BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue005 Read online

  The priestling swayed towards the screen and Halla froze. His hands wandered, picking up random objects that were not knives at all. He hefted the same lamp Halla had held, gaze captured by its prisms. “I like this.”

  The Mouth nodded at a dagger, hands hidden in his sleeves. “How about this one?”

  “Okay,” said the priestling. He dropped the lamp. Prisms clattered as it tumbled over chests and rugs, landed at the foot of the screen. The screen wobbled.

  “Come, then,” said the Mouth, and he headed for the door, the three blue-robed children following.

  Halla exhaled...then heard her name, echoing down the marble hallway. “Halla! Halla!”

  It was Gooseberry.

  The Mouth froze in the doorway, his blue robe outlining his thin frame. Through the screen Halla saw Gooseberry nearing the room. “I promised I’d help you, Halla.” Tears streamed down his lined face. “Don’t send me away.”

  He was crazy. Absolutely crazy. And it was about to cost her half the fingers off her left hand.

  Now the Mouth nodded at the room, at her screen, and the boy and girl assistants climbed back, clambering over trunks, skidding over bowls. The boy twitched the screen forward, revealing Halla.

  “Submit, child,” the Mouth said softly.

  Halla bolted past him and out the door, slamming Gooseberry aside. She pounded down the white hallway, plate banging her ribs, brooch scraping her ankle. It was incriminating to run, she knew it, but there was her stupid old uncle back there, too, and she thought she could make the back door if she just ran fast enough.

  There was pounding behind her, catching up, and her thoughts caught up at the same time.

  Gooseberry was her uncle.

  She swerved, but the hallway opened in two directions and hesitation cost her. The guard grabbed Halla, twisting one arm behind her. She tried to go for her dagger, but his arm crushed the plate into the ribs she’d bruised earlier, making her double up, retching air. He dragged her back to the Mouth, who stood with the child assistants and Gooseberry. She kicked backwards into the guard’s knees.

  The Mouth smiled, his eyes sharp on her skin.

  And then Gooseberry lunged at the Mouth, knocking him to the floor. One of the Mouth’s hands almost came out of his robes in surprise. But it didn’t, not even to catch himself.

  Gooseberry was on top of the Mouth, but the boy threw himself on Gooseberry, kicking and clawing. The Mouth lay calmly on the floor as the boy punched Gooseberry off of him and into submission. The Mouth stood and the girl straightened his blue robes with deft movements of her right hand. Her sleeves were in disarray, and for the first time Halla realized that the girl, like the immortal assistant she represented, had only one hand.

  “Theft from one, and attempted deicide from the other,” said the Mouth. His narrow face was emotionless. “The God will lay his finger of justice on you.”

  With a final kick at Gooseberry’s unmoving body, the boy stood, panting. The boy’s mouth was a dark hole, tongueless.

  Halla swallowed at the sight of Gooseberry—her uncle—on the floor. “Let him go with a whipping. He didn’t do anything to you.”

  The Mouth turned his still face on hers. “The God has chosen me to interpret his justice for him. You have no part in that.” His voice smooth, like wind. “Besides, what would the daughter of a murderer know of divine morality?”

  “I know more of justice than you.” She spat at his feet.

  The boy bent and wiped her spit from the Mouth’s robes with his fingers. “You’re just like your father,” the Mouth continued. His words rolled out, implacable. “You think you know more than anyone else. No concern for whose plans you’re disrupting.”

  He left a pause, as if she might answer him. But she did not.

  “Take the old man to the afternoon judging,” he said. “Put her in the dungeon.”

  “She’s got something in her shift.”

  “Get it off her, then.”

  “It’s nothing of yours!” Halla went for her only weapon, but the guard pulled her hand tighter, kicked her knee out so she bent to the floor.

  The Mouth nodded, and the one-handed girl crossed to Halla. With deft motions she slid the plate from Halla’s shift, maneuvering it with fingers and stump.

  “Maybe so,” said the Mouth. “But it isn’t yours, little thief.”

  Halla watched the pink lump of wrist in sick fascination. The God’s punishments were absolute.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The cell was cold and moldy, and there was nothing to do but pick at the blister on her foot and think. She couldn’t figure out how her uncle had gone from the swank and lively Uncle Ollan she had known—so different from his quiet little sister—to Gooseberry. Distantly she could feel two people being judged in the square, one after the other. Without knowing, she labeled Gooseberry as the one who caved instantly. She wondered what his sentence was—she didn’t care. She hated him for not taking her in after her parents’ death—she hated him for today. She hated him for saying, in the middle of all of it, that he was there to protect her.

  At last there were clanks outside her cell door. Another door creaked, there were thumps, and the door creaked closed.

  “Rest up till midnight,” one of the guards said. Their feet moved away and then there was cold silence again.

  “I’m going to die,” Gooseberry said. His voice seemed far away.

  “Your own damn fault.” She swallowed other words—”my uncle, my family”—swallowed them into silence.

  In the dungeon, time slowed. She almost forgot he was there.

  “I killed your mother.” The words drifted around the stone wall between them. They seemed to echo in her past long before she realized what they meant.

  “I don’t understand.” Wasn’t his only crime that of abandoning her to the charity of the lighthouse?

  “The God chose me. He put the God-Death in my mind and I was the executioner.”

  His words were lucid but the meaning was not. He seemed to have forgotten everything he’d said about the priests supplanting the will of the God. His tone was singsong, lilting.

  Anger, as the meaning sunk in. “You killed her?”

  “The God convicted her. It was justice for killing her husband, and I was no one while I carried it out. The priests say no one is complicit then. I was the God’s hands, his eyes.”

  “You killed her. Your own sister.”

  “The God metes justice.”

  “Your own sister! Do you know how I lived with no parents? The temple dumped me on a rock with a batshit old nun. I lost my citizenship, I became nobody. I slaved for her seven years before I ran away. I cried for my old life. For you.”

  Silence and blackness.

  “I thought someone must’ve killed you, too, or you would’ve taken me to live with you. Mum and Da were holy rich. I should have been raised in that class, in my rightful place as a citizen. Or with you—not that I’d want that, now that I know what you are. Not abandoned in a lighthouse.” With a nun who beat her for feeling the God’s touch, if it was the God’s touch, if all of this wasn’t some horrid perversion of the Mouth’s. Beatings twice a day until she’d learned to control what she felt, to hide it. “I shouldn’t have been tossed to the bottom. Left all alone.”

  Crying from the other cell.

  Halla shut her ears with her fists. “You deserve their death.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Halla was awakened by the scrape of iron on stone. She strained her ears, but apart from that there was utter silence; no shouts, no curses, no prayers from Gooseberry as they took him to the ring on the hill.

  She was tense after that, still and fraught in her cell. After a long time, iron scraped on stone again. A key. A small hand pushed the door inward. Golden light from an oil lamp spilled in. “You can go,” a high voice said.

  A boy of nine or so, in blue.

  The simpleton priestling.

  Halla stuck her foot in the path of the d
oor, pushed him aside, and slid out into the hallway.

  He looked up with big unfocused eyes. His head wavered, but he was not drooling. She studied the black corridor, but he seemed to be alone.

  “What are you doing here?” she said quietly.

  “The God sent me. Also, I want breakfast.”

  Halla sucked in her breath. “Can you lead me out?”

  He put one hand to his head, waved it at the hallway. Short spastic movements. “Come.” He scuttled sideways, turning his head to look at her, lamp swinging, his feet feeling out the stone floor.

  Halla crept behind him. “Does the God often send you to people?”

  “Usually he sends me things. Rabbits and pretty dove birds to —” His hands mimed cracking. He smiled in the lamplight, a brilliantly sweet smile of yellow-brown teeth. “I think someday he’ll send me a pretty person, like you. The Mouth says I have to listen to the God.”

  Slowly the words registered. “The God talks to you?”

  “Almost every day, I feel what the God wants,” he said. “That’s why I’m gonna be his next Mouth. Sometimes he hurts. I get dizzy and fall down. But the God is just.”

  Halla grabbed the small boy’s shoulder. “Does it feel like a crackling in your head? Like ants on your bones?”

  He slid away. “Does the God tell you what you want, too?”

  Halla shook her head.

  They turned up a narrow staircase and the boy rocked his head in tune with his steps. “We play games. Little games, like I try to read the Mouth’s thoughts. Or sometimes the God makes me feel ferocious angry. Then the Mouth brings me something so I can kill it. A rabbit, maybe. As soon as I kill the rabbit the God leaves me. Sometimes the God makes me happy. Then the Mouth comes. As soon as it’s over I feel like nothing again. I feel like me.”

  Little games.... An icy thought shivered up her spine. Had this boy always been a simpleton? What had he been like before the Mouth turned his attention—and the God’s attention—to him? And nobody to watch out for him.... “Don’t you have a family?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Father, mother. Uncle.”

  “The Mouth is my father now. He has a plan to never leave me. I’m scared to be the Mouth, but Father says he’ll never leave me. Not even after today; he will never ever go. Did you bring me breakfast?”

  “No,” said Halla. The story that the God chose each new Mouth must be a lie—or at least, it had become a lie, even if it was once the truth. The Mouth had handpicked this boy. Raised him. She suddenly remembered the current Mouth sitting in the room once when she met with her father and the old Mouth. He was even skinnier then, lurching and narrow with sharp eyes, and he’d watched her as the men talked. They hadn’t tried the games that day, but Halla had had a long dizzy fit anyway, that ended with her father rocking her. The skinny young man had watched her the whole time.

  Halla wanted to ask more questions, but the boy stopped at the top of the stairs. There was a dark alcove, and ahead, a massive door. The lamp swung gold circles of light in the alcove, picked out a thin gleam.

  “My dagger,” she said. “Wait.” She put a hand on the handle of the oil lamp, next to his.

  But he opened the door and let go of the lamp, leaving it swinging in her hand. “I want my breakfast.”

  She could not both keep the door open and look in the alcove, but she had not seen the boy use a key. She took the lamp into the black opening, alert for a trap. But there was nothing in there but her dagger. A chain with two iron keys hung from a hook.

  The heavy door to the main temple clicked closed. Halla swung the lamp over—but the priestling had vanished. She was alone in the temple, unguarded and unmutilated. Her skin crawled.

  But she was not going to let herself get caught again. She took the keys from the wall and strapped on her dagger. As a gesture of freedom, took the brooch from her boot and pinned it to the front of her shift. Then she opened the door, extinguishing the lamp as she did so. She slid out into a familiar white and gold hallway, keeping to the shadows. There should be an exit just a few yards. The door she had left was plain, unassuming. Strange how she had never known where it led.

  She turned the corner and there was the outside door. Dawn must be near, and Uncle Ollen’s execution at the ring on the hill. He didn’t deserve the God-Death for toppling the Mouth to the floor. But he did deserve it for killing her mother. Halla could leave him to the temple’s justice.

  Yet she stood there in the shadow of the exit, wavering.

  From the other side of the temple, the gong rang. First waking call for the priests.

  Halla left the temple in the near-dawn light. Only a few people were out at this hour, priests and sellers setting up for the huge crowds the investiture would bring. It would be a good day to slip in and out of familiar houses, with everyone in the center of town. This might be the day she stole enough to buy land, just that small piece of land. She had lost her chance at the wealth of the temple, but she would not lose sight of regaining her citizenship. It was unfair for children to suffer for the crimes of their parents. She mustn’t lose sight of her plan for change.

  The decision cleared her mind. Halla strode away from the temple. She was just deciding on a house where she’d once been to a funeral when pain swept from one side of her body to the other. Her hands clenched, her body throbbed like a struck gong. It focused to a pinpoint in her head, then as abruptly, vanished. An image, a feeling blossomed in her mind, a blood lust without words.

  Kill Ollen.

  He was at the ring on the hill, and she could kill him before his God-Death came. She could be the one to enact revenge, to make him pay.

  And she should.

  Flooded with that thought, she charged through the temple grounds. She passed nuns, assistants, market-sellers, but their eyes slid over her. They all looked away.

  Down the stone road to the temple’s hill. No one climbed that hill, but everyone knew the path. Everyone knew exactly where the God’s justice was served, though the top was shrouded in bamboo, and there was no silhouette of a man shadowed at dawn, awaiting execution.

  She slipped through that stone archway where nobody went without a purpose. It was strange how her feet propelled her forward. She had never had to kill anybody—why should she start with a man already destined to die? Almost she turned around but no, the path was there, and though the hill was dark and steep the path drew her upward. She would just see him, anyway. Just see if he was up there. Then she would turn back.

  The bamboo pressed in thicker till suddenly it thinned, revealing deep blue sky. Why would she think of murdering Ollen, Uncle Ollen who had taken her to see the traveling animals, who had let her pet the snakes?

  The dawning light picked out a figure in the middle of the clearing and her head rang.

  He was chained to the pole, arms fastened behind him, crumpled. His nose bled and he drooled. The sight surged fresh blood lust through Halla. She stumbled from the bamboo, dagger high.

  Kill him.

  Uncle Ollen’s grey eyes watered and his nose trickled. He was so weak, so stupidly weak, so incompetent. How had such a fallen thing killed her mother? His death would be a relief. A relief.

  She was on him then, one hand at his throat. He squealed, fought her with his knees. One knee caught her on the nose and cheek. Her grip loosened, but she seized him again and raised her blade. His white hair foamed around his face. She would kill him. She would be his executioner.

  She would be his God-Death.

  Her entire body convulsed on the handle of her dagger. She would be his God-Death. The Mouth had made it so. The dizziness she had felt all those years was nothing next to the actual touch of the God, yet that was what this was. The compulsion to obey thickened her spirit, crushed her fingers to the dagger’s handle.

  Halla would not submit to the Mouth. She would not.

  She would not be Uncle Ollen’s God-Death.

  Halla gripped the handle with all her wil
l and plunged the dagger into the ground.

  Scrabbled away, the compulsion tearing her mind. Kill Ollen. Kill.

  “I love you,” blubbered her uncle. His nose ran; his beard filled with snot and blood. She loved him and loathed him. She understood what he had done, what he had become from doing it.

  He didn’t say anything else, just babbled and bled on the ground. Halla felt the God-touch like her own purest desire—she was dying to strangle him from his miserable existence. She breathed, funny little gasps, trying to sort out her wants from the God’s. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  It was clear now why they had let her escape. The Mouth had probably compelled the priestling to do it. She put one taut hand into her shift and pulled the chain with its two keys forth. That seemed to take forever. Threw it at her uncle’s curled side, the links clinking. He sniveled.

  “Take it,” she said hoarsely. But as she threw it she realized he couldn’t. His hands were chained behind him. Halla flexed and unflexed fingers, took several more breaths. With long steady strides she crossed to her uncle, grabbed the smaller key, and unlocked his wrists. Dropped the chain in front of him and strode back to her spot in the bamboo.

  They stared at each other, breathing hard.

  Ollen wiped his face with his hand, his sleeve. With fumbling fingers he unlocked his ankles. He stumbled towards her.

  “Stay away,” Halla said. Her hand flicked to her empty dagger sheath.

  He wavered, tottered.

  “Farther,” she said. “Out of reach. Out of a good long lunging reach.” She went towards the pole to get the dagger. He scurried around the circle, not really getting any farther away. She gritted her teeth and wished she could kill him for it.

  “Now we’re going down the hill,” she said. “And you’re going to stay behind me where I can’t see you, and answer my questions. What do you know about my family? Our family.” The lust to kill him suffused all her questions with rage.

  Ollen sniffled.