BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue005 Read online

  Halla strode down the path, smacking the bamboo with the flat of her hand. “Stop crying. And I don’t want any garbage about the God’s fingers either. Give me sane Gooseberry. Give me facts.”

  “I can’t, I....”

  She glared.

  “I.... Your father was of the holy rich.” He fell in behind her, his feet noisy and slow.

  “Yes.” She smacked the bamboo again. It felt good to hit something.

  “Your mother and I weren’t. Our family were landowners, on the outskirts, struggling.” He sniffled again. “Your father went between the committee of the rich and the temple. He was known to be close with the former Mouth. And he had, uh...nasty methods of making the politics go his way. Which was the temple’s way, for a long time.” Ollen’s feet slid and now he was too close, pacing her. He had wiped his face and smoothed his hair, and for a moment he looked quite sane. “But ten years ago the new Mouth was chosen. The one we’ve got now. Your father disliked the new choice.”

  “This new Mouth wasn’t going to let my da run things,” Halla said slowly.

  Ollen nodded. “So your father took you up to the temple, brought you to the old Mouth. He thought he could...he wanted you to replace...I don’t know if what I think is so. No, I know. You were so tiny. Each time you came home so...strange. Like you didn’t know what was going on.” He tilted his head, mimed a lolling motion.

  Halla strode ahead, swallowing.

  “Do you know what happened next?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Halla. “My mother killed him.”

  Behind her, Ollen was silent.

  He did not say and then she was executed for it, but Halla’s fingers still clenched and unclenched at her sides. “And the Mouth had something to do with it?”

  “She was an angel, your mother—my darling. Too good for your cold father. The old Mouth must have broke with your father. And when the new Mouth took over, I think the first thing he did was compel my darling, my sweet, to kill. A God-Death without the God’s wish behind it. I don’t know. I just—she wouldn’t have done it, not a sweet sweet woman like her, she wouldn’t have killed anybody without a compulsion.”

  He underestimated her mother. Halla thought she might well have been capable of murder, if her daughter was in danger. “I’d almost rather believe she did it on her own,” Halla said softly.

  She didn’t expect her uncle to respond, but he started babbling again, something about hands and fingers, and the God-given rage swelled. “Gooseberry,” she said, danger in the word.

  Too much danger. Uncle Ollen flung himself at her feet, crying. “I had to kill her. It hit everything inside of me, horrible. I wanted to kill her, don’t you understand? My pretty sister, I loved her and the Mouth destroyed us. I wanted to hurt her. It broke our family, it broke me, made me a vagrant, no money, no land, no name. I remember, you see, all that true pure rage I remember, because it’s in me, and I wanted it. She made me promise to help you, but I couldn’t bear it. The God forgive me, I couldn’t.”

  She stumbled and kicked at him, trying to get him out of reach. “Move it, damn you!” She escaped from his clutching fingers, backed up against the bamboo.

  He sobbed again and she pulled the dagger halfway out of its sheath. She breathed long and low, stomach clenching. The God-lust was sharp and taut in her mind; she could feel its line stretching back to the Mouth, just as she always had during the judging.

  One way or another, the Mouth had killed her parents.

  Both of them.

  “I’m going to that ceremony.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The judging square was fuller than she had ever seen it. Every inch crammed, a mob of watchers and priests. Halla tried again to shake the God’s blood lust, but she was still taut with it. She remembered the prisoner reaching for the dove yesterday morning, his face distended. He had stayed in agony till he got to complete the God’s task of killing it. She swallowed and pushed through the restless crowd.

  She caught glimpses between necks, under arms. The Mouth stood at the dais, loomed over the young priestling. A bleating goat was tethered off to the side. This was the part she had thought merely ceremonial, but now she was not sure. The old Mouth’s killing of the goat was the moment of investiture. Ritually, it showed that his hands were free again. That he was a citizen again, willing to act when the God required.

  But perhaps it was more than ritual.

  Perhaps it was the way the power was passed on.

  She pushed through, moving to the front.

  The boy’s head was upright and he looked more awake than that morning in the dungeon. She wondered what compulsion the Mouth was sending to him. Alertness?

  The ritual continued, the words rolling on. “As the God speaks through me, so shall the power pass to his chosen one. So shall the next ten years pass with the God and his new Mouth.”

  “May he speak to us,” answered the crowd.

  She was nearly to him, this man who had killed her father and through other hands her mother, who had nearly killed her uncle. The Mouth of the God, her family’s death.

  “By this sacrifice, he shall prove he is willing to act for you. His mouth is the mouth of the God....”

  Maybe you didn’t have to be a landowner to provoke change.

  “May he speak to us,” answered the people. Fingers touched lips.

  Halla stepped forth from the crowd, onto the dais. “You’re using that boy,” she said to the Mouth. Her voice rang out over the judging square. “You don’t intend to step down at all. You’re perverting the voice of the God.” There was absolute silence in the crowded square.

  “Take her,” said the Mouth. His face stayed calm, his hands still folded. A blue-robed priest moved in.

  But the blood rage was still hot in her, and though directed at her uncle it was easy to let it loose on the priest. She had never killed anybody, but now she killed him, largely out of luck. She wanted to drop the wet dagger, she wanted to scream, but she did neither.

  Temple guards were closing in from the sides, but the crowd pressed around the dais, bodies tense, tongues whispering. Watching the new drama play out in the judging square.

  Harder to rein in the lust, but she took a deep breath and bent her mind to it, packing it back down inside her. She moved closer to the Mouth. In her mind, Halla could feel where the directive flowed from him to her; the open thread along which the compulsion ran. The tongueless boy at his side turned and ran, but the one-handed girl watched her with quiet black eyes.

  “He’s abused this boy to stay in control,” Halla said to the crowd. “To keep control of you.” The roar of the crowd grew, and in her side vision she saw the guards encountering resistance.

  On the level where her mind was focusing on the Mouth, she could feel that there were two channels open from him. From the Mouth to the boy, a well-worn path. From the Mouth to her, thick and shining. Her uncompleted God-Death made a channel he couldn’t close. She felt her way along it. “He’s not planning to pass anything on. He’s planning to compel the boy the way he compels the city. This boy is a puppet.”

  “Your father would have done a similar thing to you,” the Mouth hissed. “Once he saw what you could control.” His body was coiled for action but his mind wasn’t. He didn’t even understand how the power worked. His mind was too limited. He was supposed to open a thread of compulsion to the boy, to the sacrifice, giving the boy access to the God. Then the old Mouth would sacrifice the goat, completing his own compulsion from ten years ago. He would draw back, cede his power, take himself out of the loop.

  But he didn’t understand that. He didn’t understand that the same charged line was open from him to Halla. She didn’t think she fully understood the God’s power, but he definitely didn’t.

  The guards were closer now, the Mouth smiling. “Ignore the heretic,” he said to the crowd. “The God will decide her fate.” To her, quietly, “I did you a favor. Your father would have destroyed you.”

&
nbsp; Halla used that tendril, that slim thread he had left open to her. “Perhaps,” she said. “But he didn’t.”

  And then she pulled with all her will, pulled along the thread of that God-driven blood lust, pulled it out of the Mouth and into her. The power spread into her hands, her feet, until for one moment she was lit up golden like a God herself, and from far away the crowd roared at the sight.

  She could feel the thread stretching back into the weight of history, through the Mouth, who was crumpling in front of her, through the Mouth before him, and before him, back and back until it granulated and she could see no further. For one beautiful moment she saw the whole city strung beneath her, relationships, cause and effect, everything a network, a comprehensible tapestry. Threads and patterns, and she could see how events and people were there to be patterned and picked apart and rewoven.

  But even as she watched, the tapestry grew more and more complex until it spun out of control, broke apart, and then the world glittered gold in her sight and was gone.

  She was standing on the dais, a God, and then the world broke apart and she was all too human. There was immense power inside her, huge and trembling in her fingertips, but the corresponding knowledge was gone.

  Yet there was—something—out there; it was not all the Mouth’s perversion and tricks. She almost felt giddy with the realization. She wavered and the crowd gasped and those at the front stuck out useless hands as if to catch her.

  Uncle Ollen tottered up to the dais where she stood. Underneath the calm and power, the compulsion implanted by the Mouth—the former Mouth, now—still screamed.

  Kill.

  It was too much to hope that the compulsion would end; it seemed to be the line through which all her power came. Unless she could figure out how to shut it down without losing her power, it would probably never end, not till his death. The future was suddenly dense and strange, both full of possibility...and empty.

  Ollen looked at the unconscious former Mouth, the dead priests. The lolling priestling, the stone-silent crowd.

  Her.

  “Ollen,” Halla said. “My uncle. My family.” In the packed and silent judging square, she was the only person moving. She unpinned the stolen emerald brooch from her shift, the brooch with which she had hoped to restart a life.

  Halla closed the clasp and placed it into her last living relation’s hands.

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t come back.”

  Copyright © 2008 by Tina Connolly

  Precious Meat

  Catherine S. Perdue

  I am Boon. I lead my pack.

  I have chosen them, the clever, the swift, the strong. I have taught them to read the moons, to know the warming pools, to know the prey. I have taught them what no other pack has known: to hunt together. They are my pack.

  Two full moons at dawn gave us light to run. We leapt from the bubbling pool where we had stayed the night to keep our muscles warm. We filled our lungs to bursting as we ran, swift and silent to the hunt. Our webbed fingers and toes left no mark behind to show which way we’d gone under the moons’ light. We ran to beat the sun. We ran to catch big meat.

  We reached the clearing where a rumbalof lay near its hatching tunnel. I had watched it land here at dusk the night before, warm and strong. It had scraped leaf-litter and moss from the forest floor with its two-clawed toes, front then back, throwing the debris onto its wings until they drooped with the burden. Then it chuffed, cast the debris into the air with both wings, and dropped to the ground to lie still under the fall. The cover that settled onto that shaggy coat was so thorough that when the air cleared, I could no longer say for certain how the rumbalof lay, or precisely where. I knew this though; the beast would cool while it slept. At dawn, it would be slow. If we were quick and brave, we had a chance to win fresh meat.

  Now, sly and silent, we surrounded the clearing. We climbed the nearest trees and clung to branches overhanging the clearing. This rumbalof was too big to take by blind strike. We must wait for it to stand, then attack before it flew. At the sun’s touch, it would stir, night-cold and slow. We waited for the dawn.

  I glanced around the clearing. Each pack-mate watched the center. In the stillness, a mist arose from the clearing like none I’d seen before: clear, close, crystal drops with secret colors and a message. Then the sun touched the forest floor and there was no more time for wondering. The rumbalof opened its eyes. In a shower of debris, it stood and opened its wings to fly.

  In that moment I leapt, struck its side beneath the rising wing, grabbed handfuls of brown fur. Shouts from my pack-mates echoed in the clearing as they, too, attacked. I bit hard through fur and hide and into muscle, tore a gash, clung with fingers and toes as the wing thrashed my side. Clear fluid, thick and cold, pumped from the tear when the wing beat and we rose above the ground.

  Louder than the rumbalof’s wings came a cry from below, a thump and yell of pain. The wings beat a second stroke, stronger, louder. I wondered as I gnawed muscle if any of my pack still held on and if we could conquer this prey. There was a shout and a jolt that shook my hold as a pack-mate dropped onto the rumbalof from a high branch. Our flight began to stutter. Another jolt, and the rumbalof dropped.

  We slammed the ground. I lost my hold and bounced against a tree, both fists still full of fur. Gasping for a thread of air, dazed, blinking dirt from my eyes, I heard Prowl bellow for help. The rumbalof struggled to rise again and only Prowl still clung to its back. We scrambled to throw ourselves onto it once more and smash its wings. It heaved and fell, then heaved again as we bit and tore into it. There were shouts and cries and everywhere thick, clotting ooze turned black with dirt. Finally, the rumbalof stopped.

  Broken leaf and dust drifted down. Someone coughed. Dare sneezed and spat. The dirt settled and we blinked, so coated in filth we hardly recognized each other. This rumbalof we had killed, it was huge. My heart swelled with pride for what we had done. I leapt to my feet and roared, and the others joined me. We praised our strength, fierce and great. We praised this rumbalof, biggest one yet, and praised our victory over it.

  I am Boon. I lead my pack.

  I tore into the flesh and they joined me. I swallowed a ragged chunk, my throat stretched around it, and swallowed again. My brothers, too, tore off chunks of meat, tilting their chins to the sky to swallow.

  A young one, gill marks still visible, squatted at the clearing’s edge, waiting for his turn to feed. He had hatched only this year. I had watched him wend his way upstream from some hatching puddle only weeks ago. He had no strength yet, but I admired the way he investigated as he came. He was a clever wog. “Join us,” I’d said, and he’d agreed. He had run with us today all the way from the warming pools and kept up. Now he waited.

  “Come, feed,” I said, but he stayed where he was.

  Dare, on my left, watched him, too. His fist was curled in warning. Dare was well-named to curl a fist against my pack with me beside him. He had come to us from a puddle just last year when he was as small and weak as this one. His defiance could not be ignored.

  I leapt on Dare and had him by the throat before he knew what happened. He raked me with a back claw and I shook him and snarled. We both bled, but he could not breathe. He glared until his eyes began to bulge from lack of air, then he turned up his belly. Growling, I released his throat. He sucked a great breath then laughed to show he was only teasing.

  “Come, feed,” I called to the small one again.

  “Over here,” said Prowl who fed on the opposite side of the rumbalof. “I’ll pinch Dare if he bothers you again.” The youngster eased around to join Prowl, who pushed against a sibling’s speckled hide. “Shove over,” he said, and urged the youngster to feed beside him. Dare had already gone back to his meat and ignored them.

  I lifted my muzzle and sniffed. The wood was different today. Fine dust still hung in the air and sparkled in sunlit shafts. Such a thing this sparkling was. I gazed at it in wonder. Had the light ever been just so before? Was
this a new thing?

  Prowl was staring at me from across the carcass.

  I met his stare and he didn’t turn away. Did he challenge me, too? He and Dare over the same kill? I growled.

  He didn’t move, but the others stopped eating and backed away. I growled again and it seemed he heard me for the first time.

  “Pardon.” Though he said it quickly and dropped to his belly, I still didn’t understand what had provoked Prowl, nor why he submitted. He was my puddle-mate, from the same hatching.

  I grabbed the carcass and shook it, pretending to feed so the others would return. My belly had enough though. As soon as they returned, I backed away and climbed the nearest tree to wait. They’d be done soon, leaving nothing but scraps, a damp spot, and broken leaves to tell what had happened.

  Then I saw another pack.

  They were chasing a female, this season’s first. She ran ahead of them, prancing, teasing them on. They staggered with exhaustion, trying to catch her. She spotted us and ran closer. My pack caught her scent. Their muzzles were still dripping when they joined the chase, forest litter sticking to their unclean fingers and toes.

  My breath quickened, but I stayed on the tree and watched them go. I had run the race in other years and twice caught the female. The memory made me gasp: exquisite danger, exquisite joy.

  Winning the race meant nothing without the female’s consent. Each time I caught her, held her, her breath hot on my face, there was a moment of danger while she decided if she would have me or not. She would gut me with her amber spurs if she decided ‘no.’ Life or death, it did not matter to me in those moments which fate she chose. Only she must decide. I could not live with such hunger, and if I died, so I died. Twice she let me live; or two females did, once each. I never was certain.

  This time I had no desire to run, but I roared encouragement as my pack raced from sight. They are fine pack-mates, my brothers, bigger and stronger than any others. Even tired from the hunt, I knew one of mine would win.

  While they ran, I washed in a splashing stream, then dozed on a rock shelf above a deep pool. In late afternoon, Prowl joined me. He dripped water from a swim and panted from the steep climb. Bruises covered his hide from both hunt and chase. There would be tales told in the pool tonight.