Beneath Ceaseless Skies #221

by Santos Rodello

  Joakem is running faster now, slowly outpacing her.

  We’ll never outrun them, she realizes. Her mouth is dry, but she spits as much as she can into her hands. Rubbing her palms furiously, she turns, shouts a spell that shoots off sparks, like fireworks, from her fingers. The pixie swarm disperses, some hurt and whirling to the ground. The magic would have bought them a few moments’ grace to run, but Joakem is suddenly there, a battle-cry on his lips and a tree branch in hand. He bats three pixies, the impacts accompanied by moist crunches. But more are buzzing towards them.

  A terrible premonition comes upon her then.

  We’re going to die.

  * * *

  A Sunshower

  “You can’t make time go backwards.” Joakem’s smile was as big as the moon, half-shadowed in doubt, half-aglow with wonder.

  The truth was Bekka would never utter the spell. The casting was easy, but the cost too severe: a year of one’s life for every minute erased.

  Not that Joakem needed to know any of that. Bekka sealed her lips with a smile and went back to picking the pixies.

  “So are you going to show me?” he asked.

  “It’s far too complicated, and even if I did, you wouldn’t remember anyway.” Nor would she herself. You could cast the spell, lose years of life, then go back in time only to repeat the exact mistake you were trying to avoid.

  She reached up to collect a pixie, its white bands bright in the sun. When her reach proved too short, Joakem stepped over and helped, his body close enough she could feel the heat of him. Handling the pixie with a gentleness that surprised her, he laid the sleeping sprout in her basket.

  “Well,” he said, “maybe you can cast it if I make a mistake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like if I ask you to the Springheart’s Festival, and if you say no and I feel stupid. Maybe you can cast the spell so I can take it back.” His voice hitched like a frog’s.

  He was joking, she was sure. But that didn’t keep her heart from a cautious tremor. “I don’t know. It may not be a good idea. What about Miriam Cow-nose? I thought you said she likes you.”

  “You don’t have to call her Cow-nose. That’s mean. Just say yes and go to the festival with me.”

  “The witch wouldn’t be happy about that.”

  “That’s why I’m asking you. Besides, the witch probably just wants me for herself.”

  Bekka snorts, turns away, just far enough so she can give him a sidelong glance.

  The silence stretches, long enough to make even crickets jittery.

  “I don’t know if—”

  He smiles then, a grin edged in worry and hope, large enough to catch rainbows. She hears her own heartbeat, loud as a waterfall or an endless boom of thunder. The orchard seems to spin, the trees leaning in to listen.

  “Okay,” she finally says, soft with hesitation. “I’ll go with you. But you’d better behave.”

  The sun shines high above, but the first fat drops of rain fall anyway. A sunshower. An omen as mixed as her feelings.

  She knows the witch will be scolding her for days. But something within Bekka, some force swifter than her mind, insistent as youth, has moved her. Joakem practically beams, and when he steps closer, Bekka’s breath catches.

  Above them, the boughs of silver-blue leaves grant a shade against the sun, a shield against the rain. To her horrified delight, he leans in and kisses her, fearless and fierce, an instant she wishes would last thirty years...safe, sheltered, happy, beneath the pixie tree.

  Copyright © 2017 Rodello Santos

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Rodello Santos was abandoned as a baby in a downtown Manhattan Cineplex. He was raised by kind ushers who fed him overpriced Milk-Duds and weaned him on butter-flavored topping. His humor and stories have found kind, loving homes, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, and in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He is currently racing George R.R. Martin to see who finishes their next novel first. His money is on Mr. Martin.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  CRESCENDO

  by J.S. Veter

  Yacob’s crib-sister was a great one for adventures, so it was she who led them to the Hole. The four children snuck out after lunch when the mommies were settling the wee ones down for their naps and the daddies were cleaning up the kitchen. The clatter of dishes was enough to cover the sound of one squeaky-hinged side door.

  Thalie had confessed about the Hole the night before: how she had escaped the watery eye of Daddy Bain and spent the afternoon exploring the dusted ruin of the Stat rather than digging tavaroot out of Rise Common.

  It was a miracle she’d not fallen into the Hole, Dellia had said, slapping her hand over her mouth to catch the bad luck. Dellia was a great believer in luck. She had a hundred different ways to keep it close or send it away.

  Yacob wasn’t sure how he felt about luck, but as Thalie had talked about the Hole he’d crossed his fingers behind his back. The Stat was full of Holes and they were terrible deep and dark. Thalie had planted her hands on her hips and laughed at her crib-siblings to show how unafraid she was of Holes, or of falling.

  “I dropped a stone in,” she’d boasted, arching one almost-invisible brow. “It’s probably still falling.” Thalie had given Min, the youngest of them, a wink. “That Hole goes all the way to the Undertakers.”

  “No way.” Eldest of the four, Yacob often found himself firmly planted between Thalie’s nonsense and the others’ wish-wants. “You just didn’t hear it hit bottom.”

  “I listened good, Yacob, but it never hit.”

  Min had removed his thumb from his mouth long enough to declare, “Thalie’s ever such a good listener, Yacob.”

  “Mommy Lala says,” Dellia had agreed.

  “The bottom could just be very far away,” Yacob reasoned. “Remember Daddy Journy’s lesson? The Holes go down to the Beneath, and that’s a very long time ago. Not even Thalie could hear that far.”

  “Could, too,” Thalie said, thrusting her thin chest at him.

  “And there’s no such thing as Undertakers,” Yacob declared.

  Somehow that had turned into a dare, so after lunch the four crib-siblings climbed the musil tree in the back garden and dropped to the passageway behind the sharp-hedge. They listened for signs of alarm—the mommies and the daddies had rules about sneaking out –- but the only sound from their nest was Daddy Immi’s burbling laugh from the kitchen.

  It was a curving way the children took from their nest half-way up the City’s third hill to the deep-shadowed bowl of the Stat. Anyone who saw a crib of underage children pattering through the streets would ask questions, questions which would get the children sent back to Three-Hill Nest right quick, so Thalie led them through narrow places known to youngsters but conveniently forgotten by the very adults who had once made use of them themselves. It was a goodly long route, too, and by the time the children dipped into the shadows of the sparsely populated low-City the sun was well across the sky.

  Then a stone wall loomed, its slumped foundations leaning loosely uphill, revealing a forgotten entry to the forbidden Stat.

  One by one the children wriggled through: Thalie first, brave adventurer, then Min, small and lithe, then Dellia, whispering an apology to the Undertakers. Lastly, Yacob, cautious, who had a private moment of terror when he felt stone press down, unforgiving, on his backside.

  It was an admonishing hand, that stone, like the stern rebuke of a daddy. Yacob exhaled and pressed forward. The stone relented but took payment in a small smear of scraped skin. Yacob emerged into the Stat, and the Crack, the great Hole in the heart of the City, gaped at them hollowly from behind its ragged crenellations of fencing.

  “Is that where the Undertakers live?” Min asked.

  “Over here,” Thalie said, skittering over the heaved floor of the Stat. Quake grass grew gravely green between ancient paving slabs, questing for the sparse sun that c
rested the bowl of the Stat for only a few short hours each day. Seed heads popped as the children brushed by on soft-moccasined feet. The wavering silver of seed-wings followed their eddied passage.

  “What was this place, Yacob?” Min said, voice barely a whisper.

  Yacob felt very small in the huge space and Min was smallest of them all. “No one remembers,” he said.

  Min hopped from one paving stone to the next. “There must be many Undertakers, if they need a nest this big,” he said.

  “Maybe they’re giants,” Dellia said.

  “Slowly now,” Thalie said. The children knew the danger of the ever-opening and quickly closed Holes of the City. They had seen safety nets go up, springing from the ground like whiteclusters after rain. Last summer, a Hole had opened right in front of Three-Hill Nest, and the crib-siblings had spent an afternoon watching Fillers pour wagonloads of dirt-brown forget into a Hole no larger than a loaf of black bread. All through the process, in spite of the web-strong net put in place by the Finders, Mommy Lala had held the youngest children with white-knuckled hands.

  That day, once the Hole had been filled Thalie had planted her sharp chin squarely on Yacob’s bird-bone shoulder. “Did you hear the voices?” she’d asked. Yacob had pretended not to understand her. Later, he had thought to himself: not voices, no. Not like the mommies and the daddies. Not like the chirruping of carefree children. No.

  The voices he had heard were curdled and troubled. Something struggling to be heard, and though all the City dwellers knew of it, no one breathed a word.

  The Stat lay deep in the City’s memory and the Crack, its crenellated fencing like grinning teeth, had seen more than its share of Fillers. Much of Five-Hill-That-Was-Gone had been poured into its muttering, yet still the Crack whispered. Finally, the people had ceded the Stat and walled it in with the stones of its ancient foundations. Its great gate opened only twice a year, in spring and again in the fall when the Storians came. No City dwellers went to the Stat, not ever, except for Thalie on the day she was meant to dig tavaroot from Rise Common, and today, bringing her crib-siblings on a dare.

  “Will the Storians be mad to see us here?” Min asked. He was grubby all over except for his thumb, which was sucked spotless but had left a ring of brown sludge on his lips.

  “They won’t be here for months yet,” Yacob said.

  “What do they do when they come?” Min asked.

  “They look into the Crack,” Yacob said, “and then they leave.” But it was more than that. When the Storians came, the City dwellers clutched warding candles in tight fists, the bright flames guarding against the memory that greenly shadowed the Storians’ garments. And when the Storians left, more Holes opened than at any other time of the year until it seemed the Finders and Fillers would never be enough to bury the past.

  “And where do they come from?” Min wanted to know. “Where do they go?”

  “Nowhere,” Dellia answered. To the one side of the City was the sea, to the other, the mountains. What lay beyond that could not be imagined.

  “Is it true a Sixth-Hill daddy left with them, Yacob? Is it?”

  “Shush,” Dellia said, placing her hand across Min’s mouth.

  “I’ll be old enough next time they come,” Thalie said loudly. “I’ll meet them at the gate. I’ll ask them where they come from and where they go. I’ll ask them why they visit the Stat.”

  “You won’t,” Yacob said, remembering the dry curl of his tongue when he first saw them go by, near enough to touch and yet untouchable. The Storians made the mouth heavy, as if words carried greater meaning than usual when they were present.

  “I’ll follow them, then,” Thalie said. “I’ll see what they do and then I’ll follow them all the way to the sea.”

  “Thalie!” Dellia said.

  “And beyond,” Thalie finished, but Yacob noted how thin her voice was, for Thalie, like all of them, had never given thought to leaving the City. Yacob saw her considering it now. His heart constricted suddenly and he felt cold and hot at once.

  “Here,” Thalie whispered, ducking to her knees and scrambling forward. Yacob’s hands flew out to Min on the right and Dellia on the left. “Slowly,” he cautioned, and crouched down as an example. Only when he saw his crib-siblings do the same did he follow Thalie.

  The Hole was a gape-mouthed darkness. It had opened at the base of an old cornerstone, the building it had supported long since broken to build the Stat’s protective wall. Yacob suspected the cornerstone was, in fact, straddling the Hole and that the opening was much larger than they could see. Thalie grinned triumphantly.

  “The Finders didn’t come!” she crowed. “No one knows about this Hole but us!”

  It was a heady feeling. Yacob belly-crawled to Thalie, genitalia constricted in a kind of fear-pleasure he’d never felt before. The Hole was ink-black and hushed, as if it had been waiting.

  “Throw a stone down, Thalie!” said Min, who never forgot a dare. He gave a stone the size of his fist to his crib-sister and she took it, wriggling forward until her head was over the Hole. “Well?” she demanded of Yacob. He slithered forward, too, his body pressed against the grey shadowed earth and his face exposed to darkness. “Ready?” she said.

  “Ready.” Yacob inhaled the odd salt tang of the Hole. Thalie held her stone-wielding fist high and then, fingers splaying out like the light from a suddenly opened lantern, she let go. The stone disappeared into silence, and the crib-siblings held their breath.

  And held it a long time, straining for any sound at all, even a clatter that would say the stone had hit something and then tumbled farther still. Nothing. It was as if it had ceased to exist.

  Dellia had been counting. She kept past thirty, on to forty, and when the count reached one hundred Thalie said in a whisper, “Well?”

  “How far away is Beneath?” Min asked, as if memory were a distance that could be measured by anything so small as children.

  “Shh,” Yacob said, one finger held up like Daddy Immi’s when he wanted their attention.

  Thalie turned her head just so, her eyes a dark glint in her face. She heard it, too. Not the stone landing. Not the thud and bump and echo they expected. The sound was a deep rolling and a shush, like thunder pounding the mountains in spring but with a great, ponderous intention.

  Thalie’s eyebrows rose with the pleasure of discovery.

  “I don’t like it,” Dellia said. She backed away, catching hold of Min’s hand-me-down shirt and tugging him with her.

  Yacob listened, eyes on Thalie’s rapt attention. The sound poured upward, taking form, becoming something like words, expressions and sentences clumped together. Yacob heard meaning, heard rounded vowels and plosives bouncing toward them. Thalie dipped her head further, hair falling down on either side of her face, one arm slipped into the Hole as if she could grab the sense of it and pull it into daylight.

  “It’s rising!” Min squeaked. Dellia had pulled him well away. He stumbled, shirt tangled in Dellia’s fingers, yearning for Yacob and Thalie.

  Min’s fear lapped against Yacob, found repeat in the hammering of his heart. “We’re not meant to be here,” he said, wrapping his fingers around Thalie’s upper arm. “We’re not meant to know.”

  “Yacob,” Thalie said, squeezing his fingers with her own, “won’t you listen to the story?” And as she said it, Yacob’s ears were opened and the sounds from the Hole did became words, as if all the daddies and all the mommies in all the City were speaking to him at once. The voices swept into him then, and he was forever and after other than what he had been before.

  * * *

  The rains came, lashed the City with dark water that froze into bejewelled puddles lasting well past mid-winter. The mommies of Three-Hill Nest dressed the children in boiled wool coats with scarves past their noses and hats low over their eyes. Then the daddies took them to Bonfire, letting them stay up long after moonsfall to watch the wishlamps soar from the summit of Old One Hill.

  Ya
cob held Min’s thin hand. “Which lamp have you chosen?” he asked, but Min was searching the crowd for Thalie and was not interested in setting his wishes free for the turn of the year.

  “Which lamp is yours?” Dellia asked Yacob. Her face had grown sere and solemn since the Stat. Yacob could see the adult she would become, as if her child face was shallowing and her woman face rising toward the world she would inhabit.

  There was no lamp in the sky big enough for Yacob’s wishes, but he told Dellia he’d chosen the red one flying lowly toward them even now. Dellia pointed at a yellow lamp which sailed unerringly for the sea and declared it for herself. Then Dellia reminded Yacob of last year, when Yacob’s wishlamp had become entangled in the many spires of Seeming Tower and had sent hot ashes tumbling into the gutters and onto the street.

  “We should choose one for Thalie,” Dellia said. Thalie, who was absent. Thalie, who was gone from them so often that they hardly knew her scent. Thalie, who always found her way back into the Stat, no matter how often its wall was repaired.

  The crib-siblings searched the sky. Around them, City dwellers chose their lamps and said their wishes. The wishlamps moved like somnolences, fluttering against one another, drifting seaward or up to the mountains.

  “There,” Min said. It took Yacob a moment to see what Min saw. There it was, Thalie’s wishlamp, drifting purposefully toward the mountains over the deep hollow of the Stat.

  “I wish...” Dellia began, but Yacob shushed her.

  “It’s Thalie’s,” he said.

  Dellia’s own lamp crested the wall, kissed the heavy sea and burst into a shadow of flame. Yacob’s landed at the feet of some merchants who laughingly stomped it out before the flames could catch the wooden walls of the Runestall. But Min, Dellia, and Yacob watched Thalie’s lantern, Thalie’s wishes, skim the roofs of the City and disappear into the west.

  Night had almost given way to day when Thalie crept cold-footed into bed. She wriggled against Yacob, bringing with her the dry-stone smell of the Stat and the salted, crusted scent of the Hole. Yacob, drifting near slumber, curled into her, shared with her his warmth and the sting of wood smoke.