Beneath Ceaseless Skies #85 Read online

  Issue #85 • Dec. 29, 2011

  “The Death of Roach,” by Spencer Ellsworth

  “The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds,” by Seth Dickinson

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE DEATH OF ROACH

  by Spencer Ellsworth

  He has given me ink and parchment and told me to write, for salvation lies in the Aspects of the Thousand Gods, and the thirty-third is the confessional. I shall tell my story. But not to confess. Nor to boast. Nor—especially not—to atone.

  I am Roach, of the Sand-Eaters. I have been a living weapon since my girlhood. I have stolen from the inner sanctum of the godborne. I slew the Wise Khayif and destroyed any hope of peace among humankind and godborne.

  And I am not sorry.

  * * *

  Life begins and ends in blood. In my case it was especially bloody.

  My mother had been sent to kill a prince, a grandfatherly man who would, according to my father, trust a pregnant woman. The man had trusted her, but his vizier had not, and before my mother could kill the prince, the vizier’s troops caught her and wounded her.

  She made her way back to my father. He ordered her death, and he held her as they cut her open. She died apologizing for her failure.

  My brother and I were raised in tangled mountains of sharp slate, far from the Kingdom of Peace. He would weep at night for fear of the dark. When I heard the weeping, I would steal out of my room and climb into bed with him, holding him close against my chest. It was the only touch the two of us ever felt as children.

  The servants found out that we went to each other. When they forbade us, my brother wept harder than he ever had. After that I could still hear him crying through the manor, clear and bright, but I was ashamed of him.

  At five years of age we ignited, light and thought splitting our skulls. I remember waking, my fever raging, and through the blaze of fever, I could see the servants’ sha, each one a network of interlacing wires as intricate as calligraphy. I brushed those wires with what I later realized were the fingers of my own sha, and their thoughts stung, distinct and pungent.

  They worried we had been feverish too long, which I felt as a tingling, electric taste. They wanted news from the outside world, an empty taste like the aftereffect of sugar. Most of them wished to be rid of me, since I was mouthy and had a tendency to escape, but most of all they worried what my father might say, and that worry was a constant ache, like hints of vomit in the throat.

  I played with their sha, like a cat pawing at string, and realized how easy it was to remove a memory or to convince another of things that were blatant lies. It is a heady, irreplaceable power. They call us godborne, but we are the only true gods on this earth.

  Our father came for us, his sha impenetrable to us, like a stone fortress. “I hear that you have great compassion for one another, First and Second,” he said to us. Among the Sand-Eaters, a name is earned by taking a life, and we had not done so yet.

  “Yes, father,” I answered. Godborne are blind to one another’s sha, true, but I felt as though my father could see through me anyway.

  For the first four days in his manor we walked tiled floors, drank dark wines and ate soft dates drizzled with lamb fat and cheese. It seemed another world, an indefinable contrast between hard men and soft living. My father showed us maps, his weapons, and his assassins training in the courtyard, merciless humans whose minds would be fortified by drugs and meditation against the intrusion of other godborne. I was allowed to brush their sha. Each one filled me with reverence for my father, a taste so heady that wine has never compared.

  On the fourth day, I watched each assassin fall to his knees and swear fealty to my father, a personal oath as binding as any before the Gods. As the last assassin reached him, my father beckoned to us. “First. Second. Come.”

  We kneeled before him. I know the words of the vow now, but at the time, I had no idea what I was saying. I remember, though, that I felt as if I were confirming something I already knew.

  On the fifth day, before a crowd of these assassins, he ordered my brother and I to kill each other.

  “You cannot,” my brother mouthed. I did not answer.

  I can still smell the jasmine that bloomed in that courtyard and the wine and lamb the spectators consumed. I heard them whispering about me. I was the girl, but no ill choice was I; I had climbed every cliff and explored every mountain around our little manor of stone. I would be the winner already, I knew.

  The murdering knife passed between us, as all things are done among the Sand-Eaters, in poetry.

  “I take you to me with blood and breast milk,” my brother intoned, the fear palpable in his voice.

  “I take you to me with sinew and shadow,” I replied.

  We faced each other and bowed. My father’s eyes were prods in my back.

  I struck out with the knife for my brother. He caught the first blow. The second opened a gash in his arm. I saw fear in his eyes, and I thought, I cannot kill him. But it was my father’s command, and I would not disobey my father. So I kicked my brother’s legs out from under him and raised the knife. He kneed my stomach. The pain was blinding, yet I thanked the Thousand for it. He might live. I pursued my brother across the courtyard, caught him and struck him a resounding blow on the head with the hilt of the knife.

  His voice was choked. “Please,” he whispered.

  I hesitated, standing over my brother. I could hear him crying in my mind, remembered his warmth as I had held him to my breast to comfort him.

  “Please.”

  “Coward,” I said to cover my hesitation, but I was still not moving.

  And then the knife went spinning out of my hand and my brother’s hands locked around my throat, squeezing and squeezing, until our father pulled him away. I gagged, coughing for breath. He would have killed me after all.

  “You are my son,” our father said to my brother.

  Then he turned to me. “Mercy is not your way, First.” I could see the punishment in his eyes.

  * * *

  This room has been my prison for the last year. It is sunny, wide, with a table for writing.

  Each morning I can see their faces, brighter than the sunlight in this room. Wives and concubines offered anything to save their children. Riches, their bodies, each other. It made no difference. I sealed the exits. I slit small throats and the blood soaked the silks.

  To satisfy the man who has asked me to write, I will make one confession. I hardly remember the Wise Khayif’s face as he died. But I remember his women and children. I know their eye color, their moles, the length of their hair, the words they tried to say as breath left them.

  The man enters my room and sees the manuscript. “May I read it?”

  I push the paper toward him and take the platter of spiced mutton and rice he hands me. The food is too rich to give to a doomed woman, but he keeps bringing it.

  After a time, he looks up from what I have written and says, “What did your father do to punish you?”

  “He hung me by my ankles, beat me until I could not see, and left me to escape my bonds.” I scoop greasy mutton on the edge of a knife. “That was how I learned to disjoint myself and remove my hands from the bonds. Of course, he hung me again. It became a daily ritual.”

  “Thousand have mercy.”

  I chuckled. Mercy. It was a damning word in my father’s court. “Do you know when I killed my first man? I was five. He was a caravan driver. My father told me that the man had blasphemed our Thirteenth Prophet, and we could not let it pass.”

  I remember the
details of that day. The weeping man, tears dribbling through his thin whiskers, fear souring his sha. The feel of the knife’s leather haft in my hand. By the time I had finished that day, blood soaked my clothes and ran like little rivers between the blue tiles of our courtyard.

  “When I killed him, my father kissed my head and told me, ‘First, you are my daughter,’ and it seemed worth it.”

  “Your father was a beast,” the man says. From outside, we hear a low cry. One of the wounded that the monks tend, wounded in this war my hand wrought through assassination. “Have you made the world he believed in?”

  I scrape meat off the bones with my teeth. The cries of the wounded echo through the window. “I cannot speak for the dead.”

  * * *

  In my father’s court, I learned of the two great divisions among our people: godborne and human, first of course, but then of itansha and orthodox, of the murderous overlords of the khayifate and the innocent itansha dead we defended.

  My father often spoke of the first Sand-Eater, who, like him, had no title other than Old Man. “Old Man was part in a caravan of believers murdered by the orthodox soldiers. They sang the praises of the Thirteenth Prophet even as their throats were slit.”

  “The orthodox left itansha bodies face down,” I said, as I always did, filling in the next part of the story. “So their spirits could not escape to heaven.”

  “Aye. They called itansha sand eaters, for the way they left them dead. They meant it to mock. We have made it a name to fear.” My father carefully let the explosive powder drain from his hand into one of the bowed glass containers, a steady stream of tiny rock chimes. “The khayif in those days had promised to purge the land of itansha, for he feared our claim to the throne.

  “He was right to fear. Though his wives, children and brothers died, Old Man survived. He made it to the mountains. Tribes taught him, shamans who remembered the secrets of plant poisons and spells long lost to the godborne of the khayifate. He consorted with spirits of air and fire, who revealed the alchemy buried in the earth. In a few years, that khayif fell to one of our assassin’s blades. One day we will exterminate their entire line.”

  I remember standing before a crowd of human Sand-Eaters, reciting the art of assassination, an act as delicate as a painter’s strokes, or a dancer’s pirouettes. “The truth in assassination is the fear. When you can make a king, a prince, a khayif beg for his life, you need not kill them. Powerful men have wept to know Sand-Eaters hunted them.”

  My father clapped me on the shoulder and added, “I left a knife on a man’s pillow once. He went from bigotry to championing of the itansha.” He cupped my chin in his enormous, rough hand. “You are a knife in the hand of justice, and your edge is sharpened by fear.”

  As he had in our battle, my brother surpassed me again. It was our name-trial, and I was determined to become a mountain cat. I slept in one’s tracks, near the lair, awaiting a sign, but nothing came. Soon I wondered if I had even read the signs correctly. I was drinking from a cloudy pond, the only water for miles in the barren rocky hills, when my brother bounded through the water.

  “I did it!” he said to me.

  “What?”

  He held up a limp thing in his hand, its dead webbed feet shaking. “It came to me. I saw its sha and I took it—I just sucked it out, into me! Frog.” He glowed. “I have a name. Frog.”

  I never found my mountain cat. I failed that name-trial, and the next, enduring my father’s disappointment each time. Until one day I awoke in a cave with a bug on my chest, crawling over me. If I hadn’t been so hungry for my father’s approval, I would have swatted it away. I held the little squirming thing that became me and cut away its sha, the little branches that made up its life, a flat, dusty taste, until they were absorbed into my own, until its thoughts and instincts ran along my soul-branches.

  “Father,” I said as I returned. “I am Roach.”

  I waited what seemed like years for his response.

  My father, thank the Gods, did not laugh. “A survivor, then.”

  * * *

  The man looks up from the scroll. “You said you are not sorry.”

  I pause, mouth full of tangy yogurt mixed with greens and honey. “I am not.”

  “You have plunged the world into anarchy. Northmen ravage the Kingdom of Peace. There are five different men claiming the role of khayif, each with his own loyal army.”

  “There will be no victor,” I say automatically. “Every relative close enough for a solid claim to the throne was murdered. We were thorough.”

  “Do you still believe in your father’s vision?”

  I hesitate. “Have you seen humans die?” I ask.

  “Yes.” He looks away.

  “I saw my first itansha dead at Densarria,” I say. “The people of that town had surrounded the itansha and forced them into a pit. They set a fire, and whoever tried to escape met a hail of arrows. I saw the burnt bodies of mothers and children, skin melted, blackened as it ran together, lying at the edge of the pit. Scorched arrows stood out from their bodies like fenceposts, fletching burnt away.

  “Some men were strong enough to reach the row of soldiers at the rim of the pit. The soldiers hacked them apart, armor and swords against bare skin. All because of the difference between twelve prophets and thirteen.”

  I can remember every detail. That horrible smell of ash culled from burned fat and flesh. Those empty, open eye sockets. Most of all, the look on my father’s face, the unspeakable rage. He had looked over every body, counting each one, his gaze lingering long enough to register their lives.

  It is the man’s turn to be silent.

  “We were the only justice they had.” I smile. “Salvation lies in the Aspects of the Thousand, and the first is justice.”

  When I say that, I cannot help but see another child’s face, at another time, in an opulent room, a beautiful woman holding him, begging. Please, he’s not even the khayif’s. There’s a guard who poses as a eunuch. He’s the father. I raised the blade. The child died.

  “The second Aspect is mercy,” the man says.

  * * *

  It is impossible for me to speak of Spider except as a mistake. I always thought my father was a fool for trusting her; for all that I would make that same mistake myself.

  My father told me a single Sand-Eater had disobeyed him, a godborne, and I had to find him and bring him back. He was barricaded in the crypts below the city of Anticrae, lime-crusted half-drowned tunnels.

  Anticrae rose from a floodplain, a city dominated by three massive towers, far beyond the high tide. In ancient times it had been a place of tombs and altars, a hall of the dead for the older tribes. Now it was a marvel made new, with saltwater purified through thick layers of korastone. The old catacombs were mostly forgotten under the new sewer and waterworks.

  It was a hot, breezeless day when I descended into that darkness. The catacombs were cool, the air tangy with salt and lime.

  In the faint glimmer of water in the dark, I could see the cracked, sloping walls, runes skewed by broken stone, stone figures worn away to lumps by crusted salt. I emerged from the tunnel into a wide, black chamber, once high-ceilinged, now filled with the rubble of old pillars and statues, the ceiling above me bulging where it hadn’t fallen in. I could only see by the faint shadow of water.

  My quarry moved. I could hear the footsteps, light and barely noticeable over the steady wash of the water against stone. My sense of any sha was fuzzy; no discernable trace of another’s sha, just as it would be if I was hunting another godborne. I withdrew a blade from my belt, one that could extend to thrice its length at the right touch.

  My quarry came closer, on the other side of the pillar. He had heard me, no doubt, but sounds were tricky here. In preparation for this, I had spent days in deep, wet caves, following sounds and judging distances, so that I could be equal to one who had lived here.

  I tossed a pebble across the room. My quarry stopped.

  I lun
ged—and landed on a snarling, sodden, half-dead lion. He tore gouts of flesh from my arm. I switched hands and extended the blade through his midsection, but not before his paw took a chunk out of my cheek. I staggered back against the stone, yanking my blade from him, ignoring the pain, seeking a void where I was only that blade. I should have tasted the lion’s sha. My quarry had hid it from me, but even the best sha-mask could be tasted by a focused Sand-Eater. I had been a thrice-fool, overconfident. I ran from the lion up a half-fallen pillar, clutching at the weathered stone.

  Halfway up the pillar my quarry caught me, a quarterstaff slipping lightly by my ankle, like a fishhook. I leaped away but stumbled and fell, landing in the water. I saw his shadow descend from above. I lunged with the blade, but he was fast, and thin, as fast as me. I dodged, but I put out my injured arm to steady myself and my vision burst red. Before I could recover, he had me, quarterstaff closing in on my windpipe.

  “Roach,” a woman’s voice said. “Your father will be so disappointed.”

  I didn’t understand she meant, not even when she led me through a secret tunnel to a villa in the city, and there I saw my rogue Sand-Eater. She was light-skinned and wiry, obviously a half-breed of some northern raider. She was dressed as a man and, as I watched, stripped off a false black beard that might have fooled others. She smirked as she watched me stand and try not to pass out after the blood I had lost from the lion’s attack. “Old Man?” she called.

  My father emerged from a curtained chamber, followed by two more godborne Sand-Eaters. I thanked the Gods that one was not my brother. “Spider, you did well.” He raised my chin, not caring that blood still ran from my cheek where the lion had caught it. “Roach, this is the second time you have failed me.”

  I said nothing. Words would only make me appear weak.

  My father stood up and took Spider by the arm, drawing her close. She was easily my age, at fourteen barely a woman, but he kissed her as if she were full-grown and drew her into the chamber he had come from. “Keep a watch on her,” my father said to the assassins. “All night.”