BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue004 Read online

  The door boasted a gilded handle, deceptively blue in the starlight. Slowly, it turned.

  Khatire wrapped herself in shadow.

  The door opened and torchlight poured into the chamber. Khatire adjusted the light furiously, like a roof shedding rain, to remain concealed. The vaim entered, skimming the floor with ghostly elegance. His cowl was dark and thick. An older vaim, then. One who needed the hood to hide his advanced rot.

  He paused in the doorway. His cowled head rotated, and she glimpsed the twin red glimmers of his eyes. She wished she had thought to create a lump in the bed, some illusion that she still rested there, if only to purchase a few extra seconds or a few steps head start.

  An odd sound came—two staccato rasps. The vaim’s head turned in her direction. She didn’t breathe. The noise came again, hoarse and whispery like a snuffling hound.

  He could smell her. His Gift.

  Whoever sent him knew her Gift, and her Gift was her only advantage. She panicked and tried to slip through the door. The vaim’s arm, quick as an asp, hooked around her waist and pulled her close.

  The sweet scent, like fruit-glazed meat, made her gag. She stiffened in his grasp, her body tiny and vulnerable in his arms.

  “Come, whore, beg for your miserable life.” His voice was a gleeful rasp, as sharp as the knife that he pressed against her neck.

  Khatire turned her head away from his cowl, from the greenish, marbled skin and the sick red eyes. Was this Anut-ka’s fate? She closed her eyes and imagined her boy’s sweet face, sky-eyed and chubby-cheeked, and then she thought of him sneering at her, holding a blade to her throat, his eyes flashing from blue to fire-red.

  Never.

  The vaim hesitated because she refused to respond. With a hiss, he pressed the dagger deeper, sending a trickle of blood into the hollow of her throat.

  Khatire ignored it, reaching frantically for the image of mistress Ankha. She drew light particles to herself, washed her face in them, and sent them off in wild directions, a controlled explosion of color. She knew what the vaim would see: Ankha with her dark eyes and copper hair, leering at him with desire.

  The dagger clattered to the stone, and the vaim lurched back, shoving her away. “My lady?”

  Khatire staggered free, shaping her mouth into Ankha’s smile, the one that meant someone was about to die.

  “My lady, I thought that.... In the darkness it seemed.... You have already dealt with the whore?”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to mimic Ankha’s voice.

  “Then I will see to her child.”

  She froze. Anut-Ka.

  She wasn’t conscious of letting her illusion slip, but as he bowed low and turned to go, the storm of flitting particles faded to realsight. He caught the subtle shift from the corner of his eye and spun back around, cloak whispering at his ankles. Khatire dropped to the floor and fumbled for the dagger. Her soft palm found the blade and she ignored the slicing pain as she grappled for the hilt. He stepped toward her, hissing in anger. Her now-slick hand wrapped around the bone handle as his skeletal fingers grasped her shoulder and the claws of his hands pierced her skin. She gathered her heels beneath her for leverage, then launched upwards, thrusting with an underhand stroke. She grunted as the point took the creature in the throat. Hot liquid, too thick for mere blood, gushed across her forearm as she drove it up into his skull.

  His claws released her shoulder and he crumpled to the stone floor, tearing the blade from her hand. The red lights within his cowl blinked out like drowned coals, and a final wet gasp bubbled from his body. The soggy darkness that marred his cloak spread to the floor and puddled. Stink filled the room like nectar spilled from a poisonous blossom.

  Khatire couldn’t seem to catch her breath, afraid to swallow the fouled air. The cut in her palm throbbed like heartache. She had just killed one of the precious vaimen. In the eyes of the emperor, her life was forfeit.

  A dozen possible doors opened for her in that moment, but they all led to the same terrible end. She could not throw the body from the bridge. It would be spotted within an hour or two, just as Marijan’s had been. She could not drag the body through the palace to the spinrag’s lair. Even if she were strong enough, the smear of blood along the corridors would give her away. She couldn’t conceal the corpse because of the stench. Even if she solved the problem with the body, she couldn’t scrub the stains from the chamber floor before the servants arrived to change His Splendor’s dirtied sheets. Not even Tuamutef would help her solve this problem. He would find another concubine to train and he would try again.

  All the other doors closed. Only one remained open.

  Her hands shaking, her body slick with sweat, she turned toward the Crystal Stair, squeezing down a sob. She had to leave the palace before the corpse was discovered. She had to take Anut-ka with her, to spare him the retribution meant for her and the life of a vaim without a mother’s protection.

  She ran to the bed, tearing a strip from her dress to bind her bloody hand. She thought about throwing the dress across her body and decided not to. No, she would leave everything behind. It would be easier to bend the light around her if she didn’t have a stray hem flapping at her heels.

  She stepped over the vaim’s body into the doorway, then stopped. If she could not escape, she would need a different option for herself and her son. Holding her breath, she squatted next to the body and yanked the dagger from his chin. Trembling, she wiped the blade on his rich, black robes. The vaim’s blood had already etched scars in the steel blade.

  Bone hilt in her palm, she ran naked across the bridge and entered the dimly lit corridor of the concubines’ tower. A vaim guard slept near the entrance, either drugged or derelict, but she bent the light to cast an illusion of sandstone, glittering orange in the torchlight, while she hugged the far wall and eased past him. A favored daughter, delivering a carafe of wine, looked twice when Khatire used the same trick to hide again. Khatire’s fist tightened around the hilt of the dagger, but duty called the small girl on. By the time Khatire reached the high tower chamber she shared with Nefaria, she was exhausted but resolute. She and Anut-Ka would be gone by morning, or they would both be dead.

  Khatire cracked the chamber door and then hesitated. Escape depended on secrecy and silence; Nefaria could not suspect that anything out of the ordinary had transpired. She waited until she heard her friend’s steady, easy breathing, and then she closed the door behind her, leaving it unlatched.

  She tiptoed to her own mattress. She put on her sleeveless night shirt, and then over it a simple lamb’s wool dress with pockets big enough to hold the dagger. As she took quick stock of her meager possessions, she considered how she and her sister-wives were kept like little more than breeding cattle, two to a stall, with straw mattresses to sleep on. Only Ankha was permitted many personal possessions, and even those were few. But the concubines lived and died like mayflies compared to the length of His Splendor’s existence. All the real wealth was saved for his children, especially the sons. Was she right to drag Anut-ka away from that? He could be the one anointed to ascend—

  I must forget. Escape was their only chance. She shoved the doubts aside and filled the dress’s dagger-sized pockets with underclothes and stockings, a pair of slippers, the only other dress that she could wad up small enough to fit. She put a larger dress on over the lamb’s wool.

  The next part was the most dangerous, because there was no way to do it in absolute silence. She crouched beside her bed and lifted the corner of the mattress. Her fingers found the tear that she had carefully made in the fabric, and she slid her hand through the rustling straw to collect her secret possessions, the things she was not meant to own: a silk cloth wrapped around bits of jerky and dried fruit, saved for when she feared poison too much to eat from the common kitchen; gold coins, spilled from the pockets of ambassadors given ease among the cushions of His Splendor’s cast-off concubines; a tiny vial of diluted spinrag venom. The straw scratched at her skin as sh
e withdrew each item.

  Over her shoulder, her friend still lay quietly on her mattress. Khatire sighed in relief and gathered in the particles that danced around Nefaria’s face, memorizing her precious features, wasting precious seconds.

  Goodbye, Nefaria.

  She rose and tiptoed toward the door. Her thoughts raced ahead, forming a plan to remove Anut-ka from the children’s quarters.

  “I’m glad you’re alive,” came the whispered voice.

  Khatire whirled, her heart pounding in dismay.

  Her chambermate pushed up to a sitting position, then yawned and stretched her slender arms toward the ceiling. “I tried to catch your eye, to warn you, but Tuamutef whisked you away before I could do anything to help.” She glanced at the sky through a window too narrow to squeeze through. “You’ve come back early.”

  A half dozen explanations rolled across Khatire’s tongue, but none of them would fool Nefaria. She was too clever, and too familiar with lies to be fooled by them.

  “Khatire?”

  “Nefaria, I—”

  “What’s wrong? Did His Splendor fall short of your expectations?”

  “A vaim came to kill me after the emperor left,” Khatire explained, voice flat.

  “Oh gods,” Nefaria said, hand covering her mouth. “How did you—?”

  “I stabbed him. With his own knife.” She lurched across the room and embraced Nefaria, wrapping an arm around the other woman, squeezing her tight. Her other hand slipped inside her dress, reaching for the dagger. She would kill again and again if she had to, in order to save her son.

  “I want to go with you,” Nefaria whispered in her ear.

  Khatire’s hand jerked out of her pocket and she pulled away. “What do you mean?”

  “You feel like a pillow. You must be wearing everything you own.”

  “No,” she said, but it was a reflex.

  “Do you remember when you were first chosen for the tower and given the seat next to the door?” Nefaria asked. “I came to comfort you, and you asked me: ‘How does it feel to be a whore of the most powerful man in the world?’“

  “The ambassadors called you—us—that. So do the vaimen.”

  “I remember thinking you were too young to be so bitter. I told you we weren’t whores, that we were only slaves who didn’t have any choice. Do you remember what you answered?”

  That seemed like a very long time ago, measured in lifespans instead of years. “I said there is always a choice.”

  Nefaria nodded. Khatire let her vision fade to realsight so she wouldn’t see Nefaria’s face in the dark. “There is always a choice,” Nefaria echoed. “And I no longer choose to be a whore.”

  “I can’t take you with me.” But Khatire heard the catch in her own voice.

  “You must. Either take me with you or put your hand on that dagger again and kill me before I go.”

  “What makes you think—?”

  Nefaria stood, reaching for the alcove with her clothes, dressing as she spoke. “Please, if you leave me behind, I will be discarded by the emperor as untrustworthy and given to the vaimen for questioning. When they’re done using me, they’ll toss me to the spinrag.”

  Khatire didn’t know if she could shadow them both, much less all three of them once she retrieved Anut-ka.

  Nefaria’s hands were shaking so badly, she spilled everything on the floor. “Please, for gods’ sake, say something.”

  “Be quiet. And hurry.”

  She considered gathering light—enough that Nefaria might see what she was doing—but her nerves were jangled and her Gift required concentration. It would take all her focus to hide their escape, so she thought ahead to the corridors, the torches, the doorways she could use to their advantage.

  Nefaria dressed as Khatire had done. She held up the edge of her white gown and turned it inside out. “I sewed things into the hem. A silver necklace I grabbed from Tuamutef’s store when he wasn’t looking, that nose ring I told him I lost—”

  “We’re taking Anut-Ka.”

  Nefaria froze. She had birthed two children for the emperor, both daughters, and she had sent both of them away to the nurseries without a second thought. Some of the concubines were like that, especially those who had not given birth to sons. “We should just take all the children,” she snapped. “We can use their tiny bodies as shields when the vaimen come for us.”

  Khatire’s hand slipped into her dress for the hilt of the knife. “If you want to come, that is the condition.”

  Nefaria moved again, her shakiness gone, her gestures as sure and confident as a dancer’s once again. She tugged slippers over her feet and tied a dark scarf around her head in one efficient motion. “Of course,” she said. Then she whispered. “Are the vaimen born or made? I have always wondered.”

  No answer came to Khatire’s lips. She had never thought to ask that question before and dared not pause to think about it now. Precious minutes were passing and the alarm might sound at any moment. She nudged the unlatched door open. “Stay very close so I can hide our passage. It is part of my Gift—”

  “I have seen you do it,” Nefaria said, stepping into the corridor after her. “Once, down by the cobbler’s workshop, when Ankha was coming. You didn’t notice me because I was already hiding from her, but I saw you step into a corner and simply... fade into the shadows. How do you do it?”

  “Have you ever shared your Gift with me?”

  Nefaria’s silence was answer enough.

  Khatire could see in the darkness, stepping surely in places where Nefaria might stumble. She put the other woman’s hand on her waist, to keep her close, and headed down the corridor. Khatire winced as Nefaria’s layers of silk sighed with each step. Blurring the light of their passage would be useless if others heard them. The weight of the dagger in her pocket swelled with accusation, and guilt hammered the base of her throat.

  There is always a choice.

  But not yet. She did not need to choose between her son’s life and Nefaria yet.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The concubines’ tower was a long, curving wall of window- pierced rock rising from a cliff spur that split the sea from a valley choked with broken stone. The concubines occupied the uppermost floors, the children the broad floors below that connected along a causeway to the public palace and the meadows. On the lowest level, among the foundations facing the ravine and the trash pits where the wind seldom stirred, lived the oldest vaimen, lost in rot and drowned hopes as they still clung to life. No portion of the palace was more heavily guarded than the tower. Eunuch sentries watched each stairwell and intersection. Their earrings tinkled every time they stirred, a sound that ran through the halls at night like the feet of mice.

  Khatire held all this in her head, but she couldn’t think about it without her stomach knotting too tight to move. Make it through the Bitter Chamber, that is the next step.

  And maybe the hardest. She and Nefaria crept along the walls, draped in the illusion of shadowed stone. Their clothing betrayed them with every step, but the crackling torches and lapping breakers outside camouflaged the murmuring fabric. They stole past one guard standing at the Hall of Blue Swallows, then passed another pacing restlessly at the top of the Bath Stairs, carefully timing their rush past him as he paused to turn. Sweat broke out on Khatire’s forehead as she maintained patient, painful concentration during each step down the stairs. They had descended several levels, passing open archways, when someone came up from the baths, rounding a corner in the stairs and startling them so suddenly Khatire dropped her illusion. They jumped back a step as the other figure did the same.

  “Who goes there?” the dark shape said, louder than a whisper but not loud enough to reach the guard up the stairs.

  Nefaria’s fist knotted in the back of Khatire’s dress. Khatire reached for her dagger, but Nefaria pulled her dress too tight to reach it.

  “Tuamutef,” Khatire said.

  The eunuch stepped forward from the shadows. The bells
that dangled from his ears made no noise. He had removed the tiny clappers. Seeing her reaction, he held open his palm to show ear bells connected to a ring so he could mimic the proper sound of his passing.

  “When you didn’t call for me, I grew worried for you,” he said. His eyes, which had been shifting nervously up and down the stairs, settled on Khatire and Nefaria, with all their layers of clothes. Hope sprung in Khatire’s heart. It would be so much easier to reach the children’s level if Tuamutef distracted the guards.

  He shook his head once.

  “Help me,” Khatire whispered.

  His soft features shifted from frightened anger to a sad smile. He shook his head again, this time placing his hand on her wrist. The ear bells hidden in his palm cut cold into her skin. “Only if you turn and go back to your room this minute.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “Then I can’t either,” he said. “It is each to her own in the world beneath the stair.”

  He looked past her then, as if she were invisible to him, hidden by her Gift, and walked up the stairwell, tinkling the bells he carried.

  Khatire grabbed Nefaria’s hand and hurried on. Tuamutef would not seek out the guards, but he would tell everything if they came to him. Tears welled in her eyes. She held them back until they seemed to fill her throat enough to choke on.

  Down two more levels, they came to the thick main blockhouse of the tower. The stairwell opened on an anteroom guarded by a marble statue of Tabia, the first empress. Tabia had died in childbirth, swearing vengeance on any woman who married His Splendor after her, and so in all the centuries since he had only taken concubines. She was beautiful and terrible; the sculptor who captured the delicate structure of her bones was bold enough to reveal the cold, imperious curl of her lip. She loomed over the room as if she were still willing to crush anyone in her way—Khatire shuddered to look at her. Beyond her stood a wide archway framed in veined quartz blocks, alternating pink and yellow tones that curved toward the ceiling. The Chamber of His Splendor’s Seed. The room where Damijan inspected his brood of children, where they were selected for favored status or discarded, the intersection of the concubines quarters and the children’s level. His concubines called it the Bitter Chamber.