Beneath Ceaseless Skies #215 Read online

  His side hit a rock, flinging them apart and sending him spinning in the rapids.

  Ama! Ama! His heartbeat screamed.

  The harpy caught on something, feathered arms working and churning, and pulled herself free of the water.

  But with no air, to Rhee she was nothing more than a blurry shadow as he scrambled for the surface.

  He flailed as his back hit another rock, his head connecting at the temple. Blood filled his eyes.

  But the pain slipped away, just beyond his fingertips, as the water dragged him down. The cold filled his lungs, chilled the sore muscles of his back, the ache of his knees, cooled the raw wounds from the harpy, the split in his head.

  He couldn’t feel a thing.

  He couldn’t see a thing.

  I’m dying—

  And he knew it. Regret filled him like the river.

  Ama, I’m sorry.

  * * *

  Slender fingers brushed through his hair, fingers he hadn’t felt since—

  “Little flower?”

  His voice was salt and stones. Fire burned low in his throat.

  The fingers caressed his brow. His body felt distant, foreign. Missing. He cracked his eyes open, sticky, heavy.

  The sun silhouetted her, threw her into shadows except for the dark hair—the same dark hair she had given Ama. He squinted and reached for her, but his shoulder ached and the wetness weighed him down.

  She hummed her song, the song her momma wove for her, the song Rhee hated.

  “You came back for me...”

  She tipped his face towards hers with fingers on his chin.

  “Teach me the words,” she sang, and his body seized.

  It all flooded back.

  And even more, stretching back and back, twisting a chain into one link, a lifetime into one moment. Ama crying. His wife dying. His daughter leaving. The desert stretching as far as the eye could see.

  Where had she gone?

  Not here.

  “What words do you want?” Rhee asked. His voice escaped his control, eager to please and ready to sing despite his gruff rasp.

  A siren shifted at his side, came into focus. Not his flower at all. Just a creature of pale white and dark eyes. Similar, so similar, just another girl, but a monster—someone’s daughter?—no, a monster, even if she reminded him of his flower all the same.

  “The song you gave us,” she sang. “Teach me the words to that song.”

  Not that, Rhee fought. That song isn’t yours. But her command loosened his tongue anyway, muffled his brain with thick cotton.

  “She shot for the sun. And the moons.” His soul ached, twisting his heart, clenching his stomach, drawing tears to his eyes. “Constellations beyond.” He hadn’t cried for his wife when she died, hadn’t cried for his daughter when she left, hadn’t cried for Ama in the woods with the witch, but now—but now—

  “Even in her flight, the stars fell at her feet.”

  He still had control of his body, so he tangled his fingers in her long hair. The siren stiffened at his side.

  “I saved you from the river!” she sang. She reared up on her fish tail amidst the sandy riverbank, and Rhee sang the lullaby louder.

  “She shot for the sun.” He dragged her face towards him, this girl who was still a child herself, this girl who, close up, looked enough like his daughter to twist his wounds open anew. “And the moons. Constellations beyond.” She screamed and sang in response, but his strong hands found her neck and squeezed. “Even in her flight, the stars fell at her feet.”

  Her words choked off, but still he sang. Her fingers fought against his grip, nails digging ruts into the back of his hands and his wrists. He felt nothing amidst the overwhelming sea of sorrow that took his soul out with the tide.

  She looked like his daughter, and he fought to kill her—

  Her eyes bulged with moonlight when she went still in his grip. He tasted salt. He heaved her to the side and dropped her on the sand, her white throat colored with galaxies of bruises the shape of his fingers.

  He sat and dropped his face into his steady hands.

  He wept like he hadn’t since he was a boy.

  How many miles did he still have to go?

  And how would he kill Lamia without bullets? Without a gun?

  But the miles to go... he would walk them.

  And when he arrived, he would throw himself at the witch’s feet and trade himself for Ama.

  He would save her at the cost of his own life, and finally rest beside his wife in the death he deserved.

  * * *

  After a spell, he dragged himself from the riverbank, offering one last glance to the dead siren. He had no doubt the others would come for him as soon as they discovered her dead, just like he suspected the harpies were still on his trail.

  But he couldn’t think of that.

  So he walked, sliding one foot in front of the other.

  Shuffling from obelisk to obelisk, scabbed hands reaching. His head throbbed with what he feared was a fever. His leg and shoulder were torn from the harpy’s talons, but he had no way to patch the wounds. They dripped even as the rest of him dried, leaving behind a trail of blood drops like little red petals.

  When the obelisks thinned and opened into a copse of real trees, he thought he had gone mad. But there, shaded beneath the real green leaves, sat a little house of metal and stone. The cottage that stories had told him of.

  Along the outer wall of the house sat tubes of blue liquid, reaching up and up like flowers planted in a garden. And floating in the middle were curled lumps of flesh the size of children, some with fish tails and some with feathers.

  Monsters. Little creatures—but God above, none of them Ama.

  The door of the house flew open, and a man rushed out, half his face a blue and black bruise.

  “Now, Rhee, I already warned Lamia you were coming for—”

  Tanner. How was Tanner here?

  Rhee stumbled to the man, grabbed his shoulders to steady himself. “Where is she? Where is Ama?”

  “Rhee, you’re in a bad way! Sit down, sit down! Let me help you!” Tanner eased Rhee into a chair by the door.

  So many questions burned in his throat, yet...

  “Tanner.” The voice was honeyed and soft. Tanner stiffened at his name, dipped his head as another emerged from the door.

  “Lamia, Rhee is hurt.” Tanner backed away from Rhee as the witch herself came forward.

  Rhee had expected a young temptress, flagrant in her sexuality; or perhaps an old crone, withered and bent; but he had not expected this, an average woman with a crooked nose and tanned skin like she’d come off the desert. Neither ugly nor beautiful, just another face he’d see at the general store in town.

  “You’re the witch Lamia?”

  She knelt in front of him, keen brown eyes assessing his wounds the same way Ama’s eyes focused when she was drawing. “You came across my protectors then.”

  “Your monsters,” Rhee spat before thinking, gaze snapping to the tubes of growing creatures. “Where’s my granddaughter?”

  Fingers probed the cut above his knee, and Rhee’s eyes shot wide at the fire that stabbed up his spine. “Don’t—”

  “Let me heal you.” Lamia pressed something metallic to his leg above the wound, a faintly glowing square that exuded the warmth of a house fire.

  “I don’t want your damn magic.”

  Lamia fixed him in place with a glare. It was a look that reminded him of his wife.

  He shuddered as the wound on his leg pulled and itched. When Lamia moved her hand and the device away, the wound was closed.

  “What sort of magic—”

  Lamia shushed him and pressed the box to his shoulder. “The rare kind.”

  The warmth brushed against him as the skin knitted itself together.

  “You came after Ama.” It wasn’t a question. “I was told my daddy came after me, but I can’t be sure. That was probably seventy years ago now. The creatures
in the forest are supposed to keep you from coming. Supposed to protect us here in the forest.”

  “And Tanner?” Rhee spat his name like a poison. “How’d he get here?”

  “He is a necessity.” Lamia’s eyes never moved from his. Her voice was calm and assessing. “He brings me supplies for my survival, and I send him with seeds and rations for the town.” The seeds they used to grow their crops. The rations they used to eat.

  Rhee pressed his lips flat. He feared speaking would interrupt her and she’d offer him nothing more.

  “Once girls wanted to be chosen. Longed to be chosen. But families didn’t want to give up their daughters, even for a better life. They tried to kill us, so we came here to the obelisks to hide. We gave ourselves protectors, to make sure no one would harm us again. Those monsters should have been enough to keep you away.” Half of Lamia’s lips worked into a small smile and something Rhee could hardly recognize—something akin to respect. “But not you.”

  “No, ma’am. And neither will you.”

  Lamia’s smile faded. “I guarantee you that Ama is in a better place, Rhee.”

  That he could not abide by. “She can’t be. She’s not with me. She belongs with me. I’m her family, and—” Rhee stuttered to a stop. And she’s all I have left. He couldn’t say it.

  Rhee’s voice cracked when he spoke again. “Where is she? Ama?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone?” He couldn’t look at the tube creatures.

  Lamia moved the box from his healed shoulder to his forehead. His scalp began to itch. “I’ve sent her ahead.”

  “Where?”

  Lamia’s fingers brushed against his woundless forehead. “To the stars.”

  Rhee’s eyes fixed past Lamia, past the river, past the obelisks and the trees atop them as his steady hands dug into the arms of the chair. To the stars. To a place no one he knew had ever gone. To a place where people dreamed up monsters like the sirens and harpies and the machines they were made in. To a place where the fates of farms and worlds like his were decided. “Why?”

  “She can learn. She can come back and work the land as I do. Give water to the town, and the towns beyond yours that need it. Grow this world into one that can hold a bounty of life, not just a desert.” Lamia dropped her hand to his shoulder and squeezed, a gesture far too comforting for a woman so hard. “She’s smart, Rhee. You know that. And she loves this land just as you do. Just as I do. She’ll want to care for it. She’ll soon protect it as I do.”

  Rhee’s hands shook, not steady anymore. “But I couldn’t say goodbye? I couldn’t...”

  Lamia’s eyes softened. Rhee thought she might cry. “She didn’t want that. She didn’t want so say goodbye. Nothing to weaken her resolve when this world needs her.”

  “You couldn’t...” Rhee swallowed hard. “You couldn’t take me instead of her?”

  Her lips curved in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. She shone like a flower growing in the desert in that moment, made of stern stuff and yet achingly beautiful. Like his wife. Like his daughter. Like Ama.

  “I’m sorry,” Lamia said. “So few born on this world understand nature at the level she does, or have the curiosity and capacity to learn more.”

  “And I’ll never... see her again?”

  Lamia stilled. One eye watered with unshed tears, and it was this sorrow that kept Rhee in his chair when half of him wanted to hurt her for taking Ama from him. “By the time she returns, all of us will be long dead. It is the curse of traveling through the stars.”

  “I’ll never see her again...”

  He looked up at her, this desert woman in the obelisk forest, far away from home. She had the stars in her eyes even if her feet were planted on the sand.

  And Ama could grow to be like her.

  So he nodded, the storm inside him swallowing, swallowing.

  “She left this for you.” And from Tanner’s hands she took a book—small, leatherbound, unobtrusive.

  Ama’s sketchbook.

  Rhee took it in his battered hands, looked at the cover he had seen a thousand times.

  Lamia gestured for Tanner to follow her into the stone and metal cottage. The door closed between them, and Rhee felt they had slipped out of the world even if they had just left his vision.

  He thumbed through the book and found Ama’s familiar illustrations. Her cramped, curled handwriting that made notes of her surroundings. Words so complicated and long Rhee didn’t understand them all. It wasn’t a goodbye, but it was a farewell.

  He closed the journal.

  The obelisk forest was beautiful, when one knew how to look at it.

  Rhee rocked in the chair on the front porch, the sound or the river a steady tune, the shade of the trees dappling the bank.

  Would Ama be better off in a place that offered learning? A place that would teach her to create the water their planet needed?

  Her mother had wanted more than this world, more than this small town. Ama deserved better, too. Better than what an old man could offer her in a desert of scars.

  Ama deserved the whole universe.

  The storm blew out. The tide rolled in. Rhee’s hands steadied.

  He hummed Ama’s lullaby as the sky in the obelisk forest darkened.

  Copyright © 2016 Linden A. Lewis

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Linden A. Lewis is a queer writer living in Atlanta with her three furry cat sons. She can most often be found in a blanket fort full of fantasy novels or frequenting tattoo shops. She is a graduate of Odyssey Writing Workshop and is currently working on her first young adult novel about Vikings and witches. You can find her on twitter @lindenalewis.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE TRUE AND OTHERWORLDLY ORIGINS OF THE NAME ‘CALAMITY JANE’

  by Jordan Kurella

  She hunted fairies. It was how she knew this whole thing was a trap. Jane had passed through Hartville, Wyoming about once a month for the past two years, and until today it was a town with chatter wafting out of every storefront, where the saloon reeked of sweat and booze, and so much wagon traffic that it slowed her down. Now the storefronts were silent, the saloon was empty, and the wagon tracks were filling in with dirt.

  Six months ago when Jane had sworn off this job for good, she told herself nothing would bring her back to it, but this... this she couldn’t ignore. There was no way Earl would’ve passed this up, either. He would’ve known, like she knew now, that there was a fairy inside, in this art gallery painted storm-sky blue with the words “GALLERY OF DREAMS—OPEN NOW” arching over the black curtain serving as its front door. And it was open. Jane could hear someone singing inside.

  And whatever it was, it wasn’t human.

  She had eight cold-iron shells left over from when she’d given this all up, and now seemed the right time to use them. But if things started going south, she had to make sure there was one left for herself. So once there were two loaded in her shotgun, she took a step forward, but before her heel could touch down, a witch stepped through the curtain.

  “Ah, Martha Jane, so glad you could come,” the witch said as she approached. This had to be the fairy; she had skin too pale for frontier living and a dress and eyes the same midnight blue. There was a chill coming off her, like being near a mountain creek, and when she took Jane’s cheeks in her fingers, her touch was February cold. “We’ve been waiting so long for this, you cannot imagine.”

  “Got a guess,” Jane said. “‘Bout six months?”

  “Time is so fluid,” the witch fairy said. “Come inside, we have a gift for you.”

  Jane grunted, her grip tightening on her shotgun. “Won’t like it.”

  The witch only smiled, drawing Jane closer. “I can’t give away the surprise. Come.” She let go of Jane’s face and walked to the doorway, holding the curtain open.

  If Earl were here, Jane would have been more cautious. But he wasn’t, so she shouldered her shotgun, set her jaw, and ma
rched ahead through the door. There was only one way this was going to get done, and that was her way.

  * * *

  At least she wasn’t in Faerie.

  There was a dizzying quality to Faerie, where the ideas of up and down were intertwined and everything Jane said felt wrong in her mouth. Nevertheless, it was weird in here. The air felt used, like the whole world had breathed it all up before she arrived. Also, she was alone; the witch was gone.

  That witch fairy had to be magical, and if she could disappear or walk through walls, she could probably do other things. One thing Jane’d learned about fairies was that they liked to show off early, which was sometimes a blessing—it let her get a taste of what she was up against. But this witch’s kind of magic? Jane was too rusty, too low on materials, and down one partner to go up against a fairy this powerful. If Earl hadn’t gone missing six months ago, Jane would’ve been in better shape.

  Oh she’d been looking for him, but he’d vanished, like a typical man.

  It would have to just be her, the paintings on the walls, and the grand table set with all the food she could imagine. The smell of the food was sickly-sweet, like perfume layered over filth. She knew not to touch any of it or she’d get pulled into Faerie with no way out. That was the way fairy food worked. But she was so hungry, and that whole table was mocking her. She had to look at something else.

  So she turned to the walls. Each painting was a landscape peppered with people, and although Jane wasn’t much for art, looking at it beat staring at all the food she couldn’t eat. She found each picture nice enough, feeling like she could live in each one, if she had to. Here was a painting of a forest, there a castle, then down the wall, a mountain range. But all those people in the paintings, they felt off, like they’d been added later by someone else.

  It wasn’t until she arrived at a painting of a beach with a dancing girl and a cowboy staring out at the water with their hands raised high that she realized it. Maybe it was the shocked expressions on all the people’s faces, or the way they looked like they were caught in the middle of something else, or maybe how their clothes were wrong—a dancing girl wouldn’t wear her costume to the beach. These were the missing folk from Hartville, trapped inside the art, and now they were on display.