Beneath Ceaseless Skies #230 Read online

  “You would be surprised to learn that I want nothing better than to speak with you. About him. But I took this errand upon myself for an old memory’s sake, and so instead I say this: your duty is with your guardian.”

  “I want to trust you.” I clasped my hands behind me, painfully, to keep myself from pacing. “From the moment I met you I wanted to trust you. Because, if you would know, I am alone, and my guardian dead, and I am surrounded by youths who have never experienced starlore—even if they studied it—and I am starving.” And I did not know why I was telling her this, except that it was how I felt, how I still felt. So I made that recklessness my weapon and spoke my truth with abandon. “I am starving for the companionship of my peers. And you understood. You would talk to my guardian, which I took for an act of a friend. But now you return without her, and you continue to conceal your presence from your ward, and you want me to leave the palace, so forgive me if I do not rush headlong into trust.”

  Her form wavered, then reasserted itself. She spoke, as if through a veil of great effort. “I would never harm you. You are so important.”

  Ah, but so important was not the same as friend. So many truths could our words reveal.

  “Why is it then that I am so important?” I asked, watching as her form wavered, thinned out, filled out again. A kind of far-away roaring filled my ears, as if of the sea. Only a short time ago this sound had been unfamiliar, but now I was well used to it.

  “You understand starlore,” Ranra said. “Do you understand what happens to the threads of the grid when a star becomes extinguished?”

  “Yes,” I said. “A burn is created in the fabric of the grid. Neighboring threads of the grid are pulled or become unraveled. The star-wound takes many centuries to heal, and even if it heals, the grid weakens in that place. A perfect example of this phenomenon is the Katra-Araigen borderlands, where the Katran mouse-star—” I interrupted myself mid-lecture, a habit often difficult to break. “Yes, Ranra. I know. I am the preeminent living authority.”

  “I studied this extensively, before and after I died.” She flickered. Flickered. Flickered. Her form acquired a purple sheen. Then, “We do not have a lot of time. You should go see your guardian.”

  “No. You sought me out because of starlore. I need to know why. And I must know why you conceal this from your ward.”

  She nodded, impatiently. “Then I will explain the danger to you, sovereign of the sands, for all I hoped you already know it. What they now call Ranra’s Unbalancing—”

  And with a swishing sound, she disappeared. There was a purple flash, the kind I witnessed many times when my Loroli guardians pulled their dreamshape from the dreaming wilds. I looked around, expecting a lion’s leap, but it wasn’t Nihitu.

  The Raker’s eyes flew open. He pushed himself up in a sharp motion, his face twisted in anger.

  * * *

  Arrayed in flame

  His names engaged, multiple slim towers of steel, more than three. More than four? A forest of names that combined and shifted and combined. The air became thin with the power of it. Nihitu, had she been here, would have attacked my guest, but outside of the chamber, Marvushi, who likely heard everything that came to pass, remained completely still.

  I said, “This is the second time I am choosing not to defend myself against you.” The same recklessness gripped me, recklessness which was more powerful than my caution. “But if you want to harm me, you must first sever the tether between myself and my star. Any assassin would want to do that, though few are powerful enough to try.”

  The Raker’s hands balled into fists. “I am not attacking you. Because I had before. Without wanting to. But my touch did not please you, and you could not even tell me to back off. You sent me to sleep instead.”

  I stepped back. “What??”

  He stared at me. Shook his head. “Then what in Bird’s name just happened here?”

  I wanted to answer him. I wanted to know how he broke through whatever Ranra had constructed, which I perceived now as very thin threads of blue-gray light, floating torn and tattered around his body. But there were more important things to address. “Your touch pleased me so much that I was going to say yes.”

  He stepped closer to me, touching-close. So much had happened—so much sleeplessness, upheaval, so many secrets roiled and swirled around that even my pull would not loosen them all. And yet the heat of him anchored me, pulled at me. It was not the pull of his magic, which by now I have learned to deflect without much effort; it was his presence. His burning intensity. His interest.

  “You were about to say yes. And then I fell asleep,” he said. “Just like that?”

  I swallowed. “It wasn’t me.” She should tell you this secret herself. I will insist, next time—

  “I believe you.” I saw something change in his eyes, something deliberate and yet wild as I felt him set aside the questioning and his anger. He lifted his hand again. A familiar motion. Offering this power to me. “And do you still want to say yes?”

  I exhaled into that space, the tension of sleeplessness and Ladder and Nihitu and Ranra leaving my body. I, too, would put all this aside. It mattered less to me than this.

  “Yes,” I hissed.

  I thought he would move in at once, but he savored it, every sweet moment surging between us with the breath and the thumping of blood.

  Then he smiled. His fingers closed on my neck.

  I made a sound, I think, as if something desperate and birdlike had been locked in my throat. When his power flared, mine did as well.

  It felt like the air emptied out of the room and power pooled in its space—the Raker’s storm-dark, brooding, with flashes and pinpricks of lightning—and mine, orange and diffuse and throbbing with the edges of my star like clouds at sunset after Bird’s fiery passing. His fingers against my throat felt white-hot like iron in tempering, but I did not cry out, suspended in the crucible of his touch, held like I haven’t been held since...

  He brought his other hand to my chest. His power floated in a thousand quills around me, quivering in the air, ready to pierce, yet waiting. Waiting.

  suspended, like I haven’t been since the dawn of time, when—

  His eyes searched mine. For fear, I think, for he’d told me I would give it to him. It was not fear he would see now in my eyes, but pain, a pain so old, so deeply buried. I did not want to remember—

  His hand moving up my chest, to my neck. His scent, heavy and potent like dry thunder. ‘We will put aside our disagreements. I will make space for you.’

  The Raker said, “I see it hurts. It hurts in ways we did not talk about.”

  I swallowed, and my throat strained against his hand. I did not want to speak. I did not want to talk about it. I did not want to remember.

  He said, “Do you need me to stop?”

  We’ll always be together.

  I forced out, “I cannot give you my fear.”

  “It is all right. I want you to be safe with me.”

  In me, you will be safe.

  I said, “I do not want to be safe.” Responding to him, or to him, I was not sure.

  The Raker shook his head. “What do you need?”

  I need to be alone. To cleanse myself. But no, I did not want to be alone. I wanted to be held, held like the Raker still held me, one hand on my chest and another on my neck. I wanted to be seen, like he saw me. And I wanted him to see.

  “Behold,” I sang, letting my power expand, the orange vapor of my star catching fire, whooshing around us in a cleansing wave that swallowed the air and scorched away the ever-so-subtle smell of wet spidersilk. The fire congealed into droplets of gold that rolled off our skins and disappeared. Somewhere outside, Marvushi coughed and then yelled out, “I’m unharmed!”

  The Raker raised an eyebrow.

  “Marvushi taught one of the classes you attended yesterday. She is an advanced student of mine and agreed to stand guard.”

  The Raker nodded. “Yes, I remember them. Her.
” His fingers moved on my neck, as if he wanted to relinquish the grip and yet was reluctant to do so.

  I said, “Can I touch you?”

  The Raker nodded, his gaze storm-dark on mine.

  I placed my hands fingers-down on his naked torso, traced a path up to his chest. There the palms of my hands rested, where his body heaved with the exertion of doing nothing else. Through my hands, the orange haze of my power spread, touching him slowly with that heat I sometimes experience floating suspended in the outer tendrils of my star.

  “He did not want me to touch him,” I said. “Never like this. Never as equal.” So much for the Raker’s secrets being the ones to spill—for now he knew me, knew the edges of my deepest heart. “I had ordered myself to forget.”

  His right hand slid off my neck to join his other hand; and now we mirrored each other, hands on each other’s chests, stormblack and orange swirling around our bodies like mating snakes.

  “You are my equal,” he said. Then, “I, too, do not often like to be touched. But you ask. It is different. And I, too, do not want to be safe.”

  I swallowed. “Please.” Desire swirled in me, dizzying and potent like the whirlwind. I closed my eyes and brought cold fire to lick away my dress and my adornments until I stood in nothing but skin. “Please. Give me the pain you promised.”

  His power flared, deepnames morphing into pinpricks of lightning that floated all around me in his darkness, shaping themselves again into sharp shining quills. He began piercing my skin with them, each point of impact blooming with a thin cry as if of white metal, impossibly beautiful, faster and faster in a crescendo of pain so metal-white, so subtle, so pleasurable, so grand that I cried out with it, the grief for my old guardian and for my long-lost lover spilling out of me. Drops of clear diamond fluid ran down each quill, not yet free of me but outside me, trembling suspended at the edge of each needle.

  The Raker’s hands moved away from my chest. He took a step back.

  He surveyed me. Surveyed his work. And smiled.

  It was glee, and wonder, and satisfaction, and he no longer felt like anyone else. He could have tried to crush me with those feelings, his weight, his control, but I had not wanted that—and he did not.

  That’s it. It is simple. Always find lovers of your own size, I would tell him, if he’d wanted to be taught. Those who would hold your need, those whose need you would hold. He had not asked to be taught, but maybe he’d learn it from me anyway. And maybe I would learn this as well.

  “So many things I learn from you,” he said. His right hand lifted, and I saw the single, perfect ball of fire suspended between his fingers. “I promised this to you,” he said. “Do you want it?”

  I breathed, and as I breathed, the quills moved with my skin and stirred the air. It was good. So good. He never did things like this. He preferred—

  The Raker’s left hand, the one without the fire, touched the quills on my thigh. The pain was slight, but I cried out with the strangeness of it, jolts of power running up and down the short lengths, the warmth, his closeness, the floating darkness. “This. This is good.”

  He extinguished the fire and began to touch the quills, with both hands, with power and pain like stars running over me, a cocoon of sparks—and I suddenly felt like shifting, I felt like at the Sandbird festival when fiery sandbirds fall from the sky and cocoon me so I can change my body, man and woman and man and woman again. I pulled on that feeling of fullness, on bursting, I pulled on my power—and then I lit a perfect ball of flame to float between his fingers, like before. I was moved now to light the quills myself, but I wanted to give him that pleasure.

  His fingers curved around the flame, and he grinned. I was breathless by then, but I managed to say, “I will transform. I will be without words. And then, if you want.”

  “I want.” The sound of his voice, rasping against my skin. “I want your desire as much as I want mine. So yes. Yes.”

  “Yes,” I echoed.

  He began to ignite the quills, one by one and then faster together, until I was feathered in them, in that unbearably perfect heat. It hurt, beyond, somewhere, but it was perfect, exquisite, this shifting that opened my chest as I sang what I wanted, not my regular shifting but something more ancient, something older, so old I had almost forgotten. A sandbird of fire and dunes, a being given from the sun, that falls hissing between the undulations of the sand, that arises to run on long, long legs which are not made of stilts. There was no pain now, only vastness, and an all-encompassing desire to open my wings to their full span, beyond this room, as wide as the desert horizon.

  His hands wrapped around my long feathered neck with some tenderness. He looked around, but of course, we were underhill. There was no window, only the door. Just a short time ago I had carried him like this, but that had been a vision and needed no opening. This was not a vision.

  I shifted on my long legs, the fiery feathers hissing softly. I was tall now, taller than my tall personshape, almost ceiling-tall, and my wings would have no space to unfold here. I rapped on the door sharply with my thin curved beak, and the Raker walked over to unlock and open its limewood shutters.

  Outside, Marvushi’s eyes widened in appreciation. She grinned, then took a few steps back to let us step out.

  The Raker said to her, “This is strange.”

  “Marvelous, rather,” Marvushi replied. “It is for these wonders I came to the capital.”

  “No, not that. That knowing what we did, what I did, you still smile.”

  Marvushi shrugged. “What’s wrong with that? It’s truly not my place to judge, though I do have these preferences myself.”

  I shifted on my feet, the fire and heat urging me to motion.

  The Raker said, “I was expelled from my university for these preferences.”

  Marvushi grinned again. “Well, maybe you should enroll in this one.”

  I rapped my beak impatiently against one carved alabaster wall, and she apologized, then led us quickly towards a small side exit into the Tumbleweed Garden, a path I traversed many times in personshape. Marvushi flung open the grates.

  The Raker wrapped his arms again around my neck.

  Once outside, I spread my wings, wide, wide, wide like a joyful and powerful wind that lifts up veils of sand, and I hoisted him on my back with a single movement of my beak. A gurgling cry escaped my throat, and then I ran, unfolding my wings into the sky.

  * * *

  Move the sixth: to issue forth from hollow bone

  One gust of wind was all it took to lift me into the air, paling to the dawn and swirling with the smallest particles of dust and the fumes of burnt liongrass. I glided down from Starhill, over the clay streets of Che Mazri already beginning to fill, in the barest gray light of pre-dawn, with traders and their carts, with animal handlers, with misguided apprentices eager to count the last melting stars, with poets staggering in sleeplessness. Having no desire to be spotted, I glided higher and away into the open desert.

  I remember soaring like this, those years and lifetimes ago when this wind was all I had, when I’d pulled on my star, had borrowed deepnames from the land’s grid until each feather shone with the reflection of magic hidden under the sand. And it was now that I soared again, all my hurts and the creaking of my bones subsumed in the song I had not sung for anyone except Bird—but now I sang as I glided, and the Raker clung to my neck with all the weight of the stars she had borne in her tail all these dozens of my long lifetimes ago—and I had no desire to shake him off.

  Not too far from Che Mazri I now glided over hills, sparsely covered by the grey thorns of sleepweed, and a watchful lizard turned their head to follow my flight. The land’s naming grid shone from under the sand, long brilliant lines laid down by the First Ones, the foundation of the land all but invisible under Che Mazri’s history. The Raker cried out with the wonder of the grid, and I glided even higher, to give him a better view, for it was for this vision I had brought him here.

  I circle
d to the south, to where the bright lines of the land’s naming grid disappeared into the horizon, to the far-off lands of Lepaleh that lay beyond my desert domain; and west, to where the springflower city of Niyaz, my rival and sometime enemy, now rested, brilliant in her splendor and arts; and then northwest, beyond the far horizon, to the small marsh-lights of his Coast; and north and northeast, to the treacherous lands I had no desire to see, where the swirling of magic dimmed and flickered. I completed my circling, gliding towards the lands of the many wandering bands of the Maiva’at and the Surun’, the Luhazi and the Gehezi, and the dreamway Loroli beyond them, where the vision of the Tumbleweed Star protected me from looking too deeply into Ladder’s direction.

  The Raker shouted again, his hand on my neck pushing down. I could not understand his words, but I dipped lower, into a haze of a vision. Figures, tall dim figures dancing in the mist, and in their hands thin ropes of shining light. They danced as they laid down the grid, and they sang as they danced. I sang, too, louder, as loud as I could, my raucous cry overpowering the hold of the vision as I bore us away from there, from before-time, to a now.

  Shaken, I forced myself to steer towards a place I knew well. There is an outcropping of deep red rock that stands out in the desert, and an ancient refuge of rooms carved into its stone and painted sky-blue. In the years I desired to dance at the Sandbird festival, I would go there to revel in the treasures I had hidden even from my own eyes, until it was time to prepare for the ritual again.

  I gyred lower, troubled and dizzy with fatigue, until I touched my talons to the red, red rock of a small landing. The Raker jumped off my back, but I had no such elegance. I had nothing at all.

  He made to catch me as I staggered down in birdshape, toppling him to the ground. I felt more than heard something crack. But he did not let go or cry out, and I was too far gone just then to see what transpired.

  We lay there on the rock landing, his body pinned under mine, until I was well enough to shed my plumage and lie there in personshape, my eyes slowly clearing, his arms around my shoulders. He shifted my body away from his, one hand still clutching my shoulder. I felt his deepnames engage. He traced his right hand over the mess of his knee and lower leg, mirroring the structures I had made all these lifetimes ago when he’d thrown me against the wall.