Beneath Ceaseless Skies #30 Read online

  But I was about to find out. I was pretty sure the book he’d died with was one he’d written himself. It wasn’t professionally bound, for one thing, its holes punched rather crudely with an awl and threaded with twine instead of leather thonging. The covers were leather, but they were plain brown, not dyed a more impressive color, and they bore no evidence of tooling or embossing. Instead, the strange title—Hope—looked like it had been burned in with the metal nib of a pen heated in the fire.

  For all its amateurishness, I’d been anticipating reading the book from the first instant I saw it. Something about it just made my blood tingle. It was the same feeling that’d drawn me back to Senest when, for years, I’d wisely refused to come anywhere near the great city. Maybe, I thought in wonder, this is what it feels like when God talks to you.

  I put off the moment until, three days after I wandered into Malthea’s taproom, I got a message from Sister Alassa telling me Vuric had received all the rites and been decently buried. I didn’t realize that was what I’d been waiting for, but it was as though I needed to make sure the book was really mine and somehow Vuric wasn’t going to come back to snatch it away from me. Irrational, I know, but I’ve had a lot of disappointment in my life.

  That evening, with my landlady’ fine supper in my belly and a new fire crackling in the clean hearth, I finally took the book in my hands, settled down in a cushioned box chair in the corner of the bedroom and opened it for the first time.

  * * *

  I came back to myself with a profound need to piss.

  I staggered to my feet and almost collapsed from the throbbing in my head. Suddenly I felt an even more urgent need and, when I hauled the chamberpot out from under the bed, I threw up. There was a wicked burning in my throat along with a worse dryness in my mouth. I recognized the symptoms all too well. I was very hungover.

  There was no room left in the pot for what had originally woken me, so, opening my eyes to the merest slits, I went in search of the privy. At the bottom of the second flight of stairs, I met Malthea, who looked all too cheery for so late at night.

  She took one look at me and chuckled heartlessly. “Oh, my boy, anyone would think you and old Vuric had been friends from all the ale you drank last night!”

  “Last night?” I croaked, not understanding.

  Her chuckle turned into an outright laugh. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember celebrating his life? You paid for the feast. All that food and drink. Made yourself plenty of new friends, let me tell you.” She nodded toward the taproom where the three men I’d seen the first day and several others I didn’t know raised their mugs to me and cheered rather blearily.

  “You and that lot were still drinking when I got up this morning,” added Malthea, her tone turning more serious when it came to business. “You owe me for another barrel. But you can pay me later. I can see you have a more pressing errand.”

  She grinned when I remembered my aching bladder and ran past her to the privy. My mind was so thick with ale fumes and confusion that I didn’t shade my eyes and the brilliant sunshine struck me like a hail of daggers. I winced and, for the next few minutes, it was all I could do to take care of my own business and drag myself back up to my rooms.

  Once there, I saw more proof of what Malthea had told me. My fire had long since burned out and my bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in. The book I’d been so eager to read was lying abandoned on the floor. I must have dropped it when I lurched out of the chair. I picked it up, unable to recall even one word, but just touching it evoked a bizarre feeling, first a soaring exhilaration that made me breathless and then a cold fear that left me numb.

  I clung to the numbness for the next day or two. It was easier than trying to work out what had happened. It was the only part of the whole experience that felt real. Nothing else made any sense. I never drank to excess, not since I’d suffered a series of fevers years ago that left me with a low tolerance for it. So why would I now when I most needed my wits about me? And why should I have wasted my money on a funeral feast for Vuric? I didn’t even know the man except in death. Maybe I’d read something in his book that made me mourn him. But why, then, couldn’t I remember it?

  I felt the answers were in the book. Or maybe that was just what I told myself so I’d pick it up again. It called me even more strongly than before. Almost like it was whispering in my head. I’d heard of men who said books talked to them. I’d met a few in my travels. If I happened to have a copy of a book they wanted, they’d beggar themselves to get it. Literally emptying out their purses on the ground and leaving themselves not enough even for their next meal.

  I loved books, but I’d never been that mad. At least not before now. Now I thought I might spend every coin I had to read Vuric’s book again. I didn’t have to, obviously, since I owned it, but the compulsion to read it again was that strong. I couldn’t resist it for long.

  * * *

  The second time it happened, I woke in my bed and didn’t realize anything was wrong until I touched my face.

  I went to rub the sleep from my eyes and brushed my hand over my cheek. My smooth cheek. I panicked and sprang for Vuric’s mirror of polished steel that I had left hanging on the bedroom wall. I barely noticed the book falling to the floor when I stood up. My reflection was hazy but good enough to tell me that my beard was gone.

  My beard was gone. I had to see it a second time to believe it. I had no memory of shaving it off. I wouldn’t have. It let me walk the familiar streets of my childhood and feel safe in my anonymity. I would not get rid of it. But I couldn’t deny the truth before my eyes.

  I sank back down, my head in my hands. When I looked up again, I realized I’d lost more than my beard. I’d lost time too. It had been evening again when I settled down with the book and now it was morning again, sun glowing golden around the edges of the oiled parchment covering the window. It was possible I’d just fallen asleep reading, but I still had no memory of what the book said.

  I shivered and rolled back into bed. I wanted nothing more than to pull the blankets over my head and hope it was all a some strange fit. I’d had enough of those in my years on the road. I’d hoped, coming back to Senest, I could lay my fears to rest. For a while, it had seemed to work. No one was looking for me. No one talked about me. I’d been forgotten.

  I sighed and pulled the blankets up anyway. There was some comfort in just being in my own bed. If you haven’t been on the road, you don’t know what a pleasure that is. No innkeeper bellowing at you to get up and out with the dawn or, worse, no farmer with a pitchfork angry at finding you in his ditch or under his hedgerow.

  I’d almost managed to relax when I smelled the perfume. It clung to the blankets. A cheap floral scent. Violets maybe. I kicked them off, but I could still smell it. I’d had a woman here. Probably a woman I paid. A whore. And I couldn’t remember that?

  There was no one I could ask, not without sounding mad. That was the problem with being anonymous. Within a few days, though, I had to talk to Malthea when I developed itchy sores, down below, that I recognized all too well. It was the start of the redpox.

  When I finished cursing God, the angels and all the saints I could think of, I cornered Malthea in the kitchen where she was cooking the midday meal for me and her other lodgers. She’d been cool toward me recently for reasons I didn’t understand, but I needed her to recommend a discreet apothecary. I couldn’t go back to the one who’d treated me before.

  “Got more from that girl than you bargained for, did you?” she commented tartly. “It serves you right, you bringing her in off the street. There are places you can go for that.”

  I realized then she was offended because I’d sullied her house with the whore’s presence. I was quick to apologize, using all my charm. She huffed for a while longer but relented in the end, patting me on my stubbly cheek. “I suppose I can’t blame you. You’re a handsome fellow without that beard. You shouldn’t grow it back.”

  I tried to think of some w
ay to reply to that which wouldn’t sound suspicious, but I didn’t need to. My landlady kept right on chattering, now that she’d decided she was speaking to me again. “I’m just not used to having a young man around. All of my lodgers are older and know my rules. And then there was Vuric—”

  She stopped so suddenly that it made me curious. I still hadn’t settled the question if the dead man had been her lover. Doing my best to sound nonchalant, I probed, “Not interested in women, was he?”

  I meant to needle her the way she had me, but she didn’t react. Instead, she pursed her lips, almost in distaste. “He had no time for them. Said he needed to keep himself pure.”

  That was an odd remark, just like most of what she said about the dead man, but Vuric wouldn’t be the first scholar I’d heard of who saw women as a distraction from his studies. I was about to ask Malthea about the apothecary again when she, seemingly eager to change the subject, brought it up again herself and bustled me off.

  The shop was much closer than the jaedanal had been and, when I walked through the door, I figured it must have been where Vuric got his heart medicine from because the shelves were lined with wooden boxes and earthenware pots with pictures painted on them that reminded me of the foxglove. The apothecary himself, a wiry man in spectacles, was busy making up pills behind the counter and glanced up when he heard me.

  I described my symptoms and he, bobbing his head so much he almost knocked his spectacles off his nose, confirmed it was the redpox. He also confirmed what the previous apothecary had told me when I was warned about never getting re-infected, something I’d been paranoid about for years. The redpox was much harder to treat the second time around and, considering the vile herbal concoctions I’d had to drink the first time to stimulate the high fevers needed to burn the infection out, that was saying something.

  I tried to keep my bitter rage to myself. It wasn’t the apothecary’s fault I’d been stupid enough to take up with a filthy whore. I couldn’t believe I had actually been that stupid, not when I couldn’t even remember the experience that might kill me. That terrified me even more than the redpox, and it reminded me of when I’d wake from the fevers, weak, sweaty and uncertain what day it was. It was the only other time in my life I’d ever had gaps in my memory, which made me wonder if it might somehow be related to what was happening now.

  “No, no, no,” insisted the apothecary, now shaking his head almost convulsively. “That was the medicine that made you forget. You aren’t taking anything now, are you?” He eyed me very solemnly.

  I assured him I wasn’t so he threw more questions at me. Had I been ill? Had I injured my head? Had I changed my diet or my habits? I denied everything very emphatically and he quivered with greater and greater concentration. He stopped quite suddenly when a thought flashed across his face. I could tell he wasn’t going to voice it, though, too wary maybe, so I scowled at him, quite fierce in my bitterness. “What? Tell me!”

  To his credit, he did, although he had to swallow repeatedly to get the words out. “Have you... have you made... an enemy... of a... of a mage?”

  I could only stare at him in shock. Talking about magic wasn’t illegal, not the same way practicing it was, but it wasn’t something you discussed with someone you barely knew. I must have really intimidated him. “No, it’s impossible. I just came to the city. I hardly know anyone. I’m staying at the house Malthea keeps—”

  I knew I was babbling, saying more than I should, but my careful tongue had deserted me. I was almost grateful when he interrupted me. “Malthea’s house? Then maybe Vuric cursed you.”

  “Vuric?” I blurted in bewilderment. “But he’s dead.”

  “He could have done it before he died,” insisted the apothecary, in motion again, trembling now rather than quivering, twisting his hands around each other. “In which case, it’ll be much harder to undo. But I know someone—not a mage, mind you—who might be able to help. She works with angels, not demons, so you can’t call her a mage. She might know—”

  I cut him off, needing a firm answer. “Vuric was a mage?”

  He ducked my gaze, plucking at his spectacles and almost dropping them. “I don’t know for sure. That’s just what people said. No one ever saw anything. But he always made me uneasy when he came in. I’d swear I could smell brine on him.”

  Right away, I thought of how Malthea had sniffed the air in Vuric’s rooms when she first showed them to me. She knew, just like most people did, that demons stank of seawater because their home, the underworld, was beneath the Chasm Sea far to the east. She must have suspected Vuric was summoning them and wanted to make sure no trace remained in his rooms, no trace I might detect.

  I’d thought I was angry before, but it was nothing compared to the dark feelings burning in me now. I could barely be civil to the apothecary. I managed to thank him for his help and pay for a comfrey salve to give me some relief from the sores that’d brought me to him, but I stormed off while he was begging me to start treatment for the redpox before it got any worse. He was too cowed to call me back.

  I was glad Malthea wasn’t in the taproom when I banged open the door to her house. I didn’t trust myself not to throttle her. Her three older lodgers and a couple of other regulars I’d apparently made friends with the night of Vuric’s funeral feast were there. They all started to greet me but shut up as soon as they saw the thunderous look on my face. They’d all known Vuric. They must have known what he was. But none of them had told me. I glared at them until they shrank in their seats, looking like they wanted to disappear.

  I stomped up the stairs to my rooms and hesitated outside the door. They felt like Vuric’s rooms again. Full of his secrets. It didn’t matter that I’d got rid of most of his possessions. The most dangerous one remained. The book he’d held in his dead hands. All my troubles had started with that book.

  A more pious man would have turned away then, gone straight to the nearest jaedanal and sought the advice of the jaedan. After all, demons were involved and jaedani were supposed to be the experts in fighting them. But, for all my desire for a sign, I’d never been a pious man. I was used to dealing with my own problems and this was no different.

  I went inside and deliberately locked the door behind me. I didn’t want to be interrupted. If Malthea came out of the kitchen and her customers started gibbering, she might realize I’d learned the truth about Vuric and decide she should talk to me. I had the feeling she wasn’t someone who put off her problems. I’d provided her with a neat solution for how to deal with Vuric, someone she must have feared if she’d never denounced him to the jaedani and couldn’t even bear to bury his corpse. But I too could turn into a problem and she wouldn’t want to let me fester.

  I meant to have my own talk with Malthea, but there was someone else I had to confront first. Who but a man who had no friends or family would pay for his own funeral feast? Who but a man who’d long denied himself any pleasure would take up with the first whore he found? I sat down in the box chair, balanced the book on my knees, opened it the tiniest crack and shouted, “Vuric!”

  I could see a narrow strip of words down the page. Foreign words. Nonsense words. They blurred, seeming to change back into the ink they’d been, a deep ink black as night, black as moonless and starless night. I sank into that infinite darkness, as disoriented as if I’d fallen into a deep dream from being wide awake. Cold fear washed over me. I’d experienced this before and was terrified of it happening again. Soaring exhilaration reached for me. Someone else was waiting and eager to be free.

  I’d have lost all sense of myself if I hadn’t had such a rigid grip on the book. I clung to it, the only thing that felt real, and shouted again, “Vuric, I want to talk to you!”

  My fall slowed and then ceased. I could still feel myself grasping the book, but I was hovering too, bodiless, weightless, blind. Then I heard a dry rustling. It could have been the pages turning. I only knew it was a voice, sardonic and hoarse, when it said, “So you’ve figured it out,
have you?”

  “Only what you did,” I admitted freely, needing him to know I was sincere, “not how or why. Other people are going to get suspicious though. You don’t act like me.”

  “What would you suggest?” the voice asked, sounding bland, but I could feel his tension, vibrating the darkness around us. For all I knew, he was the darkness.

  “Let’s talk. Get to know each other. Make some kind of bargain.” I was distantly aware of my heart drumming hard. I could feel it in my fingertips. I was furious and frightened, but I was also practical.

  In the few days between when I awoke to find my beard gone and when I went to the apothecary, I almost hadn’t been able to keep myself from opening the book again. I knew it was dangerous, but I craved it, needing it like a hungry man needs food. I could only resist it by separating myself from it, fleeing my rooms, roaming the streets or walking along the Tengral River that flowed through southern Senest. I imagined throwing the book in the river, but it would’ve been as impossible as throwing away my hand. It’d become that much a part of me. Coming to terms with Vuric was the only way I was going to find some peace and keep myself safe.

  I told him all this, speaking into the darkness, and I know he listened, because I felt his interest. Then he spoke to me, of what he’d done and how and why, slowly at first as if he wasn’t used to talking to anyone, then more animatedly as he realized what a captive audience I was. It seemed he did consort with demons. He was quite proud of it. It took him years, decades really, to work out the rituals that would protect him from the demons’ malice, and the price was high, forcing him to live like a chirin, chaste, abstemious and in perfectly clean surroundings. Demons could have used the smallest degree of taint against him.

  The magic, though, put a strain on Vuric’s heart. He had realized he was dying. He attempted a final series of rituals, learning how to embed his soul in the words of a book so he could take over the body of whoever read it. The only snag was he could only inhabit another body for so long before he was drawn back to the book.