Beneath Ceaseless Skies #87 Read online

  “But what?”

  “I found the presence of alkalis. They... they were the same kind we found in your mother. The same kind that killed her.”

  I gripped the edge of the counter, though whether out of rage or to hold myself up, I didn’t know. The world receded from me then, and a shroud of darkness descended onto me.

  When it cleared, I was staring into those warm brown eyes. “Are you well?” the man said.

  I managed to nod. “I just had a shock,” I said. Then the tears came and I cursed myself for them. My shoulders shuddered and my fists clenched at my sides.

  The man, who was Hieronymus, held me close and weathered the worst of the shuddering. “It’s going to be fine,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.” I didn’t know how, but I believed him.

  * * *

  The sound of horse hooves on the path bring me back from the depths of recollection. I walk to the window and see Clytos dismounting. He is alone. His normal retinue have been left behind to give us some privacy.

  I open the door for him and stand in the doorway, lit by the candles behind me. He comes toward me, smiling. His face is more weathered since I’ve last seen him, bronzed by the sun and buffed by the wind. He stands before me, a half head taller. I place a hand on the side of his face and kiss him. This man who is my father. Then I take him by the hand and pull him in.

  “This is a warm welcome,” he says, placing his cloak and sword across a chair. Taking in the candles and the burning herbs.

  “That was my intention,” I say. “Wine?”

  He nods and takes up one of the cups, drinks deep. The hair on the sides of his head has the barest hint of grey, the first real signs of age I’ve seen in him.

  “There are gifts, too,” I say.

  “Gifts? For me? I thought I was the one who brought the gifts.” He says the last with a hint of mockery in his voice.

  “Well, you’ve been away for months,” I say. “And I have grown some in that time. And I thought that you should have something worthy. Especially after your last gift.”

  “Ah, the Pegasari,” he says. “That was a dear gift. But well spent, I think.”

  “She is beautiful. And wondrous. But I have brought you something rarer, I think.”

  His eyes scan the room and rest on metal box. His eyebrows raise and I nod. He strides toward it and lifts the lid slowly, tenderly. A limp snake head tumbles free. He pulls back. “Is this...?”

  “A Gorgon? Yes,” I say. “One of the last of its kind.”

  He looks at me, his face serious. “You killed it?”

  “I did.”

  “You are full of surprises.”

  “Open it all the way.”

  He smiles and shakes his head. “What do you take me for?”

  “Fine, I will,” I say and move past him to open the lid. I pull out the Gorgon’s head, now adorned with the mask that Hieronymus made for me. The bronze cast shows her face just as it was but protects us from her still powerful gaze. My finger grazes against the catch on one upper corner, depresses it.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  “Fascinating,” Clytos says. “And what am I to do with this?”

  “I thought you might mount it on the prow of your ship. And reveal it when you close on your enemies.”

  A smile dawns across his face. “A wonderful gift. Or is it a bargaining piece?”

  “No, my lord,” I say. “Just a symbol of my gratitude. For what you did for my mother.” I point to the urn that holds her ashes, sitting on the mantel.

  He smiles again, crueler this time, and places his hand on my throat, his fingers curling around my neck. Then he kisses me. Hard. His grip tight. I taste copper as his teeth find my lip, drawing blood.

  “Your mother was so fierce when I first knew her,” he says, looking at the urn. “Wild. But she was tamed.” He turns to look at me. “By the city. By her circumstance.

  “Except where it concerned you. Then she was as savage as any she-wolf with a cub to protect.” He steps closer, looks me in the eyes. “I think she would have even battled the gods for your sake.”

  “She loved me,” I say.

  He nods. “You are so beautiful.” I can see the hunger in his eyes. The mounting passion.

  “There is one last gift,” I say, mindful of my time dwindling.

  He looks at me, intrigued. “I thought you were my last gift.”

  Not a gift. A prize. I shake my head. I remove the lacquered box from its shelf and hold it out to him.

  He frowns. “What is that?” he asks.

  “Don’t you recognize it, my lord? You sent it to my mother.”

  He shrugs. “So I did. What of it?”

  I hold it out to him. “Open it.” He hesitates. “Please, my lord.”

  He stands up and walks toward me, the irritation plain on his face. With one hand, he raises the cover, sees the glass bottle. Then he lets the cover drop. “So? Why trifle me with this? Now?”

  “Because I know of the poison,” I say. I keep my eyes on him. I will not look away.

  His face twists in rage. One hand, the same he uses to raise the box lid, shoots out and grabs me again by the throat. Pain sparks up into my jaw. His strength, fueled by the Blood Olympos is staggering.

  Lines from the letters he sent to my mother dance in my head. You steal my breath from me; I shall hold my breath ‘till we meet again; I am breathless....

  I am breathless.

  He forces me down. My vision streaks with black. My eyes bulge. His erection is still there, surging with his violence. I force my hands down from where they scrabble at his choking claw and I strike. I punch and claw and pull.

  His grip lessens and I wrench away from him, sucking in great gobs of air. I turn to the gorgon’s head, but its blank bronze eyes stare back at me. Lifeless.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  Clytos is back on me in an instant, a single tear on his cheek the only sign of the pain I caused. His hand grips me once again. Stronger. Harder.

  I wonder if Hieronymus has failed me. And then I think that I will never see him again. Never feel the light of his smile, or feel his strong fingers on my skin.

  A click sounds and I close my eyes, tight, though they can barely see, and I feel Clytos release me and I sag to the ground. Hieronymus’ mask and its embedded clockwork mechanism will have fallen away now. Clytos will have looked at it. Clytos will be…

  I hear him chuckle.

  I open my eyes to see the Gorgon head lolling in front of my bedroom, tossed, no doubt, by Clytos’ god-strong hands.

  His eyes burn into me. “What exquisite treachery,” he says. “But I will have you. Then I will kill you. For you are mine and always have been.” He wrenches at my hair and pulls me up, almost snapping my neck like an olive branch.

  Movement attracts my eyes. The soft flutter of downy wings near my bedroom door. The small shape, the tangle in my weave, the orphan I fetched from the Gorgon’s lair, bends down, one small hand reaching out for the head. Her mother’s head. Now cruelly used.

  Tears blur my sight.

  Clytos notices my attention, follows my gaze.

  The young Gorgon lifts her head and I catch anger in the crinkle of her mouth and chin.

  For when I see you, my eyes shall drink you in....

  I look at Clytos’ face, not the girl’s. Never the girl’s. His eyes widen and he knows, then, in that moment, that he is undone.

  His skin pales, and he is unnaturally still. He begins to turn grey, his bronzed skin hardening and shifting to stone.

  In a moment, it is done, and he is a statue in my parlor. One hand encircles my throat, now with stony certainty. Another curls around my arm, holding me fast in violent embrace. That I can suck in a thin trickle of air does nothing to still the panic that rises in me.

  I am trapped, and the statue that is now Clytos will not move no matter how I push and pull at him. He may kill me yet, I think. Though now I can go to the Underworld with my acco
unts settled. Now I will see my mother…

  Thoughts of my mother remind me of the young Gorgon, and I see her tear-streaked face in my mind as she cradles her mother’s severed head.

  I plant my feet and push. And push. And push until I’m sure my head will burst and my breath-starved muscles will strip apart.

  Then I am falling, and Clytos’s stone form is falling, and we both crash to the ground in our frozen embrace. Then I am rolling free, Clytos’s hand still around my neck, clinging to me, crushing me.

  I can not escape you…

  Then the pressure eases and I suck in breath, greedily, at the air like water in a desert.

  I hear the flutter of wings and know that the girl has saved me. Has saved the killer of her mother. I scrabble for the mirrored glasses, where they lie on the table. Where they were meant for her mother’s gaze. I fit them to my face.

  She stares up at me, wide-eyed. Her little hand still hovers near Clytos’s arm, where she somehow released me, crumbling his fingers to dust. Then she extends that hand to me.

  Tears blurring my sight, I reach for her and take her hand.

  * * *

  I bury Clytos on my mother’s land, together with his letters. He may yet be found, but not easily.

  Still, they will come looking for him, and so I must not be here when they arrive. I pack my things, gathering the few objects the hold meaning for me. Then, with the child alongside me, now hooded, I move to Ariadne.

  Hieronymus is waiting for me at the horse. “The Blood Olympos,” he says.

  “Was not spilled.”

  “By either of you,” he adds.

  “I would give it away if I could.”

  He grabs my hand. His touch is so unlike Clytos’s, confident but kind. Warm. “No. You must make them take it from you.”

  I kiss him, and inhale the scent of him, taste him. Breathe him. Then I take him with one hand, the hand of the girl in my other, and together we walk away from a world of stone.

  Copyright © 2012 Rajan Khanna

  Read Comments on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Rajan Khanna is a fiction writer, blogger, narrator, and graduate of the 2008 Clarion West Writers Workshop. His work has appeared in Shimmer, Abyss & Apex, Podcastle, and The Way of the Wizard, among others. His articles have appeared at Tor.com and his podcast narrations can be heard at Podcastle, Starship Sofa, Lightspeed Magazine, and others. Rajan lives in New York City where he’s a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. His website is http://www.rajankhanna.com and he tweets, @rajanyk.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE CASTLE THAT JACK BUILT

  by Emily Gilman

  Jack stood high on his one thin, wooden leg and stared at the horizon. He had stood in this same spot since early spring, and his button eyes never blinked, and so by this point he had become intimately familiar with his personal patch of sky and with the acres of fields that stretched out in every direction, all of it gone to seed. He didn’t know what sorts of seeds—he knew very little about plants at all except those that were useful in building—but even he could tell that the field looked sad, forgotten and untended. Just like him.

  He had been so very tired when they came to him and said that they were sorry but they couldn’t just let him go, not with all that he knew and the enemy still out there somewhere—both the betrayer and the one who directed her.... And of course he had understood. He didn’t want them to let him go. What he wanted, he told them, was to live out the rest of his days somewhere quiet, away from people and the temptation to speak, where he might watch the sky.

  He thought the bears had smiled, though that might just have been wishful thinking; certainly they had looked at each other for a moment, and then they turned back to him. Yes, they said, that much we can do, and it is little enough payment for your services.

  And they had turned him into a scarecrow.

  Sure, it had gotten boring after a while, but it was also peaceful, and never needing to sleep gave one a lot of time to learn to read the sky; and then, rain and heat and wind and cold didn’t really bother him anymore. All in all, the birds and the wind in the trees weren’t bad company, and whenever he caught himself wishing he could go back to being a man, he remembered the bears, and the masterpiece he had built them, and the secret at its heart that he must never, ever reveal.

  But then one day, when most of the leaves had fallen and evening came early, the wind changed. It changed just before sunset and blew all night long, coming from every direction like it didn’t know who it was or where it was supposed to be going and was trying to make up for it in sheer exuberance.

  And then, just as the sun was rising in the morning, it changed once more: all at once it blew hard from the south—but strangely cold for a south wind—and so sharply and suddenly that he thought at first he had finally been knocked over. It took him a few minutes (probably—his scarecrow sense of time was not one that lent itself to such measurements) to realize that he hadn’t been blown over at all: he’d been blown out.

  Jack looked up at the faded, battered scarecrow, still tall and proud on its seemingly fragile prop, and then looked down at his own hands. They looked solid enough, but he felt thin, and he would have sworn that the wind kept blowing through him, even as it drew him north.

  “Well,” he said, but he didn’t know what else to say after that, so he fell silent. Well. He longed to just stand there, as (he felt) he always had, but something about being so near the ground made him uneasy, and in the end he began tottering, and then eventually walking, in the direction the wind wanted him to go.

  * * *

  He walked until it was too dark to see the ground in front of him, and then he crouched down among the roots of a tree to wait for moonrise. The closeness of the dirt frightened him, though. He could only hold out for a minute or two before he scrambled up the tree, moving by feel and much too quickly so that he kept scraping his hands and arms against the rough bark.

  Finally he sat straddled across the lowest branch big enough to support his weight and he leaned back so the trunk of the tree pressed against his spine, solid and stately. This was what he was meant to be; he closed his eyes and wished he could melt into the living wood that supported him, of which his scarecrow had been only a pale reflection.

  He might have stayed there like that forever, but the wind kept tugging at him and whispering strange sounds in his ears. Finally a sudden gust managed to yank him away from the tree trunk. It startled him into opening his eyes, and as he grabbed the branch in front of him to keep from falling he saw a tiny golden light flicker in the distance. It took him a moment to remember that fire could be something other than the devourer of wood and straw, but in that time his body had already remembered and started climbing down from the tree, and the wind danced around him like a pleased child.

  It was slow going, scrambling over roots and rocks and fallen branches almost entirely by feel and with only a small, far-off fire to guide him. By the time he reached the clearing he’d focused so much of his attention into his sense of touch that the sudden open space caught him unaware. The shift to flat, unobstructed footing confounded him more than the transition from land to sea or sea to land ever had; he stumbled, loudly, and so the fire’s keeper saw him well before he saw her.

  Jack saw the keeper and her knife at the same moment, but he registered the knife first and froze; his hands, which had been extended to catch him if he fell, shifted slightly upward in a remembered gesture that said, I am weaponless, don’t attack me. The knife didn’t move, nor did the hand that held it, and so Jack’s attention moved slowly away, up her arm and to her face, which flickered in the shifting light from the fire. She was dirty from travel, and she watched him so intensely that he thought she might be the first human he’d met who could stare down a mountain lion.

  As he studied her he realized that she appeared neither panicked, nor lost, nor as... she did look young, to him, but experienced. And it was this impre
ssion of capability that gave him the nerve to say, quietly but distinctly, “Hello.”

  “Hello,” she said. She did not move.

  “I saw your fire,” Jack said, “and hoped... I was going to wait for moonrise to keep going, but then I saw your fire and I thought it would be good, you know. To have company.” He hoped she knew; he hadn’t known until he said it.

  She frowned, and his heart (about which he’d completely forgotten until now) beat faster and louder in his chest. “Where did you come from?” she asked.

  He paused for a moment, thinking, and then waved vaguely behind himself. “A clearing back that way, somewhere. At least, I hope it’s back that way, that I haven’t gotten turned around....”

  “Where are your supplies?” she interrupted.

  Now Jack frowned. “Supplies?” But of course he ought to have supplies: warm clothes for after dark, and a flint or matches, and food, and water, and something to sleep in. He was human again, wasn’t he? He ought to have eaten at least once during a full day of walking.

  “What are you?” the girl asked, and when he met her eyes again he saw fear there for the first time, mingled with pity.

  “I was a man,” he said, and remembered walking down stone corridors into stone rooms that he’d first created as lines on paper. “An architect. And then I was a scarecrow. I don’t know what I am now—I think I’m meant to be a man again, but....”

  They stood for a moment, and the only sounds were the sighing of trees in the wind and the crackle of the fire.

  And then she relaxed—not completely, but enough to give him hope—and said, “You’ll probably be more comfortable if you can find a rock or a log to sit on.”

  Jack lowered his hands and took one careful step forward, then another, and in a few more steps he stood near enough to feel the warmth of the fire. “Thank you,” he said.

  She nodded, and said nothing, but after he’d stood there for several minutes with no sign of moving except to change which side of him was nearest the fire, she asked, “Aren’t you going to sit?”