BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue001 Read online

  There was no city wall as such. Wooden harbor-sheds blended with adobe homes and stone pyramids, the city growing by turns more austere toward its center; and despite their intent to abandon the sword immediately, it was unclear to Gaunt and Bone if they were truly inside Maratrace or not. They ventured inward.

  They soon found themselves upon hot, hushed, shadow-slashed avenues of white sand, slicing between close-set buildings. To Gaunt, the city seemed the work of two diametrically opposed architects. Most structures, those meant for business or habitation, sat stark, smooth, and angular, reminding her of tombs. This much was strange but hardly daunting. It was the other constructions, the public and military buildings, which cast monstrous shadows. They clawed skyward like the citadels of genius termites. Within the limits of engineering they were asymmetrical and rough-hewn, crafted to suggest diseased and disfigured creatures. The tallest structure, ebon and windowless but in outline oddly reminiscent of Heaven’s Vault, flowed with intricate carvings depicting humans and other sapients undergoing torture. Beneath it, children played.

  Gaunt led Bone nearer the children, who represented the largest knot of activity in sight. So far, other citizens had clung to the shadows, slipping indoors as the poet and thief passed by. Gaunt had only been able to discern that the Maratracians were surprisingly pale for desert-dwellers, and that many were maimed as if veterans of some ugly battle.

  “We might as well inform someone what we’re doing,” Gaunt said, worried that her scruples were generated by the sword, but unable to act otherwise.

  The older children played catch with a wooden octahedron bristling with little spikes. Usually the children avoided the hazards, but occasionally a sharp cry went up.

  Heat and distraction had made Gaunt stupid; but when she finally understood the meaning of the latest yelp, she ran toward a fallen boy.

  He cradled a bleeding palm. His cohorts gathered around him, silently watching.

  Bone slid onto the sand and grabbed the boy’s hand. Perhaps fourteen, the victim was long and lean of face, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and stared as though Bone were a particularly unbelievable desert mirage.

  “Let him help,” Gaunt implored in the language of Amberhorn, a far place, but not so distant as the homes of other tongues she knew.

  The boy regarded her in silence, but his gaze was intent, perhaps even expectant.

  Bone applied a tourniquet from his pack, and strong alcohol from his flask. The boy hissed as the liquor stung, then narrowed his eyes with a peculiar, satisfied look.

  Again in Amberhornish, Gaunt said, “Where are your parents? Or your guardians?” She pointed angrily at the spiked ball. “Why do they allow such playthings?”

  No one answered. Slowly, Gaunt grew aware of the collection of scars and bandages on the impassively staring children. One boy lacked half an ear, the wreckage neatly trimmed. One girl wore a patch over one eye, the fabric bearing a ghastly symbol. It recalled the familiar skull-and-crossbones of pirates, yet depicted a severed head and arms, all covered in flesh.

  “Does no one speak Amberhornish?” Gaunt called out. “Roil? Eldshoren?”

  “We understand you,” said the boy with the wounded hand, in careful Amberhornish. “We learn this language in school. We’re supposed to know the tongues of future conquests.”

  Bone avoided the obvious question, asked instead, “Then why did you not answer?” The thief finished his ministrations, and the boy flexed his hand with a grim smile.

  “Your questions make no sense,” he replied. “We are children. Why should we not play?”

  At this point another cry arose. A plump, tanned girl of around twelve barreled toward them, sandals slapping the sand, dirty brown hair flailing about her intense dark eyes. Had Gaunt imagined a sentient sandstorm, there would have been a resemblance. Girl collided with boy with in what seemed both tackle and embrace, weeping. He, in turn, detached himself but swatted her shoulder in amused condescension. “Skath, Skath, Skath. What are we to do with you? It’s just a little blood.”

  “Siblings?” Bone murmured to Gaunt.

  “Yes,” she said. “The mix of anger and affection is telling.”

  The girl Skath looked up at the strangers. Worry twisted her face. She took Gaunt and Bone by the hand and nodded urgently down the white street. “Come!” she declared in Amberhornish. “You must hurry.”

  “A welcoming committee at last,” Bone quipped in Roil, as they consented to be led. “But we must dispose of the sword.”

  “Perhaps this girl can introduce us to officialdom,” Gaunt said in kind. “The weapon’s emanations make me want to deliver it to proper channels. Also, I am having difficulty refusing an invitation. It’s impolite, after all.” She shrugged helplessly.

  “We are wanted thieves in Palmary, Archaeopolis, and Loomsberg,” Bone sighed, “and now we’re compelled to knock at all doors, and wipe our feet. Next we’ll be sending thank-you notes to every noble we’ve robbed.”

  They followed Skath. After some hesitation her brother tagged along, taunted by his contemporaries’ laughter.

  “A strange city,” Bone observed in Roil. “The size and condition of the buildings imply wealth, and despite their scars the children are well-clothed and fed. Yet all doors stand open, all save those of the great tower, where I saw no opening. Nor do I see city guards, or private muscle....”

  “But there are those....” Gaunt jabbed an elbow at a side street, toward one of the smaller grotesque towers. Below, figures in drab grey robes gathered in discussion. They glanced at the foreigners. “They look ominous.”

  “They cannot hurt you,” Skath piped up in Amberhornish, proving she understood more than the outlanders realized.

  “Because we are outsiders?” Gaunt asked in the same tongue.

  “They are not allowed,” Skath said. “No one in Maratrace can hurt anyone else.”

  “A lovely sentiment,” said Bone.

  “But they want to. They all want to hurt you.” With this she strode into a two-story pyramid.

  She led them through the first story, one single large room adorned with bright wall-hangings and colorful sitting pillows, where in one corner lurked a sculpture like an iron sea-urchin with spines of irregular length. The tips had a rusty look. A stairway led to a deeper, cooler level. Another sliced along three walls and led to the roof, and it was up these stairs the girl marched.

  They attained a square rooftop rimmed with flower beds, with a rustling white canopy on rickety stilts offering shade. A watering pot creaked in the dry wind; weeds choked the flower beds. A dry, sharp smell accompanied the weeds.

  Skath scanned the garden, nodded to herself, and plucked a dandelion. She handed it to Gaunt with slow ceremony.

  “I am Skath,” she said. “I keep lots of gardens, here and there. I like the plants people call weeds. Most people think I’m crazy. Have a dandelion.”

  “I am... Lepton,” Gaunt said, accepting the white puff. She chose an Amberhornish word meaning thin or light, preferring Skath know the sense of her name rather than the sound. Also, it was just as well her true identity went unspoken. “This is, um, Osteon,” she added, nodding to Bone, and passing the dandelion to him. He bowed. White seeds drifted behind him, from the canopy’s shadow into the blazing sunlight.

  “This is Skower,” Skath said with a toss of her shoulder.

  Her brother made a scoffing noise.

  “Skath,” Gaunt said. “Who rules your city?”

  The girl’s smile froze. She looked away to her weeds.

  “We are returning something to Maratrace,” Bone added. “May we show you?”

  “Um, Osteon....”

  “I feel that we must—Lepton.”

  Skath nodded uncertainly at Bone’s question, and he set the dandelion atop the roof’s wall, removed the shrouded sword, unwound the cloth. Prismatic flashes and ruby light painted the air.

  Skower hissed. Skath merely stared.

  “The Sword of Loving Kindn
ess,” Bone said. “Reputed the world’s most dangerous weapon.”

  Indeed, Gaunt thought. For she saw Skath reaching toward the sword with an expression torn between terror and awe. Her brother crept beside her like a cat tracking a lame bird.

  “Ah, now,” Bone said, edging back. “Touching magic is like petting sharks with a bloody hand....”

  Skath paused.

  But suddenly Skower grabbed her wrist. As she said, “You are not allowed—,” he shoved her hand toward the blade.

  “What are you doing?” Bone pulled back, but his reflexes were sluggish, and his movement served only to cut Skath’s hand upon one of the hilt’s crystal petals.

  Skath gasped and closed her eyes.

  “At last,” crowed her obviously insane brother, releasing her. “At last you have hurtyourself. And I only assisted you a little: a minor sin.” He babbled on, switching to the language of Maratrace.

  “This city is mad!” Gaunt snapped. “Your own sister—!”

  “She is a disappointment to us!” he retorted in Amberhornish. “Mother and Father fight over what to do with her. She has never embraced abyssmitude.”

  “Embrace this,” Gaunt said, and backhanded him.

  He recoiled, clearly not anticipating her strength, or her willingness to cause another pain. “That is—that is against—”

  “I’m not from around here.”

  Skower stared into Gaunt’s face, a tear crawling down his cheek, and his peculiar intensity collapsed like a tower of sand. He fled down the stairs.

  “Good riddance,” she said, but with little satisfaction, for Skath’s eyes were still closed, as though the girl slept on her feet.

  “Perhaps if I splash her?” Bone said, looking at the watering can.

  Skath’s eyeballs danced behind shut lids, in a way Gaunt’s bardic teachers had discovered signified dreaming. “Wait,” she said.

  Skath’s eyes opened, and she shrieked. Bone backed away, and his elbow bumped the dandelion, knocking it over the side in a spray of shining fluff.

  “No,” Skath said, spreading her arms as if sheltering the entire weed garden. She uttered frantic sentences in the tongue of Maratrace, and a few words in Amberhornish: “No, you will not! It’s wrong! Wrong!”

  She darted downstairs, whence her brother had gone.

  The nonplussed wayfarers saw her sprint down the street, dust rising behind her sandals.

  “Ah,” Bone asked, “what just happened?” He held the sword away from his body as though it were a boa constrictor.

  “You speak as if I was there,” Gaunt said, rubbing her temples and reconstructing the scene in her mind. “All I can say is, two children just had very strange reactions to a magic sword. Stranger than ours, Bone.”

  “Did the Pluribus have a hidden agenda in sending it here?”

  “Are deserts dry?”

  They watched as Skath collided with the collection of drab-robed people they’d noted earlier—those who supposedly could not harm others, but wanted to. The boy Skower was already among them, leading the drab-robes toward the house.

  “Let’s consider this from the local point of view,” Bone ventured. “Two foreigners assault a pair of children in their own home.”

  The drab-robes pointed pale fingers at the weed garden.

  “I think our work here is done,” Gaunt said. “Shall we descend this fine, angled slope?”

  “Well said.”

  They began climbing over the wall—and stopped.

  “Do you feel what I feel?” Gaunt asked.

  “Would that be, dear Gaunt, a sense that it would be wholly impolite for us to flee the lawful authorities?”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “But even worse, that it’s shameful to tread our dirty feet over these immaculate walls, when honest folk would use the stairs.”

  Bone took a deep breath. “Enough. This time the sword presumes to interfere with our long-term plans. To survive, that is. We will overcome it. On a count of three....”

  “Keeping in mind the sinister look of those towers....”

  “... Indeed... we vault the wall.”

  Bone counted three, and both leaned forward.

  And both leaned back.

  They stood there, feeling foolish, but unable to move.

  “Second plan,” Bone said. “We throw the sword, the authorities claim it. Deed done.”

  “Excellent,” Gaunt said.

  Bone made to fling the weapon, but instead set the rosy rapier tenderly upon the roof.

  “Close enough,” Gaunt said. “Let’s flee.”

  They still could not descend the wall. They used the stairs. Progress was slow, leisurely, dignified....

  “Bone, I Can’t. Move. Faster.”

  “Just keep walking.”

  The greater their distance from the Sword of Loving Kindness, the faster their pace. As they reached the front door, the compulsion was released, and finally they could run.

  It was almost soon enough.

  The doors burst in and six drab-robed figures entered. These assumed the stances of trained unarmed combatants, dropping their centers of gravity and spreading their feet, raising calloused hands and sizing up Gaunt and Bone. Gaunt glimpsed scarifications surrounding hard-looking eyes.

  “Downstairs,” Bone said, snaring her elbow like an erratic dance partner. They fled to the dim underground, shouts and snarls behind.

  Concluded in Pt. II, in Issue #2

  © Copyright 2008 Chris Willrich

  Sun Magic, Earth Magic

  David D. Levine

  “Captain! Why have we stopped?” Shira sharpened her voice as she leaned out of her palanquin. Bad enough that she had to serve for five years in this mud-encrusted backwater, but to spend even one more moment in the agony of travel piled indignation upon annoyance. Her breath steamed in the mountain air.

  “This man help seeks, Most Holy Sorceress,” the captain of her personal guard replied, bowing his head in deference to her. He was a Vubinian, black as coal, and his Novarran grammar was appalling. But at least his years in the Novarran Imperial Army had taught him some manners.

  The panting Ucnian man held by two soldiers had no such manners. One soldier forced him to bow his head, but even as he did so he glared at Shira from beneath his tangled red bangs. She met his gaze, taking in his untamed beard, his ragged woolen clothing, his battle scars. He looked old enough to have fought in the last disastrous attempt at a local uprising.

  “What kind of help?” Shira asked, not taking her eyes off the man.

  “Boy in cave, he says, trapped is. But this an ambush, could be.” The captain—Gvubi, that was his name—shielded his eyes with one hand and peered off at the horizon, where a thin column of smoke rose from a cleft and stained the gray fabric of the clouds. The vegetation on the stony hills to either side was scrubby, ugly, and tenacious—like the region’s people.

  “Send a runner to investigate. If he is telling the truth, I will help.” Annoyance seethed beneath the bronze Sun amulet that lay on Shira’s breast, but she was here to render aid as well as to represent Novarra. The life of a Sun Sorceress was a life of service, to the God and to the Empire.

  Even if the Empire sent her to a cold, rocky, mountainous hell of barbarous people, hideous food, and perpetual overcast.

  At the base of the column of smoke, a crowd of perhaps seventy people huddled in loose knots around a handful of campfires. Dogs and small children ran between the fires, and a smell of burnt mutton hung over the scene. At each fire men argued in the harsh, spitting Ucnian language, pointing again and again at a small cave that gaped beneath an overhanging brow of rock nearby. But as Shira stepped from her palanquin, the crowd fell silent—an angry stillness that spread like oil from a dropped lamp.

  Gritty mud squelched beneath Shira’s sandals as she accepted a warm elk-hide cloak from Captain Gvubi. She noted with approval that he had deployed his nine men in unobtrusive protective positions around her. But it would be better if she
could move among the Ucnians without an armed guard.

  Perhaps this unexpected delay was an opportunity in disguise. Saving the boy would show these people that she was not their enemy. Then they would give her the respect a Sun Sorceress deserved.

  “Who here speaks Novarran?” she called out.

  “I have a few words of that language.” A tall, fat man detached himself from one of the groups and strode up to her. His rough woolen shirt and kirtle were plastered with mud, as was his fringe of red-gray beard, and as he approached she smelled the sour ale the locals brewed from oats. He stood nearly two heads taller than Shira and must have weighed three times as much.

  “I am Shira Dinarian Rahalia, Most Holy Sorceress of the Sun God of Novarra, and I am here to serve. Who are you?”

  The man bowed his head. “I am called Uhric, and I too am a humble servant of a God, though I have the honor to serve the Earth Mother.” For a misguided heathen his Novarran was excellent—far too courtly, in fact, for the circumstances.

  “What is the situation?”

  “A boy of thirteen summers, by the name of Luca, is trapped in the cave you see before you. He has been there for some three days already, and so far all our efforts to free him have come to naught.” He bowed, an exaggerated gesture of courtesy, and motioned her to follow him toward the cave. Gvubi and two soldiers fell in behind them as they walked. “His foot was trapped by a falling rock, and none can reach it. We have dug, and pried, and even tried pulling him out with a rope tied around his chest, but he cried out so from the pain that we had not the heart to continue.”

  The incongruous high diction of this rustic was beginning to grate at Shira’s ears. That, and his great size, gave him an insufferable air of superiority that Shira could not abide in another person. “Where did you learn Novarran?”

  “I have visited many parts of the Earth Mother’s broad belly, Most Holy Sorceress.” And he smiled at her, an ingratiating smirk that made her loathe him still more.

  “But your fine words have failed to convince your Earth Mother to release the boy.”