious.
The sky flickers cobalt and amber and lightning. After a little while it rains. The rain stops and a rainbow appears before sparkling clouds obscure it. (All normal for Serendib weather. The city is where many sayings about weather began.)
Eight arms haul the basket up, scraping against the sandstone.
Cathay sits in the basket. Tears streak her face but she seems otherwise unscathed.
She leaps from the basket with a touch of impatience and strides over to Mariposa. “Well?”
“You have gambled and won,” Mariposa says, rising.
She slides a hand along the front of Cathay’s armored vest, careful not to cut herself on the metal scales.
“Three times,” Cathay says, looking down into her face.
“Then you have gambled and won something from me,” Mariposa says after a long moment. She tilts her mouth upward to make the prize clear.
Cathay stands, looking down, eyes neutral and wary and wistful. Mariposa’s fingers flex on the metal scales.
Cathay shakes her head.
“You have won,” she says regretfully, and releases her. “There is a risk that frightens me too far, and it lies in your eyes.”
Cathay walks away, out of the pavilion, and the piping, and the eight-armed creature who has been observing all this interchange.
Mariposa stands looking after her and the thwarted green of her eyes is that of a seed left long underground and only recently come to the sun.
To seek its fortune.
To seek the one who planted it so long ago.
Copyright © 2016 Cat Rambo
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Nebula and World Fantasy Award-nominated writer/editor Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches atop a hill in West Seattle. Her over two-hundred fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and two previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her most recent novel is Beasts of Tabat, with sequel Hearts of Tabat appearing in 2016. She is the current President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. For more about Cat, as well as links to her fiction, see www.kittywumpus.net.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
THE RIGHT BRIGHT COURIER
by Anaea Lay
The sensor feeds of our approach washed over me as I sat in Shalott’s cocoon, guiding her with my breath and thought and anticipation. The ether roads between worlds were long and we both bore the scars of our journeys. She furled her sails and pulled them tight to her hull, then turned on her side and beached herself upon the shores. Trails of nebula dust scattered in our wake, rippling out in a cascade of color and radiation that sparkled in the depths of our shared vision. We had arrived. But she did not withdraw the cocoon. Her warm, humid breath encased me, clutching me tight.
“You will not come back to me,” she whispered in my ear.
“I will.”
“You won’t,” she insisted. But in the same breath, the threads of the cocoon parted and she let me go.
I let my fingers slide along the smooth, leathery walls of her interior as I moved along her deck, then found the hatch. I paused long enough to press my lips to the center of the old flap, an apology for my impending necessity. We’d been so long in space, sailing to this shore, that the flesh of the hatch had had time to heal, so I had to cut it open anew. But I am an expert sailor and comfortable with the handling of a ship. My strokes were confident and smooth, and in a instant the flap was free once more.
A moment’s hesitation—there was so much I wanted to reassure her of—and then I was through the hatch and into the clear night air of the shores outside the Palace of Abandoned Dreams. A Bright Courier never looks back, never regrets, but when I crested the bank I turned to her. Her scales were gray and shimmering under the golden light of the double moons, her sails reflecting the ether-glow we sailed upon to travel between planets. I’d sacrificed a valve of my heart, a length of my gut, and an impossible desire, all to have her grown for me. From me. It wasn’t looking back, that last glance. You can’t look back at your present self.
The palace gates parted before me without a touch. They knew what I was, why I was there, and they did not test me. They creaked and groaned on their hinges with long disuse. Many come to collect the package from the Palace of Abandoned Dreams, but no true Courier has trod this ground. Until me.
Beyond the gates is a simple stone fountain, the water shallow and clear in its basin, ether-smoke rising purple and green where the minnows disrupt it. My first test waits for me there. Ghost images of Artie and Gwen, perched on the edge of the fountain. Artie has leaned over the edge, sucked in the ether-smoke, and exhaled it as smoke rings. Gwen laughs and claps her hands before, as one, they turn to me.
“Your road is too long,” Gwen says.
Artie reaches for me. “Stay with us.”
I don’t answer them. I will not give ghosts the answer I couldn’t give flesh before me. I walk on.
“Wait!” Gwen calls. “At least watch my trick.”
I know without looking that her hands are grasping the smoke, shaping the ephemeral substance of the ether with her gentle touch until a rainbow falls from her hands to pierce the surface of the water. I know because I saw Gwen and her clever hands do that a hundred, a thousand times before I left. Because I’d give another valve of my heart to see it again. But I am a Bright Courier, and I do not look back.
Nevertheless, their laughter follows me as I press on.
The sky above me roils in purple and orange, a tapestry of eternal sunset that blocks the stars and hides the roads through the ether. It twists and shifts above me, never stable, never satisfied, and I feel I know it. This was a place made for me, for my kind, and I love it for that. It is a trap laid for me, designed for me, and I want to hate it. I will, I think, before the end.
The path from the gate of the Palace of Abandoned Dreams is paved with mother of pearl. It shimmers under that angry sky, glows in the eternal moonlight. My shadow falls over it and the world around me grows dimmer for it. And from that shadow, my second test is born. The shadow turns into night on another world, a clear sky glimmering with stars and the golden ether-roads that I sailed with Shalott. I recognize that foreign night, that distant world. And as I do, she’s there before me, Gwen with her gentle curves and maniac’s grin. Gwen with the clever hands, pulling ether-smoke from the puddles to shape ephemeral skylines and landscapes for passersby to admire.
“Have you ever felt the substance of the ether in space?” I asked her that night, genuinely curious what she might craft with the full substance.
This time I said nothing. That night we had talked, and I’d promised to introduce her to Shalott, to push off into the ether, to let her reach out into space and shape the substance of the universe how she would. And she, in turn, asked me whether I had rooms, whether I’d join her in hers, whether I’d like to meet her particular friend. It had been so good, so perfect, the first time I’d seen this. Now I walked on, my heels clicking against the mother of pearl paving my path, my teeth clenching against the ache of giving them up again, the pain of sacrificing their temporary solace to answer my true calling as Bright Courier. We were perfect, the three of us, but I must complete my quest.
The Bright Couriers were founded two centuries ago to answer the challenge posed by the Palace of Abandoned Dreams. They do not recruit. They do not train. Their initiates find them by accident, wandering rootless and unattached until they stumble into a Courier temple. They must have hopes, desires, longings, but they may not have attachments. They must sacrifice, but it should not be painful. Initiates are tested, and when they pass, they give up the elements of themselves they want to imbue their ship and with those elements, their ship is grown. With that they create their first, their only attachment, because an anchor to their ship is a tie to themselves, and Couriers without attachments to themselves cannot be trusted. The e
ther is deep, and space is wide. The truly unattached will never find their way.
All I ever wanted was a quest. I wandered, hopeless and despairing, until I found the Bright Couriers. Until they told me of the Palace and gave me what I needed.
I am the fifteenth Bright Courier to land on these shores and walk this path.
Artie sits with a tea set on the steps to the Palace, alone, waiting for me.
“Stop a moment,” he says. “I know you’ll go on, but you owe me this much. We loved you, and you left us. Help me understand why.”
“I can’t,” I say. I continue walking, my eyes forward. But my steps slow. They slow, but they do not stop.
“You can,” Artie says, tears clouding his eyes. “Please.”
My fingers brush his cheek as I pass him by. Stubble and soft skin. They curl through his hair, and my steps are glacial. “I loved you, too,” I whisper. Then I climb the steps, and Artie is behind me, where I will not look.
Gwen kept her promise to me, that night we first met, and she took me home to her rooms and her loves. She and Artie were artists, sculptors, creators. Their walls were covered with cases where they’d trapped ether-smoke, teased it and shaped it and rendered it beautiful, then frozen it and captured it for eternity. There was no furniture in their main room, but at the center was a display with their masterpiece. I looked into it, the globe floating in the center, surrounded by a roiling orange sky, and felt the remaining valves of my heart flutter.
“I know this place,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper.
Artie emerged from the depths of their rooms and stood beside me. “It’s not a real place,” he said. “Just a toy I made. And then Gwen. She came to me, and we made it better.”
“No. Every Courier knows this world,” I said.
“It’s just a dream,” Gwen said, taking her place at my other side. “A fantasy. A perfect place, kept safe in its glass container. We’ll change it again when we’re bored of it.”
I walked around the display; found the landmass on the equator with the shallow shores, gentle and tied to the ether-roads. Pointed to the gates, the path paved in mother of pearl, the Palace with its wide steps. And inside, the hall, the box, the challenge presented to every Bright Courier. I’d known since I’d learned of it that I’d prove myself someday, that I would be the one to answer the challenge presented by the Palace of Abandoned Dreams. But I’d never before contemplated the question of when.