The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year One Read online

  THE BEST OF BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES ONLINE MAGAZINE, YEAR ONE

  Edited by Scott H. Andrews

  Smashwords Edition, 2010

  Compilation Copyright © 2010 Firkin Press

  Individual Stories Copyright © by the individual authors

  Cover Artwork “Endless Skies” Copyright © 2008 Rick Sardhina

  All other rights reserved.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

  For literary adventure fantasy short stories and audio fiction podcasts, visit our magazine's website at

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  Smashwords Edition License Agreement:

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold, distributed, or reproduced, in part or in whole. Furthermore, it should not be copied, transferred, shared, or traded to third parties. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Sword of Loving Kindness · Chris Willrich

  Architectural Constants · Yoon Ha Lee

  Silk and Shadow · Tony Pi

  Driftwood · Marie Brennan

  Unrest · Grace Seybold

  Dragon’s-Eyes · Margaret Ronald

  Kreisler’s Automata · Matthew David Surridge

  The Alchemist’s Feather · Erin Cashier

  The Mansion of Bones · Richard Parks

  The Mathematics of Faith · Jonathan Wood

  Blighted Heart · Aliette de Bodard

  The Tinyman and Caroline · Sarah L. Edwards

  Father’s Kill · Christopher Green

  Thieves of Silence · Holly Phillips

  Cover Art: Endless Skies· Rick Sardhina

  INTRODUCTION

  WELCOME TO The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year One. Within these (electronic) pages, you will find strange and vivid worlds inhabited by intriguing characters, in stories by award-winning veteran writers and newcomers alike.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies began as, if you will, a quest. There are many fantasy magazines publishing gorgeous literary fantasy and a stalwart few publishing adventure fantasy set in grand worlds, but there was no dedicated home for stories combining both those styles. I love that combination, which I call “literary adventure fantasy,” but only rarely did it pop up in existing magazines. I founded Beneath Ceaseless Skies to give literary adventure fantasy its own home.

  The response to BCS’s first year has been overwhelmingly positive. Three BCS stories received Honorable Mentions in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Six, edited by Gardner Dozois, and three in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton. “Thieves of Silence” by Holly Phillips was named to Locus’s 2009 Recommended Reading List, and “Father’s Kill” by Christopher Green won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story. At the close of 2009, Horton called BCS “a really important source of fantasy.”

  This anthology contains a varied selection of these stories. They include subtle explorations from the perspectives of multiple characters; fantasy classics such as tales of thieves; and worlds ranging in flavor from ancient Aztec to feudal Japan, from traditional fantasy to steampunk to utterly unique. If you enjoy them, visit the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website for more.

  The second year of BCS promises to be just as exciting as the first. So far we have featured stories by Yoon Ha Lee, Garth Upshaw, and Aliette de Bodard, with others forthcoming from Catherine Mintz, Adam Corbin Fusco, and Richard Parks. We continue to release stories every fortnight in three different online formats: as text, as e-book files, and as downloadable audio podcast files. This Best of BCS anthology will hopefully be the first in a series of annual collections highlighting our fiction.

  Like all short fiction magazines these days, our most significant challenge is funding. BCS is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, so we depend on donations from readers. Thank you for buying this e-book; all proceeds will go toward paying our authors and artists.

  My deepest thanks to everyone who has helped me make BCS such a success. Among them: Neil Clarke, for answering my countless questions; my cabal of advisors, for their pragmatic opinions; my family, for their unflagging support; everyone who has ever donated to the magazine, for their generosity; and, most of all, the authors, for transporting me and all the readers of BCS to countless astonishing worlds and introducing us to so many fascinating people.

  Scott H. Andrews

  January 2010

  THE SWORD OF LOVING KINDNESS

  Chris Willrich

  ONE STORM-LASHED SUNSET in the Eldshore’s antique capital, beneath Castle Astrolabe’s crumbling perch and near the Zodiac Coliseum’s bloody stones, Gaunt and Bone scaled Heaven’s Vault, there to make a hellish deposit.

  Heaven’s Vault was a golden, six-sided tower lancing like an orphaned sunbeam through Archaeopolis’ sodden skies. Rectangular stained-glass windows glittered at intervals up its six hundred feet, each with a god’s portrait in the center, surrounded by lush scenes of that divinity’s life and death. In the corners of the windows there glowed ruby numbers, as if enumerating divine blood money.

  “They are all dead, you know,” Imago Bone said within a gilded cloak, his invictium-tipped gloves scraping past the vast window of the Forge God, a blade of grass in his teeth recalling the world far below. “Or so it’s claimed. All the gods of the West. Those not embedded in the landscape, or too abstract to have form at all. Their blood stained this glass, with the blood of their high priests. And the Things beyond the glass killed them.”

  “If this is meant to deter me,” Persimmon Gaunt said, clutching her rope beneath Bone, “I’m deterred. Turn back anytime you like.” Though I wish I’d been swayed at a lower altitude, she thought. Swaying at high altitude is hard on the stomach. Her sturdy body had been toughened by weeks of travel, but the long climb ached within her limbs, and chill winds swirled auburn hair into her eyes. Dangling there, she felt not unlike the rose tattooed upon her face, the one shown ensnared by a spider’s web.

  “There’s no choice,” Bone said. “What we need is beyond this glass, that prophecy claims unbreakable.”

  The poet answered him,

  “Neither liquid nor solid: such then is glass.

  Stained with godblood and manblood, no one shall pass.

  Thus trapped between natures, ‘twill never fault.

  Eternal, the windows of Heaven’s Vault.”

  “Right,” Bone said. “That one.” The spare, ferret-like face of the thief frowned down, framed by two old scars, one from blade, one from flame. “I won’t ask again that you allow me to go alone. I merely ask that you respect the Pluribus. They are not seen much beyond this tower. But if tales are true they slew the old world, spawned the present age.”

  “I understand.”

  “I. . . do not want to lose you.” The momentary softness fled the thief’s scarred face as soon as it arrived. “Some perils must be mine alone. So you must do exactly as I say.”

  “You do not own me, Bone.”

  “You are free, Gaunt. I merely want you free and alive.”

  They reached the upper right vertex of the great window, beside a number marking
Allos the Smith’s assigned ranking among gods (thirteen), and the climbers secured themselves and readied their gear. Stray raindrops spattered the window, which glistened with the ruddy flourishes of sunset. Godblood was, it seemed, composed of all the spectrum’s colors, but with a marked bias toward the red.

  Bone removed his gloves. “The gem, if you please.”

  Gaunt slid from her index finger the ring they’d stolen from the delvenfolk of Loomsberg. It took the shape of a silver ouroboros serpent, with a crook in its self-devoured tail, and a frosty gem within the crook.

  “A ring of Time,” she said, passing it up. “And time, perhaps, to tell me the plan.”

  Bone took the ring and tested it, plucking the grass blade from his teeth and flicking it across the gem. Green coiled into brown, blew away as dust, the remnants scattering to the street. None of the hustling wayfarers beside the Vault noted the incident, nor perceived the climbers in gilded cloaks that mimicked the tower’s stones. Indeed, for all their civic pride, the Archaeopolitans preferred to act as though the Vault did not exist.

  “We could live a year,” Bone mused, “on the value of this gem. Captain Dawnglass would want it for piracy, the kleptomancers for research, Dolman the Charmed to create false relics. Yet it’s merely the tool for a larger caper.” He sighed. “This is my master heist, Gaunt. I spent decades sketching it, as a sort of hobby, never supposing I’d actually try something so mad.” He gazed if for the final time at the grey sea surging westward; then he smiled. “That is the effect you have on me.”

  For you, Bone, she thought, that was a love poem.

  But he had turned back to the window of the god-eaters.

  He put the ouroboros upon his ring finger, pressed it to the glass.

  The gem shimmered and diminished, and simultaneously the world blurred.

  Bone shuddered. Hair sprouted upon his face. Grey strands appeared on his head. His clothes frayed. So did the rope.

  “Bone. . . .”

  “A moment.” Bone shimmered back into solidity, and the gem was gone. Was his voice a trifle weary? “A moment, a year. . . so little difference to a ring of clotted Time. So little difference to me. Heh. But most of its influence was directed outward, Gaunt, at this window.”

  Was the window’s luster gone, its surface drab and colors flat? “What have you done?” Gaunt asked.

  “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Just a little temporal backwash. But the window, now. . . well, a thief appreciates loopholes. Glass is indeed something between liquid and solid, but old glass with impurities has been known to divitrify and become a solid in truth. So I wonder if the prophecy still applies to crystal. . . .”

  Bone donned his clawed gloves, scraped, and grinned.

  Soon he’d created a gap a few feet across in the corner of the Forge God’s window. He carefully lowered a crystal disc into the darkness of the tower, sliding it to one side.

  “Well done,” said Gaunt, peering up into the Vault’s shadows. “But was it necessary to keep me in the dark?”

  Bone looked at her. There were lines beside his eyes, as if a few more crows had danced there. “You are not as skilled at evasion as I. You might have been caught and questioned by delvenfolk, or eldguards, or infraseers.”

  “You were afraid I’d stop you, weren’t you?”

  He coughed. “Perhaps. I could not predict the severity of the temporal backwash. And you have so many years left.”

  She reached up and grasped his wrist. “Give me this moment, and this road, and this sky. That is enough. Never give me lies.”

  He smirked. “I am glad it’s enough, since you’ve enumerated most of our possessions.” He studied the narrow gap, patted his stomach. “For once I’m glad we’ve had little to spend on food.”

  Gaunt shook her head. “Think of it. We are down to our last gold ambrosian, and bear an infernal burden.” She cocked her head toward her pack, which bore the reason for their adventure. “And now we are breaking into one of the world’s most dangerous places.”

  “Don’t tell me you aren’t enjoying it.”

  She laughed and mimed an unchaste kiss. “After you, master thief.”

  The Vault’s windows were for the outside world’s benefit. The beings within had no requirement of light, and although ruddy illumination streamed through the windows, shadows were plentiful. Once within, Gaunt and Bone sought their dubious concealment and took the Vault’s measure.

  Their first realization was that Heaven’s Vault was in a sense two towers: a citadel of black stone perhaps fifty feet in diameter, nestled within the shell of the golden-hued exterior. A narrow, sloping passageway separated the two.

  Upon the ebon stone of the inner tower there appeared, at regular intervals, narrow doors of still darker metal resembling slabs of congealed night. Spindly glyphs, like a sequence of mad spiders’ webs, etched the walls beside.

  “Purest agonium,” Bone said after a sniff of the door-metal. “Formed, it’s said, in the hearts of draconic suicides. I’d best not touch it.”

  “The language of the lost isle of Nobeca,” Gaunt said, squinting at the writing beside the door. “I’d best read it.” Clicking her tongue, she said, “A free translation might be ‘clam, ennui, knucklebone.’”

  “So,” Bone said, scratching his chin, “beyond lies a talisman that puts mollusks to sleep?”

  “No, Bone. My translation makes no sense because the language employed is not Nobecan, but our own tongue of Roil.”

  Bone frowned at her, then at the arcane squiggles. “You could have fooled me. But then the light is dim. . . .”

  “The Nobecan symbols are here used to represent the sounds of Roil. You see, Nobecan is ideographic, not alphabetic. The glyphs with the meanings ‘clam,’ ‘ennui,’ and ‘knucklebone,’ possessed in the original tongue the sounds ‘slaw,’ ‘terr,’ and ‘dairk.’”

  “‘Hm. Slaw-terr-dairk. Slaw-ter-dark. Slaughterdark?” Bone’s eyebrows rose. “The pirate lord? Could this be his deposit box?”

  Persimmon Gaunt could almost see the fires lighting behind Bone’s forehead, illuminating storied hoards of Summerlong wine, Karthagarian gold, Wallander silk.

  “That creature was the terror of three continents,” Bone murmured, his hand drifting despite his own warning toward the dark panel. “I absorbed all his legends as a boy. He retired as a prince to a desert outpost—what would he lock away here?”

  ~ ~ ~

  A thousand miles east in the city of pain, a girl tending a weed-choked garden shivered beneath a desert moon, as if a cold western wind whispered her name. . . .

  ~ ~ ~

  Gaunt caught Bone’s hand. “This isn’t our goal.”

  Her lover sighed. “Correct. We are not stealing, this day.” He beckoned up the winding passage. “The unoccupied boxes should be this way.”

  “A moment.” Gaunt studied the crystal disc they’d dropped in the passageway, its edges marked with red powder, flecked with blues, golds, greens, and yellows. She rubbed the mouth of a pouch along its circumference. “Powdered godblood,” she said, “might just be of value.”

  “Audacious,” Bone said. “Well played. You carry the stuff.”

  They crept upward the equivalent of two stories, passing dark portals labeled for wizards, heroes, monsters, and lunatics, before they discovered the Vault had a guardian.

  A huge golden sphere rolled into view. Bearing down, it made not a rumbling, but a sticky-sounding hiss.

  To Gaunt it resembled nothing so much as a globe of frozen honey, just wide enough to dominate the passage. Like drops of blood, bubbles within glinted with the window-light. Yet this was not its most lurid aspect, for within quivered the severed heads of three men, bobbing as though the interior were viscous yet. The rolling heads stared at Gaunt and Bone, their eyes tracking the new victims, their mouths gaping wide as if shrieking silent warning.

  “Flee!” Bone yelled.

  Gaunt tarried, as much from shock as from a desire to protect her compa
nion. The golden sphere rolled closer.

  Cursing, Bone shifted to the nearest black door, jabbing glove-claws deep into the seam between metal and stone.

  The door popped. Bone swung it and blocked the way, even as the agonium corroded the claws down to smoking flecks.

  The sphere hit the enchanted metal; Bone fell backward into Gaunt. The globe steamed into sweet-smelling vapor, filling the passage with a tantalizing odor as of life’s finest meal, now over.

  Before the door swung back Gaunt glimpsed the chamber beyond. There glinted a dented brass lamp, a carved pumpkin brooding atop a saddle, a pale girl immobile within a glass coffin. Then the deposit box and its mysteries were closed off forever.

  Three heads flopped now upon the floor like fresh trout, drawing Gaunt’s gaze. They were aging swiftly. Their skins became ash, and the skulls beneath followed suit. Before they were gone, however, Gaunt thought she heard them whisper, Our thanks. . . .

  “An ambrosia globe,” Bone said. “A head within goes on living, in misery, nourished by divine honey. I told you to flee.”

  “I was startled. And I couldn’t leave you.”

  He frowned. “We must hone your self-preservation skills.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Your death would serve no one, Persimmon Gaunt!” Bone shook his head. “You affect a certain world-weariness, but you are a romantic. You must learn proper selfishness.”

  “Selfishly I ask, quit the lecture.” Hands on hips, she said, “Of more immediate concern, how many times can you repeat that trick with the door?”

  Bone grunted, looked away, removed his smoking gloves. “I had only one set of invictium claws.”

  “May I borrow what remains?”

  “They’re nearly useless. But be my guest.”

  She slipped on the gloves, which still bore remnants of the enchanted metal. “Let’s go.”

  Their luck improved. They found their goal just around the bend: the first door lacking an inscription.